RADIO CITY RAPTURE
[NOTE: This was originally posted by moi on the Wild Heart BBS (316-788-2343, if it's still online), a Witchita, Kansas board devoted exclusively to Stevie Nicks fandom. What follows is the tale of the night I saw her in concert and came justthisclose to pure, unadulterated Heaven...]
Summer of
'84, and da Flatline was in a royal funk. Stevie Nicks was bringing her WILD HEART tour to New Jersey's
Brendan Byrne (now Continental Airlines) Arena, and it didn't look
like Dixie'd be included in the audience roster. It wasn't that I didn't
want to go, goodness no! The problem was twofold: (1) I couldn't
find anyone (of either gender!) to take, and (2) the thought of going stag
to an umpity-thousand-seat hockey rink didn't exactly thrill me.
So I didn't even bother to try getting tickets. Come the day of
the show, and the guitarist from my then-band asked me why I wuz
so down. When I disclosed the above to him, his response was
"Screw it! We'll scalp tickets when we get there!"
Which we did. And of course the asshole in the parking lot who sold us tix assured us they wuz floor seats. NOT. More like the peak of Everest, about two rows below the ceiling girders. Even the fact that I was at least in the same building as Stevie didn't change the fact that I had one of the worst nights of my concert-going LIFE. Couldn't see jack, even with binoculars, and could hear even less. (Anyone who brags about the so-called "superior" [i.e. rock-concert-optimized] acoustics of the Byrne Arena -- also known as "the room that Springsteen built" -- ain't been off the floor. NO place sounds good at nose-bleed altitude!) That night, I made a solemn two-part vow: (1) I'd never see another rock show at Byrne* and (2) the next time Stevie came to this neck of the woods, I'd have decent tickets if I had to print the suckers myself.
So a coupla months later, when I noticed a tiny blurb in the New York Post that Stevie would be coming to Radio City Music Hall that September, and tickets would go on sale in a week, I said "Hot damn!," took the ticket-sale morning off, waited in line three hours -- and got twenty-third row on the floor. I was pretty delighted, overall.
Now: what to bring along to give to Stevie? After some thought, I settled on the fact that "Beauty and the Beast" is Stevie's favorite tale -- coupled with the fact that I was feeling pretty beastly myself in those days -- and got her a small green plush Tyrannesaurus Rex. (I also figgered she had been given enough teddy bears by then to choke a REAL dinosaur...)
With dinosaur in a lunchbag, and several joints in my pocket, I descended upon the Music Hall determined to have a good time. Call me a closet mystic (hell, name me one die-hard Stevie fan who isn't!), but the numbers were in my favor, specifically 13 (the day of the show -- Tuesday, that is) and 23 (my lucky number as well as my row). And I wasn't disappointed...
Joe Walsh opened the show by sauntering up to the microphone and drawling "Good morning. This is your wakeup call." He and his band then played a forty-minute set that was paradoxically loud and laid-back at the same time. For historical reference, this was around the time Joe started popping up on MTV with "I Can Play That Rock 'n' Roll For Ya." He didn't play that one, but he did trundle out "Life's Been Good" and other of his chestnuts. 'Scuse me if I'm a bit vague on the details, but heck, Joe wasn't the reason I was there. If you know what I mean and I think you do...
Two distinct memories of halftime: There's an ornate spiral staircase in the Radio City lobby, and I spent most of the intermission there smoking my doobie and feeling cheerfully wicked about it. Then, while relieving myself in the men's room, I ran across a football-jock type toting around a stuffed bear almost as big as he was. I vividly remember looking at him, at the bear, and at my own paper-bagged dinosaur and saying "And I thought I was crazy..."
Stevie's show was, needless to say, non pareil. This was the tour when her band included Liberty DeVito (Billy Joel's drummer), E-Streeter Roy Bittan, and the ubiquitous Waddy Wachtel, and the band was tight. Stevie herself looked and sounded as good as she ever would, and the relative intimacy of Radio City guaranteed great sight lines and reasonable sound. (I still brought binoculars; twenty-third row floor might have been pretty good, but that didn't mean it couldn't stand enhancing...)
Highlights of the night included Bobbye Hall's thundering conga
duet with the drum-machine intro to "Stand Back" and an
encore cameo by Tom Petty, duetting with Stevie on a sparse,
delicate acoustic version of "I Will Run To You."
(Where was MTV UPLUGGED when we really needed it?) Lowlights? Okay,
there were a couple: Stevie muffed the lyrics to the first verse
of "Stand Back," but that was nothing compared to the
ear-bendingly bad guitar solo Waddy decided to unleash during one
of the costume changes. It was too loud, totally unnecessary, and
nearly brought the proceedings to a screeching halt.
Finally, the moment I waited all night for: during "Gypsy," Stevie traversed the lip of the stage, collecting presents and other offerings of love from the crowd. I bided my time, waiting until she got closer to my section while sizing up the options: a wide aisle straight to the stage...plenty of security, but they seemed cool about letting people surge close...Finally, she had worked her way far enough over to stage right. I dashed down the aisle, waded into the three-deep crowd already at the front, held the dinosaur over my head and screamed, "STEVIE!!!"
Until the day I die, I will never forget the smile that lit up her face when she caught sight of the T. Rex. I couldn't get close enough to hand it to her personally, so the guy in front of me passed it up to her -- but she knew were it came from! She held the dinosaur close to her, looked straight at me and mouthed "Thank you." I was literally delirious with joy; the combination of the music, the lights, the bone I'd smoked, and Stevie's smile all fused together -- I guess you could call it "rapture." All I know is for ten seconds I stood there, my arm outstretched in a salute of pure joy, happier and deeper in love than I'd ever been before or since, convinced I was in Heaven.
I finally turned to go back to my seat -- and was hit by a flying wedge of teenyboppers rushing the stage. Reality, like it always does, had just butted in on my ecstacy.
I
left the moment the show ended. Didn't bother to hang out by the
stage door afterwards, in hopes of an autograph or other such
memento. Sure, celebrity scribbles on paper have their value
(both in currency and nostalgia); I, on the other hand, had
received something far better. For those ten seconds at the foot
of the "Great Stage," I touched souls with Stevie
Nicks.
Donald friggin' Trump doesn't have enough money to buy that moment from me...
* Wellll...I did go back to the Arena, years later, for a "Sesame Street Live" show with the Significant Other and Only Child. We got floor seats for that one, and it wasn't too intolerable...
(All photos courtesy of The Stevie Nicks Photo Gallery)
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