The Last Days of Ike Turner
The last days of Ike Turner: the story of a rock 'n' roll legend who lived hard, loved life but couldn't quite let go of his past

Ebony, Oct, 2008 by Margena A. Christian

Going to jail in 1989 was the best thing that ever happened to Ike Turner.

Locked up as prisoner #E4678 at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, the pioneering rock 'n' roll musician who invented a genre of music and trained several rock legends at his knee, was able to end his "15-year party" with drugs while serving two years and two months on drug charges.

Turner, who had more musical talent than a busload of today's popular bands, stayed drug-free for more than a decade. He even talked to others about the importance of not making the same mistakes he had made.

But, in 2004, while reaching out to help another person turn away from drugs, Turner was lured back into the drug world.

Three years later, he would be dead.

Looking back, Phil Arnold, Turner's longtime manager, recalls the moment when someone in need, a crack house and a puff of smoke charmed the troubled legend down that one-way path to hell.

"Ike responded to a cry for help and went to the wrong place at the wrong time to rescue a crack addict he knew. Ike said, 'Smoke blew up in my face, and that is all it took--that first whiff.' He was the fireman who went into the burning building one too many times."

In the end, Turner, who stood 5-foot-8, never really got past his drug relapse four years ago. His chronic emphysema, diagnosed in 1994 just a year after he quit smoking, forced him to rely on either a bulky electric oxygen tank or a portable model to help him breathe. He would often cry, say family members, expressing frustration that he wasn't able to move beyond his addictions.

On Dec. 12, 2007, with his caretaker by his side, a thin, 76-year-old Ike Wister Turner died from the very thing he thought he had beaten in jail.

"Cocaine toxicity."

Those two words led the San Diego County Medical Examiner to list Turner's death as an "accident." The autopsy and toxicology reports also listed contributing conditions as "hypertensive cardiovascular disease" and "pulmonary emphysema."

Background singer Falina Rasool, Turner's personal assistant and caretaker who was with Turner the day he died, remembers, "When people heard this, a lot of people were disturbed that this man was still using. I know he was trying to quit. It had a hold on him. It was too strong for him. He tried with everything he had. He wanted out."

LIVING WITH THE PAST

In the last days of Ike Turner, the groundbreaking musician and bandleader behind the first rock 'n' roll record found it difficult to let go of many things.

He never got over the 1976 divorce from his ex-wife, Tina Turner. And he never got over their career split and the professional union as Ike and Tina Turner, which won them international acclaim as one of music's first crossover acts. Ike was the force behind the duo's musical success and was also the engine that helped drive it into trouble.

"There was not a day that would go by that he didn't watch videos with Tina," says Rasool. "Two days before he died, we were watching Tina. He could tell you everything that happened at that time, like the arguments they had before they got onstage. He could remember everything. Nothing altered his mind."

Ike and Tina Turner were together 16 years before divorcing. Her accounts of spousal abuse were documented in the 1986 autobiography I, Tina, and in the 1993 movie What's Love Got To Do With It. Tina Turner has since expressed her disappointment in the movie, saying, "I would have liked for them to have had more truth, but according to Disney [owner of the film's production company], they said, it's impossible, the people would not have believed the truth." She declined to speak with EBONY magazine for this story.

The two had no contact in more than three decades even though one son, Ronnie Turner, was born during this union in 1960.

"I know everything that has happened all through his life and through my parents' divorce," says Ronnie, 47, a musician and songwriter who learned to play the bass from his father. "He wasn't happy and still working. I could just tell and feel it. He never acted like he got over [the divorce] ... My father used to come to my house a lot. I never kept my phone book around. He used to ramble around and try to look for my mom's phone number."

A MAN AND HIS 14 WIVES

Ike Turner claimed to have been married 14 times. In his 1999 autobiography The Confessions of Ike Turner: Takin' Back My Name, at least five names were listed before he even mentioned marrying Tina in 1962. After they divorced in 1976, five years later he married former "Ikette" Margaret Ann Thomas, with whom he had a daughter, Mia, now 39. Turner married a St. Louis native, singer Jeannette Bazzell, in 1995.

Jeannette, 45, who was divorced from Ike in 2000, says, "I don't want his death to be in vain. I want the truth exposed. He was a man who stood on his own courage. He was very demanding, controlling and, yes, he was a womanizer. But he gave his heart. When he was up, he was all the way up. When he was down, he was all the way down. There was no middle. That's how he lived his life."

Ike met singer Audrey Madison in 1993. She started out as an Ikette, but after hearing her gutsy voice, he made her the lead singer. Some even described Audrey as a Tina clone.

Guitarist James (Bino) Lewis, who played with Ike and Tina Turner in the late '70s and on the classic song "Nutbush City Limits," says, "After Tina left, he just never got it again. Audrey was the closest thing entertainment-wise and vocal-wise, but she was a copy of Tina. He always tried to find that again, but he never found it."

Audrey says that she and Ike had become common-law husband and wife in 1999.. They married in Las Vegas on Oct. 8, 2006. But on Dec. 22, 2006, Ike Turner had already filed for a divorce, allegedly telling people he believed someone was trying to affect him with prescription medicine.

THE BATTLE FOR IKE'S MIND

Audrey, 49, calls those claims "nonsense." She contends that Ike suffered from bipolar disorder. She was helping him but that there were people who wanted to use his illness to keep him off-balance. "In order for them to take control, they wanted him on drugs. They wanted him to be this way so they could tell him not to take his medication."

Ike's daughter Mia disagrees, "Daddy is not bipolar ... He was so heavily medicated. He could hardly speak. He was double stepping and walking sideways."

Dr. Carl Bell, professor of psychiatry and public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, described bipolar as a mental illness where people go through two phases--a manic phase and a depressive phase.

"People who are bipolar wax and wane between mania and depression," says Bell. "The symptoms of depression are typical. You lose interest and have a sad mood. You lose weight. You lose sleep. Your thinking is sluggish. You might be suicidal and you have crying spells. Symptoms typical of mania are pressured speech, dated mood, grandiosity and hyperactivity."

In the coroner's investigative narrative that accompanied Turner's autopsy and toxicology report, the medicine Seroquel was listed as a drug he was taking at the time of his death and is often prescribed to treat bipolar disorder.

Rasool, the caretaker who administered Turner's medicine, says that Ike was taking Seroquel, because he was indeed bipolar. "I would come in the room and see him change like a lightbulb, switch on and switch off. I did ask him about it. He said he made a song about it and we started laughing," says Rasool, referring to his song "Bi Polar" on the 2006 Grammy-winning album Risin" With The Blues. "He said, 'I know I'm bipolar.' He says, 'And I've been bipolar, but a lot of people is bipolar.'"

YOUNG, IN CONTROL, UNTIL ...

Before 30, Turner was a different kind of man. He didn't drink and he didn't use drugs. His band, The Kings of Rhythm, were forbidden to use drugs or drink. He was noted for firing anyone he suspected of drinking, using marijuana, cocaine, or any kind of substance. When it came to business, he didn't tolerate distractions.

"He was one of the first Black musicians to keep control of his music and he taught others," says daughter Twanna. "To me, that's why [the industry] wanted to keep him down. He taught people how to not be manipulated and how to take control. When Salt 'n' Pepa used his song 'I'm Blue' for their song 'Shoop,' they paid him for that. 'I'm Blue' was also used in the movie Kill Bill. They paid him for that too. He owns publishing on it. He was a very intelligent man and very insightful."

In his autobiography, Turner revealed that he was first introduced to cocaine by two well-known performers in Las Vegas, both now deceased. Two weeks after being given the powdered substance wrapped in a dollar bill, he tried it for the first time late one night while writing songs at the piano. It wasn't long before he was hooked, purchasing "pure cocaine" from South America.

And after years of snorting, by 1974, Turner says he had burned a hole through his nose. He was then introduced to another way to get high--freebasing..