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Another thing that's important is for the people who prefer the mature Stevie to remember that their position isn't the morally superior one, & that people who prefer a wild Stevie she-cat aren't necessarily superficial, deluded troglodytes. We all have slightly different aesthetic responses to things. I'm calling for more tolerance all around.
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That certainly isn't what I was trying to convey, and I hope it didn't come across as such. I was simply trying to convey that whether I was part of a minority opinion or a majority opinion that I completely understood and related to the idea of appreciating a mature Stevie and that he was not alone in that opinion (as it was somewhat implied).
I do love the early footage of Stevie. There is a raw intensity and power to those early performances that few performers ever even aspire too much less achieve. Stevie was and is mezmerizing. Truthfully though if I were to pick out a time period where I were to have little to no interest in Stevie as a performer it would probably be from about '85 to '95. As a fan those years (the Rock A Little Era in particular) are painful to me to watch footage of. In some ways I feel that reaction is because her craft slipped for various and sundry reasons and in some ways I feel it is because those performances were so raw and so vulnerable and so fraught with a certain possibility of peril that it is more than I can emotionally digest for more than a song or two.
Yet I am quite sure that there are some people who would undoubtedly list that time as when they fell in love with Stevie's music. I have a hard time relating to that line of thinking, but I can respect it because music is so hugely subjective...even for people who are more drawn to the technical side of music because technical superiority in no way accounts for genre preferences.