Just this Sunday greeting…
… with special thanks to Stevie Nicks.
Among other accolades, Charlotte Observer music and feature writer Théoden Janes has dubbed the longtime Fleetwood Mac singer “the witchiest member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”
Janes’ feature story below, about Nicks at Charlotte’s first Lovin’ Life uptown music festival last weekend, explains. And then some.
To me there’s ample enchantment also in his account of it — in a way, and at a time, that somehow evokes and speaks to both:
a week of devastating, reverberating tragedy for the greater-Charlotte community. Perhaps you’ve seen news or read national headlines from April 29, “one of the deadliest days for law enforcement in recent years.” (From The New York Times, 8 Officers Are Shot, 4 Fatally, While Serving Warrant in Charlotte);
and the Mother’s Day week culminating with the holiday today, one that for many, if not most, can have complex and bittersweet aspects.
mothers’ days
On this latter point, you may recall from depth psychology that mothers and motherhood, both literal and figurative/archetypal, carry many elements of both light and shadow. That’s the case with most all complex things that touch, affect, and matter to us and our lives most deeply and long, both better and worse. (Previous Mother’s Day editions have illustrated and further explored: “May Flowers” 5.14.23 and “…The Great and Terrible Mother in us All” 5.8.22.)
More personally, with editions in recent months focused on my own late mother, I had thought perhaps this week, instead of writing, the remembering of her would naturally and simply be through one of her (and my) most constant early-May rituals.
Around here it is annual annual-planting week — that is, all of the one-season-only flowers and greenery go into their outdoor planters and spaces. (And yes, it takes much of a week, sometimes more. In a few ways very much my mother’s daughter, I’m too cheap…. plus picky about the pots, the plant choices, the texture mixes, the color-combinations… to buy creations that are pre-selected and done. From scratch it takes forever; there’s a reason pre-done by someone else is pricey. Luckily, most of those aren’t appealing enough to inspire splurges.)
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But early Tuesday morning, there was Stevie Nicks. Then came the newspaper… Théoden Janes and… Stevie Nicks.
Shortly after midnight some lovely, noisy thunderstorms had punctuated the pre-dawn dream- and sleep-hours. From the first half-wakening on, the “thunder only happens when it’s raining” song lyrics from Stevie Nicks came to mind. They became the recurring internal soundtrack for each of the several subsequent near-waking jolts and the dreams in between.
I should note here, as with the quotes in the above illustration, to my mind’s ear well-remembered classic Fleetwood Mac lines from different songs tend to morph into a single, nonexistent medley (which probably wouldn’t make sense when taken all together).
Once fully awake, I had to look up the lyrics with the thunder line. The song, appropriately enough, turns out to be… “Dreams!” (The bottom one in the illustration is from “Landslide,” which I did know.)
At coffee time, as usual my first look at The Observer was the e-edition front page that’s a replica of print editions. It shows what’s in lead-story play that day, in a way the 24/7 random digital feeds and updates of separate stories do not.
On that day’s front page pictured below, along with the continued mourning of a city, region and larger community beyond, are Théoden Janes…. and Stevie Nicks.
Struck by the synchronicity with my overnight storm music, I half-assumed the story and Nicks would feature the obvious thunder-themed song.
But no! This was not the obvious, and so much better. I don’t recall the last time I choked up at the end of a rock & roll concert review, or even a concert itself.
When this one had that effect, before breakfast on a Tuesday no less, it brought to mind a lovely reminder from The Fourfold Way, from Jungian analyst Angeles Arrien. Among the four, the way of the healer urges us to pay attention to what has heart and meaning. A simple gauge for that is, what moves us to tears, whether of joy, sadness or both.
Here’s the link to Observer piece, which isn’t long and I recommend:
Stevie Nicks makes it rain during Lovin’ Life Music Fest
The lede and a lot of the Stevie Nicks focus is excerpted in full here. It’s a story best told in writer Janes’ words:
There was a moment on Saturday night, shortly after Stevie Nicks took the stage at the Lovin’ Life Music Fest in uptown Charlotte, when I suddenly thought to myself, STEVIE, what in the world are you doing? Stop it!
To that point, the festival had weathered 18 1/2 hours over two days and nights without encountering more than a couple of gentle showers, despite ominous forecasts. But then the witchiest member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame got just one song into her highly anticipated set and then said this:
“We have prayed for no rain all day — and every day for the past week — and look! There’s no rain right now.”
I knew immediately what was going to happen before the night was over. When the drenching downpour was unleashed over the inaugural outdoor festival a little over an hour later, however, the outcome took me by genuine surprise.
It was not something dismal. It was something divine.
I’d say the same for Lovin’ Life as a whole, frankly, after patrolling the vast majority of its perimeter and soaking up at least a few of the sounds of almost every musical act it had to offer over its three-day run. The event was sublime in its execution, all things considered, and in its ability to create a consistently safe and immensely pleasurable experience for the roughly 28,000 fans who passed through the gates each day….
Janes continues with general music review of the event, including suggested improvement for a second annual event already scheduled for next May. Then he details a few of headliners before circling back to Nicks for his closing (and recap of hers.)
Stevie Nicks finishes in a downpour
Like I said, she jinxed it.
Less than 10 minutes shy of 11 p.m. on Saturday — as Nicks charged through an encore that started with a cover of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” and continued with her appropriately witchy rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” — a spitting rain turned into a spouting rain, then a steady one. Anyone who didn’t have a poncho was drenched by the end of “Rhiannon.” It wasn’t letting up, either. Yet she refused to rush things.
“For this last song,” she told the huge crowd, which was sticking it out through what had become a monsoon, “I would like to tell you that usually right now I talk a little bit about Christine McVie, my friend that I lost awhile ago. ... But tonight, I’m gonna change it up. ...
“I would like to dedicate this song to the four officers who were lost,” Nicks continued, referring to those killed in Charlotte last Monday. “We came in just about when it all happened, and turned on the television and there it was.
And I just want you to know — from the bottom of my heart — how sorry I am.”
There were other tributes from other artists throughout the weekend, but she’s the only one I know of whose voice started shaking as she delivered hers.
In the audience, rain surely camouflaged some tears. And for the next 3 minutes and 20 seconds, as the drenching continued, Nicks beautifully warbled through one of Fleetwood Mac’s most emotive hits: “Landslide,” with its timeless message about the changes and challenges of life.
“I took my love, I took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
‘Til the landslide brought me down”
Friends and couples and singles danced in puddles like they hoped it would never end — this moment, this song, this rain, this show, this night, this festival. When it was over, they went home wet but happy.
Then they returned the next day, and against some odds, it never rained on Lovin’ Life again.
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Later in the week on Friday evening, weather again took center stage. I had been glad to spot a post-shower rainbow during a quick garden center errand before dinnertime. Only later was it clear that had been just the opening act for the beautiful celestial anomaly, a surprise treat for so many of us across the U.S. and beyond.
The Northern Lights, aurora borealis, here in Piedmont NC — at 35.2271 degrees North in latitude! (Normal visibility is at 65-70 degrees latitude — northern parts of Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Alaska etc.) Photos from the Charlotte region here are thanks to longtime journalist friend and reader Jane McAlister Pope, who responded quickly to capture great shots and share them online.
The quirky showing this far south is reportedly due to “solar flares and coronal mass ejections coming from the sun” according to ABC News affiliate WSOC-TV in our area. This link has a great assortment of photos from our area to Avery County in the mountains and in the north-central South Carolina parts of the Charlotte metro area.
It’s been that kind of up-and-down week, and spring, around Charlotte and in a lot of other places and lives.
Sometimes only bittersweet hits the just-right notes.
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An alert before closing: I’d like to hear then-&-now perspectives and experiences from the many of you who, like me, this month have college graduation-reunion anniversaries, some of them big years. I’m interested particularly in any of your associated memories and reflections as this coincides with the current dramatic college-campus protests and grave larger issues around the Israel-Gaza war. As with last week’s shared assortment of advance-reading and viewing from varied standpoints and factual backgrounds (“Legal Beagles, Red-Flag News” 5.5.24), this is in continuing attempt and prep for eventually discussing and writing about this.
And, that is all I have. Talk to you soon.
🦋💙 tish
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… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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