Deep Album Cuts Vol. 228: Ike & Tina Turner
Yesterday, I collected deep cuts from Tina Turner's solo career. Today, I'm going back to the Ike & Tina Turner catalog.
2. If
3. The Groove
4. Sleepless
5. Won't You Forgive Me
6. Those Ways
8. Don't Play Me Cheap
9. Pretend
10. Gonna Find Me A Substitute
11. Tinaroo
12. Hold On Baby
13. Save The Last Dance For Me
14. Every Day I Have To Cry
15. You Don't Love Me (Yes I Do)
16. Early In The Morning
17. I Smell Trouble
18. It Ain't Right (Lovin' To Be Lovin')
19. Unlucky Creature
20. Contact High
21. Let It Be
22. You Can Have It
23. What You Don't See (Is Better Yet)
24. Pick Me Up (Take Me Where Your Home Is)
25. Moving Into Hip Style - A Trip Child!
26. Help Him
27. Popcorn
28. I Had A Notion
Tracks 1 and 2 from The Soul of Ike & Tina Turner (1961)
Track 3 from Ike & Tina Turner's Kings Of Rhythm Dance (1962)
Tracks 4 and 5 from Dynamite! (1962)
Tracks 6, 7 and 8 from Don't Play Me Cheap (1963)
Tracks 9 and 10 from It's Gonna Work Out Fine (1963)
Tracks 11, 12 and 13 from River Deep - Mountain High (1966)
Tracks 14, 15 and 16 from The Hunter (1969)
Tracks 17, 18 and 19 from Come Together (1970)
Tracks 20, 21 and 22 from Workin' Together (1970)
Tracks 23, 24 and 25 from 'Nuff Said (1971)
Tracks 26, 27 and 28 from Let Me Touch Your Mind (1972)
Obviously, Ike Turner was a shitty person who beat and abused Tina Turner, which was the first thing I knew about him, since Laurence Fishburne was nominated for an Oscar for portraying him as such when I was a kid. In a way, Ike Turner was the first musical icon whose legacy was completely poisoned by his personal actions, something that happens a bit more regularly now but flippantly called 'cancel culture' instead of accountability or consequences. But Ike is dead now, he spent the last decade or two of his life in disgrace, and was in jail when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, so it at least feels like there's no harm in listening to Tina's music with him now and enjoying that part of her catalog. It's a lot more complicated for other current artists who are comparably shitty people just out using money and their fanbases to avoid any kind of accountability. River Deep - Mountain High, half produced by Ike and half produced by convicted murderer Phil Spector, is a great album with a pretty complicated legacy, to say the least.
Just as Tina Turner's early solo albums are frustratingly missing from streaming services, a lot of her early albums with Ike are unavailable too. There are about 18 Ike & Tina Turner albums (not counting 3 albums their label assembled after they divorced), and only about 11 of them are available in their definitive form on Spotify and so on, mostly albums from the mid-'60s and mid-'70s are missing. Ike & Tina Turner's Kings Of Rhythm Dance is an instrumental album, so Tina isn't actually on it, despite her name and picture on the cover.
I tried to stick to original songs, mostly written by Ike, but there are some good covers in there. Ike & Tina's version of "Let It Be," released 8 months after The Beatles one was released, is interesting to me because they completely overhauled the lyric and sort of made the civil rights movement the subtext of the song. In Tina Turner's four decades of recording albums, her only songwriting credits, for 30-something songs, spanned from the late '60s to the late '70s, on the later Ike & Tina records (she doesn't have a single writing credit on her solo albums). Unfortunately, a lot of the records that contain those songs are the ones that aren't on streaming services now, including Nutbush City Limits, the title track of which is definitely the most famous song Tina wrote. The last 6 tracks on here were all written by Tina, and that's really some of the very best stuff on the playlist. It's a little hard to say for sure who wrote what back then, however -- the 1972 version of "I Had A Notion" is credited to Tina, but the "I Had A Notion" on their debut album in 1961, the same lyric and basic song with a different arrangement, was credited to Ike.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, March 24, 2021 at 11:24 AM.
You can skip to the end and leave a response.
Post a Comment