New Tour & Boxed Set Highlight The Solo Career Of Stevie Nicks

STEVIE NICKS LAUNCHES TOUR AT THE MEADOWS

BELLADONNA

By Roger Catlin

After spending most of the '90's out of the public eye, Stevie Nicks is following last year's successful Fleetwood Mac reunion with a solo concert tour.

She laces up the big-heeled shoes Wednesday, when, as the Fleetwood Mac reunion tour did, Nicks' solo tour begins at the Meadows Music Theatre in Hartford.

"I've never been able to do anything like this," says Nicks, who turns 50 Tuesday.

In a tour intended to promote her new three-disc boxed set "Enchanted", she'll be able to highlight songs from deep in her catalog. But she'll also find room for Mac classics like "Rhiannon", "Gold Dust Woman", and "Dreams".

"I'm going to do a version of 'Landslide' since I have two incredible guitarists," she says, "and they should be able to play the part alomost as well as Lindsey."

There is one thing she won't try without Lindsey Buckingham, her longtime romantic partner and original musical collaborator, with whom she joined Fleetwood Mac in a package deal in 1974. It's "Silver Springs", the B-side that became a hit from the 1997 live reunion album, "The Dance". The song seemed directed at Buckingham. In concert, it became a searing statement as she stood to face him as she sang it. "I can't do 'Silver Springs' without Lindsey," she says, "After people seeing us and having it on TV all the time, I think it would be kind of an empty song without the other person."

Getting a set list together for the concert shouldn't be any more difficult than sifting her solo career into a 46-track boxed set. That selection was made shortly after the Mac tour ended in December. And the tracks don't follow chronological order. "I wanted people to go, 'Could that have been yesterday or could that have been 10 years ago?'"

Nicks, who chose the order of the songs on the bestselling "Rumours" album, thinks sequencing is one of her best unsung skills. "It's one of my favorite things to do."

Her secret is to match beginnings and ends of songs. "If you like the way the end of one song goes into the beginning of the next one, I figure you'll probably listen to the whole song." That also made for some startling juxtapostions on her boxed set. "On the third disc, I put 'Twisted' and 'Long Distance Winner' together because of the incredible similarity between the sound of the voice, and the songs."

Never mind that one song was written for the 1996 disaster movie, and the other came from the long out-of-print "Buckingham Nicks" duet album 23 years eariler.

In concert, she plans an acoustic segment with three takes on Hollywood from various parts of her life--"After The Glitter Fades", "Garbo", and "Rose Garden." All are on "Enchanted" a work who colorful picture booklet also includes occasional quotations, such as the startling admission that most of songs, "famous ones, the ones you hear on the radio," were written in the bathroom, which she calls "my santuary through the good times and through the bad times."

"Bathrooms are usually acoustically great because of the tile," she says "And showers are amazing. If you have a pretty big shower, you can just move a chair in there and take your guitar and the sound is incredible."

"We're also talking really big beautiful bathrooms. Not the little crummy bathrooms. So I can make a little recording studio in the bathroom and the sound of the voice, get echo and effects on the voice that you couldn't get anywhere else." Among the hits from Nicks' bathroom are "Gold Dust Woman" and "Edge Of Seventeen".

The name of the boxed set was suggested by her brother, Christopher Nicks, who was art director of the project. "'Enchanted' had always been his favorite song, so that was the first thing her thought about." she says "And of course in the mystical way I live my life, 'Enchanted' seems to make a lot of sense to me."

Magic was also involved in the Mac reunion, she says. By now, it seems like it didn't even happen.

"The whole Fleetwood Mac thing seems just like a dream. It went by so fast. It was a lot of concerts--45 concerts--and it went by so fast." Musically, it was most satisfying, she says, "It was like being in back in the 70's. It was as close to feeling like I did in the beginning of my whole rock & roll life."

Any chance for future Fleetwood Mac music seems to to be in the hands of Christine McVie, who decided to return to England last December. "She said 'I did what I said I was going to do and I'm going home,'" Nicks says "What are you going to say when somebody says that to you? 'No you can't?' Everybody did out best to convince her to finish out this (tour to promote the live album) and she didn't want to. So we thought: better to let her go and give her lots of love and she'll come around.

"It doesn't worry me in the least that Fleetwood Mac will not always, somehow be together," she says "I mean, how could we not do any music after what just happened to with us?"