Spector, according to our spy in the Greater Bethany Community Church in Gardena, Calif., was among several celebrity mourners including Bonnie Raitt and Little Richard who gathered to say good-bye to the Grammy-winning musician.
"I'm so sorry, I wasn't prepared to say anything," said the thin and frail-looking music producer. "Nobody had told me that I was going to speak. This is a very sad occasion for me."
Spector rambled, but he had points to make. Here they are, for better or worse:
"First of all, the things that were said about Ike, that were in that piece-of-trash movie they made about him were ... (applause), it was a piece-of-trash movie. I haven't seen the movie but it was told to me, and [Barney] Kessel was the world's greatest guitar player in the world and the only reason that Ike didn't play on 'River Deep, Mountain High' was because Ike was the second greatest guitar player in the world. I treasured him and everybody knew it except Ike. That's how good he was
"B.B. King told me at a party with Doc Pomus and Joe Turner and Ray Charles sitting there that Ike Turner was the only guitar player he wouldn't play behind. That's how good he was. But Ike never boasted. He came to parties with me and I'd say, 'play, play' and Ike would never play.
"Ike could play circles around Eric Clapton and Eric knew it. I had someone once ask me what's the difference between Ike Turner and Eric Clapton. I said, 'you don't know the difference between Eric Clapton and Ike Turner? That's funny, why don't you ask Eric, Eric knows.'"
"Ike made Tina the jewel she was. When I went to see Ike play at the Cinegrill in the '90s after his absurd reason for being sent to prison for no reason other than being a black man in America, there were at least, and I counted them, five Tina Turners on the stage performing that night, any one of them could have been Tina Turner."
"And sell-out, whom you really love and respect but I have an ambivalence towards Oprah Winfrey. She made Tina Turner's book into a bestseller, which demonized and vilified Ike. The book wouldn't have sold 10 books. It was badly written. It was a piece of trash and because Oprah idolized Tina, she didn't feel it wrong to vilify a 'brother.'"
"Other black sisters did the same thing to Ike and there was a very famous story about Whoopi Goldberg, who had a television show for about five minutes, interviewed Ike. Ike had called me and said, 'Shall I do the show?'
"I said, 'You can't get hurt.' And he said, 'OK, I'm going to do it.'
"And we figured it would be good because it's Whoopi and Whoopi asked him, 'I understand before you were married when you were living together, you beat the hell out of her and she tried to commit suicide because she was so terrified of you and she tried to jump out of a window,' and Ike said, 'Yeah, but it's hard to jump out of a window from a basement floor.'"
"It was only one Ike. I learned more from Ike than any professors I've been around. He never, ever bothered me. He never interfered with me. He never got in my way."
"When we did 'River Deep Mountain High,' people said you can't put Ike and Tina Turner's name on that record. It won't sell because they are rhythm and blues and it's a pop record. I said I signed Ike and Tina Turner, it won't even say featuring Tina Turner; it's Ike and Tina Turner."
Spector said part of the reason he became disillusioned with the record business was because he could not make Ike and Tina as big of an act as he wanted.
"I wanted them to be the biggest revue in America. They were the first act that I recorded that ever could play big-time and break it in Vegas and America."
Roger Friedman
Fox News
Saturday Dec. 22, 2007
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