whammy bar.It was the Channel 4 documentary that annoyed me the most. In it were Mick Jagger, Elton John and David Bowie. They all praised Tina to the skies - as well they might. But they said nothing about Ike.
Even the most cursory reading of the history of popular music shows that Ike Turner began rock'n' roll. Little Richard confirmed to me that he had never even touched a piano until he had heard Ike Turner's 'Rocket 88' on the radio. 'When people talk about rock 'n' roll, they talk about Chuck Berry. They talk about Fats Domino. They talk about Little Richard. They leave the main thing out,' Richard said.'It ain't Little Richard, it ain't Chuck, it ain't Fats Domino ... no, we came on later. Before all these people, IkeTurner was doing his thing. He is the innovator.'
Rock 'n' roll has made Jagger, John and Bowie very wealthy indeed - they could at least have made a nod in his direction. Ike's only appearance in the documentary was in the blue uniform of the California State Penitentiary.
When 'What's Love Got To Do With It?' came out, the hostility against Ike was running so high that it seemed to me that he had been tried in the court of world public opinion, found guilty and sentenced without anybody hearing the case for the defence. This son of Mississippi had been Iynched and I determined to do something about it. So what if he was a wifebeater? He was also a man who had made a contribution. He was a significant figure. There are two sides to every story. And even a murderer gets counsel for the defence.
It took me about three weeks to get his phone number. I called him and asked him if I could write a book about him. He said sure. He was fresh out of jail and felt that he was not getting too many phone calls at the time. Then came the hard part. Publishers go to the movies too and, although they are liberal by nature, they have to sell into a market that is not. Besides, these days publishers - especially American publishers - have to be seen to be politically correct. Ike Turner - who peppers his conversation with 'chicks','niggers' and 'motherfuckers' - is anything but PC. But eventually over lunch a friend arranged, I managed to talk a British publisher into it.
Then came the really hard part. Have you ever tried to make a deal with an old rock'n' roller? These guys want cash in their pocket before they say a word. They have been ripped off by the white man once, twice, probably a 100 times too often. My literary agent earned every penny of his 10 per cent.
After endless rounds of negotiations, with Ike chipping into our percentages at every turn, a deal was done and I went to California to hang out with the man. He was, of course, charm itself. Women fell at his feet, despite the reputation the movie had given him.
While women loved him, in banks and shops and in the street, many men saw him as a hero. One black guy even told me,'The man had to do, what he had to do.'
This is not to say that Ike is Mr Nice Guy. He has a volcanic temper and can be scary to be with. But he can also be kind and generous. The singer Barbara Cole told me that after she had an operation for polyps on her vocal cords, he took her in and taught her to sing again.
While I was with Ike, he helped one of his new Ikettes and her four children escape from an abusive husband. I suggested that he set up the Ike Turner Refuge for Battered Wives, though I doubt he would get support from many women's groups.
The man works tirelessly. He hands out pictures and handbills, and signs autographs like he is a politician running for office. But he knows that it all counts. He presses the flesh in the soul-food restaurants he eats in twice a day and he will even pull over a police car to hand the officers a glossy ten-by-eight, signed, with a handwritten message - 'What's love got to do with it? Not a goddam thing' perhaps. This is the way he reaches his public. Sadly, they cannot see him often. His new band - fronted by four girl singers in short dresses - rarely gets to play in the US. But they can be seen on the Continent, in Australia, South America and the Far East. In 1994, they won an award for being the best live band in Japan.
Partly due to the success of Salt 'n' Peppa's 'Shoop Song' - which is one of his - Ike drives a gold Mercedes and dresses like a rock star. He has a studded leather jacket, painted silver; purp]e suits; collarless shirts; leather riding boots. His hands are heavy with chunky gold rings and bracelets. And round his neck hangs a gold scorpion encrusted with diamonds. Scorpio is his star sign - but it would suit him anyway.
He is certainly a dominating character. Travelling anywhere with him, you turn into an acolyte. You get to stand behind him like a minder - then you get asked to run out to the car to get more pictures, dial phone numbers and hold things for him. I stood just a couple of months of this. How did Tina manage 18 years?
But then when you are alone with him and he plays the piano or the guitar and sings an old blues song, or you hear him composing, you know you are in the presence of a genius.
He and I made an odd couple hanging out in the clubs and afer-hours joints of Los Angeles - a streetwise black from the Deep South and a suburban white from the Home Counties. We made an even odder couple when we travelled down to Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he was born.
'You and me couldn't have done this back then,' he pointed out as we sped down highway 61 which runs through the heart of the Delta.
Clarksdale is about the size of Reigate, Surrey, only it is in terminal decay. It was a bit like going to the Isle of Wight or Staten Island - leaping back 40 years. People were friendly, but suspicious. Guns bristled in pockets.
We visited the house where Ike was born. He pointed out where his father's body had been dumped after being fatally beaten by a white mob.He took me on a tour of the places where he had his first sexual experiences, the Riverside Hotel where he had hung out with Robert Nighthawk and the house of a friend's father where he had first heard Pinetop Perkins play the piano - a moment that changed his life.
We went to the gas station where he had seen Denzil Turner, an epileptic, shot dead by the police because he was having a fit. There were no hospitals for blacks, back then. If you got hit by a car, you were dead.
And we went to the Compress, where at 15 Ike had seen a black man shoot 26 white men before they got him. The Klan slashed his throat and shoved his severed penis into the gaping wound - as a warning to others. It was a warning Ike Turner refused to listen to.
The Alcazar Hotel, where Ike had first worked as a lift attendant, was closed. But Ike sat on the pavement outside where over 50 years ago, he sat doing the unthinkable in the segregated South - watching the white girls in their little mink stoles getting out of the boyfriends' daddies' cars and thinking of things he knew he could never have.
Although the hotel was shut, the radio station, WROX, was still broadcasting from the second floor. This was where a teenage Ike had been a disc jockey. Those early days had given him an encyclopedic knowledge of not just the blues, but also jazz - his favourite artist is Louis Jordan - and country and western - his favourite type of music.
We could not make out if the town was now integrated. Ike was convinced it was not. As we drove out through the posh Oakerhurst area, he barked repeatedly, 'Ain't no niggers living out here.'
We also discovered that just two years ago, the municipal swimming pool had been filled in after a series of racial incidents. It seems that in Clarksdale, at least, blacks and whites still cannot get used to using the same water.
Despite his background, Ike is untainted by racial prejudice. He is simply brutally frank about it. The only colour he is the least concerned about is the colour of money-- greenbacks or pink cashiers' cheques only, thank you very much.
We travelled back up the long flat road north to Tennessee and freedom, which Ike had first taken as a kid on his bike, nearly 55 years ago. It was the same road he had taken in 1951 with the Kings Of Rhythm, on their way to their first recording session at the Sun studio in Memphis. As they had pulled out of Clarksdale, Jackie Brenston pointed out that they might need some original material. Up until then they had been covering the jukebox. So on the way, they wrote 'Rocket 88'.
Back in Memphis we went to the Peabody Hotel. The player-piano in the lobby has a sign on it which says, conspicuously:'Do Not Touch'. Ike walked straight up to it and thundered out a boogie woogie. A bossy middle-aged woman rushed up to reprimand him. He said with a cheeky smile,'Sorry ma'am, but when I first came to Memphis you didn't allow no niggers in here.'
Now he was staying in the Celebrity Suite.
We went to Sun, which he had not visited since the early 1950s. He thought it had closed down. When he walked in the door he went straight to a piano and played, incongruously, the theme from 'Chariots Of Fire'.
It is true, lke Turner is a maddening individual. His little goatee beard and his square-cuthair, raised slightly at the sides like horns, make him look like the devil. He has a diabolical laugh. But he is undoubtedly a human being - a tough, talented, irrepressible, complex human being.
But when Ike Turner was busted for drugs, he did not complain that he was from a broken home. There was no special pleading. He took his punishment like a man. Now he asks for just one thing. He is 64. He says that, statistically, black men in the United States die at 65. He has one year left and he just wants to play his music.
Ike Turner has contributed to the world. He has given to it more than he will take away. He has suffered more than his accusers. When he just asks to play, who could deny him that?
