Concert review: Stevie Nicks digs deep into ‘trunk of Gothic lost songs’
Going to see a good double-bill concert like the Pretenders and Stevie Nicks, then finding out at the door that the Pretenders won’t be playing after all is a little like buying a new pair of shoes, getting home and finding out there’s only one shoe in the box. It’s a pretty good shoe, but you sort of had your heart set on the pair.
With the Pretenders out of the picture (they also canceled a Wednesday night show in Miami due to singer Chrissie Hynde being sick), the spotlight was firmly on Nicks. The results were mixed.
The tour, billed as the 24K Gold Tour, seems like a good idea: Take a big star like Nicks and send her out to play some of her hits and a bunch of lost tunes from her “dark trunk of Gothic lost songs” and tell some stories.
Nicks certainly has stories, but that was sort of the problem with Thursday night’s show at Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena. Some of her stories were enlightening and amusing, but boy, did they go on and on. Several were five minutes or so; at one point in the middle of the show, she went nearly 10 minutes without playing a song. And the tour has been going on since before Halloween and Nicks has been telling these stories every night for more than 40 shows, so they aren’t exactly spontaneous any more.
The other problem with the show was all those lost songs. Some of them were very good — “Enchanted,” “Starshine” and “Crying in the Night” certainly could have been big hits — but most of the audience didn’t recognize any of them. There was nearly an hour in the middle of the show in which she played a bunch of pretty songs, but nothing anyone knew by heart. Coupled with the momentum-killing stories, the show never really got rolling.
That’s a shame, because Nicks sounded really good, especially at the end of the show, when she ran through “Gold Dust Woman,” a hard-rocking “Edge of Seventeen,” “Rhiannon” and “Landslide.”
http://jacksonville.com/entertainmen...hic-lost-songs