Unleashed review says Stevie is bloated and sedated

[Jondalar]

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Lindsay raised us up; Stevie brought us down


By John Petric
The Other Paper

I have a theory about Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac: She’s really Nancy Reagan as seen through a slight time warp.

The former first lady was definitely there in the bloated weirdness of the mystical chanteuse Nicks Saturday night at the Mac’s well-attended, well-intentioned Nationwide Arena show.

Despite a wealth of fine and good songs, everyone’s parade of memories was mercilessly squalled upon by the lethargic and loopy Nicks. You’ve never seen a bigger psychic party pooper.

Thanks to gigantic video screens flanking the stage, Nicks’s eyes appeared as toxic slit-trenches honing down on us like Big Brother’s weird big sister—that is, when her eyeballs could occasionally be seen. Normally they were half-closed, as if Nicks were focusing on her inner Ouija board, conjuring up spirits of Manuel Noriega and other notorious cocaine kingpins to rescue her from the banal reality of singing the hits yet one more time.

And I’m not going to even talk about how large the screen made her nostrils. You can only imagine how much illegal activity those air passages have seen in their day.

Nicks was a living wreck. When she spoke between songs, she made no sense. Between her garbled story about growing up idolizing the Velvet Underground and her trademark bleating vocals, which were more half-hearted than the onset of age would allow for, one could be forgiven for thinking Nicks was a tad heavily sedated.

All of which made her the complete opposite of Lindsay Buckingham, the hyper-intense, emotional guitarist/singer/songwriter and her former love partner.

Buckingham, slim and trim and highly energetic; Stevie, low and slow and quite possibly affecting Earth’s orbit. Buckingham, jovial and happy to be alive, his personality definitely his own; Nicks, everyone from The View rolled into one person, but on their worst days only. (Nicks seemed to hate everyone for being at the show—her unhappiness was that visceral.)

Buckingham, raw passion; Nicks, quite possibly the most depressed woman to ever waddle onstage on platforms. Sad, really.

The hits sounded good, though: “Rhiannon,” “The Chain,” “Dreams,” “Landslide,” “Tusk,” etc. But I’d have to say this was only because they were so well-written to begin with and were supported by the dy-no-mite rhythm section of John McVie and Mick Fleetwood. Buckingham and Nicks—once the equivalent of Lennon and McCartney for the spoiled-rotten California narcissistic set—did an uneven job of selling them.

As the pair traded the spotlight, Buckingham would work the crowd into a frenzy only for Nicks to bring it down. He was a lightning strike with an inimitable guitar style. She had the happiness level of a gorilla fresh out of banana rehab. You didn’t want to be around her.

By the time the band got to “Say You Love Me,” Nicks—who clearly was Moby-Dick to Lindsay’s Captain Ahab by this point—began to seriously lose what little steam she had stored in the haunted old engine house called her soul. She seemed prepared to collapse onstage, her platforms and top hat destined to be her lasting memorial.

And then she surprised us.

When she came out from backstage after her latest costume change, she was draped in black for “Stand Back.” (No problem, lady.) She crossed her arms, black Mass-style, but unintentionally looked like a Mardi Gras float. Then she unloaded the song with a heretofore unseen amount of emotional energy: vitriol, pure vitriol.

The woman has issues, by God, and to her credit she finally made them work for her.