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Originally Posted by trackaghost
Yeah, but surely she could have handled three chords on some of the songs.
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Well, ok, but handling three chords is about 10 percent of the job. It's a lot easier to sit in your living room & strum your guitar than it is to play onstage surrounded by a band & amplifiers & monitors & an audience & all the accompanying confusion. Knowing some guitar chords is the tip of the iceberg of being a performing musician. You're responsible for being able to "keep up" with your entire band & having to make spontaneous & immediate judgments about subtly changing tempi & dynamics, being in the rhythm "pocket," & making all those adjustments you have to make based on not just what you hear but what you see. It's pretty tough if you're not used to it. At the Mac concert in Inglewood way back in the early '80s when the video was shot, the band started "Oh Well" on two or three different railroad tracks, & Mick jumped from one track to the other on his congas. Lindsey & John & even Christine on maracas all got back on within seconds. They all knew what they were doing & how to fix problems that happen onstage. They all know how to deal with feedback as instrumentalists or with other aspects of rotten sound. Stevie just doesn't have that experience or those gifts. The others can keep damage to just track turbulence, but she'd have completely wrecked or hit the snowdrift.
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Obviously she can strum a guitar and if she had played every night, even doing something simple, she's probably be pretty decent by now.
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I guess I could agree with that. If she'd been playing guitar onstage all these decades regularly, we could talk about her as an instrumentalist in addition to a vocalist.
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That's one thing I've always found disappointing about Stevie that she never really tried at all to become a better musician.
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I've always been puzzled by the fact that her piano playing shows no evolution or improvement from one eon to another. I teach piano lessons & have never seen this phenomenon in anyone else, or heard about it in anyone else. It just might be an anthropological first!