Stevie Nicks shows her demons with “Live At Red Rocks”

In the mid-80’s rocker Stevie Nicks was at the top of her game with her multiplatinum-selling albums (1981’s Bella Donna &  1983’s The Wild Heart). However, by 1986, her “game” was being threatened by a deadly cocaine habit which greatly affected her then-latest album, Rock A Little, and its subsequent tour. Her 1986 concert, Stevie Nicks: Live At Red Rocks chronicles her concert at the beautiful Red Rocks Ampitheater tucked away inside the Colorado Rocky Mountains in Denver.

While this dvd is far from Nicks’ worst performance, it’s not up to par with her post-drugs performances such as her 2009 dvd: Live in Chicago. Nevertheless, there are some redeemable parts of this concert. For example, she opens the show with the Bella Donna-era classic, Outside the Rain with a nice fade-into her Fleetwood Mac classic Dreams. 

However, one of the best parts of the concert is when she performs Talk To Me from 1985’s Rock A Little. Her vocals sound amazing just as they do on the album.

One of the cutest moments of the film is after Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You. Someone in the audience releases a white-winged dove. The dove is then handed to Nicks (who tries to get the bird to speak into the mic) and she tries to release it, but the bird doesn’t leave.

Unfortunately Nicks’s performance of No Spoken Word is an absolute disaster in both sound and film. The closeups of her face are obviously retouched due to her drug issues. She looks tired. Additionally, her vocals sound tired. It gets even worse with Beauty and the Beast. On the ever-popular Edge of Seventeen, she performs a completely unnecessary vocal solo. At times, she even looks like she’s, as the great George Costanza once said on Seinfeld, in “a full-fledged body heave set to music.”

Overall, it’s an okay dvd due to the fact that it contains rarer songs that Nicks nowadays doesn’t perform live. However, it shows her in the worst part of her drug-fueled days. Fortunately after this tour she checked into rehab and has been off cocaine ever since.

B-.

Stevie Nicks reminisces about how her greatest songs came about in “Live In Chicago”

Rock music’s Gold Dust Woman, Stevie Nicks, returns with Live In Chicago,

her first live video since 1987’s Live at Red Rocks. This is a concert dvd that

is sure to please Nicks fans old and new.

Nicks surely knows how to entertain an audience. Instead of this being a standard concert dvd, Nicks makes it an experience for concert-goers and viewers alike – complete with stories about what inspired such hits as If Anyone Falls and Landslide. She opens the concert with the ever-popular Stand Back from her 1983 hit album The Wild Heart. On the ever-popular Fleetwood Mac hit Rhiannon, Nicks re-emerges dressed in a black top-hat, black gloves, and a black skirt – thus becoming Rhiannon. She does this transformation again on Gold Dust Woman, which makes the concert more enchanting and brings it to a new level of greatness.

One of the most entertaining stories that Nicks shares is about the time she wrote a song during the recording of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album in 1977 in Sausalito, CA. There was a time when she was not needed in the studio. A person in the studio gave her a key to Sly Stone‘s (of Sly and the Family Stone) studio. While there, she wrote what would be Dreams.

Stevie shows her true rock side when she exclaims that “this is my most angriest song” albeit with a little love and breaks into Fall From Grace from her 2001 release Trouble in  Shangri-La.

However, one of the more weaker moments is when she invites Vanessa Carlton to sing The One and Circle Dance. Though Nicks is a rocker, Carlton is a soft rocker. She has no point in being there.

Overall, it is a great dvd that celebrates the many hit songs spanning Nicks’ 3-decade long career. Perhaps the dvd’s title should have been titled “An Enchanting Evening with Stevie Nicks in Chicago” because it is one enchanting experience.