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Ike Turner Dies at Age Seventy-Six

Ike Turner an essential and largely undervalued figure in the history of both rhythm & blues and rock & roll, died in his home in San Marcos, California, earlier today. He was seventy-six years old. The cause of his death is unknown at this time. To the public, Turner was best known as half of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, a hard-hitting R&B band that tore off a string of hits in the Sixties and early Seventies — most notably a torrid version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” that cracked the Top Ten and became a pop-culture staple on the basis of Tina’s smoldering spoken introduction to the song (“We never, ever do nothin’ nice and easy”). Influential far beyond its hits, the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. But Ike Turner had been a musical innovator for years before he met Anna Mae Bullock, the singer who would eventually become his wife and, as Tina Turner, propel him to international fame. Born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1931 and raised on a steady diet of the blues, Turner eventually became an important songwriter, producer, guitarist, pianist, band leader and talent scout. “Rocket 88,” a blistering R&B hit in 1951 that is often cited as the first rock & roll song, may have been credited to Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats. But Brenston, who sang the song, was simply the saxophonist in Turner’s band, the Kings of Rhythm, who performed the song under Turner’s leadership. Turner played piano on the track, and may well have written it, though that, too, was credited to Brenston at the time. It would not be the last time Ike Turner was overlooked. But without becoming a star in his own right, Turner thrived in the free-wheeling days of the independent record industry in the South in the 1950s. A propulsive pianist who first learned his style from the bluesman Pinetop Perkins, whom he met as a child, Turner eventually became an outstanding guitarist. His rhythmic sense was at once r

Published: 2007-12-13
Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Rock News

Alternate Takes: Who’ll Stop the Rain?

“I always felt that the musician’s job, as I experienced it growing up, was to provide an alternative source of information,” Bruce Springsteen told Rolling Stone three years ago, on the eve of the Vote for Change Tour. As the war in Iraq drags on with no end in sight and no hope for anything resembling peace, rock & roll is doing just that. Springsteen and John Fogerty have both just released new albums that draw some of their strength from a direct return to their early music, and have something else in common as well: They both address the war in Iraq. Springsteen and Fogerty were born just four years apart — Springsteen in 1949 and Fogerty in 1945 — but by the time Springsteen put out his debut in 1973, Fogerty’s Creedence Clearwater Revival had just called it quits. Both are artists who — from the start — were able to be at once current and out of step, looking backward to shape their styles, Fogerty to Fifties rockabilly and Springsteen to Sixties R&B-driven rock. Fogerty’s Revival — the title a clear nod to his rapprochement with the CCR sound — slaps at George W. Bush explicitly, using rock & roll as weapon. “I can’t take it no more,” he brays while pummeling his guitar like it’s Little Richard’s piano. “You know you lied about the WMDs/You know you lied about the detainees/All over this world.” On a frankly nostalgic album (skip the ode to the Summer of Love), the handful of songs taking on Iraq give the music urgency. In 1980, Springsteen made his debt to Fogerty clear by borrowing the title of a ten-year-old Credeence song — “Who’ll Stop the Rain” — for a lyric on “The Ties That Bind,” the lead track of The River. He also showed up on the cover in a plaid shirt, the same sartorial statement Fogerty used to signal his own working-class sympathies during the ruffled-collared heights of hippiedom. Springsteen’s Magic — the title a refer

Published: 2007-10-09
Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Rock News, Alternate Takes