The tour established a connection between Tina Turner and the rock world that would prove durable across the decades that followed. It is not incidental that, in the early 1980s, when Roger Davies was trying to reposition her career in terms that could reach a mainstream audience, it was rock musicians and rock-adjacent producers who were the collaborators who made the connections. David Bowie’s public enthusiasm for her work, Rod Stewart’s willingness to appear with her on Saturday Night Live, the music press’s readiness to take her seriously in a rock-pop context — these were not arbitrary cultural alliances. They were the downstream consequences of a relationship between Tina Turner and the British-American rock world that had been established on the 1969 Stones tour and had never fully faded.
Mick Jagger, whom she had performed alongside in 1969, would be a visible presence in her 1980s career as well — performing with her, speaking about her publicly, treating their professional relationship as one that had lasted because it was based on genuine mutual recognition rather than commercial calculation. When Jagger appeared with Turner at various 1980s events, it was a signal to the rock audience that had followed him since 1969: this is real, this matters, this is part of the same tradition we’ve been in together.
The 1969 tour was also, it should be said, an introduction of the Revue to the commercial structures of arena rock — the logistics of large-venue touring, the expectations of rock promotion, the economics of a market that was, in 1969, becoming the dominant form of popular music commerce. The Revue was accustomed to the Chitlin’ Circuit’s economics. The Stones tour exposed them to something different in scale and structure, and the exposure was relevant to what Tina Turner’s own later tours would become.