>>128986318
>But legendary? This woman really knew how to show off her legs.
yeah even back then girl singers got unwarranted cred if they were coom b8

So you can find I&T records in the dollar bins. the very first few records are super expensive because they are so limited and rare. but basically everything else you can get for a few dollars....

Chartswise they did make some splash but not to the level of rolling stones, beatles or something.

Was Tina's voice not as good as everyone thought? I dont believe that to be the case. I think tina's voice and emotion is fantastic.

I think the problem lies with Ike.... He was a great arranger. He also brought out the best in Tina imo. I prefer her work with ike than the solo stuff imo.

So what is it where Ike comes up short? ...His guitar playing.... I mean.. it's decent. even creative at times. But compared to page, clapton, hendrix he comes off as a bit of a hack.

Had ike been a big talent on the guitar combined with Tina's voice. I think they could be talked about to the likes of the stones, the who etc...

what do you think? what held them back?

>>128986446
Ike probably didn't have what it took to develop Tina's talent. He was a control freak and his music tastes were still stuck in the 50s. "River Deep, Mountain High" happened only because Phil Spector banned him from the recording booth and when that record underperformed in the US he must have thought "See I told you so" and went back to the same old same old. Also Tina didn't care for Ike's outdated tastes and wanted to be doing more modern styles of music.

>>128986628
so what you suggest Ike do instead? turn them into Jimi Hendrix? allow Tina to do what she did in the 80s twenty years early? just abandon the R&B. And do what the white folks were doing? who knows if it would have worked.

>>128986660
that was kind of the point. Ike didn't know how to adapt to the 60s.

>>128986446
Ike and Tina didn't write hits. They mainly covered soul and R&B hits of the day. They excelled live which is where they made their money but their records are usually low budget crud with fuzzy sound and indifferent covers of popular hits on literallywho labels.

>>128986790
Bit unfair, not all of their records sound like they could have recorded in 1925 and they had a number of good ones. I do agree that they recorded for too many budget labels that made them look cheap and dime store.

They were a hot live act, but the relentless sexualization of Tina made it hard to take her seriously and they had more crossover with Elvis and Tom Jones fans than rock listeners while the long-hair audience thought they were just entertainers and not serious artists.

>>128986906
if you ever saw their interviews they had to deal with all the usual crap black musicians faced back then like segregated venues in the South, being told that they'd better get out of town after dark, having guns pointed at them etc. their earlier records were pretty raw R&B that made few concessions to commerciality so it would have been hard to make a pop crossover. all things said they were more successful than many contemporaries.

>>128986906
I recall a scene in Gimme Shelter where Ike and Tina were opening for the Stones on the ‘69 tour and Tina was, uh, fondling the microphone very suggestively. You never saw a black female singer in the 60s get that lewd, at least not in front of a white audience.

>>128987017
they were miming going down on each other onstage! anyway, Ike always just assumed black musicians would get ripped off by labels and make about $10 from record sales so they had to depend on touring for income. also they did do funk numbers like He Makes Me Holler proving Ike was capable of contemporary-sounding material. my guess is that he was unwilling to subjugate himself long enough to play ball with a label that could break his act into the mainstream in a big way while woodshedding enough original material to fill LPs.

Again, the main reason is they didn’t really write their own songs. They didn’t create hits. No "Love Is Strange" or "Dedicated To The One I Love" or "Hit The Road, Jack." James Brown was also struggling in the early 60s and not putting out any records anyone cared about, but he had dramatically turned his fortunes around by 65 while Ike and Tina didn't so much.

One album in the top 10,000 on RYM at about 6,000 doesn’t really support their case….it supports the case that Ike and Tina cut a lot of mediocre albums.

And I love Tina… I think Ike was a poor producer and didn’t put a lot of effort in the studio….he probably struggled with low budgets.

>>128986446
Ike was too controlling as he followed a vision that just wasn’t very compelling, and he pushed Tina too hard so she often came across as shrill. It’s like they were simply trying too hard. They made some great records - I love their Come Together LP - and I really prefer when they dial it back a little and allow some space in the music.

I hate that stupid Proud Mary horn riff though.

>>128987117
they did do original songs, but yes they overdid it with covers which probably hurt their image

in re: what others have said. Ike was definitely a child of the 50s R&B scene and came up alongside BB King, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, and all them. they were all hard-nosed black guys who performed in seedy juke joints, some of them like Berry had been in jail and they beat women to a pulp. they had hard lives growing up in poverty and dealing with life in the segregated South. they also ruled their backing bands like Mussolini.

all of that 50s R&B crowd got wiped from the charts by the rise of the Beatles and Motown, with the exception of James Brown because he was uniquely forward thinking in a way most of his peers were not. some thought the Beatles and Motown were too slick and not raw enough.

the long and short is Ike had all of Berry and Brown's stubbornness and controlling personality but unlike Brown he also wasn't innovative enough to adapt to the changing times in the 60s.

>>128987017
Ike and Tina opening for the Stones almost but didn't quite sell them to whites. The Stones had a lot of black musicians tour with them, sometimes like with BB King it was a resounding success and crossed them over to white audiences, other times they didn't take. It was funny because Tina was flirting with Jagger onstage on that tour and Ike looked like he was going to stroke out.

>>128987117
>Again, the main reason is they didn’t really write their own songs
Ok well neither did Aretha Franklin, but she did have big bucks major label support unlike the plethora of chicken scratch R&B labels that Ike and Tina recorded for, plus top tier session musicians and a high degree of creative control in how her songs were arranged.

>>128986318
I know the sex had to be hella bomb

>>128987371
Ike was very much a hard, mean SOB and never seemed to care about pop crossovers the way eg. Sam Cooke did. Their act was dangerously sexualized for that time, it predicted bling rap by a good 40 years. Aretha, BB, and James Brown kept it clean, they were very conscientious about looking presentable to whites and not coming off as a stereotype. That said nobody believes Tina's solo dreck in the 70s-80s got near those records.

>>128986660
I think the point was Tina wanted to do more, you know, Motown kinds of stuff and Ike really didn't seem to care about anything after 1957 or so.

>>128987670
nonetheless Tina did have a meteoric rise after going solo while Ike faded out for a number of reasons some because he went on the world's ultimate coke binge for years

it was a problem that Ike and Tina just recorded for any label that would have them and lacked a consistent, stable environment with one label the way some of their peers did

>>128986446
Ike is underrated as a guitarist, sure like most R&B players he doesn't do more than the song requires which is one reason Hendrix got kicked out of the scene.