Billy Joel and Stevie Nicks kicked off their much-anticipated, nine-date “Two Icons, One Night” co-headlining tour at Los Angeles’s SoFi Stadium on Friday, March 10, and the evening featured not one but two surprise duets between the Gold Dust Woman and Piano Man that had the 70,000-capacity crowd cheering.
But it was Nicks’s tributes to two other much-missed rock icons that had the crowd in tears — and Nicks’s name trending on Twitter.
Nicks played first, delivering a hits-packed set that included solo songs like “Stand Back,” “Edge of Seventeen,” and “If Anyone Falls” as well as Fleetwood Mac classics like “Dreams,” “Gypsy,” “Rhiannon,” and “Sara” and a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” Four songs into her set, the two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee performed “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” the Pretty Woman single that she said her late friend Tom Petty “gifted” her in 1981 — and the SoFi audience absolutely erupted when Joel unexpectedly emerged from the stage wings during the second verse to take on the Petty role. Later, during Joel’s main set, Nicks returned the favor by guesting on his tune “And So It Goes.”
Nicks also reprised her crowd-pleasing cover of Petty’s “Free Fallin’”— which she’d previously performed on tour with Fleetwood Mac when Mike Campbell, former guitarist for Petty’s band the Heartbreakers, played in the 2018-2019 Mac lineup. “Free Fallin’” provided a powerful moment Friday, but it was Nicks’s encore of Fleetwood Mac’s coming-of-age ballad “Landslide” — dedicated to her late friend and bandmate Christine McVie, while a slideshow of vintage Nicks/McVie photographs ran on the venue’s wall-sized video screens — that resonated the deepest.
When “Landslide” ended, Nicks paused and bowed her head once morest her microphone stand, her eyes brimming with tears. “I have to imagine she’s still here. It’s all I can do,” she said, choked up, as her band members supportively surrounded her to take their final bow. Friday marked the first time that Nicks had performed a public concert since McVie’s November 2022 death.
Joel and Nicks’s Two Icons, One Night tour continues April 8 in Arlington, Texas, followed by dates in Nashville, Philadelphia, Columbus, Kansas City, Foxborough, Baltimore, and Minneapolis. The two artists’ kick-off setlists were:
Stevie Nicks
Outside the Rain
Dreams
If Anyone Falls
Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around
Fall From Grace
For What It’s Worth
Gypsy
Wild Heart
Pretty Woman
Stand Back
Free Fallin’
Gold Dust Woman
Sara
Edge of Seventeen
Rhiannon
Landslide
Billy Joel
The Natural (The End Title)
My Life
Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)
vienna
Zanzibar
An Innocent Man
Don’t Ask Me Why
Just the Way You Are
Allentown
And So It Goes
Say Goodbye to Hollywood
Sometimes a Fantasy
Only the Good Die Young
The River of Dreams
Scenes From an Italian Restaurant
Piano Man
We Didn’t Start the Fire
Uptown Girl
It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me
Big Shot
You May Be Right
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