River Deep, Mountain High – Ike & Tina Turner
Well I’m gonna be as faithful as that puppy, no I’ll never let you down
June 18th 1966 I was 9 years old. Mum had walked out of Hellingly Hospital but on the advice of Dr Maggs had volunteered to go back for a short while. When she finally returned home, she’d been away for nine months. I was happy when she came home. Her mum, my nan, had been helping Dad to run the house, and us. Andrew had been in Portsmouth, still a baby, but by now he was walking and talking. A little boy. Paul and I shared a bedroom and we talked after the lights went out. The staircase went up and then forked right and left, we were on the left and Mum and Dad were on the right. The cat used to have its kittens on top of the wardrobe in Mum’s bedroom. At the halfway point of the staircase I could sit and listen to my parents arguing. Sometimes I was already downstairs when they started fighting, and Mum had a technique. She went for Dad’s glasses. That was that – pretty much – he’s blind without them. Bt if I was upstairs when the fight started, Paul and I might walk down the four steps to the mini-landing. Down the stairs we could see a french window onto the back garden. To the right was the door to the living room with the record player and the table where we ate. The TV was in the front room. Rationed. A dog, and a cat would be somewhere around. Bookcases. And, right now, my mum and my dad were having a high-decibel screaming match. Or rather my mum was. Dad’s parries were usually low-key, murmured dissents, accusing my mum of stupidity. Since he had gone to Cambridge and she’d left school at 15, this was something of a blue-touchpaper-lighting moment on his part : fireworks guaranteed : If she was stupid, what did that make him ? An utter imbecile for using the taboo words, for climbing onto an intellectual ledge of education he had climbed alone and casting rocks and stones down into the newly-despised slough of ignorance from whence he had climbed ! His mother was proper working class, and his dad too. John was the only one of his family (he had four older sisters) to go to Grammar School, and then the only one to stay on, then take Cambridge Entrance Exam and go up to Downing College in 1955. Totally intrepid, there were two other working class boys in his year, one from Yorkshire, one from the midlands. A fish out of water. People talked down to him, for the first time in his life he wasn’t the best. He was the lowest of the low amongst the Etonians, Winchester boys, Harrow snobs, privately-schooled little empire-builders. At the end of that first year, he’d gone back to Portsmouth and married Heather, and together they’d embarked on his 2nd year at Downing. I was born some 9 months later, in Cambridge.
But intellectual intelligence is probably less than 20% of the story. Maybe a little more, but not much. Emotional intelligence, which boys have less of, is a little more precious, certainly to me. Then – no. I had no idea. Maybe younger lads have more emotional intelligence, but evidence points to the opposite. They’re into riding bikes, collecting bird’s eggs, fishing for frogspawn and fighting with David Bristow. Collecting comics and not washing properly. Doing stupid things. Anyway – I’m wandering. This particular half-formed 9-year old was sitting listening to an offstage fight between mum and dad from the T-bone of the staircase. Paul aged 7 had joined me. I don’t think we were that interested in what they were actually saying, but I think we needed to go downstairs. So we stopped, slightly guiltily because it meant we were now eavesdropping. I can’t remember a word of it, I never was much cop at lyrics, but the music I can recall, because both of them have spoken to me in a similar key, before and since.
But just then a jar of marmalade flew horizontally through the barely-visible doorway downstairs and smashed violently against the wall below me. Orange jelly, glass and peel started to slide down the wall. It was a stunning moment. The pitch of the argument went up, then became teary and finally included moments of some silence.
Did Paul and I then walk down the stairs and out into the garden leaving them far far behind ? Out to the village with it’s curious green paths that ran everywhere, along the roadside, into the fields, down to the sand-pit and far away.
Or did we tiptoe back upstairs and read comics ?
It was so intense that the rest is blank. Either, both. Perhaps we went downstairs and saw that Mum had Dad’s glasses in her hand, and he was demanding their return. But now I feel that they were actually arguing about getting divorced, because Dad, as Paul once said many years later, “had a roving eye” and he’d been taking the piss for years, later confided to me in far too much detail by Mum. They were divorced later that year and Dad moved out. I used to remember it as the other way round. That they had a fight, then divorced, then Mum went into hospital. Linear. Blame. Made sense as a memory. But maybe when I was in my thirties I suddenly realised that Dad looked after us with Nan for 9 months, and was still there when she came out. But maybe that was when the eye roved. Can’t say I even knew what that meant then. But somewhere over that murky summer, I pedalled furiously along country lanes with Stephen Criddle even beyond the railway line, to Chalvington and Ripe. And swung on a black bent tractor tire over a pond with Martin Coleman and his dog Boffin. And on the radio, there it was, amongst Sunny Afternoon, Sloop John B, Strangers In The Night and Sweet Talking Guy, this monster single which appeared to be made of something else entirely.
I think it actually was. Truly. In early 1966 when River Deep, Mountain High was recorded, it cost over $20,000 to make, unheard of at that time. But let’s re-wind a little. The second married couple in this story, Ike & Tina Turner were married in in Tijuana in 1962, but are now almost impossible to think about without Angela Bassett‘s glorious performance in What’s Love Got To Do With It? immediately filling the frame as Lawrence Fishburne glowers behind her. Domestic violence poster children all grown up. But there’s more to Ike Turner than wife-beater. Rocket 88, recorded in 1951 with Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats, is considered by many to be the first rock’n’roll single ever recorded. Who cares right ? Their tempestuous marriage lasted until 1976 when Ike’s cocaine habit was so out-of-control that he had burned a hole in his nose and would get regular nosebleeds. Tina escaped and never looked back. But amongst the violence and drugs, they had made some great music together. Tina’s original name was Anna Mae Bullock, and she dated the saxophone player of Ike’s band The Kings of Rhythm in St Louis, Missouri before singing one song at one show. The rest is herstory. Tina Turner has one of the most soulful soul voices of any era. The first single for Ike & Tina Turner was A Fool For You on Sue Records, but by 1964 Ike Turner had sacked them and was prowling around the record business looking for a pop hit. Ike & Tina Turner had been touring the southern soul circuit for hundreds of days per year, and had produced a series of great LPs, and great singles, all of which would be dwarfed by this cavernous, gothic piece of work. Ike signed up with Warner Brothers where he met Bob Krasnow who would start to manage the husband and wife team and introduced them to Phil Spector.
Ellie Greenwich & Jeff Barry in 1964
Our third married couple, Ellie Greenwich and her husband Jeff Barry were New York songwriters who married in late 1962 and then decided to exclusively write together from that moment, upsetting previous songwriting partnerships. But three years later they’d composed Be My Baby & I Can Hear Music for The Ronettes, Da Doo Ron Ron for The Crystals (see My Pop Life #131), The Dixie Cups’ huge hit Chapel Of Love and The Shangri-Las’ mighty single Leader Of The Pack.
Quite a cv. All of the above (bar Leader Of The Pack produced in New York by George Morton) were produced by Phil Spector in Los Angeles, and he always had a cut on the publishing too. Greenwich, Barry, Spector became the badge of a hit record. But in late 1965 control-freak Spector hadn’t had a hit record for a whole year. He paid Ike Turner $20,000 to stay away from the sessions, and recorded with the Wrecking Crew whose members Hal Blaine, Carol Kaye, Glen Campbell, Tommy Tedesco and many many others had already sat in on many of the big songs of the decade, often on Spector’s signature wall-of-sound productions. You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling. Mr Tambourine Man. I Got You Babe. As well as all those with The Ronettes and The Crystals. This though was to be Spector’s biggest production to date.
Tina, Phil, Ike, Goldstar, 1965
Late ’65 they were all in Gold Star Studios at Santa Monica & Vine, running through the chord changes and orchestrations. Days and days later they were still recording. Tina was down to her bra, scorching hot and howling into the microphone one of the great vocal performances in all music. The final peak at 3 minutes is unmatched in pop I would suggest. A genuine tingle every time I hear it. It certainly isn’t matched by the combined force of The Four Tops & The Supremes in a 1971 cover which only takes off on the bridge section. Diana is game, Levi Stubbs is is too polite on his puppy verse, but that was Motown right there. Aimed at the white audience, so more polite, less gutsy and raw, more pop, less black. A bigger hit than Spector’s I’m guessing, in America, although Tina’s is now considered one of the pinnacles of pop history. Less black ? Weird to think of it like that, perhaps that’s a racist construction but in any event, the gospel element is often subsumed in Motown records, less so at Stax, Specialty, Sue, Atlantic or other soul labels. But whatever is pop and whatever is soul, greatness is greatness, and all of the acts mentioned above are truly great. Tina Turner didn’t sing Remember Me after all. But Spector reckoned River Deep, Mountain High was his greatest moment. So did George Harrison among others.
Tina Turner & Phil Spector at Goldstar, late 1965
Extraordinarily, River Deep, Mountain High was not a hit in the USA at all, either on the pop charts or the R’n’B charts, and opinions ranged from “too white for the black chart” to “too black for the pop chart“, and Spector retired in disgust, remarking later that he understood famous American traitor Benedict Arnold which told us a) how very hard he took the record’s failure, and b) how bonkers he was. He didn’t work until 1970 when John Lennon and George Harrison gave him the Twickenham Sessions and he went away and made Let It Be, later producing many of the pair’s solo records in the 1970s.
However, River Deep, Mountain High was a chart hit in England in July 1966. At some point that summer England won the World Cup. I know because I was in the village shop and the shopkeeper smiled at me. “England won The World Cup” he said. I was so happy. Even though we hadn’t watched it. I didn’t really know what it meant to be honest. Perhaps that means that my dad wasn’t at home then and had already left. Funny things memories.
full song –
the original promo with Ike singing along, which he doesn’t :
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