Soundstage, Stevie Nicks
Television Review by John Demetry
"This is a show of stories of life of how we got here tonight," Stevie Nicks introduces her new Soundstage concert special (which she also co-produced). This intro establishes the show's context, after opener "Stand Back." In that song, Nicks asks the listener to "read between my lines." She not only cuts an iconic figure with her dancer's lines in song after song (the gold shawl, the top hat, the twirl, the black cape, the feathered cap and raised skirt when she bows). Nicks also provides suggestions for reading between the lines of her songs via brief autobiographical introductions. However, through their organization in the show's two-part structure (check local listings for PBS air dates), the songs really convey an artist's journey, the formation of an identity. A luminous presence -- her life experiences shine on this stage. She is a star.
Nicks establishes the significance of a star's journey in storybook style: "In the beginning, in 1981 when we did Bella Donna (1981), that was a hard step to walk away from Fleetwood Mac." This moment remains her defining action as an artist -- as she puts it, as a "songwriter" -- but also as a woman. It proves a decision as fraught with peril as any of the choices she might apply to "Landslide": leaving Lindsey Buckingham (her Fleetwood Mac collaborator and former lover), heeding the kick inside that looses her from her father, pursuing a career as a rock goddess rather than settling for a normal life, and never marrying or having children.
Soundstage highlights a catalogue of love songs that present the ramifications of these decisions in romantic terms. She spins these love yarns in a personal poetic language, an idiosyncratic set of metaphors and symbols that are expansive (the undeniable "Edge of Seventeen"), even within sometimes unorthodox musical structures (the mystical longing of "Sara"). From "Rhiannon" to "Landslide," Nicks attests to the experiences that shaped her: the choices she made and the twists of fate (love and death). These existential qualities, singular songwriting, and unmistakable voice distinguish her songbook from others in the soft rock market. She sustains those qualities even in those more conventional solo records ("Enchanted," "How Still My Love").
Indeed, like all once and active Macs, a signifying absence colors every solo performance or recording, like a "shadow against the wall" (pace "If Anyone Falls"). Here, Nicks' star presence and expressive command constitute the spectacle. Her band, obviously having a good time, merely serves the songs: Waddy Watchell, capable and unimposing on guitar fails to lead the twists and turns of "Sara" and "Landslide" into the sublime; the trio of female back-up singers basically act as flawless extensions of Nicks' limited vocal range -- a community of sister support -- in contrast to the dynamic call-and-response that characterizes the Mac's heartbreaking harmonies. Without the multiplied meaning and creative ferment offered by Buckingham and/or Christine McVie's vocal harmonies (that slip into Nicks' like a hand in glove), Buckingham's ear as a producer, and his tender guitar accompaniment, Nicks' lapses in taste occasionally undercut her most earnest intentions.
Soundstage demonstrates the cost of artistic freedom in Nicks' choices of songs to cover, performing five songs by other artists. The writer of "Beautiful Child" and "Silver Springs," who cites as inspirations The Everly Brothers (for "I Don't Want To Know"), Prince (for "Stand Back"), and Bob Dylan (for "Thrown Down"), towers over those she covers in this concert: Dave Matthews Band ("Crash Into Me"), Tom Petty ("I Need To Know"), Bonnie Raitt ("The Circle Dance"), Vanessa Carlton ("The One"), even Led Zeppelin ("Rock 'n Roll" -- this cover actually worked as a fun encore at her Jones Beach performance this summer).
Despite Nicks' boast to present Dave Matthews' "Crash" "through the eyes of a woman," her vocals don't really transform these songs. Only with the odd gesture does she make of these covers a spectacle of her Difference: as when, on "Crash Into Me," Nicks declares, "I'm Queen of the castle, you're a dirty rascal." She sings that line with the "na-na-na-na-boo-boo" attitude befitting the taunt of a playground game -- while significantly changing the original's "King" to "Queen."
The moment surprisingly synchs with -- but does not even begin to rival -- Buckingham's use of gym-class childhood rituals of embarrassment as cosmic metaphor in the song "Red Rover" -- from Fleetwood Mac's Say You Will (2003). Nicks should appropriate The Ting Tings' uncanny recall of dodge ball, Darwinism as hegemonic indoctrination, on "That's Not My Name": "I miss the catch if they throw me the ball / I'm the last kid standing up against the wall." With that song, The Ting Tings achieve Buckingham-inspired sublimity while realizing Nicks' feminist/feminine aspirations through a dense wall-of-sound climax that layers: "Are you calling me darling? / Are you calling me bird?" Of course, The Tings Tings might bow before Nicks' use of vocalization and onomatopoeia in "Edge of Seventeen". . .
Part 1 of PBS's presentation of Soundstage establishes Nicks as an independent woman (via five solo tracks, "Sara," and three covers of male artists). Part 2 suggests the moral dimensions -- the relevance -- of Nicks' iconic status. However, it does so through the crafty contextualization of her bad taste.
There's no accounting for the mysteries of friendship, so I don't judge when Nicks introduces Vanessa Carlton to the stage as her "song child." Carlton appears like a harbinger of DOOM with her Morticia Adams 'do and unflattering purple dress. Together, they sing Carlton's "The One":
Carlton's "The One" represents the Juno Generation's notions of romance: sentimentalizing high school experience, claiming hipster badges of identification ("indie show," "the tape I made you"), and defining "love" as extension of narcissism:
However, the songs that surround the duets provide the substance of that inspiration. Note: Nicks does NOT invite Carlton to duet on a STEVIE NICKS song! Nicks shows how influence works by drawing upon the culture -- the inspiration -- of which the Juno Generation remains wilfully ignorant. Part 2 opens with the epic, Percevalian search for the ideal in "Rhiannon." Bookending the Carlton duets, "Sorcerer" and "Landslide" offer understanding of pain and loss "through the eyes of a woman." She stages "Landslide," the show's penultimate performance, against a backdrop of photos of her recently passed father and a shower of light that falls like James Joyce's snowfall "upon all the living and the dead."
Earlier, the light falls like gold dust. The Carlton duets spin on the axis of "Gold Dust Woman" -- you know, Nicks and Fleetwood Mac's nod to Patti Smith punk! This is how culture works. With these songs, Nicks draws upon our shared history to impart moral lessons about Desire and Ambition and Sacrifice -- considerations at which Carlton and the Juno Generation scoff. "Gold Dust Woman" warns of the devastation that awaits, adding a new fade out -- "You don't feel me now / You should see me now / You can't save me now!" -- while the back-up singers borrow the chant from Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain": "Running in the shadows!" What I wouldn't give to see/hear a "Gold Dust Woman" duet with Stevie Nicks and Mary J. Blige!
Appropriately, the concert ends with "Edge of Seventeen" -- the song that justifies a solo career. The number coalesces the show's themes. The interaction between Nicks and the back-up singers (sharing smiles) and the musicians constitute an ecstatic catharsis: revved up by a troupe of violinists and one of the most recognizable guitar riffs in rock history. According to her greatest hits package, Crystal Visions (2007), in recent performances, Nicks dedicates "Edge of Seventeen" to the American troops fighting in the Middle East -- a fact this presentation fails to acknowledge. Having engaged the Juno Generation, Nicks and PBS might have used this opportunity to raise moral awareness to the level of civic consciousness.
Fortunately, she performed such uplift in her tour promoting the Soundstage show, DVD, and CD. During the tour, Nicks entered the stage for her final encore, bathed in light and decked out in white tuxedo and top hat. She sang "Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You" against a backdrop of an American flag and images of American soldiers in Iraq. These rhetorical flourishes represent means of seduction and persuasion: Marlene Dietrich meets Patton. This encore expanded the show's political dimensions and redefined the song's meaning, challenging her "song children" (and audience) while offering an expression of gratitude to American soldiers. This audaciously patriotic spectacle must be too politically unfashionable for public television. Thankfully, Nicks' personal tales raise the flag for feeling. For that, I salute her.
Set List:
Stevie Nicks
Soundstage (Part 1)
1. Stand Back
2. Enchanted
3. If Anyone Falls In Love
4. Sara
5. Fall From Grace
6. How Still My Love
7. I Need To Know
8. Crash Into Me
9. Rock 'n Roll
Stevie Nicks
Soundstage (Part 2)
1. Rhiannon
2. Sorcerer
3. The One
4. Gold Dust Woman
5. The Circle Dance
6. Landslide
7. Edge Of Seventeen
Television Review by John Demetry
"This is a show of stories of life of how we got here tonight," Stevie Nicks introduces her new Soundstage concert special (which she also co-produced). This intro establishes the show's context, after opener "Stand Back." In that song, Nicks asks the listener to "read between my lines." She not only cuts an iconic figure with her dancer's lines in song after song (the gold shawl, the top hat, the twirl, the black cape, the feathered cap and raised skirt when she bows). Nicks also provides suggestions for reading between the lines of her songs via brief autobiographical introductions. However, through their organization in the show's two-part structure (check local listings for PBS air dates), the songs really convey an artist's journey, the formation of an identity. A luminous presence -- her life experiences shine on this stage. She is a star.
Nicks establishes the significance of a star's journey in storybook style: "In the beginning, in 1981 when we did Bella Donna (1981), that was a hard step to walk away from Fleetwood Mac." This moment remains her defining action as an artist -- as she puts it, as a "songwriter" -- but also as a woman. It proves a decision as fraught with peril as any of the choices she might apply to "Landslide": leaving Lindsey Buckingham (her Fleetwood Mac collaborator and former lover), heeding the kick inside that looses her from her father, pursuing a career as a rock goddess rather than settling for a normal life, and never marrying or having children.
Soundstage highlights a catalogue of love songs that present the ramifications of these decisions in romantic terms. She spins these love yarns in a personal poetic language, an idiosyncratic set of metaphors and symbols that are expansive (the undeniable "Edge of Seventeen"), even within sometimes unorthodox musical structures (the mystical longing of "Sara"). From "Rhiannon" to "Landslide," Nicks attests to the experiences that shaped her: the choices she made and the twists of fate (love and death). These existential qualities, singular songwriting, and unmistakable voice distinguish her songbook from others in the soft rock market. She sustains those qualities even in those more conventional solo records ("Enchanted," "How Still My Love").
Indeed, like all once and active Macs, a signifying absence colors every solo performance or recording, like a "shadow against the wall" (pace "If Anyone Falls"). Here, Nicks' star presence and expressive command constitute the spectacle. Her band, obviously having a good time, merely serves the songs: Waddy Watchell, capable and unimposing on guitar fails to lead the twists and turns of "Sara" and "Landslide" into the sublime; the trio of female back-up singers basically act as flawless extensions of Nicks' limited vocal range -- a community of sister support -- in contrast to the dynamic call-and-response that characterizes the Mac's heartbreaking harmonies. Without the multiplied meaning and creative ferment offered by Buckingham and/or Christine McVie's vocal harmonies (that slip into Nicks' like a hand in glove), Buckingham's ear as a producer, and his tender guitar accompaniment, Nicks' lapses in taste occasionally undercut her most earnest intentions.
Soundstage demonstrates the cost of artistic freedom in Nicks' choices of songs to cover, performing five songs by other artists. The writer of "Beautiful Child" and "Silver Springs," who cites as inspirations The Everly Brothers (for "I Don't Want To Know"), Prince (for "Stand Back"), and Bob Dylan (for "Thrown Down"), towers over those she covers in this concert: Dave Matthews Band ("Crash Into Me"), Tom Petty ("I Need To Know"), Bonnie Raitt ("The Circle Dance"), Vanessa Carlton ("The One"), even Led Zeppelin ("Rock 'n Roll" -- this cover actually worked as a fun encore at her Jones Beach performance this summer).
Despite Nicks' boast to present Dave Matthews' "Crash" "through the eyes of a woman," her vocals don't really transform these songs. Only with the odd gesture does she make of these covers a spectacle of her Difference: as when, on "Crash Into Me," Nicks declares, "I'm Queen of the castle, you're a dirty rascal." She sings that line with the "na-na-na-na-boo-boo" attitude befitting the taunt of a playground game -- while significantly changing the original's "King" to "Queen."
The moment surprisingly synchs with -- but does not even begin to rival -- Buckingham's use of gym-class childhood rituals of embarrassment as cosmic metaphor in the song "Red Rover" -- from Fleetwood Mac's Say You Will (2003). Nicks should appropriate The Ting Tings' uncanny recall of dodge ball, Darwinism as hegemonic indoctrination, on "That's Not My Name": "I miss the catch if they throw me the ball / I'm the last kid standing up against the wall." With that song, The Ting Tings achieve Buckingham-inspired sublimity while realizing Nicks' feminist/feminine aspirations through a dense wall-of-sound climax that layers: "Are you calling me darling? / Are you calling me bird?" Of course, The Tings Tings might bow before Nicks' use of vocalization and onomatopoeia in "Edge of Seventeen". . .
Part 1 of PBS's presentation of Soundstage establishes Nicks as an independent woman (via five solo tracks, "Sara," and three covers of male artists). Part 2 suggests the moral dimensions -- the relevance -- of Nicks' iconic status. However, it does so through the crafty contextualization of her bad taste.
There's no accounting for the mysteries of friendship, so I don't judge when Nicks introduces Vanessa Carlton to the stage as her "song child." Carlton appears like a harbinger of DOOM with her Morticia Adams 'do and unflattering purple dress. Together, they sing Carlton's "The One":
We sing along to the indie show
The songs they play mean more than I can say
And the tape I made you,
Hope you think of me when it plays through
Carlton's "The One" represents the Juno Generation's notions of romance: sentimentalizing high school experience, claiming hipster badges of identification ("indie show," "the tape I made you"), and defining "love" as extension of narcissism:
I don't need you to tell me I'm the oneCarlton, like Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody, claims Nicks as an influence. That's about as meaningful as the character of Juno identifying Patti Smith as her musical idol and then making music that's closer to, well, Vanessa Carlton -- "the indie show" -- than Patti Smith (or Stevie Nicks). Carlton and Cody mean to claim Nicks merely as a status symbol: another hipster badge of identification. With Soundstage, Nicks defies fashionable "anger." Regarding her "meanest" song, "Fall From Grace," she emphasizes that it contains a "touch of love" -- the Nicks difference. So, she counters the Juno Generation's attempt at appropriation through a generous (a friendly) gesture. In her duets with Carlton ("The One" and the Raitt cover), their harmonies (which are lovely) represent the spectacle of Nicks offering literal inspiration. Nicks offers her "breath," her voice, the weathered sign of her experience.
You'll never know that I was the one
However, the songs that surround the duets provide the substance of that inspiration. Note: Nicks does NOT invite Carlton to duet on a STEVIE NICKS song! Nicks shows how influence works by drawing upon the culture -- the inspiration -- of which the Juno Generation remains wilfully ignorant. Part 2 opens with the epic, Percevalian search for the ideal in "Rhiannon." Bookending the Carlton duets, "Sorcerer" and "Landslide" offer understanding of pain and loss "through the eyes of a woman." She stages "Landslide," the show's penultimate performance, against a backdrop of photos of her recently passed father and a shower of light that falls like James Joyce's snowfall "upon all the living and the dead."
Earlier, the light falls like gold dust. The Carlton duets spin on the axis of "Gold Dust Woman" -- you know, Nicks and Fleetwood Mac's nod to Patti Smith punk! This is how culture works. With these songs, Nicks draws upon our shared history to impart moral lessons about Desire and Ambition and Sacrifice -- considerations at which Carlton and the Juno Generation scoff. "Gold Dust Woman" warns of the devastation that awaits, adding a new fade out -- "You don't feel me now / You should see me now / You can't save me now!" -- while the back-up singers borrow the chant from Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain": "Running in the shadows!" What I wouldn't give to see/hear a "Gold Dust Woman" duet with Stevie Nicks and Mary J. Blige!
Appropriately, the concert ends with "Edge of Seventeen" -- the song that justifies a solo career. The number coalesces the show's themes. The interaction between Nicks and the back-up singers (sharing smiles) and the musicians constitute an ecstatic catharsis: revved up by a troupe of violinists and one of the most recognizable guitar riffs in rock history. According to her greatest hits package, Crystal Visions (2007), in recent performances, Nicks dedicates "Edge of Seventeen" to the American troops fighting in the Middle East -- a fact this presentation fails to acknowledge. Having engaged the Juno Generation, Nicks and PBS might have used this opportunity to raise moral awareness to the level of civic consciousness.
Fortunately, she performed such uplift in her tour promoting the Soundstage show, DVD, and CD. During the tour, Nicks entered the stage for her final encore, bathed in light and decked out in white tuxedo and top hat. She sang "Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You" against a backdrop of an American flag and images of American soldiers in Iraq. These rhetorical flourishes represent means of seduction and persuasion: Marlene Dietrich meets Patton. This encore expanded the show's political dimensions and redefined the song's meaning, challenging her "song children" (and audience) while offering an expression of gratitude to American soldiers. This audaciously patriotic spectacle must be too politically unfashionable for public television. Thankfully, Nicks' personal tales raise the flag for feeling. For that, I salute her.
Set List:
Stevie Nicks
Soundstage (Part 1)
1. Stand Back
2. Enchanted
3. If Anyone Falls In Love
4. Sara
5. Fall From Grace
6. How Still My Love
7. I Need To Know
8. Crash Into Me
9. Rock 'n Roll
Stevie Nicks
Soundstage (Part 2)
1. Rhiannon
2. Sorcerer
3. The One
4. Gold Dust Woman
5. The Circle Dance
6. Landslide
7. Edge Of Seventeen
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