Standing in that weary confessional — the ladies' room line — at Tina Turner's recent sold-out engagement at Radio City Music Hall, I overheard a woman confide to her friend, "I told my husband, 'There's two things I want to do before I die: see the Pacific Ocean and Tina Turner live.' "

At 58, Turner has that Eighth Wonder of the World status. You do have to see her to believe her; like her good pal and, some say, psychic twin, Mick Jagger, she is the shouting, shimmying embodiment of rock & roll. Her legendary legs — supported on this last tour by the corporate puissance of Hanes hosiery — bracket classic rock & roll imagery. They straddle decades and styles, from the roughest R&B to the creamiest contemporary pop.

At this point, Turner's arduous rock odyssey — made public in her 1986 autobiography, "I, Tina," and in the 1993 film "What's Love Got to Do With It" — has settled firmly into modern pop mythology. Detailing the years of physical and mental abuse by her ex-husband and stage partner, Ike Turner, and Tina's subsequent triumph as a solo act, it is the tale of a soul survivor.

Herewith, a few pertinent facts: Leggy, coltish Anna Mae Bullock was born in 1939 to a sharecropper's family in Nutbush, Tenn. Hers was the lonely childhood resulting from a broken home. She spent her early years being cared for by relatives. When her mother, Zelma, left the South and relocated to St. Louis, she took her teenage daughter, who wanted desperately to be a singer. Anna Mae was discovered in a club in East St. Louis, Ill., by Ike Turner.

Sharp, talented and worldly, Ike Turner had a rocking, well-known R&B band, the Kings of Rhythm. His 1951 hit, "Rocket '88," has often been cited as the first true rock & roll record. Ike signed Anna Mae, dressed her, renamed her Tina, set her out front with some Ikettes ... and they hit the road. It was Tina's arresting vocals that got the group a hit, in 1960, with "A Fool in Love." She ripped some wild, hormonal screams across the demure girl-group backup of those "shoop-shoop" times. The song's punch line would prove eerily prescient: "You know you love him and you can't understand/Why he treat you like he do when he's such a good man."

They remained a raucous R&B roadshow, largely unknown to rock and pop audiences, before the couple — married in 1962 — met up with producer Phil Spector. Legend has it that Spector paid Ike to stay out of the studio while the producer wrapped his mammoth Wall of Sound around Tina's vocal firepower, torqued up the tempo and came up with 1966's "River Deep, Mountain High." The record stiffed here but was a huge hit in the U.K., which led to the Rolling Stones inviting Ike and Tina to open for a tour there. It proved a swell exchange program: Mick Jagger got some dance tips, and Tina cozied up to rock & roll, cutting a successful cover of "Honky Tonk Women" in 1969.

She did not escape her domestic hell until Independence Day of 1976; she took off with 36 cents and a Mobil credit card, later astounding the divorce court judge when she also walked away from the money, the real estate, everything, just to get away clean and fast. By then, Tina was deep into Buddhism, chanting daily. She knew that security lay within her own thrumming rib cage and not in a pricey pile of stucco in the Los Angeles hills.

Tina Turner's "comeback," in 1984, was with the triple-Grammy-winning "What's Love Got to Do With It?," a few minutes of alternating rage and resignation that speaks to a lifetime of serious experience. Suddenly, Turner, who had torn up the big screen in her brief turn as the Acid Queen in the Who's "Tommy," was a glowing MTV presence. She camped, vamped and seethed at Mel Gibson in "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" and sang its hit theme,"We Don't Need Another Hero." Subsequent albums ("Break Every Rule," "Foreign Affair," "Wildest Dreams") have kept her on the road with lavish shows, which, this time around, featured two and a half steamy hours of Total Tina, dancing just as ferociously as she did 30 years ago with the Ikettes.

She was in New Jersey, at the very end of her two-year "Wildest Dreams" tour, when we spoke by phone. As with the last time we'd visited, in a Manhattan hotel suite, Turner was packed — headed home to her villa in the South of France — and she couldn't wait. She'd been renovating, making the old house totally hers in a very womanly way, she said. Assistants and an acupuncturist buzzed about her hotel room. She was so tired and itchy to leave, it "hurt." "But hey," laughed the road warrior, "let's do it!"