Ike & Tina Turner - The Bolic Sound Sessions Extended Liner Notes
Ike & Tina Turner - The Bolic Sound Sessions Extended Liner Notes
It’s always bittersweet when a legendary performer decides it’s time to call it a career. Tina Turner’s retirement from public view was perhaps more melancholy than most; her heroic ‘80s solo comeback after breaking up with much-maligned hubby Ike had represented an empowering victory that inspired several generations of faithful fans.
It’s also undeniable that Ike & Tina Turner, as a unit, may well have been the most electrifying live act of the 1960s. As the Ikettes prowled the stage catlike around her and a dour Ike peeled off shards of blues-kissed licks on his Fender Stratocaster in the background, Tina epitomized raw, molten sex appeal. Her gritty, soul-steeped pipes brought the best out of Ike’s own compositions before they proceeded to focus on an extraordinarily wide variety of covers that encompassed everything from Creedence Clearwater Revival to the Beatles and Stones.
Had it not been for Ike’s offstage excesses, the duo might have permanently conquered the universe together instead of Tina needing desperately to escape in 1976 to do her own thing. But Sunset Boulevard’s trawl through the duo’s ‘70s deep catalog underscores just how stunningly potent they were in the studio. Ike produced masters at a prodigious pace, peddling the finished product to any and all interested labels, believing anything resembling an exclusive contract was a trifle to be ignored. His wildhair philosophy toward the recording industry adds up to a discographical nightmare today, but leads to mighty fun listening all the same.
Ike and his hard-driving Kings of Rhythm were highly successful on the St. Louis R&B scene long before Tina ever entered the equation, but there’s no doubt that she put them over the top. Born Izear Luster Turner, Jr. in Clarksdale, Mississippi on November 5, 1931, Ike gravitated to the piano long before he picked up a guitar, inspired by boogie specialist Pinetop Perkins rehearsing with the King Biscuit Boys in Ike’s childhood buddy Ernest Lane’s basement.
“Ernest Lane and I was the same age, and we was comin’ home from school and we heard this noise,” said the late Turner. “We went over there, and boy, these guys--this guy was playing piano so fast, man, I couldn’t hardly see his fingers! And I said, ‘Damn, man! I wanna do that!’ Lane said, ‘Me too!’ Anyway, we started talkin’ to Pinetop, and he started teaching us different little boogie-woogie things. And from there, that started my musical life.
“Then along came Amos Milburn and Charles Brown. All those guys had a big influence on me. But Pinetop was the main one.”
During the late ‘40s, Ike constructed a jump blues combo known as the Kings of Rhythm, their ranks including saxists Jackie Brenston and Raymond Hill. “There was two bands. We had one big band, which was the Tophatters. And then we had the Kings of Rhythm,” he explained. “The ones that could read music, they played more jazz when we broke up into two groups. They all could read music, and they played more jazz. And then the ones that couldn’t read, we changed ourselves into the Kings of Rhythm because we kept up with the jukebox. Whatever was hot on the jukebox, that’s what we played.
“Raymond was a good saxophone player. But see, all of us was kids together, and whatever was hot on the jukebox, we would take it off note for note. So would Jackie Brenston, but Jackie was more alto and baritone. And Jackie would play more Louis Jordan’s kind of stuff. Raymond would do more of the Jimmy Liggins, Joe Liggins, and ‘Chicken Shack Boogie,’ that kind of stuff.”
The Kings of Rhythm journeyed up to Memphis in March of 1951 to make their debut sides at Sam Phillips’ fledgling studio. The jaunt was not without its mishaps. “The drums, the stuff fell out of the car. It was tied with the trunk open, and the bass on top of the car. The amps and things got wet,” said Turner. Willie Kizart’s amplifier took a beating in the mishap, factoring into the distortion in his guitar work. “We were just excited that we were gonna record,” said Ike.
One of the songs the Kings of Rhythm waxed that fateful day was the blazing “Rocket ’88,’” sung by Brenston. Phillips shipped the master off to Chicago’s Chess Records, and it ended up an R&B chart-topper for Jackie that summer. Sometimes referred to as the first rock and roll record, it was actually a takeoff on Jimmy Liggins’ equally raucous “Cadillac Boogie.” Ike was on his way. He hired on with the Bihari brothers’ Modern Records as a talent scout and session pianist, playing on classic Modern sides by Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, and Elmore James as well as his own. At Sun, he worked with Little Milton and Billy “The Kid” Emerson.
Ike added guitar to his musical arsenal for purely practical purposes. “I had trouble keeping guitar players,” he said. “They were scarce. And the guy that I had, he wasn’t reliable. So then I started goin’ with a girl, Bonnie, the girl I used to live with. And she played piano.” He purchased his first newfangled Stratocaster at O.K. Houck’s Memphis music shop.
“I bought it and I just started playing,” Ike said. “I love Gatemouth Brown, and the way he used to do ‘Okie Dokie Stomp.’ That’s the first thing I learned on guitar, was ‘Okie Dokie Stomp.’ I began to learn to play ‘Okie Dokie Stomp’ and another song called ‘Junior’s Jive’ by Roy Milton.” Ike built his unique guitar technique around viciously hammering the Stratocaster’s whammy bar. “I didn’t know anything about a guitar, and I thought that’s what it was for,” he said. “It was for tremolo, and I’d use it as a whammy, to make it scream.”
Turner and the Kings of Rhythm abandoned oppressive Mississippi in 1954 for the urban climes of St. Louis, attracting a local following for their danceable rhythms and horn-fueled sound as well as their athletic showmanship. “I used to jump up in the air, and we’d do backwards flips with the guitars, me and my nephew (electric bassist Jesse Knight),” said Ike. “I stopped doin’ that after we started traveling across the country, because I figured if we went across the country doin’ them backwards things with the guitars, then they would always expect to see you do it. If you don=t do it, then they’d say you didn’t do a good show.”
The Kings made a series of scorching singles for the Federal imprint in 1956-57 with Brenston, Billy Gayles, and Clayton Love their principal vocalists, “I’m Tore Up” enduring as a blues standard. Ike’s blistering guitar solos, peppered with savage whammy bar bends, were explosive in the extreme.
Ike discovered Anna Mae Bullock in 1957 at the Manhattan Club in East St. Louis, Illinois. Born November 26, 1939 in Brownsville, Tennessee, she grew up in a sharecropping environment in nearby Nutbush, singing in a church choir. Her mother had moved to St. Louis well before Anna Mae joined her there when she was 16. An underage Anna Mae frequented the area’s nightspots with her sister Alline. Ike was reticent to allow her to sing with his band, but she grabbed a mic one evening from Kings drummer Eugene Washington and belted B.B. King’s “You Know I Love You,” catching Ike’s ear and convincing him to give her a shot.
Bullock’s earliest appearance on wax was negligible. She was listed as Little Ann when the local Tune Town logo issued the 1958 single “Boxtop,” sharing credit on the label with fellow vocalists Ike (who sang bass) and saxman Carlson Oliver. The young singer was pregnant with Raymond Hill’s baby at the time.
Ike & Tina finally hit paydirt in 1960 when they cut his composition “A Fool In Love.” Tina wasn’t his first choice to sing the throbbing grinder. “I wrote this song, ‘A Fool In Love,’ for Art Lassiter,” said Ike. “He didn’t show up at the recording session, so I put Tina’s voice on there with intentions to erase her voice and put him on when I found him. I didn’t find him.
“I was playing at a white club called Club Imperial on Goodfellow and West Florissant in St. Louis. I played the song out there at the club, and the kids at the club said, ‘Why don’t you put it out on her?’ So I said, ‘No-o-o,’ ‘cause she was goin’ with Raymond, and I was thinking Raymond and I came up from kids together. And I=m thinkin’ like, he always wanted to be the bandleader. So if I put the record out on her, he’s really got it. He’s gonna want to snatch her.
“Dave Dixon was a disc jockey there in St. Louis. Dave said, ‘Man, I’m sending this to Sue Records.’ So he sent it to Juggy Murray. And Juggy came down to St. Louis. I was gonna think of a name, ‘cause Raymond wasn’t there. And that’s when I patented the name Tina Turner, so if he come back and snatch her, I’d just get another Tina.”
There was no need for any substitutions. “A Fool In Love” took off like a rocket, peaking at #2 R&B and #27 pop in Billboard during the fall of 1960 and making Ike & Tina Turner (they wouldn’t marry until 1962) stars. Ike wrote their next major R&B hit near year’s end, the less-than-humble “I Idolize You,” for Tina to sing to him, but authorship on their surging ‘61 smash “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” was originally credited to Joe Seneca (writer of Little Willie John’s ‘58 classic “Talk To Me, Talk To Me”) and J. Lee, although BMI now lists Rose Marie McCoy and Sylvia McKinney as its composers.
There was another discrepancy: despite Ike & Tina’s shared billing on the single, a #2 R&B/#14 pop seller in mid-‘61, Ike was nowhere near a studio microphone on the lovey-dovey duet. “He was playing the piano, and I was screaming and hollering with Tina, and Sylvia (Robinson) was playing the guitar. And they never even mentioned it. But it doesn’t matter. We published the song,” revealed the late Mickey “Guitar” Baker, who knew all about hit duets: his “Love Is Strange” in vocal partnership with Sylvia was a 1957 R&B chart-topper. “It was definitely me going all through that nonsense with her. And it was just natural.
“She went in there and started hitting. The way the record was made, in those days, they had those little booths that the singer would sing in to isolate her. And I’m in there with her. She’s singing, I’m talking. Well, she cannot sing unless she’s gyrating! She must have damn near knocked me down!
“‘Ikey!’
“Bam!
“It was really something, boy. I think we did it in one take. I couldn’t have done two takes on that! Everything I said was ad-libbed. It had nothing to do with anything. I just knew what she was saying, and made comments.”
“It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” wasn’t Ike & Tina’s only blockbuster that year; “Poor Fool,” a more conventional Ike composition, commenced its climb to #4 R&B near year’s end. What’s more, Ike launched his self-named female group, the Ikettes, in 1961 with his harmonious “I’m Blue (The Gong-Gong Song)” on Atco. Their personnel would change often over the course of the decade, and they scored more hits for Modern and other diskeries. Ike & Tina’s winning streak at Sue continued into ‘62 with “Tra La La La La,” and the Kings of Rhythm released their seminal all-instrumental Dance album that year as well.
The duo’s longterm relationship with Juggy’s Sue Records lasted well into ‘63 and regenerated briefly in ‘65, but Ike wouldn’t remain loyal to a label for a long time after that.
He and Tina recorded for Warner Bros. and its Loma subsidiary as well as the Biharis’ Kent and Modern logos during the mid-‘60s, enjoying a handful of chart entries for each. The troupe’s firebreathing climactic segment in the 1966 concert film The Big TNT Show spread their name way beyond the chitlin’ circuit.
Ike issued 45s on his own imprints as well. “I had a label called Prann,” he noted. “I had another label called Sonja. I’ve had four or five different ones.” There was a brief ‘66 hookup with Ray Charles’ Tangerine label, and Tina screamed her lungs out on Phil Spector’s epochal anthem “River Deep – Mountain High” that same year for A&M (its lack of chart success sent the eccentric producer into a tailspin), which Ike had nothing to do with at all. Later in the decade, there were Ike & Tina singles on Cenco and Pompeii and an album for Capitol.
That’s a lot of recording without a lot of monetary reward to show for it. The tide finally began to turn when Ike & Tina signed with Minit Records and ventured down to Memphis to wax “I’m Gonna Do All I Can (To Do Right By My Man),” a decent-sized R&B hit during the spring of 1969. But Ike was up to his old tricks; Bob Krasnow’s Blue Thumb imprint was also pressing up fresh product on the pair, and their “The Hunter” and “Bold Soul Sister” there outpaced their Minit outing on the charts that year. Minit had the last laugh, though: the duo’s rendition of the Beatles’ “Come Together” for the firm just missed the R&B Top 20 in early ‘70, and they were bumped up to the Liberty parent label for a sizzling reprise of Sly and the Family Stone’s “I Want To Take You Higher” that summer.
Liberty apparently had no problem with Ike & Tina focusing primarily on covering the rock hits of the day rather than generating fresh titles. The strategy paid off bigtime when they escorted Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” in directions even John Fogerty could never have contemplated, first taking it slow and sensuous and then cranking the tempo up to supersonic speed. It hadn’t been long since CCR’s original adorned the national airwaves, but that didn’t stop Ike & Tina’s imaginative remake from sailing to #4 pop and #5 R&B in 1971.
Liberty had been acquired by United Artists, and Ike & Tina once again made the leap, remaining on the major label into 1975. They never equaled the mammoth impact of “Proud Mary” on the charts (“Nutbush City Limits,” Tina’s relentless account of her hardscrabble beginnings, just missed the R&B Top Ten in 1973), but they recorded prolifically at Ike’s Bolic Sound attempting to do so.
Obviously Ike didn’t submit everything he worked on with his troupe to UA for release, or this compilation wouldn’t exist. Ike tinkered with his tapes endlessly at his Bolic Sound, trying out different tempos and arrangements and vocals, then hanging onto the alternate treatments, often quite different from the released masters, ostensibly for subsequent leasing opportunities. Those masters from the depths of Ike’s archives are the basis for this two-disc compilation. They date from the ‘70s, when the duo was at its peak in popularity and regularly guesting on network TV variety programs if they weren’t touring the rock circuit.
It boasts some familiar titles, yet in all cases they’re not the versions we know so well. The studio duet of “Proud Mary” here, for example, sure isn’t the hit; Ike changed the chord progression and slowed the tempo, practically transforming the duet into a new number altogether. He recast the pair’s early ‘60s hits “A Fool In Love” and “I Idolize You” at Bolic a decade or so after the original versions debuted with a heavy dollop of funk. This treatment of “Baby--Get It On,” their last chart entry in 1975, isn’t the same as the hit rendition either. Clearly Ike was a producer who was never quite satisfied, and he apparently kept working on these tapes even after his partnership with Tina was at an end, seeking elusive perfection.
A lot of studio titles will be unfamiliar even to longtime fans of the pair. Rosco Gordon’s R&B chestnut “No More Doggin’,” B.B. King’s tough “Why I Sing The Blues,” and the Ann Cole/Muddy Waters classic “Got My Mojo Working” received savage dustings off. “You’re Up To Something,” “Honey Child I’m Over You,” “Trying To Find My Mind,” and “You Paid Me Back With My Own Coins” sizzled. Vocals were democratically spread around: “I Can’t Believe What You’re Saying” was a blazing Ike & Tina duet; Ike stepped up for “You Can’t Have Your Cake And Eat It Too,” and one of the Ikettes seems to have sung the joyous remake of Ray Charles’ immortal “I’ve Got A Woman” as “I’ve Got A Man.” This version of “Pick Me Up (Take Me Where Your Home Is)” is meaner than the one gracing the pair’s ‘71 ‘Nuff Said LP.
Ike chose some covers that seemed odd fits for Tina’s awesome pipes to immolate, but the Beatles’ “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window” and “Come Together,” Bob Dylan’s “She Belongs To Me,” the Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’,” and the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman” clicked just the same. When the tunes were in their R&B wheelhouse—a Stax medley of “Don’t Fight It” and “Knock On Wood,” Sam Cooke’s “Shake,” Stevie Wonder’s “Living For The City”—the results were a knockout. Without Spector’s famous “Wall of Sound,” “River Deep – Mountain High” sounded very different but no less powerful.
Capturing the volcanic excitement of Ike & Tina’s live revue on a reel of tape was a bit more challenging, since their visual impact was as crucial to the formula as what flowed directly into the mics. Yet when they ripped into “Proud Mary” at warp speed as they did in Brussels in 1975, they not only left their audience devastated, they will you too.
Too much abuse forced Tina to leave Ike in 1976. It was tough sledding for her initially as a solo act—her solo UA LPs basically went nowhere late in the decade—but things turned around for her in a big way in 1984. First her revival of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” was a huge seller on Capitol early that year, and then her Private Dancer album was a monumental success, thanks in large part to the pop chart-topper “What’s Love Got To Do With It.”
Two more major hits closely followed: “Better Be Good To Me” and the set’s title track, which featured Jeff Beck on guitar. Tina’s sound had changed radically; she was now recording in Great Britain in more of a rock and pop vein, though her pipes were as incendiary as ever. Private Dancer went multi-platinum, Tina exacting the most satisfying revenge on her ex-husband imaginable: she became a far bigger star without him than she had ever been with him.
Ike’s career went in the reverse direction. While Tina was riding high, his drug use got the better of him; there were several run-ins with the law and a brief stint in prison at the dawn of the ‘90s. Ike tried to recreate the magic of his days with Tina with several new duet partners, but it never really worked. Here and Now, Ike’s 2001 comeback CD on the IKON logo, earned considerable acclaim as he reverted to his blues roots. But his last act was a relatively brief one. An emphysema-racked Turner died December 12, 2007 at age 76 in San Marcos, California.
Tina has weathered a stroke and intestinal cancer in recent years herself, but she and her husband, considerably younger German music executive Erwin Bach, have persevered (he donated one of his kidneys to her in 2017). A 2021 documentary on her amazing life titled Tina brought her back into the spotlight once again, likely for the final time.
For a turbulent decade-and-a-half, Ike & Tina Turner made musical history. Sunset Boulevard’s The Bolic Sound Sessions documents some of it with material that’s as rare as it is compelling. Handle this collection with asbestos gloves—it’s that hot! --Bill Dahl
SOURCES
Blues Records 1943-1970, Volume Two, L to Z, by Mike Leadbitter, Leslie Fancourt and Paul Pelletier (London: Record Information Services, 1994)
Joel Whitburn’s Top R&B Singles 1942-1988, by Joel Whitburn (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research Inc., 1988)
T*I*N*A, by Bart Mills (New York: Warner Books, 1985)
Wikipedia website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/