Palm Beach Post 9-28-01

For Nicks and fans, magic is Fleet-ing

By Jeff Ostrowski, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer, Friday, September 28, 2001

The two personalities of Stevie Nicks took the stage at MARS Music Amphitheatre Wednesday night.

There was the glamorous, husky-voiced blonde who recorded all those bewitching hits in the '70s and '80s. There also was the poster child for the ill effects of hard living.

Nicks' fans clearly paid to hear the early incarnation of Stevie, and the singer made them happy with energetic if sometimes sloppy versions of songs from her Fleetwood Mac days and from her early solo career.

Nicks opened her 90-minute performance with Stop Draggin' My Heart Around and proceeded through Stand Back, Dreams and I Need to Know.

But even as Stevie's fans fantasized that they were being taken back 20 years, the later, burned-out version of Nicks injected harsh reality.

Nicks' voice clearly was limited, and it's possible that she hasn't recovered from the case of bronchitis that forced her to cancel 13 shows this summer.

Her nine-piece band -- including two backup singers, three guitarists, a drummer and a bongo player -- couldn't camouflage her shortcomings.

Instead, the band proved overkill, playing too loud and producing a muddy sound. The nadir was a 10-minute drum-and-bongo duet leading into Edge of Seventeen.

Nicks also moved painfully slowly. Her characteristic shawls and capes seemed designed to create the illusion that she was moving more than just her arms as she sang.

The enthusiastic crowd didn't seem to mind. Fans got their hit of Fleetwood Mac nostalgia, and they seemed indifferent to her newest work.

While fans stood for familiar songs such as Dreams and Stand Back, they sat for Sorcerer and Too Far From Texas, tunes from Nicks' latest album, Trouble in Shangri-La. She introduced both songs with stories about Fleetwood Mac bandmate Lindsay Buckingham, showing that she hasn't evolved much as a songwriter in the past two decades.

In the end, Nicks' glamorous personality occasionally recaptured her white-witch glory days. But her later incarnation ultimately proved that those days are long past.

Thanks to CL Moon for sending this article to us.