St. Louis Won't Make Ike's Day
Obviously, love's got nothing to do with it.
The mayor of St. Louis turned down a request to make Sept. 2 Ike Turner Day in honor of the R&B icon's scheduled performance at the Big Muddy Blues Festival.
While Mayor Francis Slay's office declined to expound on why he had refused music festival director Dawne Massey's appeal, but it presumably had something to do with Turner's legally challenged past and confessed history of violence against ex-wife Tina Turner.
The musician has publicly admitted to slapping and punching—but not beating—Tina during their tempestuous 18-year union that was chronicled in the 1993 biopic What's Love Got to Do With It, with Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett both scoring Academy Award nominations for their turn as the oft-warring spouses.
The "Proud Mary"-covering duo were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, a ceremony Turner missed because he was busy serving a prison sentence on drug charges.
Regardless of his blemished record, however, Sept. 2 was supposed to be all about the music, according to Massey.
"He helped put St. Louis rhythm and blues on the map," she told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "We were only looking to celebrate his contributions to the music industry. Many entertainers have checkered past."
True that, but the mayor's office still received phone calls from people who didn't want Ike to have a whole day devoted to the 75-year-old artist.
"We believe there is a zero tolerance for any kind of violence," Bridget Brennan, executive director of the St. Louis Healthy Marriage Coalition, told the Post-Dispatch. "We would not want to honor someone who has publicly stated they have hit their wife." The Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence also applauded the mayor's decision, the newspaper reported Thursday.
"People are living in the past," Scott Hanover of Thrill Entertainment Group, which reps Turner, said. "They don't know the man I know. This ain't 1962."
Turner received a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame in 2001. His 2006 album Risin' with the Blues won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album.
The Mississippi-born guitar wiz met Tina Turner, back when she was just Anna Mae Bullock from Tennessee, in nearby East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1956.
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