Essay 4831

From The Chicago Tribune…

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Music legend-turned-villain Ike Turner dead at 76

By Greg Kot

Ike Turner, who died Wednesday at age 76 in his suburban San Diego home, changed the course of modern music, scored numerous hits and yet is best known as the scoundrel who abused Tina Turner.

The couple’s bloody, bruised relationship, portrayed in the 1993 movie “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” helped turn Ike Turner into a villain. Yet before he ever met Tina, Ike Turner was a visionary multi-instrumentalist and songwriter.

Long before Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry burst into the public eye, Turner was playing rock ‘n’ roll. Some people think he even invented it with the pummeling “Rocket 88” in 1951, recorded with his Kings of Rhythm at Sam Phillips’ Sun studio in Memphis and spiked by Turner’s distorted guitar. The song, released on Chicago-based Chess Records under the name of the singer, Jackie Brenston, established a pattern for Turner’s career: He would always be the man behind the scenes, a crucial but often unrecognized cog in the development of blues, R&B, rock ‘n’ roll and soul over the next three decades.

“Blues men in America, we were outcasts,” he said in a 2001 interview with the Tribune. “All of our lives, since I was born, we were outcasts. Before the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds came along --- it had to come from whites in England for America to appreciate what we did.”

Turner grew up in Clarksdale, Miss., the cradle of the modern blues, but his childhood was an ugly one. He was sexually abused and witnessed the lynching of his father. He learned piano by watching Pinetop Perkins play in a friend’s basement, “and music became my life,” he said.

He mastered piano and guitar, and worked as a band leader and talent scout through the ‘50s, participating in historic sessions by B.B. King, Otis Rush, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Elmore James, Little Milton, Junior Parker and countless others. Turner moved his Kings of Rhythm to St. Louis later in the decade, playing a high-octane brand of blues, boogie and rock ‘n’ roll. When Anna Mae Bullock barged onto Turner’s stage one night between sets and demanded to sing, the bemused band leader gave the teenager a shot, and was sold. With the soon-to-be-christened Tina Turner, he had found his meal ticket.

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