In 1951 Ike Turner organized the band, booked the session with Sam Phillips and shaped the distorted guitar sound on “Rocket 88,” a record many historians call a contender for the first true rock and roll single. The label credited it to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, Brenston sold the rights for more than $900, and Turner and the Kings of Rhythm were paid $20 each. In this deep dive we examine how that betrayal, layered on a Clarksdale, Mississippi childhood marked by his father’s death after a beating by a white mob, an abusive stepfather and sexual abuse, forged a pathological need for control that built an empire and then destroyed it. This is not a redemption story; the episode looks strictly at the documented facts of an organizational genius whose cruelty is inseparable from his legacy.

We trace his education in the control room of radio station WROX, where he hosted “Jive Till Five,” his boogie-woogie lessons by ear from Pinetop Perkins, and his years as a one-man talent scout for Sun and Modern Records, facilitating early recordings by Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King while executives took his songwriting credits. Then we follow his move to East St. Louis in 1954, his strictly disciplined, teetotaling Kings of Rhythm, his refusal to play segregated clubs, and the 1956 night a young Anna Mae Bullock grabbed the microphone at one of his shows.

• How a damaged amplifier stuffed with paper produced the fuzzy guitar tone that changed rock and roll
• Why Turner renamed Bullock “Tina Turner” and trademarked the name so he could replace her if she ever left
• The Ike and Tina Turner Revue’s rise, from touring with the Rolling Stones to a Grammy for “Proud Mary,” alongside the documented domestic violence behind it
• Tina’s escape in Dallas in July 1976 with 36 cents in her pocket, and the cocaine addiction, prison sentence and public infamy that followed
• His late Grammy wins for “Here and Now” and “Risin’ with the Blues,” his 2007 death, and the uncomfortable question of whether the art can be separated from the architect