Futuristic Punk-Soul.

Yesterday I completed a four-disc set I’ve been slowly working on for about a year and a half: a comprehensive overview of the music of Ike & Tina Turner.

There are two primary misconceptions out there that need debunking:

1) Ike held Tina Turner back from achieving her full potential until she went multi-platinum in the 80s with “What’s Love Got To Do With It.”

2) Ike & Tina Turner were a relatively minor act in the history of r&b, soul, and funk, hampered by second-rate material and pedestrian arrangements.

If you think the first is true, I have nothing to say to you. Enjoy your shallow little hell of Billboard-charting music. The rest of us will be over here, listening to the good stuff.

The second misconception is more serious, and more widespread. Part of it is simple rockism (which can be code for racism): “album artists are more important than singles artists, legendary labels like Atlantic, Motown, Sun, and Philles are more worth paying attention to than thousands of small, no-budget labels, and Beatlesesque diversity, ambition, and writing-their-own-songs are the marks of the true artist.” Part of it is an understandable desire to ignore a wife-beating, time-serving asshole like Ike Turner (so why are Phil Spector, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and James Brown still revered?). And part of it is the almost legendarily fucked-up state of their discography.

A large chunk of Ike & Tina’s music remains trapped in vinyl grooves, never issued on CD (or even LP!), and only showing up in drips and drabs on quasi-legitimate reissues and budget-priced compilations. The Turners recorded for more than ten different labels while they were together, and very few of those labels are speaking to each other, even today. Until Rhino manages to get everyone to play nice — and good luck prying Phil Spector’s gunpowder-stained fingers off the tracks he owns — and issues the definitive collection, this wholly imaginary one will have to do. All the tracks here have been issued on CD; it would take some work, but you could track them all down.

Ike and Tina Turner were one of the greatest musical acts of the 1960s and 1970s, that golden age of Greatest Musical Acts, easily on a par with Sixties legends like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, the Supremes, the Temptations, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Led Zeppelin, the Doors, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Johnny Cash, Sly & the Family Stone, Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Young, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and James Brown. But they were also profoundly influential at the very beginning, not only of rock, not only of soul, but of rock & roll.

Ike Turner played on and probably composed one of the finest claimants to the title of The Very First Rock & Roll Record, “Rocket 88.” He was a great barrelhouse pianist, comparable to Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, and when he picked up the guitar, his stinging, nasty tone and piercing solos made him the equal of blues legends like Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Lightnin’ Hopkins. When he hooked up with a Tennessee r&b singer named Annie Mae Bullock, the foundations of r&b shook. Ike & Tina’s very first record, “A Fool in Love,” released at the dawn of the 1960s, was something new under the sun: it opens with a low, bluesy, daemonic wail from Tina, who moans, “there’s something on my mind....” and then the Kings of Rhythm and the Ikettes burst in, all explosive rhythm and insistent, chanting vocals. Tina’s raw, sandpaper voice shrieks, howls, fights, screams, as the Ikettes gleefully taunt her with being a fool whose man is gonna run out on her. (And life imitated art. Over and over again. The constant undercurrent of Ike & Tina songs is that love means jealousy, violence, betrayal, and revenge. They are the bluesiest soul group ever.) Nothing quite this raw, or this highly-charged, had soared up the charts before. And they remained raw. Trebly, nasty, with Ike’s fuzzed-up guitar and Tina’s hoarse shrieks, they’re the opposite of what a lot of soul fans love. When they tried to be smooth, they only became deeply strange instead, and bankrupted Phil Spector into the bargain. Ike’s insistence on overcharged dynamics and coked-up tempos can even, for brief flashes, make them sound like some kind of futuristic punk-soul. When they’re not exploring the deepest, darkest corners of the lived-in blues, that is. At the end of the 60s, with support from the Stones, they made a bid for rockist relevance, covering Lennon, Mick ’n’ Keef, and the Family Stone, and their greatest (only great?) album, Working Together came out of that period. They got funkier with the times, and rocked harder, and lived harder, until finally Tina reached escape velocity. She appeared as the Acid Queen in the film version of Tommy, and never returned to Ike. When they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (riding the coattails of Tina’s cheese-pop 80s hits), Ike was in prison.

They were always an autonomous force, a touring orchestra that could be split up into any number of configurations to meet whatever the market demanded. The reason they never stuck to any one label is that they never needed to: no studio musicians or big-shot producers could take the place of the Kings of Rhythm and Ike himself behind the knobs. With a massive, constantly-rotating personnel, they were perpetually on the road, on the chitlin circuit or maybe a step or two higher, rocking and socking The People, not particularly caring whether the college kids who were supposed to be the future heard them. And so the college kids didn’t; and the Baby Boom generation has forgotten what Ike and Tina could really be. Which is where this collection comes in.

The set opens with fourteen tracks by various pre-Tina configurations of or pseudonyms for Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm. The focus is generally on Ike, though: his piano, his guitar, or his singing. The version of “Box Top” is not the one that Tina sings backup on (and which was her recording debut); that’s also unavailable on CD. The set is more or less in chronological order, with some fiddling due to pacing considerations. The Ikettes, of course, sang Ike & Tina’s backup vocals, and issued a number of great girl-group singles, mostly produced by Ike. And Tina sang on a lot of them. Venetta Fields and Dee Dee Johnson were both Ikettes. When the artist name is curiously-formatted, that’s how it appeared on the 45rpm release of the song. Only one song (a cover of Charles Brown’s “Driftin’ Blues”) was not actually issued during the years the set covers; it was a previously-unheard bonus track on a recent release. And everything here is a studio recording; while they were dynamite live, that’s a whole nother set.




IKE AND TINA TURNER’S ROCK & SOUL EXTRAVAGANZA!! 1951-1975
With The Ikettes, The Kings of Rhythm, Jackie Brenston, The Family Vibes, and More!

Disc One: 1951-1963
1. Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats “Rocket 88”
2. Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm “I’m Lonesome Baby”
3. Ike & Bonnie Turner “Lookin’ For My Baby”
4. Lover Boy “Love Is Scarce”
5. Ike Turner & His Orchestra “Loosely”
6. Ike Turner “All The Blues, All The Time”
7. Lover Boy “The Way You Used To Treat Me”
8. Ike Turner & His Orchestra “Cubano Jump (Hey Miss Tina)”
9. Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm “Matchbox (I’m Gonna Forget About You Baby)”
10. Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm “Rock-A-Bucket”
11. Ike Turner & His Orchestra “She Made My Blood Run Cold”
12. Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm “The Rooster”
13. Icky Renrut “Ho Ho”
14. Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm “Box Top”
15. Ike & Tina Turner “A Fool In Love”
16. Ike & Tina Turner “I Idolize You”
17. Ike & Tina Turner “I’m Jealous”
18. Ike & Tina Turner “Poor Fool”
19. Ike & Tina Turner “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”
20. Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm “Prancing”
21. Ike & Tina Turner “Tra La La”
22. The Ikettes “I’m Blue (The Gong-Gong Song)”
23. Ike & Tina Turner “You Should’ve Treated Me Right”
24. Ike & Tina Turner “The Argument”
25. Ike & Tina Turner “Tinaroo”
26. Ike & Tina Turner “You Can’t Miss Nothing That You Never Had”
27. Venetta Fields With Ike Turner’s Band “Through With You”

Disc Two: 1963-1966
1. Ike & Tina Turner “Don’t Play Me Cheap”
2. Ike & Tina Turner “No Amending”
3. Ike & Tina Turner “Mojo Queen”
4. Venetta Fields With Ike Turner’s Band “The Cheater”
5. Ike & Tina Turner “All I Could Do Was Cry”
6. Ike & Tina Turner “I Need A Man”
7. The Ikettes “The Camel Walk”
8. Dee Dee Johnson & Ike Turner “You Can’t Have Your Cake”
9. Ike & Tina Turner “It’s All Over”
10. Ike & Tina Turner “Merry Christmas Baby”
11. The Ikettes “I’m So Thankful”
12. The Ikettes “Peaches And Cream”
13. Ike & Tina Turner “Chicken Shack”
14. Ike & Tina Turner “Keep On Pushin’”
15. The Ikettes “(He’s Gonna Be) Fine, Fine, Fine”
16. Dee Dee Johnson & The Ikettes “Living For You”
17. Ike & Tina Turner “Somebody Somewhere Needs You”
18. The Ikettes “Can’t Sit Down ’Cos I Feel So Good”
19. The Ikettes “Blue On Blue”
20. Ike & Tina Turner “I Can’t Chance A Breakup”
21. Ike & Tina Turner “Gonna Have Fun”
22. Ike & Tina Turner “Stagger Lee And Billy”
23. Ike & Tina Turner “Make ’Em Wait”
24. Ike & Tina Turner “Flee Flu Fla”
25. Ike & Tina Turner “Dust My Broom”

Disc Three: 1966-1969
1. Ike & Tina Turner “River Deep, Mountain High”
2. Ike & Tina Turner “Oh Baby!”
3. Ike & Tina Turner “Save The Last Dance For Me”
4. Ike & Tina Turner “Hold On Baby”
5. Ike & Tina Turner “Such A Fool For You”
6. Ike & Tina Turner “I’ll Never Need More Than This”
7. Ike & Tina Turner “A Love Like Yours”
8. Ike & Tina & The Ikettes “So Fine”
9. Ike & Tina & The Ikettes “Betcha Can’t Kiss Me”
10. Tina Turner With Ike Turner & The Kings of Rhythm “You Got What You Wanted”
11. Tina Turner With Ike Turner & The Kings of Rhythm “Too Hot To Hold”
12. Ike & Tina Turner “Shake A Tail Feather”
13. Ike & Tina Turner “Cussin’, Cryin’ And Carryin’ On”
14. Ike Turner & The Kings of Rhythm “Funky Mule”
15. Ike Turner & The Kings of Ryhthm With Tina Turner “Driftin’ Blues”
16. Ike & Tina Turner “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”
17. Ike & Tina Turner “I Am A Motherless Child”
18. Ike & Tina Turner “The Hunter”
19. Ike & Tina Turner “Bold Soul Sister”
20. Ike & Tina Turner “Early In The Morning”
21. Ike & Tina Turner “I Know”
22. Ike & Tina Turner “Why I Sing The Blues”
23. Ike & Tina Turner “Stormy Weather”
24. Ike & Tina Turner “He Belongs To Me”
25. Ike & Tina Turner “Raise Your Hand”

Disc Four: 1970-1975
1. Ike & Tina Turner & The Ikettes “I Want To Take You Higher”
2. Ike & Tina Turner & The Ikettes “Honky Tonk Women”
3. Ike & Tina Turner & The Ikettes “Come Together”
4. Ike & Tina Turner & The Ikettes “Contact High”
5. Ike & Tina Turner “Young And Dumb”
6. Ike & Tina Turner “Proud Mary”
7. Ike & Tina Turner “Workin’ Together”
8. Ike & Tina Turner “Funkier Than A Mosquito’s Tweeter”
9. Ike & Tina Turner “Evil Man”
10. Ike & Tina Turner “Ooh Poo Pah Doo”
11. Ike & Tina Turner “I’m Yours (Use Me Anyway You Wanna)”
12. Ike & Tina Turner “The Game Of Love”
13. Ike & Tina Turner “(As Long As I Can) Get You When I Want You”
14. Ike & Tina Turner “I Wanna Jump”
15. The Ikettes “I’m Just Not Ready For Love”
16. Ike Turner & The Family Vibes “Garbage Man”
17. Ike & Tina Turner “Nutbush City Limits”
18. Ike & Tina Turner “Sexy Ida, Parts 1 & 2”
19. Ike & Tina Turner “Sweet Rhode Island Red”
20. Ike & Tina Turner “Walk With Me (I Need You Lord To Be My Friend)”
21. Ike & Tina Turner “Baby — Get It On”
22. Ike & Tina Turner “Delilah’s Power”
23. Tina Turner “The Acid Queen”