“A timely seasonal (very large) stocking filler to delight the vintage R&B enthusiast. Prior to Fred's "Dynamite", two books had been issued between 1999 and 2003 giving the story of Ike and Tina Turner, but "Dynamite", so named after their 3rd LP release, concentrates on Ike's recording sessions, with just seven pages of Ike's domestic story.
Three and a half pages of acknowledgements include names of established researchers. several I am happy to say are Woodies, and the sheer number of contributors give some idea how thoroughly the subject matter has been researched and compiled. The chapter headed "The Ike Turner Sessions" focuses on the years 1951 to 1976, with approximately ten to eighteen pages per year crammed with fascinating detail. Each page includes a chronological listing of recording data plus an account of events, e.g. tours, TV shows and interviews. Record label photos and period advertisements are littered throughout
The discography is nearly 100 pages showing records from around the world containing Ike, and irrespective of his role on the recording.
The book is obviously a source book for researchers, but anybody who has the merest interest in black music should not overlook this great read. Sure, there are "lists", but these are referenced in the introduction, so avoiding what the buffs will target there is still a terrific story to tell. The book is only available in softback and an average of £40 should secure.”
Ken Major, Tales From The Woods (December 2022)
“Fred Rothwell's 2001 opus 'Long Distance Information – Chuck Berry's Recorded Legacy', is one of my most visited reference works. This guy know how to put together discographical information in a style that elevates it from being cold, dry and stuffy into something immensely enjoyable and unputdownable. But regular readers of this mag will already know that, as he's been a contributor here for many years. Indeed, his itemised lowdown on some of Ike Turner's most rockinest cuts in last November's NDT is a perfect example of what's on offer here across this book's 673 pages.
Ike's excesses and misdemeanours in his private life are well known and have been documented elsewhere. This book separates art from the artist and concerns itself with the music he recorded between the years 1952 and 2006, though obviously it does touch upon aspects of how he lived his life in the narrative.
Its scope means it covers 54 years in a business that witnessed trends come and go at a steady lick, so it goes without saying that not everything here fits into the 'rock n roll' bag as we know it. Far from it. It goes through r&b, rock n roll, pop, soul, blues, funk and so forth. But Ike Turner's influence and involvement in the early days of the Big Beat cannot be denied and I very much doubt there'll ever be another look his creative work in as much depth as 'Dynamite!'. Therefore, even if you just have tfe slightest interest in his music but want to know more, then this is what you need.
The format is pretty much the same as Fred's Chuckster book, listing each and ever recording Ike played on/produced, together with recording date, location, release info and personnel details. Linking text puts everything into context and the whole thing is illustrated by photos, label shots and trade ads. Copious index sections allow the reader to find song titles, names, albums, locations, chart history etc. with ease.
All told, the book chronicles 389 recording sessions – in both studio and live settings – offering a description of each title recorded, details of the origins of songs, background stuff on musicians/vocalists and so forth.
Ike plied his trade at locations all over the place – primarily in the deep south in the early days: Memphis, Greenville, Canton, Little Rock, Clarksdale etc. - but the schoolboy in me always chuckles whenever I see that his own studio in Los Angeles was called Bolic Sound.
In Fred's own words: "Musically, Ike Turner was a phenomenon. Starting out playing a pounding piano style, he then switched to guitar on which he proved to be equally adept, developing a wild whammy bar technique. He was also a band leader, performer, composer, record producer, talent scout, recording studio owner, proprietor of numerous record labels and all round hustler. Ike was also a workaholic, especially at Bolic, where in a drug-induced state he would record for nights and days on end."
I only ever got to see Ike Turner once – at the 'It Came From Memphis' show at London's Barbican on April 18th 2005. He was headlining a wonderful line-up also featuring Sonny Burgess & The Pacers, Billy Lee Riley and Jack Clement. There'd been protesting from some circles, demanding he be removed from the bill re his much-publicised reputation for domestic violence (Mrs. Trellis of North Wales penned a particularly stern missive), but he performed nonetheless – complete with the obligatory Tina lookalike (wife No. 13?). Unfortunately, he didn't do 'Rocket ' but he did play some wonderful rocking r&b on both piano and guitar. I'm not condoning anything he may or may not have done in personal life, but he was a highly original musician and getting to see him was something else I could tick off my Bucket List.
Just like there'll never be another Ike Turner, there'll never be another Ike Turner book like 'Dynamite!'.”
Trevor Cajiao, Now Dig This (January 2023)
“Blues discographies have been around at least since the 1940s, if not before. Nowadays they range from a brief "selected albums" section at the end of an article on an artist in a magazine (or on a website) to the kind of in-depth examinations of Blues Records 1943¬1970 and Dixon & Godrich's Blues & Gospel Records 1890-1943. Fred Rothwell has previous form as co-author (with Phil Wight) of the classic and oft-referenced Muddy Waters discography, and his book on Chuck Berry was extremely well-received – but that was around two decades ago.
If you have been wondering what he's been up to since then, here's the answer. The variety of Ike's material appealed to him; this book ranges across Ike's forays into blues down in Mississippi, through rock and roll, pop, R'n'B, soul, and on to rock, disco, funk and rap (though most of it with a blues base of course) and back to the blues itself.
The book is not a simple listing, impressive though that would be in itself anyway. Each section – with sessions related generally by year – is prefaced by some scene setting, part biography, part reviews (both vintage and Fred's own opinions), and there are plenty of photographs, vintage adverts and label shots. The result means that this is a discography you can actually sit down and read. And no, Fred does not gloss over or dismiss Ike's personal life and relationship with Tina, though neither does he dwell on it. The depth of the discographical work itself is stunning, given that Ike would record seemingly constantly. Dynamitel is a true labour of love and a very handsome looking one too.”
Norman Darwen, Blues in Britain (May 2023)
“When Ike Turner died in 2007, he left behind a musical legacy as rich and deep as that of anyone in rock n roll (a genre heplayed a significant part in creating) or R&B (the style he was associated with for most of his career, at least partly because it was just about the only "label" the mainstream recording industry would assign to a Black artist who wasn't either a traditional bluesman or a watered-down pop crooner). He also, of course, left a personal legacy darkened by his years of substance abuse and domestic violence, a history he was never entirely capable of extricating himself from, despite his latter-day self-reinvention as a blues/R&B roots man, reunited with glory-days compatriots like Ernest Lane and performing at festivals throughout the US and overseas. In fact, although he managed to remain clean for over ten years after he was released from prison in 1991, he ended up succumbing again to the demons that had ridden him for most of his life (as he admitted in his gut-wrenching, privately recorded confessional song, A Shamed Man, heard in the biography aired on theTV series Unsung in 2015). As a result, he is still often seen in the popular imagination as something of a demon himself, irredeemable despite his artistic achievements—not the least of which was his mid-1950s discovery of Anna Mae Bullock and his subsequent Svengali-like transformation of her into Tuna Turner, a role she'd adopt as her own and which would catapult her to pop music stardom and eventual immortality.
Author Fred Rothwell, whose previous books include Long Distance Information, a similar study of the career and oeuvre of Chuck Berry, and 2015's Gangster of Love, a biography of Johnny "Guitar" Watson co-written with Vincent Bakker, informs us that "this book has been twenty years in the making, which means that he started the project several years before Ike Turner passed away. It was obviously a prodigious undertaking; he cites numerous bibliographical and discographical sources, as well as musical contemporaries of Turner's and blues/R&B scholars and aficionados from the US, Europe, and Great Britain, along with a wide range of magazines, newspapers and websites ranging from specialty publications focused on the music to more general sources that published interviews with and/or articles about Ike Turner. Along the way he appears to have listened to virtually everything Turner ever recorded and viewed most of the documentation of his career that exists on film or video (whether physical or online).
I mention these multiple sources not just to praise Rothwell's work ethic but to give the reader an idea of the depth and breadth of his research, and the scope of the book that has resulted. Despite its meticulously researched and cross-referenced documentation of virtually every recording Ike Turner participated in as leader, sideman, or producer, Dynamite! isn't merely a compilation of discographical data. The book begins with a relatively brief but vivid and informative biographical overview; more enticingly, the subsequent sections, although focused primarily on Rothwell's stated purpose of presenting Turner's "recorded legacy," are further enriched by additions details and anecdotes drawn from Turner's life; many of them first-person recollections from people who were there (including band members and Ikettes from various points in his career), many of which will probably be unfamiliar to even the most dedicated fans. The result is far more than a record of Turner's musical activities in the studio, on record, and on the road—it is in fact, a musical biography. Ike "the man" comes as alive in these pages, as does Ike "the musician (and Ike "the songwriter, Ike "the band leader," Ike "the arranger," Ike "the producer" et al). The range and scope of his activities and musical interests is as vivid a subtext here as are the accomplishments that made his 60-plus-year career (if we include his early years scuffling along the club and juke joint circuit in the area around Clarksdale. Mississippi, where he was born in 1931) one of the most significant in American popular music.
Had Ike Turner recorded nothing else in his career except Rocket 88 in 1951, his place in R&B/rock 'n' roll history would be secure, even though vocalist Jackie Brenston ended up being billed as the leader (and songwriter) on the record when it was issued by Chess, and the band, Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, was renamed Brenston's "Delta Cats." It's characteristic of this book, and of Rothwell's dogged completism, that the Rocket 88 session at Sam Phillips' studio in Memphis, thoroughly documented and vividly described (including the events leading up to it, when B.B. King "discovered" Turner and his freshly minted Kings of Rhythm in a Mississippi nightspot—variously remembered as either the Harlem Inn in Chambers or an unnamed Clarksdale juke—and then recommended therm to Phillips), also serves as a starting point for a wide-ranging discussion of other sides released during more or less the same time that capitalized on the style and feel of that record, as well as some fascinating, if unprovable, rumors concerning the song's authorship. We're also given the disc's actual recording date—March 7 instead of the commonly cited March 6—along with Ike's own take on its significance in rock 'n' roll history ("Rocket 88 is the cause of rock'n'rolI existing").
The entire book proceeds at that level of detail, exegesis, and scholarship. Each year of Turner's career from 1951 through 1976 gets its own chapter; his final 30 years, compromised as they were by his mounting personal problems, are divided into the periods 1917-1995, 1996-1999, and 2000-2001.
Of special interest to many LB readers will be the years before Tina came on board, during which Ike worked variously for both Sam Phillips and the Bihari brothers (the Modern/RPM labels) as A&R man, producer, and session musician, overseeing (and/or playing on) sessions featuring such fabled blues figures as Howlin' Wolf, Elmore Jarnes, Bobby "Blue" Bland (just beginning his career and billed as "Robert Bland"), Rosco Gordon, Little Milton, and, according to some recollections B.B. King himself, as well as a raft of less-famous but significant blues and R&B artists. A few years later, in 1959, he and the Kings traveled to Chicago for a series of now legendary sessions for Eli Toscano, resulting in such classics as Otis Rush's Double Trouble and All Your Love (I Miss Loving) and Buddy Guy's early You Sure Can't Do (which featured Ike, not Buddy, on guitar), as well as a release by a very young Betty Everett (I'll Weep No More / Tell Me, Darling) and several important outings by Ike and the Kings of Rhythm themselves.
By that time, Ike had released the first sides featuring the vocals of a young woman from Nutbush, Tennessee; whom he billed as "Little Ann" at first. It wasn't until 1960, when he turned her loose as Tina Turner on A Fool in Love, released on Sue in July of that year, that her full potential began to be realized—even Ike, up to that point, most likely didn't realize what he had. Soon, with her torrid stage presence along with Ike's relentless perfectionism and the quality of the musicans he recruited, the Ike & Tina Turner Revue evolved into a show capable of going head-to-head with the J.B.s, Sam & Dave, or any other of the myriad "housewrecking" acts burning up the chitlin' circuit at the time. Their fame probably culminated with 1971's epochal Proud Mary, helping Tina to become that rare artist who remained as revered among her original Black admirers as she became among the white "crossover" audience who eventually also embraced her. It's all documented here. Rothwell provides vignettes from vintage, often rare, film and video clips of the Revue in action during its glory years—along with the full Ike & Tina sessionography and discography, as well as lke's ongoing, on-and-off-again work as producer and/or studio musician for other acts (even toward the end, as impaired by substances as he sometimes was, he was a prodigious worker, putting in day after day after sleepless night in his Bolic Sound Studio in Inglewood, California, which he established in 1970 and held on to until a somewhat suspicious fire destroyed it in January of 1981.
Ike's dedine, as tragic as it was, is recounted here as well, as is the remarkable, if ultimately doomed, comeback he embarked on after his release from prison in 1991. Throughout the book. Rothwell is effusive in his praise of Ike's genius and the quality of the music he created (and hdped create) during the years when he was at his artistic best, and he also reminds us that the man's childhood had been scarred by tragedy (his father died from injuries sustained in a racist beating when Ike was less than six years old) and sexual abuse at the hands of at least two grown Clarksdale women ("Nowadays it would be called paedophilia; back then, it just happened"). But he doesn't spare judgment where he believes it's warranted; although he concurs with those who suggest that the movie What's Love Got to Do With It, and at least parts of Tina's own autobiographical writings and public statements, adorned an already tawdry story with unsubstantiated embellishments and factual errors, he nonetheless affirms that "Ike's treatment of Tina was atrocious, even if overstated by the media, and cannot be excused," and that at least part of the travaiIs he endured during the final decades of his life could be considered a kind of karmic justice. In the end, with Ike alone in his studio recording A Shamed Man, his devastating testimonial of self-loathing and expiation, we're left with "a pitiful, self-abasing confessional from a man who knew his end was nigh.
Along the way, though, Ike Turner gave us some of the finest and most lasting R&B of all time, most of it as thrilling now as it was when it was first conceived. That, in the end, is the essence of the Ike Turner story, and it's what this book celebrates with majesty and grace.”
David Whiteis, Living Blues (January 2024)
