IKE TURNER'S UNLIKELY LEGACY

By STEVEN IVORY

My favorite Ike Turner story happened in the '60s, emanating from CBS-TV's now-historic Studio 50 in New York City, where the popular Ed Sullivan TV show was filmed.

Backstage, Ike, Tina Turner and the Ikettes stood, just minutes from performing. Yet Sullivan noticed that Turner wasn't wearing his guitar.

"You're on next," Sullivan said to Ike, nonplussed. "Where's your guitar?"

"I need the key to the guitar," Turner replied nonchalantly. "Can't do nothin' without the key."

Sullivan, host of the most popular variety show on television and thus not a man to be toyed with, stood there, bewildered. Key? Key to the guitar case? A musical key?

"No, The KEY," Turner calmly repeated, emphasis on "key," as if Sullivan should know, though Ike knew the didn't. "The key is the money. We don't do nothin' 'til we get paid."

While Sullivan might have been miffed at the sheer audacity of the implication--Negro, he might have said to himself, this is not some juke joint, bowling alley, bar-b-que pit or Chitlin' Circuit hole-in-the-wall you used to play; this is uptown, big-time Manhattan and network television--the TV impresario couldn't be mad. There wasn't enough time. Instead, Sullivan directed that somebody immediately get Mr. Turner his money.

That was Ike Turner: slave-driver of a bandleader and producer whose shrewd business acumen was the result of getting one raw deal too many early in his career; a relentlessly ambitious so-and-so who pushed the Ike and Tina Turner Revue to the brink in order to get it right, and a seminal figure in American music whose song, 1951's "Rocket 88" (credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats) was one of the first rock and roll records ever.

Of course, Turner, who passed away December 12th at his San Marcos, California home at age 76 from emphysema, is better known for beating the hell out of Tina anytime he felt the notion. This nagging detail will forever eclipse the fact that it was Ike who turned a young, shy Anna Mae Bullock into a bold soul sister named Tina Turner. It was Ike who decided that she and the shaking, shimmying Ikettes (as in Ike) should be all legs, miniskirts, heels and straight, shoulder-length wigs (during the late sixties Black Power era, he considered afro wigs for the women, but 'fros didn't have movement, and on Ike's stage it was all about movement). Ike decided what Tina would sing and how she would sing it.

So meticulous was Turner of his vision for the Ikettes that singer Bonnie Bramlett, historically the first white Ikette (who went on to have a career with her husband as Delaney and Bonnie), was let go not because she couldn't sing or execute the steps Tina choreographed, but because Ike reasoned her hue, or lack thereof, upset the uniformity of the Ikette's look.

To be sure, Ike's physical and emotional abuse of Tina will trump his musical accomplishments, much like the legend of his singular molding of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue will dominate the irrefutable fact that Tina, who was more than merely there, came up with ideas for the act, too.

However, at his passing Mr. Turner has left yet another legacy, an unlikely one, that has little to do with music or Tina and even less to do with him--not anymore, anyway--and everything to do with us. Perhaps it doesn't even qualify as a legacy, simply something for us to consider. And it is this: is it fair for one's frailties to be the full measure of a man?

Most of the media reports I came across regarding Turner's death treated his musical career as a mere footnote, focusing largely on things he did to Tina. Rotten things that, ironically, are the reason anyone cares that Ike died in the first place.

Speaking on behalf of Ike is like bending over in a prison shower to reach for a bar of soap--both are unpopular positions. I'm not defending Ike's wicked deeds; the man himself wrote whatever ends up his epitaph. Unlike most of us, Turner had to live with his mistakes publicly.

However, while it wasn't his intention, Turner has left us to consider words like acceptance. Compassion. And most important, forgiveness. One can only hope that in the end Ike found those keys, keys in which we should all want to play. For those are the keys of life.