Ike Turner

READING Ike Turner's own account of his life, you might suppose that things had come a little too easy. Sex, for example. From the age of six he had walked to school in Clarksdale, Mississippi, past the house of a middle-aged lady called Miss Boozie. Each day she would be there in her thin cotton dress, asking him to feed her chickens. Afterwards she would tidy him up, and then take him to bed and teach him the moves. “In those days they didn't call it abuse,” said Mr Turner later, chortling at the memory. “They called it fun!”

Or take cocaine, which Mr Turner did to such effect in the 1970s and 1980s that he reckoned he had spent $11m on his habit. It started with two friends slipping him a wad of paper with about half a gram inside, in Las Vegas in 1960. He put some in his nose more or less out of curiosity, felt nothing, but was then astounded to find that he wanted to stay up all night writing music, and was still lively the next day. In a short time he was ordering it “by the suitcase” and passing it round to his friends.

Or take Tina. She sashayed up to him one night in St Louis in 1957, Anna Mae Bullock as she was then, just 18 with a wild, wide mouth and incredible legs, and took the mike away from him to show how she could sing. Her voice was a powerhouse. Naturally she joined the band. Mr Turner was vague as to whether they ever married exactly. He got some piece of paper from a photographer's booth in Mexico that seemed to make it official, though afterwards he vaguely remembered being married already with two children. Well, he never pretended to be a good father (...)

The Economist (décembre 2007)

(La rubrique "Obituary" de ce journal est un chef-d'oeuvre).