"So Fine" by Ike & Tina Turner (1968)

And just like that, like Phil Spector and his "wall of sound" never happened, Ike Turner continued hustling around, this time securing contract with recording company from Dallas where they released his next project titled "So Fine". In his defence, we must admit that majestic and now very much revered "River Deep, Mountain High" was in fact completely rejected and ignored at home - it is easy to be a critic after the fact and to worship the record now, but back in the day homegrown music industry did not embrace it. At all. In fact it sunk without a trace, dragging Spector along with it. That Europe celebrated it so wildly must have been mind-boggling but also highly useful to couple who found enthusiastic audience in another part of the world. 

"So Fine" is basically what Ike was doing all the time trough 1960s with various degree of success - endlessly re-hashing and re-recording his older recordings with different arrangements, tweaking with novelties and working his band hard in order to keep afloat. My impression is, until he actually opened his own recording studio, recordings were not so important to him - the bread and butter were live performances, therefore all these singles were contractual obligations. What makes "So Fine" mildly interesting is that besides Ike and 101 version of "A Fool In Love", singer-songwriter Bonny Rice joins for collaborations and he was actually not half-bad (this is the guy who wrote "Mustang Sally", "Respect Yourself" etc) - the whole album has a very interesting, soulful and steamy atmosphere but suffers from lack of interesting material. You know all those stories when people say "oh you know, she would never achieved anything if it wasn't for him"  - well, here is a perfect example how did it work with Ike at the helm. He was iron-fisted bandleader with first-rate talents around him, but his ideas were very much generic and he was repeating himself. The only interesting things here were "Shake A Tail Feather", "So Fine" and "You're So Fine",  all of them covers of original hits by other people. Actually some of these were big hits during previous decade so it comes as Ike's idea of updating older R&B sound to current times. Really, according to him, the band was just cruising nowhere and its interesting he never admitted to himself that all his success is because of his wife, who also happened to be magnificent and charismatic vocalist - Tina on the other hand, sounds committed as ever, incapable to deliver anything but 100% no matter what it is. As the final result, the album actually sounds better and more coherent than many of their 1960s pre-Spector releases. It is forgotten and obscured by their other work but definitely worth searching, even if it has absolutely no hits. The way Ikettes and Tina harmonise in a title song is quite something.