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REVIEW: Stevie Nicks at Sands Bethlehem Event Center is older, but still bewitching
Stevie Nicks has always seemed to know more than the rest of us — more about affairs of the heart, more about the meaning of life, more about the future.
You could tell it in the way she told us in the 1982 Fleetwood Mac song “Gypsy” that “Lightning strikes/maybe once/maybe twice,” or in 1975’s “Landslide” that “time makes you bolder/Even children get older/And I'm getting older, too.”
Now Nicks really is getting older — she turned 68 this year — and all those things she sang about 40 years ago (!) seem to have been realized, both by her and her audience.
Nicks may no longer be the bewitching young beauty she once (though she’s still stunning). But her concert Saturday at Sands Bethlehem Event Center showed that those insights that made listeners marvel so long ago still do today.
(Clearly, people still crave them; the concert set the event center’s record for fastest sellout in May, with all 2,550 seats going in 14 minutes).
And her vocals are still stunning — perhaps occasionally singing in a slightly lower register, but strong and resonate, and enuring through the night.
In an 18-song, two-hour show, Nicks played many of those songs that so mesmerized. After opening with the deep cut “Gold and Braid” from early in her solo career, she dived deep into the hits.
“If Anyone Falls” from her 1983 sophomore solo disc immediately showed her vocal strenth.
She sang “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” her 1981 solo debut hit with Tom Petty, with supporting act The Pretenders’ singer Chrissie Hynde.
And five songs into her set, she pulled out “Gypsy,” performing it for the first time on this tour — wailing vocally and drawing a cheer by doing her well-known spin dance.
Nicks, in a black dress on top of which she frequently changed shawls and scarfs, explained that the idea of the tour was to sing songs that “had great stories” attached to them, and she told several during the night.
She explained “New Orleans” from her 2011 album “In Your Dreams” (an underappreciated gem the shows how good her songwriting still is and how well she can still sing) was a reaction to Hurricane Katrina.
She said “Moonlight (A Vampire's Dream),” was a reaction to the “Twilight” movies that spurred her to write that album around it. Weird but lovely, it was a piano-and-voice tour de force on which she leaned forward and whipped her hair as she sang.
Nicks also played several deeper cuts. She tied “Wild Heart,” a pounding and wistful song from her solo disc “Bella Donna” to the title track from her debut solo disc.
But the show’s standout was her hit “Stand Back,” played as a harder-rock number. It had all the urgency it did when she released it 33 years ago, and she again did her spin dance.
She wound down the main set with another hit, “Gold Dust Woman” from Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” album — slower and more menacing — then closed the main set with her hit “Edge of Seventeen,” showing pictures of the late Prince on the big screen behind her to acknowledge his inspiring the song.
She returned for an encoure of her breakthrough single with Fleetwood Mac, “Rhiannon,” then her lovely 1981 hit with Don Henley, “Leather and Lace,” after telling a story about dating the singer.
For a show of such generous length, Nicks only sang three songs from her newest album, “2014’s 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault,” even though her current tour is named for the disc.
She sang the disc’s “Starshine” mid-concert. Early on she did “Belle Fleur” and near the end of the show “If You Were My Love” — two songs she originally wrote for “Bella Donna” but left off that disc.
She also did “Crying in the Night” from her pre-Fleetwood Mac “Buckingham Nicks” disc with Lindey Buckingham.
Unfortunately, Nicks skipped the other iconic song mentioned at the start of this review, “Landslide.” She also skipped her biggest hit with Fleetwood Mac, “Dreams,” which she had done on other shows on the tour, as well as her second-biggest solo hit, “Talk to Me.”
Clearly the crowd would have enjoyed hearing both of those. But as she said in her early solo hit “Edge of Seventeen,” with which she closed the main set and she wrote when she was 34, “I'm a few years older than you.”
These days, she really is. And maybe she still knows more than the rest of us.
Supporting act The Pretenders played a 62-minute, 16-song set whose strength was its great catalog from the 1980s.
Songs such as “Don’t Get Me Wrong,” “Message of Love” and a slow “I’ll Stand By You” all still resonated, even though the group has only frontwoman Chrissie Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers from its original lineup.
But its biggest hits were best. “My City Was Gone,” a chronicle of the late 1970s economic failures wrought on Hynde’s native Akron, Ohio, was thumpingly updated to resonate just as loudly today. “Back on the Chain Gang,” a chronicle of emotional wreckage of the heart that similarly still holds true.
“Middle of the Road” was roaring, with Hynde playing harmonica, and the closing “Brass in Pocket” was great fun.
At 65, Hynde still is very much the strong rocker-chick that made her so successful in the first place. The three songs the band played from its new album, “Alone,” released a month ago, were good. The title track, was a Rolling Stones rocker, was best.
http://www.mcall.com/entertainment/l...119-story.html