Ike Turner's Unhappy Ending

Perspective

DESPITE BEING CREDITED with recording the first rock ’n’ roll record (1951’s “Rocket 88”), the late Ike Turner had to fight for respect during the last two decades of his life——at times appearing on South Park and The Howard Stern Show as the butt of a joke he went along with to help clear his name. Miraculously, Turner’s career seemed to be on the rebound last year. He received his first Grammy Award since “Proud Mary,” which he had shared with ex-wife Tina in 1971. Ike Turner had recently collaborated with bands such as Gorillaz and The Black Keys, turning at least a few fresh ears on to his crunchy guitar riffs and wisecracking rasp.

During an interview with San Diego Magazine, shortly after receiving his Gram my for Best Traditional Blues Album, Turner was upbeat about his prospects, despite shortness of breath from emphysema. (In his final year, he carried around an oxygen tank to help him breathe.)

“For seven years, I caught hell out on the road, because people thought I was the worst person in the world,” Turner said. “But I’ve conquered it. Now people are accepting me for what I do, and I finally got enough nerve to walk out front with my band, The Kings of Rhythm.”

Unlike his second wife, Tina, who owns a home on Zürich’s Gold Coast and an estate overlooking the Mediterranean Sea near Nice, France, Ike Wister Turner spent his final years in a modest, one-story tract home in San Marcos——his prized gold Fender Stratocaster propped against the living room wall. It was here the perpetually maligned rock-music pioneer settled after serving time for cocaine possession. And here, friends say, is where he prayed, recorded and worked assiduously to overcome his image as the man who mined and refined Anna Mae Bullock’s otherworldly soul shriek with a violent hand, christening her Tina Turner.

Despite eulogizing props from Little Richard and Phil Spector at Ike Turner’s rocking funeral service in Gardenia (which Tina did not attend), only time will tell whether the stain attached to Ike’s legacy will fade.

Oceanside drummer Bill Ray, a member of The Kings of Rhythm, was at Turner’s Viewpoint Drive home December 12, when the bandleader from Clarksdale, Mississippi, died at 76. The band gathered at Turner’s house around 10 a.m. that day. His health had taken a downturn in the preceding weeks, and Turner’s childhood friend, Ernest Lane, felt an impromptu jam session might raise his spirits.

Ann Thomas——a former Ikette who bore Turner’s child while he was still married to Tina——remained close with him through the years and had come to San Marcos to care for him. Thomas served Turner breakfast in his bedroom that morning. In the other room, Lane sang the gospel tune “There Is No Secret What God’s Love Can Do,” likely the last song Turner ever heard.

“Ann went in to get him and say, ‘Ike, we’ve got a surprise for you,’ ” Ray recalls. “All of a sudden we start hearing these screams coming from behind the door. I’m thinking, maybe he’s having a moment; maybe they’re having words . . . and then the screams turned into wails. I went up to the door and knocked and Ann said, ‘Somebody get an ambulance.’ ”

It was too late. The prison time Turner served for cocaine possession in 1990 didn’t change his habits. A month after Turner’s death, the coroner’s report said he died of an accidental cocaine overdose.

THOUGH IKE AND TINA divorced in 1976, it was Disney’s 1993 film, What’s Love Got to Do with It (based on the autobiography I, Tina), that cemented Ike’s image as an wife-abusing ogre.

“When I joined the band, my ex-wife was like ‘Eww, Ike Turner! Oh my God, Bill, you’re going to work with him?’ ” says Ray, who played on Ike’s Grammy-winning CD Risin’ with the Blues. Ray also recalls Turner being dissed by a female airport employee in Memphis, an all-too-frequent occurrence, he says.

“Why couldn’t he live that down?” Ray asks. “We all make mistakes. Ike’s just the one guy on the face of the planet who’s not to be forgiven for his mistakes.”

Turner’s saxophone player, Ryan Montana, was effusive in his recollection of Turner as, if not entirely transformed, a somewhat withdrawn and humble man working at redemption——one who frequently helped his female singers make rent and who convinced bass player Kevin Cooper to quit smoking by supplying him with nicotine patches.

“I think he grew more and more shy and more paranoid and reclusive in the latter part of his life, because, man, he just got hammered on forever,” Montana says.

Turner was known to have been married at least four times, most recently to singer and Tina-clone Audrey Madison. According to band members, Madison hadn’t been to Turner’s San Marcos home in months. But Ray says it was Tina——who acknowledged his death with a curt statement, saying she hadn’t spoken with him in 35 years——Ike secretly pined for.

“I was privy to some letters he had written to her as of six or seven years ago,” says Ray. “If she were to come in the room and stand in front of him at any given time, he’d fall on the floor and cry like a baby.”