Tina Turner rocked San Diego venues for decades
Tina Turner, whose musical career spanned over five decades, died on Wednesday at the age of 83. As part of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue in the 1960s, Tina Turner performed at many smaller venues around San Diego, including Lola Ward’s Jazzville at 11th and Broadway, UC San Diego’s Revelle Cafeteria, and the Cinnamon Cinder nightclub on El Cajon Boulevard in La Mesa. Her last San Diego show was at the Sports Arena, now Pechanga Arena, in 2000, at the age of 60.
Former Union-Tribune writer Karla Peterson ranked Turner’s final San Diego appearance among her favorite rock concerts. Here is her 2000 review.
From The San Diego Union-Tribune, May 1, 2000:
TIMELESS TURNER CONQUERS THE YEARS AND CROWD WITH PURE POWER AND SOUL
It’s been years since Tina Turner has made an album that is worthy of her, but at the Sports Arena on Friday night, she found a new song that could sum up her timeless charms in three words:
“Absolutely Nothing’s Changed.”
Eerie, but true. After four decades in the business, the 60year-old Turner seems immune to the damage rock ‘n’ roll can do. While performers half her age turn up on VH1’s “Behind the Music” looking like Freddy Krueger, Turner is tearing through two-hour shows with energy to burn and grace to spare.
How does she do it? Maybe its the muscles you get from 40 years of strutting in sky-high stilettos. Or the lung power that comes from 29 years of singing “Proud Mary” like you just discovered it that morning. Or the stamina you acquire after too many years of carrying the weight of over-produced concert extravaganzas on your own sensible shoulders.
Turner did all of the above Friday night, and she made it look criminally easy. As she did in her 1997 Sports Arena stop, Turner sang negligible new songs with redemptive passion, brought musty oldies blazing back to life, and put her own distinctive stamp on songs you thought could never belong to anyone but their original owners.
Miraculously, she also made herself heard over the bland racket of her nine-member band and managed to avoid being swallowed whole by her multileveled, staircase-bedecked set or getting trampled by her five busy dancers.
The whole hyperactive setup made the tireless singer work harder than she should have to, but to watch her upstage a giant video screen with a flash of her killer smile or tame an overblown version of “Addicted to Love” with a welltimed growl is to be in the presence of the best ring master in the business. It may be a circus, but it’s Tina’s circus. And there is no mistaking who is in the center ring. Looking as sexy as ever in shiny black leather, Turner opened the show with a glitzy blitz through Sly and the Family Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher,” followed by a triumphant version of “Absolutely Nothing’s Changed,” a survivor’s anthem from this year’s “Twenty Four Seven” album that had her crowing I may be bruised, but I ain’t broken, in a voice that could sandblast your scars clean away.
While the near-capacity crowd roared its approval, Turner kept up the breakneck pace with a medley-style tear through “A Fool In Love” (Ike and Tina Turner’s Top-40 debut from 1960), “Acid Queen” and “River Deep, Mountain High.” As always, Turner’s jet-propelled dancing and singing were impressive, but she treated these classic tunes like aging relatives she wanted to hustle out of the room before they did something embarrassing.