Friday, December 14, 2007

Good Night, Ike



He was a famously cruel abuser, a controller, a cage. He arguably created one of the first rock and roll albums ever. He recently won a Grammy for an album of downhome blues. He was a gifted musical writer and arranger. He could bring out someone's shining light and then threaten to snuff it out forever. He was bad, mad, hard, funky and blue. Goodbye Ike Turner.
The wise man said:Don't ask me
All i know is you'll be sorry
Sorry when i'm dead
Dead and gone
In a bitchin' blaze of glory
Holding a grudge can take a lifetime
And there's a lot that i got to say
I'll tell it to the world
On my deathbed
Someday
Na, na, na, na, na, na
--Deathbed, Ike Turner

4 comments:

Butchie said...

Evil and then Ike. Are all the famous wifebeaters dying off?

JBoombostick said...

Ike was one cool ass dude.

Butchie said...

Here's some of Phil Spector's eulogy for Ike:
"Ike made Tina the jewel she was. When I went to see Ike play at the Cinegrill in the '90s after his absurd reason for being sent to prison for no reason other than being a black man in America, there were at least, and I counted them, five Tina Turners on the stage performing that night, any one of them could have been Tina Turner."

"And sell-out, whom you really love and respect but I have an ambivalence towards Oprah Winfrey. She made Tina Turner's book into a bestseller, which demonized and vilified Ike. The book wouldn't have sold 10 books. It was badly written. It was a piece of trash and because Oprah idolized Tina, she didn't feel it wrong to vilify a 'brother.'"

"Other black sisters did the same thing to Ike and there was a very famous story about Whoopi Goldberg, who had a television show for about five minutes, interviewed Ike. Ike had called me and said, 'Shall I do the show?'

"I said, 'You can't get hurt.' And he said, 'OK, I'm going to do it.'

"And we figured it would be good because it's Whoopi and Whoopi asked him, 'I understand before you were married when you were living together, you beat the hell out of her and she tried to commit suicide because she was so terrified of you and she tried to jump out of a window,' and Ike said, 'Yeah, but it's hard to jump out of a window from a basement floor.'"

Mohawk Chieftain said...

Another Drug Overdoser...
Another one leaves the Good Guys behind...