Slick Stevie Nicks Plays To An Adoring Crowd

Nicks has gained considerable weight since her heyday with Fleetwood Mac, and her stagewear seems designed to hide it. Between every song she changed glittery shawls or floor-length, dark-color dresses, adding a calculated theatricality to the evening.

And, oh yeah, the music - the drummer's boomy bass, the electric guitarist's straight-ahead licks, and even the Latin percussionist's fills were all standard-issue arena rock.

Nicks was in town to promote a recent 3-CD retrospective, The Enchanted Works of Stevie Nicks, so this writer hoped she would challenge listeners with interesting arrangements of little-known works. No such luck. Even that material came out of the Nicks machine homogenized and safe.

Boz Scaggs opened the evening with a characteristically fine set of hits and blues covers. His fluid, earthy guitar-playing is the perfect counterpoint to his heavenly smooth blues vocals. Known to be a perfectionist, Scaggs and his band faithfully reproduced recorded versions without sacrificing vitality.