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Nikon Theater At Jones Beach
Sunday, September 4
Better than: A radio stuck on the classic rock station.
"Welcome, Jones Beach," Stevie Nicks said before her second song on Sunday night, the last night for both her current mini-tour and the Long Island oceanfront amphitheater's 2011 season. "If you know me, you know there's nowhere I'd rather be than the ocean. I love it here." The crowd—even those people flouting her request to not hoist their cameraphones and get video of her performance that night—cheered.
For the rest of the evening—a 14-song set almost evenly split between her back catalog's most memorable songs and selections from this year's In Your Dreams—Nicks and the audience kept up this rapport, with her at one point wishing that she had another hour tacked on to the show to tell her stories; that the audience consistently responded to her reminiscences about the distant and recent past in kind, even breaking out into whoops and applause when she merely mentioned the Aspen mountains that had inspired Fleetwood Mac's monster hit "Landslide," was a pretty convincing sign that the feeling was mutual. (This even though the weather conditions were such that every audience member could feel as if they, too, were standing in front of a wind machine. Solidarity!) In her inimitable voice, she offered up the backstory for her military spouse's lament "Soldier's Angel" and tagged it with a plea to donate to the USO; she lost herself in the music, shimmying and twirling and giving her musicians Dances Of Stevie's Veils when they soloed; she gave a splendid introduction to her opening act Michael Grimm, a former America's Got Talent winner who'd pulled off a pleasant, if somewhat reserved, set of Stevie Ray-leaning blues-rock earlier in the evening.
By Maura Johnston
Full Review at the Village Voice
