Stevie Nicks talks Crow

06.10.2008 9:29 am
Stevie Nicks talks Crow, Winehouse on way to Chaifetz Arena Friday
By: Kevin C. Johnson

Stevie Nicks has somehow managed to escape my interview clutches these past 20 years I’ve spent writing about music, and my chat with her last week was worth the wait.

Nicks, a longtime favorite of mine who performs at Chaifetz Arena on Friday, called my home office last week in the midst of a tornado warning that made national news. She was watching the news reports while at a tour stop, asked if I was OK, and said if I needed to hurry off the phone at any point because of the weather, it was cool.

She was a great interview, chatty, revealing and forthright. The interview runs in the Post-Dispatch in Thursday’s Get Out, and will be online at http://www.stltoday.com/, but her comments on Sheryl Crow and Amy Winehouse are only found here.

Crow made some headlines recently when she suggested she’d fill in for Christine McVie on the Fleetwood Mac tour next year. But Nicks shot down the idea of her friend joining her on the road with the veteran band.

“Sheryl and I discussed this in the nicest of ways. Sheryl has a new baby, and a new baby is all encompassing. We decided it wasn’t the best idea,” says Nicks. “I had to explain to her the ups and downs of being in a band like Fleetwood Mac. You sign your name on the contract and it’s like being in the Army. You don’t have your own life anymore. That’s why I went solo.”

There will be no second female vocalist with Nicks on the Fleetwood Mac tour. Instead, a backing singer will step up to the plate. “We’re excited about this, because now there are five or six songs we love that we can put back into the show,” says Nicks.

Nicks, whose past problems with substances are well known, has words for the constantly troubled Winehouse about getting her act together before she’s forgotten. Nicks’ advice comes from a loving place, she says.

“I will always think of myself as a drug addict, and it’s hard to tell a drug addict to stop doing drugs. They have to wake up and say I’m done, have that epiphany, get on a plane and go to rehab and stay there for two months,” says Nicks.

You gotta love Stevie Nicks.

Tickets to her concert Friday are $45-$95, available through MetroTix outlets, www.metrotix.com, and by calling 314-534-1111 (go to MetroTix’s web site and get half off lower level tickets using promotional code MAC, up until 5 p.m. Tuesday).

Peter Cincotti was just announced as Nicks’ opening act.

Lindsey Buckingham UTS Tour Stats (update)

Managed to find additional dates and tour grosses for Lindsey's Under The Skin Tour. Additions to the list are marked with an asterisk.

Stevie Nicks at Hard Rock Live (Review)

(photo - Hard Rock 2007)
Stevie Nicks

Saturday, June 7

Hard Rock Live

Browardpalmbeach.com

Better than: Watching Stevie Nicks 10 years from now.

The body of Stevie Nicks turned 60 last month. Her voice has been 60 for a while.

Maybe it was all that coke in the '70s, or maybe it was that her vocal cords weren’t durable enough to handle her preferred mode of singing. I suspect it was the latter — Stevie’s always cited Janis Joplin as a prime influence, but she never had Janis’s chainsaw pipes, nor the dubious good fortune to die at 27. In the '70s, Stevie Nicks performed like a blues shouter even while her recorded output highlighted a voice better suited to witchy balledeering, and even back then her fans worshiped her primarily as a crone in the making.

She’s not in-the-making anymore — now she really is a crone, and her fans love her for it. They went genuinely apeshit at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino last night, with the first twelve rows erupting into near-moshing when guitarist Wally Wachtel ended a long solo by segueing into “Edge of Seventeen." The Hard Rock isn’t known for volatile crowds, and the reactions down front were more intensely physical than anything Aerosmith ever got in the same venue. Nicks fans are passionate people.

They’re also, I might add, exactly the same demo you might have seen at a Hillary Clinton rally a few short months ago. They are overwhelmingly white, female, and middle-aged, with a few old hippies tossed in for grit. There’s plenty of lesbians and skinny young white girls who can’t dance, but are willing to try. I counted four blacks in the auditorium. All of these people are madly in love with a white, 60-year-old woman with a sometimes-grating voice and a history of relationship trouble. Their devotion is so intense that, when fully demonstrated, it looks a little creepy.

In the case of the Nicks fans, you can understand why. Despite the shocking limitations of her vocal range — which I’m pretty sure doesn’t even span an octave anymore — Nicks’ performance is surprisingly muscular. Heartfelt too, which is even weirder (how a singer can stay attached to a song like “Gold Dust Woman,” which implores you to “Rock on ancient woman/follow those who pale in your shadow,” is anybody’s guess). Since Stevie’s touring in support of a greatest hits package (Crystal Visions), her current show sticks mostly to the lollipops that even non-Nicksians can dig, but she never sounds tired of the material. Last night, she seemed most engaged when tearing into the most obvious of chestnuts, like a huge, raucous version of “Stand Back” or the long slow build of “Rhiannon,” which she brought to an acceptably molten climax (she’s been fiddling with the end of that song since 1975, and only now has she finally gotten it right). She only seriously faltered when she tried doing something new, like a version of Zep’s “Rock’n’Roll” which was a whole helluvalot more staid than the original, or a version of Dave Matthews’ “Crash Into You” that made you appreciate Dave’s charms as a singer.

The set was under two hours but felt a little longer, probably because Stevie kept darting backstage to change bits of her costume. Since all of her costumes were pretty much identical, it’s hard to say why she bothered. If I were her, I would have used that time to do something about my boots. Stevie Nicks’ footwear looks like some kind of medieval torture device, equipped with huge, cruel heels that force her to do the entire show en pointe. This may be the reason Stevie refused to move around the stage during the show. Not once did she come over to our section, off to the side of stage left. She remained glued to the five feet around her monitors at center stage, and though she seemed mobile enough in that circumscribed little area, it would have been nice to see her up close — especially since those of us at the sides of the arena couldn’t see the video screen mounted behind the drummer (I assume that’s where it was mounted — like I said, I couldn’t see it). We were starved for visual stimulation, but Stevie didn’t care.

The long-time Stevie fan sitting next to me noticed this, and complained about it. She also noted that Stevie should stay the hell away from Dave Matthews songs, and commented on the unfortunate state of Stevie’s vocal cords. Even so, she said she “loved the concert” and thought it was “wonderful.” This is what it means to be a fan of Stevie Nicks, or even Hillary Clinton: it’s not the execution that matters, but the gusto of the attempt.

--Brandon K. Thorp

Stevie Nicks - Hard Rock Hotel - June 7, 2008 (3 Pics)

Stevie Nicks performs in concert at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida on June 7, 2008.
Photo/Michael Bush

Wal-Mart + Fleetwood Mac = New Release

A quote from the New York Times surfaced today by Irving Azoff, founder and chief executive of FrontLine Management regarding the possibility of a NEW Fleetwood Mac release. (Azoff's partner in FrontLine is Howard Kaufman, Stevie's Manager, formerly of H.K Management) FrontLine acquired H.K Management in January, 2005. H.K Management at the time also managed Fleetwood Mac so I'm assuming they are now under the FrontLine umbrella.

The article is about the latest round of artists to release cd's and dvd's exclusively through Wal-Mart by-passing the major labels all together. The article doesn't indicate that this is new music from Fleetwood Mac, just that Azoff is talking to Wal-Mart about it's possibility.

Good news to me!!!!

[quote]
"Mr. Azoff said that he was already talking to Wal-Mart about an exclusive deal for Fleetwood Mac's next release. “Classic rock really works there,” Mr. Azoff said."

New York Times

Stevie Nicks' Visions Still Crystal Clear in Concert

BY HOWARD COHEN
hcohen@MiamiHerald.com
Redorbit.com

Stevie Nicks proved 60 is the new 30, as the rock legend nearly sold out Hard Rock Live near Hollywood Saturday night -- just a year or so after her last appearance at the 5,000-plus seat venue -- with a hit-packed, lively set that found her in good voice and reinforced her stature as a rock and roll original.

Nicks might not move on stage with the gale force drive she tapped into in the Bicentennial year but who, aside from Mick Jagger, still can? Nicks is probably the only performer who can earn a standing ovation for merely twirling on stage, as she did during her third number, Stand Back. But given her familiar songs to draw upon, from a solo career and from her ongoing Fleetwood Mac catalog, and a distinctive voice that's grown richer over time, Nicks plays to full houses because she can. Saturday, she didn't take that blessing for granted. She sounded engaged, delivered all the expected favorites such as Dreams, Stand Back and Rhiannon with clarity and purpose, offered a rarely performed album cut (a mesmerizing How Still My Love, from 1981's Bella Donna) and threw in a few remakes.

Her audience ranged from a 10-year-old who was enjoying her first concert with her mom, to some overheated dude in the rafters who couldn't stop yelling, ''I love you Stevie!'' for most of the 105-minute show.

Still others were here to share memories (and we could here some of their stories because South Florida audiences just can't watch an event without providing a running commentary of their own): There's the first car they drove when, on its AM radio, they heard Nicks sing Rhiannon 33 years ago. Or the time they had big hair in the '80s when Nicks initially sang about a life lived on the Edge of Seventeen.

None of these fans' recollections were quite as musical or endearing as the star's own tales from the stage. In introducing If Anyone Falls, Nicks, whose band features sister-in-law Lori Perry Nicks on harmonies, told how she wrote the 1983 hit after one of her single friends tossed out a hopeful line, ``if anyone falls in love I hope it's one of us.''

''I thought that was such a good phrase I went home and wrote that song,'' Nicks said. Sorcerer, she explained, came about in the interim between the commercial failure of her duo album with ex-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham in 1973 and the pair's joining of Fleetwood Mac on New Year's Eve 1975. A tender Landslide movingly featured a video montage of her father Jess Nicks who died in 2005.

There weren't any major surprises in Nicks' set list. She's opened many of her solo tours with Outside the Rain since her first in 1981 and it was in lead position again. A convincing cover of Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll is now a regular encore. Of the two new additions -- Bob Seger's rollicking Face the Promise and Dave Matthews' acoustic Crash -- only the latter cover proved ill-advised despite Nicks' insistence she could sing a male song. She can. But her otherwise exceptional band, led by veteran guitarist/musical director Waddy Wachtel, ran ramshod over its slight melody. When Nicks charitably introduced Crash by saying 'it's the most fun I've had in 10 years,' our first thought was that she needs to get out more.

The uninspired computer-generated effects on a video screen also disappointed but some new tweaks, like a brief electronic keyboard pulse in the bridge of the rocker Fall From Grace, kept her music fresh and stylish. Overall, Nicks delivered a crowd pleaser that sets her up well for her next challenge: a proposed 2009 tour with Fleetwood Mac.