St. Louis Post-Dispatch du lieu suivant : St. Louis, Missouri • Page 21

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH THE ARTS ENTERTAINMENT SUNDAY, JUNE 21, 1992 3C MUSIC St. Loilis Summit: Ike Turner's Return Recalls Heyday UMNll.M'M 4 rV -r i By Paul A. Harris WHEN YOU TALK to Oliver Sain or Ike Turner, famous names come cascading out of the conversation like driftwood riding down a swollen river. Naturally, Tina Turner comes up.

And Elvis Presley, who once hung around in a West Memphis radio station with Sain and his buddy Junior Parker three young men taking the temperature of the Memphis music scene as it rapidly approached the boiling point. Or how about Jimi Hendrix, whose fussing with wah-wah pedals and fuzz tones irritated Ike Turner? Ike briefly housed and employed the itinerant, soon-to-be superstar guitarist and last saw Hendrix heading out of town with a Little Richard tour. And we shouldn't overlook record producer Phil Spector, who clashed with Turner while putting that famous wall of sound around Ike and Tina's "River Deep, Mountain High." Ike Turner is scheduled to be a special guest when Oliver Sain's Soul Reunion '92 comes to Mississippi Nights on Friday evening. The program, which will also feature Clayton Love, Fontella Bass, the Sharpees and others, promises to be something of a St. Louis rhythm-and-blues summit, recalling the city's heyday.

Both Sain and Turner came of age in Mississippi. They headed north separately, hauling with them sounds that began taking shape in the rural South long before either of them was born. Both re-imagined those sounds in contexts that appealed widely to the listeners and dancers in northern cities, and both eventually became legends of St. Louis music. "I never played in Ike Turner's band," Oliver Sain clarified at the outset of a recent interview.

"You see, we go way back, cutting records together, producing and writing songs out at Technisonic. But I was ABOVE: Ike Turner (center, with guitar) and his Kings of Rhythm sometime around 1955, when he was one of the biggest names on the St. Louis rhythm-and-blues scene. The woman is Bonnie Turner, his first wife. it Bill Greensmith ABOVE: A recent photo of Ike Turner.

RIGHT: Ike and Tina Turner backstage before a performance at George Edick's Club Imperial on West Florissant Avenue in 1969. 14 fi Pit never an employee. "I met Ike in Mississippi. He used to mess around with the record companies owned by the Bihari brothers, who owned Modern Records. They had cut some stuff with my stepdad (Willie Love, of the original King Biscuit Hour Band) and a lot of other people.

"When I finally heard Ike play, just before I went in the Army, I was down in Greenwood Everybody there-was talking about Ike Turner. I went to hear him one night and they were just awesome. That was the band Kings of Rhythm that he subsequently ended UP in East St. Louis with." Dut got insecure after his split with Tina Turner. And after I got insecure, I started doing drugs, and then I got a fear of rejection thinking that the public wasn't going to accept me by myself.

I just went off the deep end.f IKE TURNER win i.i n. ii mm I ft' lf Oliver Sain Soul Reunion Where: Mississippi Nights, 914 North First Street, Laclede's Landing When: 9 p.m., Friday How much: $12 in advance, $14 on day of show Lineup: Ike Turner, Fontella Bass, Billy Gayles, Clayton Love, the Sharpees, Jacqui Staton, Pat and Danny Liston, Max Baker and the Oliver Sain All-Star Band Information: 421-3853 A- Wayne CrosslinPost-Dispatch ABOVE: Oliver Sain, who also got his musical start in Mississippi. Ike Turner, who comes from Clarksdale, fits the description of "musical impresario" to a During his 60 years, Turner has disc-jockeyed, talent-scouted, composed, produced and, of course, recorded. He learned early on how to operate in the music business during an era of racial exploitation. In Mississippi, Turner recorded his bands under assorted names, instinctively knowing that tin-eared lawyers who loomed over the business would fail to recognize the not-too-carefully concealed similarities between the sounds of bands like Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm and Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats.

Some scholars credit that latter group using saxophonist Jackie Brenston as a front for its true leader, Turner with cutting the first rock 'n' roll record: Turner's "Rocket 88s." "As far as writing was concerned: I would use a lot of names," Ike Turner explained recently, speaking on the phone from his hotel room in LosAngeles. "I used my mother's name on some songs. I recorded under my name for another company. Some of my records were recorded under the name 'Eki which is my name backwards. "I didn't know anything about trying to get out of contracts in those days.

And you know what a lawyer will charge you. So I would record for Chess Records under one name and record for another record company under another name, until I started with Tina. Then we stuck with one name: Ike and Tina." Annie Mac Bullock, born Nov. 26, 1939, in Brownsville, first sang with Ike Turner under the name Little Ann. In 1960, when the then-married duo recorded "A Fool in Love" at Technisonic Studio on should have just got another girl at that time and kept going, instead of stopping.

"But I got insecure. And after I got insecure, I started doing drugs, and then I got a fear of rejection thinking that the public wasn't going to accept me by myself. I just went off the deep end. I was actually hiding, when I think i about it now." i Having spent two years in the California prison system on a substance-related charge, Turner recently returned to the music scene in Los Angeles. "I'm recording right now," he said.

"I've got some of the best stuff I've ever cut in my life, I think. But I'm not finished with it. "I'm working with a singer named Vera Xnd Jeanette Bazzell, who is from Peveley, cut a sofig with me called 'Baby Get It which is one of the songs I'm going to do when I come there on the 26th. And she'll be with me. i "I'm going on four years of sobriety now.

I've got no interest in drugs anymore. Music is my life. I just spent 15 years of my life doing nothing playing and creating in hotel rooms, playing for maybe 10 people. I guess I was still scared that I wouldn't be accepted. "I told Ike, 'Well, I don't think she's too Ike kept repeating that in interviews.

I kept reading that Oliver Sain didn't think Tina Turner was too hot. But I was not impressed when I first heard her. Then, as I heard her more, I realized she had a certain power a certain thing that was going to make it." With an emerging superstar female vocalist, and an ability to adapt to music's changing fashions, Ike Turner recorded more than 30 albums through the 1960s, variously released on the Sue, Warner Brothers, Philess, Blue Thumb and United Artists labels. Ike and Tina's relationship, however, did not survive Tina Turner's soaring fame, which came on the heels of "River Deep, Mountain High." And Ike Turner freely admits that his confidence left with Tina Turner. Recalling his days with Tina, Turner fantasizes a battle of the bands with his former mate.

And he believes he should have taken a "business as usual" posture toward their musical relationship, all along vocalists being part of what he claims to have long recognized as a volatile breed. "When one of those singers got the big head and took off, I would just get one of the others," Turner said. "That was the thing I should have done when me and Tina broke up: I Brentwood Boulevard, they were Ike and Tina Turner. "I was supposed to record that record with a boy named Art Lassiter," Turner recalled. "He was one of the singers I used back then.

I had Billy Gayles in those days, and I had Tommy Hodge. I had Jimmy Thomas and Clayton Love and Fred Samples. I think some of these guys are still around St. Louis. "We cut that record at Technisonic.

At that time, it was owned by Ed Cantor, who was just used to cutting TV commercials then. "There wasn't a lot of screaming and stuff on records, back then. We went in there to cut 'Fool in and there's a part in the middle where Tina hollers. Well, when she did that, Cantor hit that talkback button in the studio and said, 'Dammit, don't you holler in my Oliver Sain recalls. Turner's telling him about his female vocalist in the late 1950s.

"They got together when I first came to St. Louis," said Sain. "I mean, right about the exact time, because the rumors were all over town about the gal that Ike had discovered. And I kept hearing about it. "Finally, Ike told me about it.

He said, 'Man, I found this girl. She's going to be So I was off one night when they were playing in East St. Louis, and I just wandered in there. URBAN DESIGN SIDELIGHTS Planting And Paving Museum's Corner Of Park i r-t iv it- 'ill -i 1 992, Los Angeles' Times And Goofy for veep: Michael Eisner for president? Hey, in this wacky election year, why not? That's what satirist, writer and now playwright Jamie Malanowski figures. A casting call has gone out for his off Broadway production of "This Happy, Happy Lanjl," which will feature an Eisner "act- -alike" in the central role as president of the United States.

In the play, Eisner, chairman of the Walt Disney takes over the country after a constitutional crisis and, in the process, "America is Disneyized," said Malanowski, who based his play on a story he wrote for Spy magazine last fall. "Disneyized," Malanowski says, means "like Disney World. You get the impression everything's well painted, well maintained, orderly and there's a kind of creepiness to it all." After "Wayne's What's the real world like after you leave "Wayne's World" especially if you're Wayne? That's a question Hollywood's been asking about the future of comedian Mike Myers. When it was announced that Myers had agreed to star in TriStar Pictures' "So 1 Married an Axe Murderer," a black comedy that's been in development at various studios for over four years, as his follow-up film, the question on a lot of people's minds was why this project? An insider close to the negotiations says that Myers' decision was based mostly on the script, in which a bachelor assumes his girlfriend is a killer. Says the source, "It was simply a question of him finding a script that he thought was funny and was I.

right for his sensibilities." And how much is Myers being paid? No one will say, but his price apparently has gone up considerably since "Wayne's World" grossed more than $100 million. Meanwhile, negotiations for Myers' appearance in the "Wayne's World" sequel are "95 percent complete and will be finished soon," a source says, paving the way for the next "Wayne's World" to begin filming next April. "IITI Missouri Historical Society By E.F. Porter Of the Post-Dispatch Staff SOMETIMES, though not very often, it happens that an evil design will have have a benign result. More often, the reverse is the case and a benign proposal will have a malignant byproduct.

Both causal relationships are apparent in the Louis Art Museum's plans to pave over three patches of Forest Park for parking. Parking lots are the evil a "necessary" evil, as developers like to call them, as though necessity can magically turn evil into good but an evil withal. But the expansion of the museum building for the sake of more exhibit space, which is the underlying reason the museum wants more parking space, would not be such a pernicious thing. Despite what the museum's opponents maintain, most of us probably do not consider an art museum an egregiously inappropriate use for park land. We all might prefer that it had been built someplace else, but the fact is that it has occupied the same spot in that park for three generations.

In land use, as in politics, tradition counts for something, and possession is nine-tenths of the law. Similarly, the landscaping, the planting, the elimination of some roads and rerouting of others, the outdoor architecture, the whole $6.5 million project that the museum has proposed to soften the impact of the proposed parking lots, would be a stylish enhancement to the museum's corner of the park. And the park could sure use it. As artistic as one might rightfully expect, the art museum landscaping plan is actually two plans. The one for the front (north) side of the museum is formal, rigidly ordered and elegant; the one at the rear, loose, informal and naturalistic.

Front yard, back yard; rather like a house. The program Removing the two curving roads that extend out front-of the museum, along with their spectacle-like terminal turnarounds, and replacing them with small overlooks and curved paths flanked by formal, continental-style colonnades of lindens. Narrowing the street in front of the museum and replacing the ulcerated asphalt with patterned parterre of paving stone. Putting a balustraded terrace in place of the eroded hillside around the equestrian statue of St. Louis.

The Palace of Arts at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. The temporary wings were razed after the fair, and the permanent central structure became the St. Louis Art Museum. Filing the gaps around the museum with a total of 560 new trees (counting the lindens) and 1,600 shrubs and installing an underground irrigation system to keep them healthy.

Eliminating the section of Government Drive where it slices through Kennedy Forest, Forest Park's last, sad little patch of woods, and letting nature heal the wound. Because the grassy shoulders of Government Drive are about as wide as the road itself, the gain in woodland would be about twice the area now actually under pavement. There would be three parking lots folded into this scheme, one on the slope bordering the woods, the other two out front behind the rows of lindens, approximately where the curved roadways are now. The landscape plan makes provision for eventual expansion of the museum building itself in, as museum director James D. Burke puts it, "the footprint of Mr.

Gilbert's original design." Cass Gilbert, the New York architect whose St. Louis works include the Central Public Library, was the designer of the Palace of Arts at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. It consisted of a permanent central structure at the center flanked by temporary wings made of lath and stucco masquerading as ornate masonry. The wings were razed after the fair closed and the central element became the art museum you see today.

Sometime over the next two or three decades, as the need for more exhibit space becomes greater, the museum intends to reconstruct those wings, or something close to them. Burke said. The issue will be how close. No architect today is likely to be happy mimicking Gilbert's Beaux Arts style, yet the St. Louis citizenry has a right to demand that the addition be harmonious and unobtrusive.

And they may get the chance. The opponents of the museum's plan object not just to the parking lots but to the provision embedded in the ordinance adopted by the Board of Alderman that grants the museum control over 22 acres See MUSEUM, Page 6.