Tumult!, page 6
In yet another sequence of apparent karmic influences (as Tina Turner would later undoubtedly feel given her evolving philosophical and spiritual inclinations), sister Alline had been dating, among her many beaus, the drummer of the Kings of Rhythm, Eugene Washington. Gene began to notice over the coming weeks that his girlfriend was always showing up with her younger sister, then still a gangly junior at Summer High School. Washington, who felt the vibes coming off the girl like electricity but also knew very well Ike’s tastes in ladies (generally big and round, all around), felt that she was way too skinny and underfed by country standards to ever really garner much attention from his majesty.
But the erstwhile rhythm man and longtime member of the Ike cult was smart enough to know that he needed to cultivate the friendship of Alline’s mother and to gain her trust and affection (today I believe we refer to this cultivation process as grooming)—or perhaps I should say, as a proficient enabler, that he was devious enough to do so. He actually audaciously asked her mother, whom he had gotten to know somewhat, if Anna Mae could go to the Manhattan as long as he looked after her (kind of like enlisting the protection of a crocodile when you think about it). And Anna’s mother, never known especially for her maternal instincts, gave her consent.
As the drummer, Washington had a platform raised above the rest of the band, and from this perch, he was able to observe the young fan and her restless yearning to sing along. He even went so far as to dangle a microphone off the edge of the stage to pick up the chirps and warblings of perhaps the most enthusiastic audience member. Anna Mae became a regular at most of the clubs where King Ike was appearing and somehow struck up a friendship with the bassist in the band, Jessie Knight, among others, in what seemed like a pronounced attempt to penetrate the inner sanctum of Turner’s kingdom.
She even pressed her sister Alline to ask Eugene Washington to ask Ike if she could try a song sometime, which he mumbled some disinterested assent to but never really followed up on because (even Anna Mae was certain) she was not his type of dame. Finally, her patience wore thin, and during an intermission one night—in a quiet spell when most of the band was hanging out, smoking or drinking, but Ike was up alone onstage playing the organ by himself—Anna Mae recognized the song he was tinkering with, a BB King tune called “You Know I Love You.”
Washington returned from outside, by now half plastered, and began playfully offering the microphone to his girlfriend Alline, who, though a fairly reckless party girl, wouldn’t have been caught dead singing in public. Observers can recall what happened next, and certainly Anna Mae will never forget it since it was that moment when destiny stands up and screams, “You!” She took the mic and started singing along, “I love you for myself but you’re gone and left me for someone else, when night began to fall I cry alone . . . ,” causing Ike to pull up short, jump offstage with a wailing “Girl!,” pick her up off her feet, and demand to know what else she knew how to sing. Anna Mae’s response was as guileless as it was accurate when she quietly remarked, “Well, everything they play on the radio I guess.”
* * *
Knowing the Anna Mae we’ve all heard of today, it’s hard to imagine a teenager, someone who had never sung professionally, wanting so badly to climb onstage with this strange but alluring guy who had been around for years already. But knowing the later Tina, we might at least imagine her gumption at thinking, as quoted by Maureen Orth in a Vanity Fair profile, “I was of course very excited. Very competent too, because I’ve been a singer all my life.” Right, all sixteen years of it so far.
Turner was utterly blown away by the raspy voice coming out of this skinny kid, someone he was already nicknaming Little Ann in a deceptively friendly manner. Orth also referenced the technique Ike employed, what I would call using self-pity to gain sympathy from the obvious raw talent in front of him. “My problem is, people always took my songs away from me, and my singers always leave me.” He was so knocked out by her voice and energy that he couldn’t believe she was only a teenager who sounded like an old Bessie Smith howler. “When I got there,” Tina explained to Orth, “Ike was so shocked, and he never let me go.”
So Ike played some songs she knew, the band began to mull back in and join in as she sang “Since I Fell for You” and did a duet with Jimmy Thomas on “Love Is Strange.” It sure is. Her mother Zelma of course wanted none of it once she discovered that her daughter had already been singing semiregularly instead of doing what she expected her to do: be a nurse or a maid. Oddly enough, in a few short years, Anna Mae would indeed be a nurse and a maid but with only one patient: Ike.
He sent his second failed attempt at a singer, Anna Mae Wilson, over looking for his new young discovery, much to the horror of Zelma. Then, afterward, he again sent his loyal drummer to come across as a chaperone since, like all characters of his ilk, he needed to befriend the girl’s mother in order to have full and easy access to the girl (at this stage, only to her voice). He then also went over in person himself to visit and charmed her mother, as he was somehow able to do with most people, promising that he’d personally take care of her and make sure nothing bad ever happened.
As reported in Off the Record, her voice was indeed remarkable and maybe even one worth conniving over. “When I started singing with Ike, I was basically patterning myself after most of the male singers I was around, like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke. I think my voice is heavy because my mother’s and my sister’s also is. I think the raspiness is the natural sound. But the style really came from mimicking my surroundings. The pretty way of singing is not my style, I like them rough.”
She was so young when she started, despite the strange maturity of her voice, that she didn’t really see what was going on in the dynamics of their blossoming relationship at all. She even stipulated to all and sundry that Ike was very good to her when she first started her career, going so far as to claim that since she was still in high school and singing only on weekends, they became close friends and had what she thought was a fun life.
She also actually felt sorry for his sob saga, something he was counting on no doubt, and she could even empathize with him (her inherent skill), which was something I’m sure he carefully calculated and amplified. “He was broken hearted because every time he got a hit record on somebody, of course they got to be the star,” was how she put it to Gerri Hirshey in a GQ magazine piece. “The man was very nice to me, way before our relationship really started, I promised him that I wouldn’t leave him.” That was almost a prophetic statement on her part.
At first, their relationship was kind of sibling-like, in a foreboding sort of way, but Ike wasted no time, partly because he was a brilliant talent scout, partly because he was a cad, and totally because he suddenly saw and heard what was missing in his earlier protégées Bonnie and Annie Mae Wilson. Turner went out on a shopping spree and bought her new clothes as stage attire. To me, what he decked her out in was almost a kind of female impersonator costume: hugely high stiletto heels, nylons, and skintight, clingy, sequined miniskirts. That’s when I think he truly felt the future arriving, and he jumped on board.
No doubt all of the other patrons of the Club Manhattan, especially the women who always had an impossible-to-understand attraction to Ike, looked on this scrawny kid with disdain as she suddenly assumed a regular role onstage. Disdain is putting it mildly perhaps; it was un-diluted hatred for someone they assumed was only stealthily cashing in her meal ticket. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Anna Mae was simply soaking up the exciting glamour and enjoying the attention bestowed on her for what she always knew was an innate vocal gift, and it was really King Ike who was the one who saw his one-way ticket away from the dives of St. Louis. He dreamed of going onward and upward to the legitimate theaters and concert halls he so coveted, such as the Regal Theater in Chicago, the Howard Theater in Washington, or the holy grail of all music performance cathedrals, the Apollo Theater in New York.
He may have been nuts, but he was also right (almost always), and the other members of his Rhythm Kings knew it too when they heard it in Anna Mae: something out of this world, a magical sonic ingredient you can’t just concoct no matter how good a musician you were. Loder characterized it very well: “Her voice combined the emotional force of the great blues singers with a sheer, wallpaper-peeling power that seemed made to order for the age of amplification.” From my perspective, she was also about to accidentally invent rock music.
Drummer Eugene Washington couldn’t believe his ears either, noting that women don’t usually get away with this degree of raw power, unless they were Bessie Smith maybe, and he was fully aware that up until that point, he and Ike and the other Kings were basically delivering solid but simple and down-home boogie-swing numbers. This was a whole new ball game, and it was the real deal, an original style, not just them doing covers of other people’s music anymore. Ike could now write it, and Anna Mae could dish it out. It was a match made in you know where.
Moving swiftly after he inadvertently “discovered” his future singing sensation, their very first appearance as Ike and Tina Turner was as the opening act for a BB King concert on January 9, 1956, at the Café Royale in Lake Charles, Louisiana. A vintage poster identifies King performing his hit “Every Day I Have the Blues” and featuring special “guest” (singular) Ike and Tina Turner, with the freshly minted Tina being still only seventeen years old.
At this stage, another musician of Ike’s unit, Raymond Hill from his “Rocket 88” days, was doing the duties of being her first official “boyfriend.” They moved in together, and he stayed for a while, but then he moved on, amiable but maybe not fiery enough to match “Little Ann,” as Anna Mae was still known personally during this period. Ike stepped in, and even though he’d gotten his other girlfriend pregnant, he became seriously unplatonic with Anna Mae to the point that when she too became pregnant, Ike’s girlfriend Lorraine naturally assumed that it was Ike’s. She knew how much Ike liked to get people pregnant.
But pregnant with Raymond Hill’s baby, not Ike’s, Anna Mae’s conflict with Ike’s jealous girlfriend was still amplified. On August 20, 1958, recent high school graduate and eighteen-year-old Anna Mae gave birth to Hill’s son Craig (who sadly would kill himself in 2018), while on October 3, Ike’s girlfriend Lorraine gave birth to hers: Ike Jr. This was obviously a freight train moving at faster and faster speeds, heading who the hell knew where. But I honestly suspect that both Ike and Anna Mae knew exactly what each wanted from the other and what they were going to get out of the deal—up to a point. By this time, Raymond Hill was already history, so Anna Mae briefly took a job as a nurse’s aide in the maternity ward of Barnes Hospital to try to make maternal ends meet.
Ike, as usual, was fighting tooth and nail with his band members, the singers (especially Lorraine), and anybody else who was foolish enough to get in his overheated way. The next thing she knew, “Little Ann” was officially named lead singer of the group, so she dutifully moved back out of her mother’s place (not liking it much with her anyway) and into Ike’s house and cultish musicians commune in East St. Louis. There was already an ominous note hanging heavily in the air. That was when Anna Mae felt it: the first time she definitely knew that Ike Turner was assuming a huge role in her life.
It must have felt like she was the still child star of her own movie, except it was her real life. Rather ominously, she characterized it later on as, without fully knowing it at the time, Ike moving in on her life—a curious turn of phrase and one that couldn’t possibly bode very well for all concerned. To mark the occasion, he raised her salary to a whole $25 a week. To make it all truly official, though, he’d have to turn her into Tina Turner. And that’s just what he did.
3
CHITLIN’ ROYALTY Touring Mania
“Her vocals sounded like screaming dirt . . . it was a funky sound.”
—Juggy Murray, Sue Records, 1959
Basically, blues, jazz, rock and roll, soul, and funk all evolved out of turning adversity into art. The Chitlin’ Circuit was the fond name of a collection of performance venues throughout the southern, eastern, and upper Midwest areas of America that provided commercial and cultural acceptance for African American musicians and other performers during the era of racial segregation. The name derives from the soul food item chitterlings (stewed pig intestines) and is also a play on the Borsht Belt, a resort area that was popular with Jewish entertainers from the 1940s and 1960s. The live concert touring club circuit provided employment for hundreds of black musicians and eventually brought about the birth of rock and roll as a central if unintentional side effect.
Music is also very often integrally connected to major social issues, as Aaron Cohen stressed in Move On Up. “A generation born at the tail end of the African American Great Migration created its art while contending with segregation, integration and deindustrialization. Music ran alongside civil rights activism, and some performers contributed to that crusade.” Tina Turner would definitely be among the most influential of them all.
The circuit term ironically memorializes the cultural history of black people, who were often given only the intestines of the pig to eat as opposed to the bacon or ham, thus coming to symbolize acquiring a taste out of necessity but coming to like and identify with it. Ike and Tina Turner came to represent a certain kind of majesty within this supposedly humble entertainment environment that helped elevate it into a cultural phenomenon. Their Revue would create among the first major crossover opportunities for mass white audiences to absorb black musical motifs. They were also probably the busiest performers on earth during this time.
Aaron Cohen’s comments to me on the intertwined nature of geographical and cultural influences are revealing in this respect. “The vast African American migration from north to south and the music that resulted is, indeed, too vast to adequately describe. But it was often multi-directional from the 1940s through the 1960s, with urban northern performers and musicians influencing Southern artists as much as Southerners brought their sounds up north (musicians going back and forth, producers and arrangers from Detroit working in Memphis and vice versa).
“What’s interesting in Tina Turner’s case is that she seemed to be more global than exclusively American. Maybe that eclecticism came through in her embrace of Buddhism, but I can’t say for sure. Maybe this international personal vision served her particularly well enough so she could have numerous inner resources to draw from as she staged her huge comeback later on in the 1980s.”
The touring circuit was a powerful but also a dangerous context for performers, as Cohen also clarified to me: “While this may be a broad statement, I always understood the ‘chitlin’ circuit’ to be the loosely (very loosely) organized network of performance venues for African American audiences that sprung up during segregation and, to a limited extent, still exist today. The circuit itself was filled with crooks and thugs (of all colors) and I have heard that, actually, Ike Turner was accomplished at not just forcefully dealing with these characters, but making sure that his entire band got paid. Not sure if that’s true, but I could see how Tina Turner would have seen him as a protector in this environment, at least, initially.”
For Toronto-based music journalist and author John Corcelli, the astonishing growth and evolution of musical styles connected to geographical shifts is a powerful one. Corcelli concurs on the essential ingredient of these North–South artistic “trade routes” in constructing a uniquely Yankee musical sensibility. “When it comes to race-relations in the United States, Turner had to find her own artistic path. Sadly, many of the great American black singers had to play gigs that were ‘politically correct.’ That said, a gig is a gig, and if you choose to make your living in concert performances, you’re no worse for wear by doing so by any means necessary.
“To me, Turner paid her musical dues by rigorously playing the ‘chit-lin circuit’ and she emerged out of it as a kind of rite of passage, just as so many black performers that came before her had done. My main observation regarding that vast cultural migration is that our entire understanding of contemporary American music would not ever have been created without it. All American music is rooted in dreams, as the great Duke Ellington once said.”
James Porter, always an astute chronicler of black rock music, certainly feels that African American artistry is beyond geography and far outside the scope of merely northern or southern sensibilities. The dream of freedom, whether political or musical, disregards arbitrary borders. “To me, that means one thing: limitless cultural aspiration. You don’t have to be bound to one specific idea of blackness. You can redefine the medium as you please without having someone from on high tell you it’s not black enough. Or white enough. I think this was a by-product of the African-American cultural migration—mentally, musically and physically. The downside of this is that some of the grit-tier southern sounds, like the blues, were left behind, with the incorrect perception that it was synonymous with hard times. Even so, there still were vague traces of the blues in all mainstream black music, at least until the disco era.”
Despite their close working and living relationship, however, I remain convinced today of something I’ve always suspected: I seriously doubt that Ike Turner ever had any romantic interest in Anna Mae Bullock whatsoever. Conquest perhaps but only in the very broadest sense of the word. I don’t think he found her attractive at all in the customary sense, but he did have a profound and sudden awareness that she was a prodigy, probably because he was one too (or used to be). He needed her to fulfill his long-held dream of music world domination, even though he was a small thinker and likely just wanted more club dates, a few more record sales, and more expensive drugs.
