FANS ARE NOW RATING THE SHOWS AS WELL

1-5

5 BEING THE BEST

Rated "5" for Stevie, "2" for Technical Issues by Michelle

What should have been a great concert for Stevie last night at Irvine Meadow was marred by technical difficulties. This was not a regular Stevie Nicks tour stop, it was Jacks 93.1 Radio Concert and Stevie was the headliner with a lot of other artists playing before her. It was a very big show with a rotating stage, the kind where they could set up the next band while each band was playing. It opened with Sugar Ray, and then the Stray Cats played. Both of these were in the afternoon during daylight and the Stray Cats were really good. Then Tone Loc played two rap songs. Then the Pretenders played at dusk, and they were pretty good too. After that ZZ Top played right as it had turned dark. And they blew the house down, they were fantastic. Not only did they sound extremely good, but they had a great light show with a wall of lights behind them that lit up with great visuals.

Then when they turned the stage around to reveal Stevie’s set up you could see that they had the screens for Stevie’s video show and the curtain that dropped during the opening of Rhiannon, like she has had for the entire Crystal Visions tour. But they didn’t show her photo on the screens as usual before she came out. Instead they kept the color bars on the screens and had a computer menu up trying to do something. It appeared that they were having big trouble. And when Stevie finally came on stage after a long wait, there was no light show at all and no video projections. They never showed one image, the background remained black through her entire set. And there was no light show at all, and the stage was mostly dark. Stevie’s face was lit, but all the other band members and the background singer’s were in dark, you could hardly see any of them. And you could hardly see Stevie dancing around either. And the curtain didn’t even drop during Rhiannon. It seemed like whatever c omputer program had all the pre-sets for the show was not working at all.

This would not have been a problem at a Stevie concert, as us Stevie fans don’t care. As long as we get to see her, the video stuff is just a bonus. But a lot of the people in attendance were there for other performers and it was a sold out show. And especially after ZZ Top had just played a killer set with a beautiful stage show, it really looked bad that Stevie was playing in almost darkness with no visual show. Any fan of hers could tell that she was not happy about the screw up and neither was her band. And you could tell it had raddled them all and their set was a mess because of it. People there not to see her could not tell she was pissed off, as she is always a professional and appeared to be happy on stage. But the only song that sounded very good was Landslide. Literally every other song sounded off. And the sound mix was horrible; Stevie’s vocal kept dropping out in the middle of songs. Then in the middle of her set Stevie went off stage at the wrong point and then said to the audience that this was her “glitch”, but she never told the audience about the major glitch that ruined her set. It seemed like she should have, since after the show many people thought that ZZ Top should have been the headliner instead of Stevie, and this was totally due to the technical problem. After their performance, her set surely didn’t seem like big time rock and roll. It was very anticlimactic. I’ve seen Stevie a million times and I saw the two Greek Theatre shows at the beginning of the Crystal Visions tour and the Phoenix show three weeks ago, all of which were great. Last night is not the concert I will remember from this tour!

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