Was there something that happened in your past that makes you passionate about those particular issues?
AGUILERA: I’ve been around situations. Domestic violence. It’s so sad. It’s a topic that’s so kept quiet. It’s in the home and no one wants to get involved.
Do you mean your home?
AGUILERA: Yeah, I think the reason why my drive was so strong and I was so passionate about music was because I grew up in an environment of domestic violence. Music was my release to get away from it all. I would seriously run up to my bedroom and put on that Sound of Music tape. She [Julie Andrews] was free and alive, and she was playful and rebellious against the nuns. I know it sounds really cheesy but, um, that was my escape. I would open up my bedroom window and I would just imagine the audience. I would just sing out. As far as the past, I got myself out of it. And I promised myself when this happened, I would try to help others who were in the same situation.
Why do you think it took your mom so long to get out of the relationship?
AGUILERA: People don’t know domestic abuse unless they’re in it. It’s not only physical abuse, but it’s the damage inside—mental abuse. It’s a sad thing to go through and watch. They play with your mind and make you feel bad about yourself and (trails off and doesn’t speak for several seconds) . . .
So now you want to help others in the same situation?
AGUILERA: Yes, one thing would be to go to different schools and talk to kids about different personal experiences of my own and try and help them in some way. Get them to come out about their own experiences.
As far as your relationship with your father now, did he ever apologize?
AGUILERA: Yeah, he’s apologized. I think he had a lot of guilt.
Did he apologize after you got successful or before?
AGUILERA: Actually before. I also lived around other situations. Next door to where we lived, I heard what was going on. There was so much domestic violence going around when I grew up, with my dad traveling in the military. It’s so sad. So sad. I wanted to be so strong for everybody—for my mom and everyone. That’s why I’m so girl-empowerment oriented (laughs uncomfortably). Even “Genie in a Bottle” is about making a guy work for it.
[Continued . . .]
A year after Ike Turner’s 1975 performance in New York City with the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, the floodgates of his life burst open. Tina Turner walked out on him, claiming emotional and physical abuse; his studio in Inglewood, California, was razed in a fire; and he began logging more arrests (eleven) than legitimate solo albums (one). Then there was the Tina Turner biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It, which portrayed him as a domineering, temperamental, career-obsessed, wife-beating cocaine addict. A few years after emerging from prison for cocaine possession in the mid-nineties, Turner decided to play his first concert in New York since that 1975 performance. With some reluctance, he agreed to an interview before the show.
When you were growing up, you saw a man shoot twenty-six other men?
IKE TURNER: Yeah, when I was a kid. It was in Mississippi. In those days, it was almost like if you was black, you was just like a roach or an ant or something they step on and never even think about it. I’ve seen them put blacks in bails of tar. You know, they take a guy and dip him in a hot bail of tar, and then put feathers on him. That’s the way it was in those days.
Did that create a lot of resentment in you?
TURNER: You know, I never carried any malice in my heart for nobody, because otherwise I would never meet guys like you or nobody, man. You have to meet people for what they are themselves. It never had no bearings on me. My father was killed by a group of whites. The same thing, man, but anyway, I’m pretty open. I wish the public would be better open with me and with my career. Because movies can make people anyway they wanna make them.
Why haven’t you performed in New York in so long?
TURNER: You know, like when Tina and I broke up, I don’t know, I got insecure and started doing drugs and things. Man, I just didn’t . . . I was afraid of rejection from the public, you know, because everybody knew that she did the singing. But I did all the choreography, the songs, the music, the arrangements. I did everything. But the public never knew what I did, because I wasn’t interested in being the front of the show. So I just got insecure, man. And I didn’t really get myself back together until I went to jail. I started performing some in jail, and putting groups together and shows together in jail, and then that’s when I got my confidence back.
What kind of opportunities did you have to perform in jail?
TURNER: Once every two or three months you can put together a show, and we were dressing guys up like Ikettes. Everybody was dancing like girls onstage, and we just had a lot of fun.
I wonder if they’re going to contact you for a job when they get out.
TURNER (laughs): For a fact, some of ’em have.
What instruments did you have in jail?
TURNER: They gave me a piano when I was in jail and they gave me two guitars. I was living in a dorm, and so I would put it under the bed and stuff. I never was mistreated in jail, man. I was earning five hundred dollars a week while I was in jail selling coffee, candy, and cigarettes. I saved up thirteen thousand dollars the seven months I was in there, because I had went down to zero financially.
You know, I got a call from some group that says they’re going to protest the show—
TURNER: What?!
You haven’t heard about that?
TURNER: No, no. You know, they really misled the public about me in this movie. The movie ain’t really about Tina, it’s about me. And I’ve never seen the movie yet. But Tina, in this magazine that just came out called Elle magazine, admits in there that she never was a victim, that the whole movie was a lie. And she said she could’ve left anytime. And anyway they did that movie like that to sell the movie.
So why didn’t you sue the producers?
TURNER: My attorney was supposed to be a friend of mine and Tina’s, and I signed this contract for him. And it was four years later, man, when I found out that I signed away my rights to sue them if they portrayed me in the wrong light. And it really hurt me a lot. It’s really a downer, man. It’s making it harder for me getting my career because some people think I’m really like that movie.
A lot of people don’t realize you had an impressive career before Ike and Tina with “Rocket 88” and all these incredible sessions that helped form rock and roll.
TURNER: No, they don’t. I used to hide Elvis Presley behind the piano back in Arkansas.