The singers booked weren’t exactly small time. They were the Ikettes, Ike Turner’s backing singers, and Tina Turner was part of the package. The vocal parts were tricky and took time to master. She may not have been the quickest learner (compared to Linda Sims and Debbie Wilson), but Tina was proud of her work on these tracks and wanted Ike to hear them.
He wasn’t impressed, asking ‘What is this shit?’, and took the Ikettes’ name off the album credits. Ike Turner’s reputation hasn’t exactly soared over the years, and it seems uncontroversial to say he was not the helpmeet and business manager most people would choose.
His negotiating position when approached by Zappa was strange in itself, since he didn’t want the singers paid more than $25 a track. Most negotiators with their eye on profit stipulate a floor rather than a ceiling to the auction, but he clearly considered it important to keep Tina’s status in the marketplace low, throwing her in as a bonus with the backing singers who were presumably recruited in the first place to back her. The deal between Turner and Zappa, Ike and Frank, was a strange confluence of negativity. A businessman who didn’t want his wife to know her true worth was signing a contract with another who prided himself on his cheapness in everything. Zappa aimed with the help of a world-class vocalist, her services acquired well below market rates, to give vocal depth and lustre to songs about the low inherent value of women, though this was not of course what I heard in 1973.
Danger! The heavy rhetorical superstructure is bringing this conceit close to collapse. It’s all going a bit Tay Bridge. Time to underpin the whole ramshackle edifice with stanchions of properly reinforced personal material.
If Dad had confronted me, or us, with this scatological wallowing, pointing out how sickening it was, with its reliance on our complicity in its degradation of women, what would I, or we, have said? Never mind that he lacked a feminist vocabulary. He was by generation a sexist but hardly misogynistic. Family life didn’t require him to show his ideological colours more clearly by calling on him to shape the future of a female child — there are adjustments that fathers without daughters don’t have to make. The sensible thing would have been to play for time, pointing out that the two of the Mothers’ albums from the previous year, Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo, came as close to big-band revivalism as avant-garde progressive rock could reasonably be expected to get.
Then I would probably have said, ‘You just don’t get it,’ delivered with an attempt at scornful finality — so much easier to pronounce, as a sentence, than its more truthful cousins, I just don’t get it. I don’t get how free speech and censorship can both be so … nasty. If I didn’t want to be protected, then it was a mystery how I was going to avoid being degraded myself.
When arguments of this sort loomed with Dad I held tight to my trump card, which was probably why relatively few of them were fully played out. Dad had an acute tactical sense of when an opponent had a secret weapon, so that it might be wise to hold his fire. And what was my secret weapon? Only that Dad had a copy of The Godfather on the bookshelves in his study, which fell open at a grotesquely sexual passage on page 26. Cheap paperbacks blab, they spill every secret. Only a respectable quality of binding keeps its counsel, discreet about which pages have been most urgently consulted, exactly where the reader’s lowest self has been worked on. I was armed against any attack from Dad. Let him who is without smut cast the first stone.
I could imagine arraigning Dad in some sort of family tribunal.
Mars-Jones Jr: Perhaps the clerk of the court will be good enough to read aloud the passage marked. There by my thumb. Speak up, man! You’re mumbling.
‘Her hand closed around an enormous, blood-gorged pole of muscle.
It pulsated in her hand like an animal and almost weeping with grateful ecstasy she pointed it into her own wet, turgid flesh.’
Prisoner in the dock, you there, judge of first instance — Is that something you would wish your cleaning lady to read? I hardly think so. Small wonder you are unable to meet my eye. Yet you left it in plain sight on your bookshelves, where it might cause any amount of distress to impressionable young people, tender-minded homosexuals among them, who might stumble upon it. I put it to you, judge in the dock, that you are no more than a whited sepulchre, yea a whited sepulchre, full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness …
For all I know, Dad had the same conflicted feelings about passages like that as I did about pages from Burroughs and Genet, which disgusted me but gave me a jolt of nihilistic arousal just the same. If we’d had that confrontation I was so well armed against, he might have admitted that this was his objection to the availability of pornography, not the fear that Psychopathia Sexualis might be bought by the lower orders from station bookstalls but the fear that he might buy something viler than The Godfather himself. Before this conversation could take place, of course, he would have had to start cultivating the habit of admitting doubts and vulnerabilities.
I had unwittingly bought an album to which Tina Turner and the Ikettes contributed backing vocals, but I wasn’t yet ready to buy actual black music — my breakthrough came at long last with Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up’ in 1977. Can it really be true that Dad was more open to black music than I was as a teenager? There’s a certain amount of evidence to support the suggestion, and in our family we’re crazy for evidence. We can’t get enough of it, either to strengthen our hand or to inform ourselves about the high cards the opposition is likely to play.
Dad bought only two singles in 1968 and both of them were MOBO, as it’s called now, Music Of Black Origin. In fact they book-ended the range of what the culture had to offer at the time. There was The Edwin Hawkins Singers’ ‘O Happy Day’, gospel at its most submissive and serene. And there was Pigmeat Markham’s raucous novelty record ‘Here Come The Judge’. I thought ‘O Happy Day’ was soupy, and I was not the one in the family who habitually ordered soup. I thought ‘Here Come The Judge’ was infantile, and I was embarrassed that Dad got so much pleasure from it (‘This judge is hip and that ain’t all / He’ll give you time if you’re big or small’).
Pigmeat Markham was as much a comedian as a musician, almost a vaudeville act insisting on a bygone stereotype — it was only a few years since he had been appearing at the Apollo blacked-up, with his lips painted white. Of course Dad didn’t pay attention to the racial angle. ‘Here Come The Judge’ was cashing in on the popularity of Markham’s appearances on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. And naturally it was the catch-phrase itself that appealed to Dad.
For a while he used the song as his theme tune, entering a room (‘Here Come the Judge, Here Come the Judge’) to his own accompaniment of rhythmic speech. It seemed a bit amateur, somehow, even self-defeating. The Queen doesn’t blow her own trumpet. She has heralds for that. Dad was a one-man band.
Gloriously, we had the last laugh. We listened to the B-side, billed as ‘Here Come The Judge (Part 2)’, which amounted to an extended smutty joke of exactly the sort that Dad hated. A defendant is up in front of the Judge on a charge of indecent exposure. Eventually it turns out that he has twenty-seven children. The case is dismissed by the Judge on the basis that the defendant hasn’t had time to put his pants on. We knew how appalled Dad would be if he realized what he’d subsidized with his six-and-eightpence.