Ike White had the kind of life that sounds too outrageous to be true. Given a life sentence for murder at the age of 19, he spent his time writing songs with his fellow prisoners and was soon discovered by Jerry Goldstein, a record producer and affiliate of Jimi Hendrix. They managed to record Ike’s debut album, Changin’ Times, from a mobile studio in prison in California in 1974. By 1978, Stevie Wonder had caught wind of the socially conscious, funky record and secured a new attorney for White, who petitioned for his release that year. Set free, White was poised for stardom and had just had a child with his new wife – Goldstein’s secretary. Then he disappeared.
In 2014, the story piqued the interest of Dan Vernon, the British film-maker behind The Changin’ Times of Ike White, a documentary that airs this week. “The producer of my film, Vivienne Perry, first heard Changin’ Times back in 2012,” he explains. “It was a very obscure record that had only partially been revived as a sample on tracks by Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg, but she was fascinated by it being made in prison and started calling the people listed on the back of it. She heard all these rumours that he was dead or hiding in Hawaii [because of] tax evasion – and then one of the players, Greg Errico, said that he had changed his name to David Maestro and was now working as a lounge act in LA.”
Vernon, who had been played White’s work by Perry in the back of a cab in South Africa “while chasing down Idris Elba for a film”, was blown away and decided to fly out to meet White. “Ike was quite surprised when he got the call from us, but he was also very welcoming – it felt like he had been waiting for someone to tell his story,” he says. Vernon ended up staying at White’s house for three days in 2014, hearing about his difficult upbringing and the supposedly accidental killing of a grocery store clerk during a bungled robbery that had landed him in jail.
But there was another twist to come. Two weeks after he had returned to England with this preliminary footage, Vernon got a call from White’s new wife, Lana. She told him that White was dead.
“He was so excited about the film,” Vernon says. “We found out that he had called up old friends and even Stevie Wonder to tell them about it. But he was also a guarded man and you could tell he was holding something back. It was only once I got back home that I realised he had only spoken about his time leading up to and in jail, but nothing after it.” Remarkably, after only three days of knowing each other, White had entrusted Vernon with his archive, a treasure trove of photographs and tapes of his multi-instrumental noodlings that would prove to hold some of the secrets to his enigmatic past.
“We weren’t sure how we would continue on with the film, but then one day Lana called me and said she had found a tape of White getting married to someone else, despite telling her he hadn’t been married before,” he says. “She was obviously shocked and wanted to know more. We decided it would be the right thing to do to continue to unearth his life story, as that was one of the last things he had asked of me.”
What Lana and Vernon found was a trail of at least six different names that White had used, at least five different children he had fathered and countless wives, married either legally or otherwise. In his film, Vernon paints an evocative image of the soft-speaking White, meandering from his 2014 interviews with the man to talking-head analysis of his musical prowess, conjecture on his disappearance – perhaps owing to shady dealings with local gangsters – and then a redemptive road trip narrative. Lana meets some of his previous wives and together the women come to terms with the confusing, confused identity of the man they had loved.
“I’ve never done a film before where you have the responsibility of someone’s entire life in your hands,” Vernon says. “I think he was sick of the stigma that had followed him on the outside, the fact that people always associated him with his crime and were even asking if he should have been released at all just because of an album. So, he decided to become a chameleon, to take up new lives and families where he could to escape it all, but of course it would always catch up with him.”
Did Vernon feel deceived when he had met White? “No, I didn’t feel lied to, since we ran out of time together and never captured all of his life on tape,” he says. “All we could do after he died was to show him as he was: this combination of lies and truths, held together by his music, which he was always trying to better. It felt like even he might have lost sight of who he was along the way.”
Watching the film, it is certainly difficult to grasp how much of White was a master manipulator and user of women, and how much was a traumatised man attempting to escape the mistakes of his youth by any means necessary. In essence, the film plays as a parable of the difficulty of rehabilitation and biographical storytelling when your subject is so unreliable.
Vernon believes that the film serves as a “form of therapy” for White’s wives. There is a remarkable encounter that results in one ex providing a shamanic cleansing for Lana in the Arizona desert. “The film has given Lana a new lease of life,” he says. “She wants to tell her own story now and has been writing and producing. This film is a story about the healing process and forgiveness from all the people Ike left behind.”
With Changin’ Times due to be reissued, Vernon is sure that his film will raise more questions than it answers about White. “There is a lot more to mine from him,” he says. “Very recently, one of his friends who watched the film said to me: ‘Why didn’t you include the part of his life when he was a pornography star in Germany?’ I don’t even know if that’s true, but this person is convinced it is, and that is just the nature of Ike’s mad life. And the stories will only continue.”
Arena: The Changin’ Times of Ike White is on BBC Four tonight at 10pm
