Well That Was Rough
 

I feel bad!

What's worse, the bass player going crazy or Stevie forgetting the second verse? The cocaine was off the boundaries that night. :distress::distress:

Waddy was the only one keeping his cool it looked like.:laugh:

yeah even the girls were all messed up.

such a shame because her voice was still awesome then and she p!ssed it away.

That was when Stevie used to rock the house. Those were the good old days. If you had been there you would know how the energy level was amazing during those shows.

Coke fueled shows were the best. She was young, and so full of energy and life. Loved it.


You have no idea what you missed out on.


:blob2:

Jesus! Thank God she didn't end up face down in a bathtub, a washed up has-been. I can see why Jimmy dumped her. She was out of her freaking mind.

Ah, yes, the old days. This was my first Stevie Nicks tour. Luckily I saw a show early (and maybe less cocaine fueled) in the tour. There were some great moments, vocals, and awesome stand out performances. Then there were some like the Stand Back referenced in this thread :).

When Family Guy did a bit several years ago about Peter and Lois performing in a talent show baked, I thought of this tour.

Yeah, I can't deny she rocked, but she rocked a little too excessively. It's entertaining, albeit a bit tragic seeing the messy state she was in she was . This clip is pretty much an sample of the entire show I attended. At the time I wasn't keenly aware of her predicament. I was just disappointed how disjointed the show was ---awkward dead spaces between songs which ruined the pace of the show.

She would leave the stage often (sniff, sniff). She missed cues, forgot lyrics. There was air of desperation. Whenever she chatted to the audience between songs, she garbled quickly, and no one could understand what the hell she was saying. She sang every number a frantic manner that often derailed or sucked the charm or essence out of the songs. She was in her own world. It was a train wreck.

I recall telling myself she is better than this spectacle I was witnessing. It bothered me for weeks after the show. With a hindsight and perspective I can find amusement in it. It was what it was -- unique style and time, but also a very precarious period in her life. I'm grateful she had the support and fortitude to pull out of this potential death spiral.

Agreed that the performance in this vid is god awful. But then, Stand Back is always god awful live. A cacophonous mess of thudding noise with hoarse bawled lyrics and a lot of running/staggering around.

I swear that some time ago this same performance has been posted in a thread that talked about the best performances of Stand back.

You are correct and it was ME that posted it. It is my FAVORITE live performance of Stand Back. The audience is on edge wondering what will happen next :eek:
I hate to say it but I miss the wild Stevie so much.

That was a coke fueled Stand Back. Here is a Klonopin fueled Stand Back. I feel the worst for Chris because playing the keyboards gave her the hardest job of trying to get back in form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI2djwEnJPM

I understand, I've come to love the Red Rocks performance even if the close-ups are re-registered and the vocals doesn't match with her mouth.
Not all the Klonopin Stand backs are bad, this personally is one of my favourite:

yes they were especially the Concert September 9, 1983 Colt State Park in Bristol RI ( not Bristol CT ) Someone was flinging pineapple at her (coolers and booze was allowed ) she was pissed and tried to climb down off the stage to kick some ass

I've read lots about that show. Gosh if only there was a video of that :eek:

She will kick some a$$ and throw the pineapple back at them and bop them off the head with it.She's lucky it wasn't a beer bottle.
.
She did not try to throw it back in return because she could get sued.

What a mess.

Nobody can tell me "those were the good 'owl days." I'd take calm, cautious stage Stevie anyday over that disaster in the video above.

I am so amused by the reactions to Stevie circa late 1970's to 1980's....

Its interesting how some people today have swung to a very puritan mentality concerning drug usage. Please do not watch the Woodstock concert from 1969... You will be horrified by both the audience and the players, the very founders of the Rock music you enjoy today....what many of us view as a wonderful time in our past, you view as a trainwreck.... The pendulum constantly swings. Trust me, in 30 years you will be horrified by your grandchildren's behavior.


:laugh::laugh::laugh:


.

Maybe that one of the reasons why I cant get into the current artists because they have no stemina .

Performers from the 1950's up to 1980's under the influence or not can write and perform better then todays crop of artists which are under the influence of auto-tune.

Why this board all of sudden went negative with FM and its members .

I know one of the reasons why.

No new music.

I love this performance tbh, yes it's messy but it's also 10x more interesting and less predictable than current-Stevie.

I also like it, especially the guitar solo sans Brad Jeffries's dance. To be honest she could handle it maybe even better alone.

Co-sign this.

Agreed! That dance/march she does circling the stage from 4:28-5:01 - What I wouldn't give for her to do something so weird and spontaneous like that in her set these days. :nod:

Right??!! I know she totally could still do it. Now I'm grateful for even the slightest unscripted movement..and there aren't many but they still do exist. You just have to watch for them.

This was I think the BEST Stand Back, after Coke, and after Klonopin.

Agreed, I love this one.

I'm sorry, but a bad performance is a bad performance. That performance of Stand Back was a train wreck. Now okay , maybe if I was in that front row while she ran around the stage off her head I would find it exciting and better than swaying Stevie I saw in concert 2 weeks ago.

And if was so against drugs as you seem to suggest, I wouldn't be listening to Stevie :lol: But it's clear she has a problem in this video, and she saw it herself and got help. That's just a bad bad performance.

And you have proven my point.... Those of us who partied like that did not view it as a problem (as you referred to it) or "off her head". For many of us it was a lot of fun and before it killed us it was simply time to stop and start a new chapter of our lives. But I assure you, she was having the time of her life at that moment and looks back at that time (albeit foggy & through long nets of white) as a lot of fun. She wouldn't change a thing in regards to using coke. The only thing she was sorry she ever started using was Klonopin. I agree with her, any drug a shrink gives you is a bad drug....doctors are the biggest benzodiazapine pushers in world....and only weak people take drugs like that that turn people into sheep. But that is a discussion for another topic.

Please feel free to rewrite her history in your mind any way that makes you feel better about being a fan of someone who loved doing blow with a brandy chaser....someone who smokes pot to this day on a daily basis and still enjoys her chardonnay.... And is also into some pretty mystical esoteric stuff too....

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Well when it comes down to it, she was missing cues, mixing up verses and her ad libs were all over the place. Irrelevant to whether she was having fun or not, that was a bad performance and if I attended a concert full of missing cues, messing up verses and hoarse ad libs I'd feel like I didn't get the service for my money :laugh:

it was, technically, a bad performance. She wasn't too sure where the hell she was-- in many ways. She couldn't remember her lyrics, she couldn't articulate them properly when she did.... not good.

I think what those who enjoy it are saying is really more that it is entertaining. That's different. Despite the mistakes they found it compelling, fun, spontaneous. And that's fine if you are sitting in the audience and have paid good money and want to be entertained and see something you wouldn't see anywhere else.

For Stevie, regardless of how she chooses to paint it, it had by that time become a genuine life risk. Paul Fishkin, who was there, talks about her coming to the brink of overdosing more than once. She had days where she was totally incoherent. Tom Petty talks about basically just expecting to get the call that she was dead from an overdose. There are pics of her during that time where there is always someone standing on either side of her, holding her up. Fishkin says there were times "we had to scrape her off the floor" ... literally. Mick talks about how scary it was, she was soooo far gone and there were nights she didn't know she was onstage. I think all of that qualifies as a very bad situation indeed.

Again, for some this made for very entertaining performances to watch. I get it. But for others, and call me a prude if you like but I am one of them, such performances are mostly cringe-worthy. They aren't performances she wants to be remembered for. I totally get the point people are making that at least on coke she had a tremendous amount of energy and seemed like she was having some fun onstage versus her very static, stand-still-and-wave-my-arms performances lately. But let's also remember those shows were 30 years or so ago. She was still in her 30s; she's now in her 60s. Inevitably her onstage antics will have changed. And if she's got a foot injury and other issues (maybe with her hands/wrists, etc) then that makes her less likely to be jumping around too. I'd kill to see her do a high kick in the boots again, but it just ain't gonna happen. But I'll take her standing still over her having a manic overdose any day. :shrug:

she always "performs" for the cameras at a live gig it's never as animated any more

so true god going to an Aerosmith show and wondering if Joe Perry was going to be propping Steven Tyler up and doing most of the singing , I guess it was just the time we were in and I too do not regret it or would not change what I did .

I agree. She's ashamed of those performances and has said as much.

That doesn't mean she is ashamed of her drug use. She tells people it was unsafe and could have killed her, but I don't think she's especially sorry she did cocaine. She doesn't hang her head over that. What I think she hates is seeing or hearing those performances where she was out of her mind, stumbling and incoherent.

I mean people can remember being high on drugs or alcohol as fun: all the laughter and dancing and what not, but who wants to see pictures of themselves vomiting or passed out? Not many. I think performances like that are almost the equivalent of seeing someone with their head in the toilet. That's not the revelrous part of drugs. That's the revolting payback.

Michele

Stevie on coke at 70 wouldn't give that kind of performance anyway, 70 is 70. Now if she had worked on her fitness like, I dunno, Bruce Springsteen (and even he had more energy at 30), she could probably have some inspiring energy at her age, but that's a lot of work and most people don't do it, and it seems to me she was always on the easily fatigued side.

I'm certain she had a lot of fun, but drugs are the kind of thing where it's more fun to play than to watch, so I certainly wouldn't have wanted to pay to see a performance like that. I don't find it especially fascinating, even if I don't find it especially heinous either. I mean, I can get ****ed up on drugs but I wouldn't charge people to watch me, why should they? (That said, the "Gold Dust Woman" video from Japan where she's h i g h a s a k i t e, I find that fun to watch sometimes, but at least she enunciated all the words and her voice was still gold and she wasn't as close to a fatality. (And anyway I like that song better than "Stand Back".))

The Klono one just makes me sad, that's clearly just a pure struggle.

I think it's normal that she remembers all the fun but not the rest, that's the way drugs work; it's also the way human mind works.

However, for a woman with menopause and the subsequent hormonal changes in her body it's more difficult to stay quick/industrious on the stage. Women after their 50s have a much more substantial decrease in density of the bones.

Alcohol was also majorly in play along with heavy cocaine use. Mick wrote in his first book she checked into Betty Ford for both cocaine and alcohol addiction. Coke gets you high and alcohol brings you down some and then more coke. Its and endless cycle.
Does anyone remember Stevie's Behind the Music advertisements where Paul Fishkin says how worried everyone was about Stevie and there were near overdoses on the road. That part was cut from the hour segment but it was in the promo. I remember being so curious to hear more about the near overdoses but it was obviously cut from Behind the Music.
It was the out of control 80's. Its more scary to me than sad. But its entertaining nonetheless. I was 13 when I saw Stevie in concert in 1983. There were times during the show that scared or confused me but nothing like the RAL tour. The next stop on the RAL tour after this New York stop was Pittsburgh. Stevie was more subdued and you can listen to Stand Back in the bootleg. She does the song very good. Its obvious she was majorly partying in New York :eek: Stevie fell off the stage opening night in Houston during the Rock A Little tour. http://rockalittle.com/usatoday4-14-1986.htm
The Klonopin years is extremely sad. In the link I posted to see Stevie just stand by the mic and smile while she misses her cue over and over is very sad. I was hoping Mick would have written about this in his recent book but he did not. Stevie writes while coke almost ruined her life and career, Klonopin was much worse.

BTW...her voice during the NY RAL show is more alarming than any missed cues or odd behavior. Its totally shot. But the end part of the NY video when Stevie introduces her band says a lot about her uncertainty. She introduces her keyboard player who is not there. Its funny and cute but I think it shows no one knew when she was going to introduce the band and who was going to be introduced first.

Now THAT'S my girl!!

I don't know how you could NOT like it!