Sunday, September 16, 2007

Stand Back Update On Singles Sales Charts

**Update 10/04/07**
On the Billboard Hot Dance Singles Sales Chart (Issue Date 10/13/07) Stand Back moves up two spots to #4 in it's 5th week on the chart - after dropping last week from it's #2 peak.

On the Billboard Hot Singles Sales Chart , Stand Back is holding at #13 for a second week and it's 5th week in total on the chart.

The Remix Single of Stevie's tune Stand Back debuted at #10 on the Billboard Hot Singles Sales Chart on September 15, 2007 peaking at #4 the following week.

The single also debuted the same week at #3 on the Billboard Hot Dance Singles Sales Chart, peaking at #2 the following week where it stayed for two weeks

STEVIE STEPS MAC IN TIME

STEVIE STEPS MAC IN TIME
Sep 16 2007
by James McCarthy, Wales On Sunday

FLEETWOOD Mac rock goddess Stevie Nicks is set for a comeback with a project based on ancient Welsh stories.

The star is interpreting 12th Century tales of the medieval Mabinogion and has hinted the work could be transformed into a cartoon.

The Mabinogion is a collection of stories from medieval Welsh manuscripts. They are partly based on early medieval events, but almost certainly hark back to older Iron Age traditions.
And Stevie, 59, says she can’t wait to rewrite ancient Welsh history for the modern age.

She said: “It’s almost like this has been laid out for me by the Gods – or whomever – that this will be the next 20 years of my life.

“It could be a movie, it could be a record. It could be a couple of records. It could be a mini-series. It could be an animated cartoon. There is no end to what this could be because the stories are so fantastic.”

It’s not the first time the singer/songwriter has dabbled in things Welsh.
Nicks’ 1976 song Rhiannon, from the album Fleetwood Mac, was inspired by a novel featuring two characters named Branwen and Rhiannon.

She later bought an Afghan hound and named it after the Branwen character.
Stevie, who is working hard on her Welsh project but says she was recently interrupted by a call from her manager.

She said: “We started in that totally scholarly ‘you-are-a- student-of-Welsh- mythology place’.
“And then I got a call from my manager saying, ‘I need you to come to Vegas right now because Celine Dion and Elton John are playing back-to-back at Caesar’s Palace, and they want you to do a week there.

“He told me, ‘It’s really good money and you don’t have to travel very far’. And I’m, like, ‘I’m on a spiritual quest here. I really cannot come to Vegas’. And he’s like, ‘Stevie, you have to, please, just come tomorrow’.”

So did Nicks stick to her spiritual guns? Nope.

“We went to Vegas,” she said.

Friday, September 14, 2007

Stevie Nicks & Friends Soundstage Live

It appears that the random concert date of October 19th in Chicago wasn't so random after all.

Talk on the street is that Stevie will be performing in concert at the Grainger Studios for Soundstage on October 25th. No word yet on whether this is just to be taped and shown on PBS, or if this will also be released as a DVD... Let's hope it's released on DVD!

She's long overdue for a concert DVD... It's been over 20 years since the release of her Live at Red Rocks DVD.

STEVIE NICKS AND FRIENDS LIVE IN CONCERT!
PRICELESS OPPORTUNITY TO SEE STEVIE NICKS AND FRIENDS LIVE IN CONCERT IN CHICAGO AT SOUNDSTAGE, SPONSORED BY MASTERCARD!

Stevie Nicks
Thursday, October 25th, 2007
8:00 pm
Grainger Studios, Chicago

Thanks to Betsy from The Ledge for the news and to carol7lynn for the proof that it's happening.

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Stevie Nicks: a survivor's story

Telegraph Magazine Article 08/09/07

Thirty years after she sold her soul to the devil and, with Fleetwood Mac, set new records for rock'n'roll overindulgence, Stevie Nicks has somehow lived to tell the tale - and what a tale it is. Now if only she could remember where she lives… Interview by Mick Brown. Photograph by Neal Preston.

During the 10 or so years that she was addicted to cocaine - back in the days when Fleetwood Mac's album credits would include a 'thanks' to their dealer - Stevie Nicks estimates that she must have spent more than $1 million on the drug. 'At $100 a pop - that's a gram - and we were the ones who were buying it for everybody else; not only us, but all our friends.' Nicks thinks about this. 'Actually, I would say millions.'

It all came to end in 1986, when a plastic surgeon advised her that if she wanted her nose to remain on her face she should stop snorting coke immediately. (The legacy was a hole in her septum the size of a five cent piece.) So it was off to the Betty Ford Clinic in Palm Springs, which was like 'the army' - meetings from six in the morning until nine at night. 'Tammy Wynette was there, and one of James Taylor's backing singers.' After 30 days she had an epiphany, and that was it for the cocaine.

She hunches forward in her chair, sipping at her tea, which is about the strongest stimulant she indulges in these days. The dying afternoon sun is slanting through the window behind her, casting a halo around the blonde curls that tumble past her shoulders. 'So when I left Betty Ford, I felt that I was fine. But my world was terrified that I was not fine.'

Your world? 'The powers that be, the people around me. They were terrified I was going to start doing it again. I think everybody knew I wasn't an alcoholic, because I'm not; but I drank. And every-body thought I should go to AA, and in order to get out of that the next best thing in everybody else's eyes was for me to go see a shrink. I really didn't want to go. But I finally just said all right in order to get all of you off my back…'

The psychiatrist, she says, put her on a tranquilliser called Klonopin - 'he said to calm my nerves a little. I didn't want to do it. He said, "You're nervous." And I was nervous; I'm a nervous person. So I finally just said, all right.' Klonopin, Nicks says, is a member of the Valium family. 'It's a tranquilliser, right? And you think, what does tranquilliser mean? It tranquillises you!' Particularly when, as Nicks claims, the drug is radically oversubscribed. After a year, she realised she was beginning to put on weight and lose interest in her work. 'And the saddest thing, I did an interview in England, and somebody had sent the article to my mother and she read it to me over the phone. And it said, you could see Stevie Nicks in there, but she was very sad and very quiet and she was just a shadow of her former self. And that article broke my heart.

advertisement'And after that, it got worse, because he kept upping my dose. 1988 into '89, I'm now not even writing songs any more. I was living in a beautiful rented house in the Valley, and just pretty much staying home. Ordering take-in and watching TV. And I've gained 30lb and I'm 5ft 1in tall, and I'm so miserable. And I started to notice that I was shaking all the time, and I'm noticing that everybody else is noticing it too. And then I'm starting to think, do I have some kind of neurological disease and I'm dying?'

So 1993 comes rolling round, and Stevie Nicks is finally convinced that the protracted high dosage of Klonopin might be killing her. So she does exactly what you or I might do. She instructs her personal assistant, Glenn, to take her daily dose - just to see what effect it has.

'I said, it won't kill you, because it hasn't killed me, but I just want to see what you think. Because Glenn was terribly worried about me - everybody was. So I was taking two in the morning, two in the afternoon and two more at night. At that point if I could find a Percoset, because I'm so miserable, I'd take that, or I'd take a Fiorocet - anything.

'So Glenn proceeds to take all my medicine. He was setting up a stereo in the living-room. Well, after half an hour he was just sitting there. And he said, "I can't fix the stereo and I don't think I can drive home." And I said, "Well, good - just stay there, because I'm studying you." And he was almost hallucinating. It was bad. And I called up my psychiatrist, and I said, "I gave Glenn every-thing you've prescribed for me." And the first words out of his mouth were, "Are you trying to kill him?" And the next words out of my mouth were, "Are you trying to kill me?" '

Nicks admitted herself to the Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Venice Beach. It took her 47 days to detox. 'Dallas Taylor, the drummer for Crosby, Stills and Nash, was there the whole time. I nearly died. I moulted. My hair turned grey. My skin started to completely peel off. I was in terrible pain.' She shivers at the memory. 'I think it's very good to talk about this to get the message out into the world about addiction to this particular drug. That was the worst period of my life. They stole my forties. It was eight completely wasted years of my life.' Here's the irony, she says: the 'powers that be' had sent her to the psychiatrist in order to keep her working, but the 'treatment' he gave her made work almost impossible. 'It's very Shakespearean. It's very much a tragedy.'

But what happened to Glenn?

Nicks throws back her hair. 'Glenn was OK, because it was just for one day.'

Stevie Nicks lives in a large, extremely beautiful house built in the 1930s in the American colonial style, situated in the hills behind Santa Monica. She is in a meeting when I arrive, and I am shown into the library - a wood-panelled room, the walls hung with pre-Raphaelite miniatures and tapestries. On the bookshelves are volumes about the Kabbalah, Madame Blavatsky and Arthurian legend; a copy of The Johns Hopkins Consumer Guide to Drugs sits beside Luxury Hotels of the World.

At length Nicks appears and leads me down the hall, past a store room filled with travel wardrobes - her stage costumes - and into a spacious sitting-room. There is a velvet chaise-longue draped in silk, Persian carpets, carved tables. Home recording equipment, keyboards and a couple of guitars stand in one corner. Nicks moves among the collection of colourful Art Deco lamps that stand on every surface, carefully orchestrating the ambient light. 'That's the famous blue lamp that's been in lots of photos; that's a Tiffany,' she says. 'And so is that one. I don't know about the others.'

Even though she is now 59, as Stevie Nicks puts it, 'I still look very much like me', which is to say unreconstructed fantasy flower-child: kohl-eyed, bee-stung lips, wrapped in a muted symphony of rustling satin and chiffon, legs encased in pointed heel, knee-high black suede boots. In Fleetwood Mac's heyday in the late 1970s Nicks was 'the mystical one' whose ethereal appearance, love of gothic romances and songs about witches, gypsies and dreams lent her a certain evanescently wistful air. 'Sweet, fragile, airy-fairy,' she says with a laugh. 'That was this person on drugs.'

Nobody survives in the rock'n'roll business for 30 years by being 'airy-fairy', however, and there is a palpable vein of toughness under the cordial, disarmingly confessional manner. Nicks is delightful company; but you wouldn't want to cross her.

Nicks was married once, fleetingly, but she has no children and no permanent partner. She shares the house with her god-daughter, who is in her early twenties, and who lives in the guesthouse above the garage. Nicks has lived here for two years, and it was a mistake, she says, from day one. So she is moving to a penthouse apartment on the beach and the house is on the market.

'I saw it, and there was this big family living here that obviously loved it. So there was a vibe here. And something in me thought, maybe I can have that. I was not here three days before I thought, what the hell do I here? I was too shallow and stupid to realise that it wasn't the house I'd fallen in love with but the mom and the dad and the four kids, and the smells of the cooking.' She sighs. It is, she reflects, a house 'for adults. And even though I'm pushing 60 I don't feel that I'm that old yet.'

Does she see beauty when she looks in the mirror? 'Sometimes I still think that I'm looking OK. And other times I look at myself and I go, "Oh, my God, you're so old." '

She pulls a face and laughs. 'I wrote a song once called The Prettiest Girl in the World, and that was a long time ago. But when you've been the prettiest girl in the world - and I don't mean the most beautiful girl; I just mean a really pretty girl, a really talented girl, a girl who writes really good songs. When you've been all that and you're a lot older, it is hard. You see the lines' - Nicks runs her fingers along the thickening curve of her jaw - 'and you start to see this happening; and even though I'm thinner than I was a long time ago, you see your body changing and you go, well maybe this is not age-appropriate and I shouldn't wear the chiffon scarf any more; and then you go, but if I'm going to change the whole thing it's not me any more.' She shakes the thought to one side. 'I'm just terribly excited to get into my rock'n'roll penthouse and out of here. I feel old here.'

I don't know if Stevie Nicks's passport describes her as 'rock'n'roll star', but it is the term she uses to describe herself, completely unselfconsciously, as if rock'n'roll star were a vocation, or a destiny embodied in the genes.

Nicks's father was a business executive - a vice-president of Greyhound Buses, the president of a food company - whose work took the family on a journey across the south-west of America - Arizona, Los Angeles, New Mexico, El Paso, Salt Lake City, San Francisco. The elder of two child-ren (she has a brother, Christopher), as a young girl she was fixated on two things - dressing up and singing. Her teenage heroines were Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin. In high school she met another aspiring rock star, Lindsey Buckingham. They became a couple and moved to Los Angeles, performing together as a duo, both singing and songwriting. In 1975 they recorded an album, Buckingham Nicks, that led to them being invited to join Fleetwood Mac. A British blues band that had transplanted to America, Mac had already enjoyed a distinctly chequered history with one founding member, Peter Green, succumbing to LSD psychosis, and another, Jeremy Spencer, leaving to join the religious cult the Children of God.

The addition of Buckingham and Nicks brought a pop sensibility and a clutch of exhilarating songs that rejuvenated the group. An eponymous album went to number one in America; the follow-up, Rumours, released in 1977, became a phenomenon. By then, Nicks and Buckingham were breaking up after five years together. The seven-year marriage of the band's bass player, John McVie, and pianist, Christine McVie, was coming to an end. The drummer, Mick Fleetwood, was in the midst of divorce proceedings with his wife. Rumours fastidiously chronicled this tangled and incestuous emotional mess - made more tangled still when Fleetwood and Nicks began a surreptitious affair that ended when Fleetwood switched his affections to Nicks's friend Sara Recor - the inspiration for Nicks's song Sara. Nicks, meanwhile, embarked on an affair with Don Henley of the Eagles.

Rumours went on to sell more than 30 million copies around the world (it remains one of the biggest-selling records of all time), launching the group into the realm of imperious self-indulgence more commonly associated with dictators of small African countries. During the group's Tusk tour in 1979, Nicks insisted that each hotel room she stayed in should be painted pink and equipped with a white piano. I remember being present at a photo-shoot for the group in LA the following year. A certain tension permeated the air, and at one point a crisis loomed when one of the group discovered that the champagne that had been provided was not of the preferred vintage; a minion was dispatched to fetch more. The shoot took less than two hours. But enough gourmet food had been provided to feed Burkina Faso. 'And nobody ate a bite, right?' Nicks says with a knowing shake of her head. 'If we'd just counted the meals that we ordered and were never eaten it was probably a million.'

Between the cocaine and the banquets, the sports cars and the Hollywood mansions, Mick Fleetwood went bankrupt - twice. 'Because Mick didn't write songs, so he didn't make the publishing money that Christine and Stevie and Lindsey did,' Nicks says. 'But Mick spent just as much money. Millions. So if Mick Fleetwood could go back right now and change that, he would.'

Nicks and Buckingham were more careful, retaining an independent business management firm to handle their affairs when they joined Fleetwood Mac. 'So even though we spent a lot of money, a lot of it was invested.'

What was it invested in?

'I have no idea.'

Fame, and the privilege and separation it brings, has a way of incapacitating people, insulating them not only from other people, but from the practicalities of life. When I ask Nicks for her zip code she admits she has no idea what it is. Or her house number, or her telephone number. Her driving licence ran out in 1978, and she has never renewed it. 'My life is very cloistered really,' she says. 'Because I don't go anywhere by myself, you know what I mean? I'm very, very famous, and I walk in somewhere and people are, like, "Oh, my God!" And I love it, and it's sweet and I sign autographs. But on the other side of that, my assistant and I get in the car and go to the mall; I'm certainly not going to give up shopping. But I would seldom get in a car all by myself.'

When she and Buckingham were living together and struggling, before Fleetwood Mac, Nicks did everything: she kept house, worked as a waitress and a cleaner. 'I made the money that supported Lindsey and me, and I paid for the apartment and the car and everything. And I loved that.'

A few years ago she went to see a psychologist - she was having a 'horrible' menopause, she says, and wanted to talk to an older woman about it - 'and she said to me that in a way the saddest day of your life was the day you joined Fleetwood Mac, because that was when you ceased to be caretaker and became somebody that everybody else took care of. And she was absolutely spot on. Because I'm very much… if my family's coming here for Christmas, I'm the one who's making the house ready and fixing the beds. I don't have people around to do that kind of stuff for me.

'The people that I have gone out with will tell you that I'm a great girlfriend. I want to make sure that you have the llama hot-water bottle, and the perfect cashmere blanket and the exact perfect pillow. I know about all that stuff.'

Nicks recorded her first solo album, Bella Donna, in 1981, and has released eight albums in the years since. Her fortunes dipped radically in the mid-1990s, when she was struggling with her addiction to Klonopin, but her last studio album, Trouble in Shangri-La, released in 2001, went multi-platinum, giving her her greatest success in two decades. At the same time she continued to play a part in the ongoing soap opera that has been Fleetwood Mac. She formally left the band in 1993, but rejoined in 1997. The last album by the band, Say You Will, was recorded in 2003, but Nicks shows scant enthusiasm for the prospect of another reunion. Christine McVie retired from touring in 1998, and Nicks says she has no interest in working with the group unless McVie returns. 'I don't like it as the boys' club. We could make millions and millions of dollars touring again. But I just don't know if I want to go again without Chris.'

This dedication to her career has not been without cost. Nicks 'pretty much sold my soul to the devil a long time ago', as she puts it, so that 'I could follow this dream fully and completely, and not be wrapped up in children and husbands and boyfriends and all of that. I chose not to have child-ren.' Her brief marriage in 1983, she says, 'doesn't count'. It was an odd episode. That year her best friend Robin died of leukaemia three days after giving birth to a son, Matthew. A grieving Nicks convinced the bereaved husband, Kim Anderson, that they should marry and raise the child together. 'Completely crazy.' She shrugs. 'We were all in such insane grief, just completely deranged. The families were just outraged at what we were doing; in a lot of people's eyes it was very blasphemous. But I didn't care. All I cared about was that little boy, Matthew.' The marriage lasted only a few weeks, before Nicks made the decision to bring it to an end. 'I said, "You have to take the baby and go back to Minnesota", where he was from, where he had family, "because, Kim, I'm a rock'n'roll star. It's what I do, it's who I am." ' She didn't see Matthew for the next eight years, but she is now putting him through college in Atlanta.

There are the great loves of your life, she says, then there are the loves of your life, and then there are the companions of your life - 'there's all the different kind of love affairs that you have. But all the great loves of my life wouldn't have been any better at settling down than me.'

And who has been the greatest love of her life?

'My great, great love was Joe Walsh.'

Joe Walsh? Of the Eagles? I struggle to keep the note of surprise out of my voice.

'It's crazy, isn't it?'

I am no expert on Nicks's romantic adventures, but I've done my research. Her affairs with Buckingham, Fleetwood, Don Henley, the record executive Jimmy Iovine - all are well chronicled. But nowhere have I found a single reference to Joe Walsh.

'1983 to 1986,' Nicks says crisply. 'I don't know - why do you love somebody? Why do you love them so much that when they walk in the room your heart jumps out of your chest? I don't know. But I fell in love with Joe at first sight from across the room, in the bar at the Mansions Hotel in Dallas. I looked at him and I walked across the room and I sat on the bar stool next to him, and two seconds later I crawled into his lap, and that was it.

'We were probably the perfect, complete, crazy pair. He was the one that I would have married, and that I would probably have changed my life around for…' She pauses. 'A little bit. Not a lot. But he wouldn't have changed his life either.'

The reason they broke up, she says, is that they were both 'really seriously drug addicts. We were a couple on the way to hell.'

The relationship finally ended when Walsh got on a plane and went to Australia 'to get away from me, basically. He thought - or so I'm told by my friends that Joe told - that one of us was going to die, and the other person would not be able to save them. And I did think I was going to die, absolutely. It took me a long, long time to get over it - if I ever got over it. Because there was no other man in the world for me. And it's the same today, even though Joe is married and has two sons. He met somebody in rehab and got married. And I think he's happy.'

Oddly enough, Nicks once said very much the same thing about Lindsey Buckingham, telling one journalist that Buckingham was 'my first love and my love for all time. But we can't ever be together. He has a lovely wife, Kristen, who I really like… I look at him now and just go, "Oh, Stevie, you made a mistake." '

Nicks shoots me a look when I mention this. 'Well, he was my great musical love, and that's very different. Lindsey and I both loved each other not just because we loved Lindsey and Stevie, but because we loved what Lindsey and Stevie did. And that is definitely what kept Lindsey and me together for as long as we did stay together. It's not that he's not a great love - he is a great love. And I write songs about him to this day. I don't know why. But whenever we're together we fight - to this day.'

Nicks thinks on this. She doesn't want people to think that she thinks love doesn't exist, she says, or that she has given up on finding it for herself.

'It's not that. It's just that I am fine without it because it's like I'm involved in a love affair all of the time with my music and what I do. But if the right man walked into my life today and said, "Will you go out to dinner with me tonight?" and I felt that thing, I would absolutely do it. But I love what I do so much that I've never sat around and worried about it.'

She has always tried to be a good person, she says. 'I've tried very hard to use my fame, and my money and my power to do good things.' Last year she established her own charity project, the Stevie Nicks Soldier's Angel Foundation, which aims to use music in the rehabilitation of US servicemen and women wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. The idea for the foundation came to Nicks after a visit to the Walter Reed military hospital in Washington in 2005. ('I walked into Walter Reed today a single woman with no children,' she wrote on her website journal. 'I walked out a mother, a wife, a girlfriend, a sister, a daughter, a nurse, a patient's advocate - a changed woman. What I saw today will never leave my heart.')

'And believe me, talk about feeling old.' Nicks laughs. 'I go in and some of these kids don't even know who I am. So of course I tell them.'

The foundation has provided hundreds of iPods to injured servicemen and women. 'In my estimation music is the best thing you can possibly give to them, because it's the only thing that's going to get them up out of the bed,' Nicks says. 'So I try to do good things - things that I can make happen that maybe the next person couldn't make happen. I don't think I'm a prima donna at all. I was the same person when I was a waitress and cleaning people's houses.'

Her life has long followed a pattern. She rises sometime around midday, and goes to bed between three and 4am: 'My favourite time is midnight.' She writes songs and listens to music and goes on tour. 'If you asked me, "What's your idea of a good time?" I'd say a fantastic grand piano, overlooking the ocean if possible; or going to a studio and being able to record; to write a new song and listen back to something I wrote yesterday and really put it together.'

She is working on a new project now, inspired by The Mabinogion Tetralogy, by the American author Evangeline Walton, and its connection to what is probably Nicks's most famous song, Rhiannon. The Tetralogy is an epic retelling of stories from the Welsh Mabinogi - a collection of myths and legends that are believed to date from the 12th century. Nicks had never heard of Walton or the Mabinogion when she wrote Rhiannon in 1973.

'I'd read another novel about two sisters, Branwen and Rhiannon. I wrote the song about Rhiannon, and bought an Afghan hound and named her Branwen. So it could have been the other way around, you know.'

In 1978, after a fan had introduced her to the Tetralogy, she contacted Walton and visited her at her home in Tucson. 'She was living in this little tract home, and you went inside and it was all, like, gothic and curtains. And right on the mantelpiece was a big stone lion inscribed with the words "Song of Rhiannon". I thought, this is so wild - the world is small somehow, you know? If you look at the dates, it was kind of like Evangeline's work ended on Rhiannon, and mine began. It's almost like this has been laid out to me, by the gods - or whomever - that this will be the next 20 years of my life.'

Three years ago Nicks and a couple of girlfriends spent three months in Hawaii brainstorming the Tetralogy with a view to translating it into a musical work. 'It could be a movie. It could be a record. It could be a couple of records. It could be a mini-series. It could be an animated cartoon. There is no end to what this could be, because the stories are fantastic. We started in that totally scholarly, you-are-a-student-of-Welsh-mythology place. And then I got a call from my manager saying, "I need you to come to Vegas right now because Celine Dion and Elton John are playing back to back at the Caesar's theatre, and they want you to do a week there. It's really good money and you don't have to travel very far." And I'm, like, "Howard, I am on a spiritual quest here; I really cannot come to Vegas." And he's, like, "Stevie, you have to, please, just come tomorrow." '

So what did she do? Stevie Nicks throws back her head and laughs. 'We went to Vegas.'

'Crystal Visions… The Very Best of Stevie Nicks' is released on September 24

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

New Stevie tour dates??

Live Nation lists two new dates for Stevie. The Norfolk, VA show, according to the venue, was said to be a mistake - but Live Nation still has it up on their site... Stevie is scheduled to be in California November 14th with Mick Fleetwood for a private show at the Oracle OpenWorld. I'm sure the November 14th Norfolk date is an error.

Friday, 10/19/07
Rosemont Theatre
Rosemont, IL
On Sale Mon, 9/10/07
at 10:00 am CST

Wednesday, 11/14/07
Constant Convocation Center
Norfolk, VA

Monday, September 03, 2007

Stevie Nicks Video Compilation of the Greek Theatre Show in LA May 17, 2007

A video compilation I uploaded to Youtube of all the songs performed at Stevie's Los Angeles May 17, 2007 show at the Greek Theatre. A really great show from early on during the Crystal Visions tour. Check out Sorcerer... She looks great in this clip and really just puts all she has into it... Also check out the some of the notes she's reaching particularly during Sorcerer, How Still My Love and Edge of Seventeen... Her voice really is getting stronger with each passing year and tour. Thank you Stevie!


Thursday, August 30, 2007

Richard McCaffrey Photos of Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac




Richard McCaffrey's Photography has been featured in music publications such as Rolling Stone, Cream, Guitar Player and in national magazines / newspapers Blender, People, Look, NY Daily News and The San Francisco Examiner. Images have also appeared on MTV, VH1, CBS Sunday Morning as well as on hundreds of Albums / CDs and in numerous books on the music industry. He is the co-author of the book X-capees, a photo-history of the early San Francisco punk rock scene, and Not Fade Away, a tribute to Gerry Garcia. His collection documenting the music industry contains over 100,000 Photographs.

These spectacular photos of Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie and Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac were taken in 1976 & 1977 in Oakland, California.




Prints of these shots are available to purchase through Richard McCaffrey's site directly along with many other artists he's photographed over the years.

Stevie Nicks Live - How Still My Love - Concord, CA May 17, 2007

Opening night of the Crystal Visions Tour in Concord, CA on May 17, 2007. This is a song Stevie previously only performed at her "Dreams" shows at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Very sexy exit walk at the end!

Friday, August 24, 2007

Stevie Nicks "STAND BACK THE REMIXES"


Only 1,000 copies available worldwide! To purchase a limited pressing of Stevie's "Stand Back" Remix Single - go to perfectbeat.com

There is a funny back-story as to how this came in existence. Months ago when we first heard the mixes were being done, we contacted Warner to ask for the tentative release date. We were told that there were NO plans to release this as a single, and the mixes were done simply to market her new greatest hits CD, ‘Crystal Visions’. Over the next few weeks we had several conversations with Warner about the possibility of getting a limited pressing just for Perfect Beat. We were sure we had it.

Three weeks ago we got the call from Warner telling us it COULD be done, but it was going to take too long to get everyone to sign off on the project. So what they did was ‘sneak’ the single out. They slated it for a full commercial release, but the catch was, they were only going to press up 1,000 singles. It was going to be distributed through the normal Warner distribution channels. We were told to immediately place an order (that day) to lock in a quantity and it would essentially be a Perfect Beat exclusive! Unfortunately, many retailers and online retailers get automatic quantities allocated to them for new releases so we couldn’t grab all 1,000 like we wanted to. We did however score HALF of them, 500 and they are now here in the building.

TRACKS:
Tracy Young Take You Home Mix (11:26)
Tracy Young Take You Home Dub (11:32)
Tracy Young Take You Home Mixshow (6:56)
Ralphi's Beefy-Retro Mix (11:12)
Ralphi's Beefy-Retro Edit (7:32)
Morgan Page Vox (7:02)
Morgan Page Dub (7:01)

Warner has told us straight up, the ONLY reason this CD single is available is because of Perfect Beat. The truth is, CD singles are dying. But we are convincing labels to press up a limited number just for us die-hards that appreciate CD quality music, artwork, and a sweet package! So we present to you this very special release. We ask once again that you purchase this, even if you already obtained it through other shady means. We promise, it will make it easier and easier when we talk to Jive, Interscope, Epic, Sony and RCA and ask for special pressings as well. Did we mention “Edge Of Seventeen” is being remixed right now by Peter Rauhofer? Sure would be a shame if that never came out.



label: Warner added: 8/07

Monday, August 20, 2007

Stevie's Performance Review from Jack's Second Show


Stevie perfomed along with ZZ Top, The Pretenders, Stray Cats and Sugar Ray at Jack's Second Show at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in Irvine, CA on Saturday August 18th. Here's one review of her performance at the show:

Pretenders and Stray Cats stand out at Jack FM concert

Stevie Nicks never went on until shortly before 10 p.m. She seemed agitated about the amphitheatre's curfew and that her set would be cut short. After one song, she went backstage for a costume change and realized it was at the wrong time (at least Nicks was honest in admitting this to the crowd).

Little had changed from recent solo tours. Overwrought synthesizer and electronic drums signaled "Stand Back." The nine-piece band tended to overwhelm Nicks' voice (a middling sound mix didn't help). Clad in flowing black chiffon dress, the Fleetwood Mac chanteuse sashayed across the stage. "If Anyone Falls" suffered from dated '80s production and shouty vocals.

Instead of relying on her other solo hits, Nicks concentrated on Mac faves and all worked well. A soft piano instrumental preceded "Rhiannon," "Dreams" was lush and smooth and "Gold Dust Woman" had more of dramatic flair. Nicks, wearing her trademark shawls, twirled and sang into a microphone stand draped in beads.

Tom Petty rocker "I Need to Know" was dashed off, then Nick said, "this song is about compromise." The acoustic-based version of the Mac's "Landslide" had some guys singing along with their girlfriends. A percussion heavy "Edge of 17" closed the main set. Photos by Kelly Swift

The Set:

Stand Back
Enchanted
If Anyone Falls
Rhiannon
Dreams
Gold Dust Woman
I Need to Know
Landslide
Edge of Seventeen
Rock N Roll

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Shopkeeper and Stevie Nicks own horse

Sydney Morning Herald - Sydney,New South Wales,Australia
Michael Evans owned a horse once. It had wheels at one end and a tail of hemp.

THERE'S no obvious link when you ponder a list of names including Myer baron Bill Wavish, Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks, pub owner Bruce Mathieson and music promoter Andrew McManus.

But add Gai Waterhouse and you start to get an idea there might be a neddy involved.
Sure enough, shortly before 10 am today, an upcoming three-year-old called Illume will prance around Randwick in a practice run for horses still on training wheels.

That odd collection of names are, in fact, the horse's owners.

The story goes that chums Wavish and Mathieson invested in the horse with Waterhouse.
But some time after Nicks, the chanteuse, was brought by McManus for the 2005 Melbourne Cup, Waterhouse apparently sold her stake to the American singer, with another stake going to Gai's mum.

Waterhouse still trains the gee-gee, named after a Nicks song.

Whispers around the track suggest one name tossed around for the horse was Illegal Substance although we can't imagine such a link to a wholesome band such as Fleetwood Mac.

Horsey officials apparently thought the name inappropriate and ruled it out.
Nevertheless, we're just happy it wasn't named after another Fleetwood Mac song, Little Lies .

Wavish wouldn't be too keen on Nicks wowing him with the chorus: "Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies."

Friday, August 03, 2007

Stevie Nicks "Fleetwood Mac, Cocaine and Me..."

According to DWIG from The Ledge, Stevie is featured in a 6 page interview in the September edition of MOJO Magazine ahead of the September 24th UK release of "Crystal Visions... The Very Best of Stevie Nicks". Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones is on the cover.

STEVIE NICKS Fist fights and coke binges with Fleetwood Mac's diaphanous spirit of the 70s.




[edit: scans courtesy of trackaghost from The Ledge]