Tumult!, page 10
The down-to-earth person Krasnow encountered was one whom most people saw, someone with a sensual public persona but with private mores that are quite old fashioned and traditional. When one met her, Tina could be your girlfriend, your sister, your best friend—she could fulfill all these emotional markers at once. Yet when she gets up onstage in performance, she has the ability to powerfully stimulate you by bringing lyrics to life in a way that is uniquely hers alone.
Phil Spector had more than a few things in common with Ike Turner, not the least of which was a prodigy background and an intense relationship with his own lead singer, Ronnie Spector (née Bennett). Krasnow has mentioned to Rolling Stone that “at one point Phil had every single big studio musician in Hollywood in there, and of course most of the famed Wrecking Crew, with Hal Blaine and the brilliant bassist Carol Kane.”
All this for just one track, for only one side of a single, not even for an entire album. “River Deep, Mountain High” was indeed a Spector masterpiece with sound so deep and heavy that you almost lost yourself in it. When Ike finally heard the track, Ike was gob smacked, there’s no other word for it. He was so impressed that he couldn’t describe it; this was in another league altogether, hell, in another dimension. In the vernacular of musicians, he was bummed out by it big time. He thought this was impossible to do, maybe because it usually is impossible.
It is generally agreed that Tina gave the performance of her life for this quirky producer. As per his usual obsessive technical laboring, Spector took months to complete the pressing he was satisfied with, with Krasnow reporting that he was brought sixteen different pressings to consider, each more compelling than the last, which, as he characterized it at the time, only dogs could hear the differences on.
At long last, in the late spring of 1966, the magical musical period in which Revolver by the Beatles came out, “River Deep, Mountain High” was finally ready to be unleashed. George Harrison himself, in fact, considered it one of the most perfect recordings ever made, a pop song so well crafted that nothing whatsoever could be done to improve on it.
Indeed, Spector, never one known to be that modest, was fairly certain that this song was going to be the first number 1 chart-topping hit for Ike and Tina and effusively told them so. Amazingly, though, to many at the time (but almost to everyone else since then), it wasn’t—it was a complete flop, at least by established Spector standards. Larry Levine, the gifted audio engineer who had worked with him on the overall construction of his wall of sound, was equally stunned by the mediocre response of most music trade publications.
He felt that basically Spector, the boy wonder who had amassed maybe twenty-five chart-topping records in a row, was due for his turn at some cutting down to size by critics and industry types. Other producers, musicians, and the music-loving public at large of course saw it and heard it quite differently. It was embraced as the glittering production and performance peak it really is. Yet it still didn’t really sell. It climbed to number 88 on the pop charts during the summer and then began to slide.
Spector was crushed and deeply disappointed. Levine thought that Phil just felt so vulnerable and depressed that he withdrew into himself, didn’t want to make any more music, and just kind of permanently retreated behind his already ubiquitous dark glasses and hid away in self-imposed silent exile.
When Spector had first played the intended Tina song for her, singing along on a guitar, she was mesmerized, as reported in New Musical Express: “Wow! Jack Nitzsche’s arrangement was really something else! I was knocked out by the Jeff Barry/Ellie Greenwich and Phil song.” After all the hard work she put in on the song “River Deep,” Tina was still stunned, especially by the awesome complexity of its recording style.
In the Best of Tina DVD film, she expressed her amazement at its sonic architecture: “He was so much behind that project—it was something he strongly, strongly believed in. I’ve got to tell you—it was an army of backing vocals—it was a choir. The room was chock-full of singers.” But alas, despite how complex it was (or maybe even because of it), the industry couldn’t relate to it, and listeners were puzzled by its waves of instruments and voices. On the official Tina Turner website, her historical comments clarified why: “It was too black for the pop stations and too pop for the black stations. But at least it showed people what I had in me.”
Her version of its B-side, “A Love Like Yours,” swept up the U.K. charts to become a number 16 hit, largely as a result of touring abroad: “We were breaking the chains that were holding us back from a mass audience,” by which she meant a white audience. Now all she had to do was find a way to break the chains holding her to her thuggish pimp. It was a tough ride of course, especially because of her own sense of loyalty no matter how misplaced it might have been.
For the first seven years of her troubled life with Ike, she felt obliged to be loyal to him because of how he had helped her in the early days. Naturally, she found it difficult to separate his attitude and behavior from what he had done for her professionally, but her confusion was also compounded by fear, just as everyone else around him in his clique also shared that strangely seductive hold he seemed to exert over people.
This odd cult-like environment was observed publicly by myriad people in their circle: the fact that he ruled his roost by a vicious intimidation so severely that if any of his own band broke some of his compulsive rules, they could be fined or fired, assaulted, or pistol-whipped.
Tina was also naturally disappointed by the song’s public and critical responses, feeling that it was her entry into a whole new side of her musical persona (which it actually was, as time would show) but that the audience just wasn’t quite ready for so radical an evolutionary leap.
As often happens, though, with musical releases in one country or another, “River Deep” was quite a smash in Europe, where there had always been a healthier appetite for black music in general, for innovative pop in particular, and especially for a dish named Tina. But regardless of its reception in some quarters, 1966 was still their biggest creative and commercial turning point, especially for Tina, after personally diving so deep and reaching so high.
RIVER DEEP, MOUNTAIN HIGH
Released in 1966. London Records. Recorded at Gold Star Studios. Produced by Phil Spector and Ike Turner. Personnel: Tina Turner, vocals; Barney Kessel, guitar; Carol Kaye, bass; Jim Gordon, drums; Claudia Lennear and Bonnie Bramlett, backing vocals; Harold Battiste, piano. Engineer: Larry Levine. Arranged by Jack Nitzsche, Barry Page, Perry Botkin. Cover: Dennis Hopper. Duration: 37:06.
River Deep, Mountain High (Jeff Barry, Phil Spector, Ellie Greenwich) 3:38 / I Idolize You (Ike Turner) 3:46 / A Love Like Yours (Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier) 3:05 / A Fool in Love (Ike Turner) 3:13 / Make Em Wait (Ike Turner) 2:22 / Hold On Baby (Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector) 2:59 / Save the Last Dance for Me (Doc Pomus, Mort Shuman) 3:02 / Oh Baby (Ike Turner) 2:46 / Every Day I Have to Cry (Arthur Alexander) 2:40 / Such a Fool for You (Ike Turner) 2:48 / It’s Gonna Work Out Fine (J. Michael Lee, Joe Seneca) 3:14 / You’re So Fine (Lance Finney, Bob West, Willie Schofield) 3:14
A gorgeous studio recording peak, River Deep, Mountain High is thirty-seven minutes and six seconds of sheer sonic spectacle, with the title song lovingly handcrafted at Gold Star Studios by Spector. Sharing production duties with Ike for the first time in both their careers, it was released again in 1969 on A&M Records with a different track listing and song selection. Pitchfork named it number 40 on the best 200 records released in the 1960s. It’s a good place for the uninitiated to begin any exploration of their joint collaboration.
I’ve always been partial to Ben Fong-Torres’s insights into Tina in general and this record in particular as he explored it in Rolling Stone way back in 1971, when the impact of this record was still intensely fresh. “‘River Deep, Mountain High,’ to hear that song for the first time, in 1967, in the first year of acid-rock and Memphis soul, to hear that wall of sound falling toward you, with Tina teasing it along, was to understand all the power of rock and roll. It had been released in England in 1966 and made Number Two, but in America, nothing. ‘It was just like my farewell,’ Phil Spector says. ‘I was just sayin’ goodbye, and I just wanted to go crazy for a few minutes—four minutes on wax.’” Alas, that’s always felt like Phil’s attempt at explaining away why his homeland didn’t quite get what he was up to at all.
Ben’s appreciation for Tina’s true superstar stature is also very adept, placing her in the pop and rock pantheon where she belongs, close to the Rolling Stones, largely because when she’s onstage, many people compare Tina Turner to Mick Jagger. But Tina, in fact, when observed more closely, is much more aggressive and more animalistic than even Mick. She owns whatever stage she stands on.
Equally revealing, given what the couple was going through at the time, was Tina’s comment in Phil Agee’s book Tina Pie that no matter what was happening to her personally, “I always go on. Whatever’s bothering me—I don’t care how bad it is—I drop it when I go on stage. You know that kind of hypnosis—I don’t know what it’s called—where you induce yourself into a trance? Self-hypnosis? Yeah, that’s it. I hypnotize myself, and I forget.”
But the unique sonic sensibilities of “River Deep” had to compete that same year even with themselves via the familiar-sounding Soul of Ike and Tina Turner, released on Kent again, which by now was far from anything easily recognizable as soul music. The year 1967 showed them once again to be masters of live concert albums with Festival of Live Performances on Kent, and 1968 offered up Ike and Tina Turner on London and the quiet little rocker called So Fine on Pompeii. But 1969 would be their magical year.
No less stellar a band than the Rolling Stones, British musicians who were deeply enamored of black blues and rhythm-and-blues sounds by artists such as BB King and Tina Turner already were about to embark on a fall tour of the United Kingdom. Mick, Keith, and the lads thought it would be a fine idea to invite the whole Ike and Tina Turner Revue along to open for them in their large-scale concerts. And it was with them that Tina Turner began to fully solidify her newfound persona as a Rock Goddess.
That, coupled with a live U.S. clip of a “River Deep” performance on the English Top of the Pops television program, started Tina on her road to rock royalty, with Ike now more or less along for the ride, a disgruntled figure in the shadows, while the spotlight spent more and more time focused brightly on her. But despite Ike’s long slide into the oblivion he had largely brought on himself, the up-and-coming Rolling Stones were all ready, willing, and able to give Tina the recognition they believed she truly deserved.
Porter also emphasized to me the passionate inspiration that later so-called rock artists, especially the white ones, such as the Stones, would glean from their supposedly more mild antecedents. “Historically, whenever the white rockers looked to R&B for inspiration, it was usually with an emphasis on the raw and the raunchy. An Otis Redding, say, would be more adaptable to a garage-rock format than a Jerry Butler. Ike & Tina, with their high-energy live shows and guitar-based sound, were a natural for rock bands to pick up on. Even though their live shows had the formal precision of a Las Vegas revue, Ike’s guitar and Tina’s screaming voice detonated with rock & roll dynamite. They were almost a total natural to open shows for the Rolling Stones and to later headline the rock festivals and ballrooms.”
Apart from Mick Jagger admitting that she taught him to dance properly onstage, Keith Richards also harbored a not-so-secret fondness for Tina when he got to know her on tour. He can often be witnessed practically ogling her gutsy presence onstage. For the British rock band so in love with black blues music, it was almost as if she took them back to drama school and demonstrated what show business was really all about.
Richards also had no illusions about what made the Turner Revue so special. He knew it was all Tina and not the ersatz Svengali that Ike imagined himself to be. It was equally obvious that Ike saw himself as another Phil Spector, the driving force behind the star. But he was also a force of another kind, a nasty pimp capable of pistol-whipping musicians in his own band—someone you don’t want to be around, let alone mess with.
Richards’s fellow Stone, bassist Bill Wyman, was especially fond of dating young Ikettes, and he concurred on the Best of DVD from Image Entertainment, “I heard horrendous stories from The Ikettes about what was going on in the background. It was almost unbelievable actually. They changed so quickly, The Ikettes, every time you saw them, it was a completely different set, because they just couldn’t deal with what was going on.”
And yet for all its stylistic bigness, there is still a basic irony to this Spector signature song having been composed for her if not about her since its odd sentiment is rather telling indeed: “When you were a young boy did you have a puppy that always followed you around, well I’m gonna be as faithful as that puppy no I’ll never let you down.”
* * *
After her instantly legendary working relationship with Spector and the remarkable song that was birthed by him, all the other subsequent producers they worked with had to up their game technically. This was not a conscious choice or effort on their part; it was simply an alteration of the soundscape that became a natural new part of their sonic scenery. Each song after this one also tended to be bigger in scope and scale just as a matter of course, with a good example being their upcoming version of the wonderful John Fogerty song “Proud Mary,” a song that is pretty much associated with her now much more than his own Creedence Clearwater Revival version. And needless to say, all of Tina’s solo records after she liberated herself from Ike were to be crafted in the most grandiose proportions production-wise.
Although Spector was fairly obliterated by the less-than-stellar reception of his volcanic masterpiece, Tina took it in stride, happy just to have the opportunity to break out on her own (as coproducer) and away from her increasingly paranoid husband. Meanwhile, Ike was likely pleased just to have the Phil episode, during which he had zero control over anything to do with the project or his wife. In his claustrophobic mind, there was room for only one rooster in the yard no matter how brilliant everyone claimed this interloper was.
The near-mystical associations with Spector continued on unabated, however, in the music world, with his mythology blossoming only once, he withdrew to his castle overlooking Sunset Boulevard. Rolling Stone editor Jan Wenner once asked him how he managed to so skillfully create the sonic environments in which only his records thrived, and his answer was typically both laconic and bombastic at the same time: “When I went into the studio, I created the sounds that I wanted to hear.” His unique Tina sound was still a big hit in England, where the Rolling Stones took them on tour in September–October for twelve straight dates in addition to another twelve or so on their own at select clubs scattered around the country.
The Stones tour launched at Albert Hall for a live concert was also being recorded for Got Live If You Want It. After six songs, however, the hall erupted into a near riot with adoring fans storming the stage, a shocking glimpse of a whole new world for Ike and Tina, who were basically down-home chitlin’-circuit veterans at heart suddenly thrust into pop at the top. Tina hit it off quite nicely with the bad boys of rock and roll of course, especially Mick Jagger, who firmly believed in having an opening act that forced his own band to raise their game in order to top them, something Tina did easily.
Ike as usual didn’t get along with Jagger or Richards apart from accepting their worship as an early black rock and roller who had inspired them in the first place. Adoration he could get into; equivalent respect, well, that was something else again. He also didn’t much appreciate the fact that Jagger, Richards, and Wyman were all dating his Ikettes, as that kind of rooster competition really irked him, maybe even more than the musical kind.
What England really offered to Tina was a chance to finally see a potential life beyond Ike, what she perceived as a new life, a new way of living, of being. And the more exposure she got on independent non– Ike-controlled venues and shows, such as the popular program Ready Steady Go!, the more she liked what she saw, especially since the vast new white audiences were focused largely on her and her fellow singers and dancers and less on the sinister glowering presence of her dour puppet master.
One of the psychics she frequently consulted for guidance in her life and career even told her that she predicted that she would become one of the biggest of stars and that her partner would fall away like a leaf from a tree.
The psychic also saw the number 6, which apparently told Tina that even though Ike was beating her up more and more often, she should hold on for another six days, another six weeks, or another six months, which of course morphed into another six years.
So hold on she did, through the follow-up to the Stones tour and on into France and Germany and a raft of newspaper and television appearances. Fans and critics alike went bonkers over her zesty stage show yet also adored her still kind of quiet, humble approach to the whole carnival she was living in.
The frenzied touring continued—that was naturally where the big money was in the business anyway, something that at least kept Ike off her back, busy counting his cash. The road was still the same old show business grind, with one new change: the press was constantly following her now, extolling her style and her personality as well as their music. Subsequent to “River Deep,” she was now seen by the public and the media not just as a vital part of the Turner Revue but also the central sun around which they all orbited.
Ike’s hyperactive label hopping also continued on through the following year of 1969, with Cussin’, Cryin’ and Carryin’ On on Pompeii, Get It Together and Get It–Get It on Cenco, and His Woman, Her Man on Capitol, rounded out by In Person on Minit, the only album to achieve good sales, reaching number 142 on Billboard—a cyclone of compositions. The bigger she got of course, the angrier Ike got, now resorting to twisted wire coat hangers as his tool of choice in his raging attacks on her.
