The one gig Stevie Nicks called “extremely difficult” to perform
Stevie Nicks has performed thousands of shows. Available data suggests she’s up to around 800 in her solo career alone. The success of each performance will be different from the last, though she’s only ever called a single show “extremely difficult” to perform.
And no, the performance in question wasn’t the hugely famous 1997 Fleetwood Mac reunion show in which she sings ‘Silver Springs’ directly at former partner Lindsey Buckingham, emotionally charged by their fraught relationship. No, she deemed something even more difficult than that.
On February 18th, 2006, Nicks performed a special concert with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. The unique event took place at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne’s City Centre. Nicks spent an entire month gearing up for the single night, tweaking the instrumentation so that everything would sound just right.
In an interview with the New Zealand Herald in 2006, Nicks detailed the onerous task of rehearsing for the concert with the incredible symphony. Speaking of the chilly January where all she did was prepare, prepare, and prepare, she said, “That was extremely difficult because you are working with someone who is writing string arrangements for your songs – which is amazing, but you have to know where they are going at every moment.”
To me, any of her solo efforts would sound beautiful, bountiful, and ethereal alongside an orchestral arrangement, but Nicks is her own harsh critic. She continued, “Because when you put an orchestra with a rock ’n’ roll band, you don’t want The Sound of Music. You want Kashmir. You want Led Zeppelin, not Julie Andrews and the Von Trapp Family.” No offence to the legend that is Julie Andrews, surely.
There was added pressure as the performance was being filmed for a DVD release. And Nicks was right to be anxious, as the evening was plagued by a few technical difficulties. Nicks had to re-record ‘Outside the Rain’ and ‘Dreams’ at the end of the show, still draped in the unique outfit for ‘Beauty and Beast’, the song she had originally played last. The efforts apparently couldn’t be saved, and the DVD was never released.
In the same interview, Nicks detailed how expensive months of rehearsals are, especially with so many people to consider and account for. The sailing sound of the orchestral addition from the recordings that have since made their way out into the world certainly made the fuss worth it.
Plus, the singer-songwriter was never one to give up. Still isn’t. She went on to say, “I guess I am really lucky because I don’t have to stop. When I stop it’ll be because nobody wants to see what I do anymore. But I never look at it as bad thing. I’d like to have the time off, but as Don Henley would say, We’ll sleep when we’re dead.”
Nicks recently had another difficulty to overcome, though this one meant she finally got the time off she so wished for in 2006. “I broke my shoulder for about eight weeks, I was like, pretty much in bed and in a lot of pain,” the ‘Dreams’ singer admitted, after announcing on August 1st that all of her upcoming tour dates in August and September were postponed due to a shoulder injury. Thankfully, she’s back and better than ever.
