As most of you know, Ike Turner -- Tina's ex-other half -- has a reputation for being the wicked prince of the blues. In her tell-all book, I, Tina, and the subsequent film, What's Love Got to Do With It, Ike was painted as a wife abuser of monstrous proportions, a creature somewhere down the evolutionary scale beneath Joey Buttafuoco, John Wayne Bobbitt and those horned demons that Buffy slays on the WB.

To make matters worse, Ike had a drug habit during his days with Tina bad enough to embarrass even a Hollywood agent. Slide guitarist Chris Darrow recalls renting Turner's old Bolic recording studio in the mid-1970s and finding that the faders on the mixing board wouldn't move. "I unscrewed the top and found the mechanism clogged from all the spilled cocaine that had crystallized."

But Turner did jail-time for his drug capers, which is more than either major candidate for the White House can say, and these days Ike is a clean-living, healthy-looking model citizen married to an attractive singer named Jeanette and living in the San Diego area. "I like my life now," he says.

Still, those ugly spousal abuse stories from the old days don't go away, particularly as there were few magazines in North America that didn't print Tina's story and treat it as gospel. It didn't matter to the media at large that Ike disputed many of the facts. Typical was a Vanity Fair spread in 1993 that gave Tina reams of pages to tell her side in language so perfectly edited that she sounded like Diana Rigg hosting Mystery on PBS. Ike received a skimpy couple of sidebar inches to respond, and the editors included every "uh" and "duh" that a man might speak when cold-called and asked to defend himself on the spot.

"Ain't nothing like a woman's scorn," he says now, but the attacks still grate on him. "I don't feel like I should have to go around defending myself because of what somebody else says."

At least Tina told Vanity Fair he has a large penis.

But for a man so vilified, an odd thing occurs when Ike Turner turns up at blues events -- the other performers tend to behave as though Robert Johnson himself had just come back from the dead. Case in point -- a few years ago, Homesick James stopped a show in a 1000-seat concert hall to carry on a long-winded conversation with Turner, whom he had spotted in the audience. It didn't matter that the crowd wanted Homesick to finish "Dust My Broom" and an embarrassed Ike was urging him to continue. Homesick wanted to catch up with his old friend. Backstage at the same gig, ex-Muddy Waters sideman Pinetop Perkins was equally overjoyed to see Turner. "Ike's one of the best people I know, and I've known him since he was a boy," he said about Turner whom he taught piano in the 1940s.

And it's not just the old-timers. Joe Louis Walker, arguably the best guitarist among his generation of younger bluesmen, has made a point of working with Ike, both in the studio and at big summer festivals. "I like Ike. He's my man," Walker says, and he's not talking about the 34th President of these United States.

It's clear that Ike Turner has packed a lot of heavy-duty living into one lifetime. He was just 20 years old and not long out of Clarksdale, Mississippi, when he and his band arrived at Sun Records in Memphis to cut what some critics consider the first rock'n'roll song, "Rocket 88." The record went to No. 1 on the R&B chart and stayed there for five weeks. A mint 45-rpm pressing recently sold to a collector for nearly $10,000. "I wish a had a box of them," Ike says.

1 | 2