Fleetwood Mac Fans! Stevie Nicks Guests On BIO’s “The Chris Isaak Hour” Thursday At 10pm ET

By ButtonKnows

I know me some Fleetwood Mac and I love me my Stevie Nicks. So much so that my purse is crafted (by Karla of Chicago’s “Bagitude,” not me and some duct tape) of an actual Rumours album cover in homage to the multiple discs I wore out and replaced.

And I still wish I would have tried a little harder to convince my only daughter’s dad to let me name her Rhiannon. A little, anyway.

So fellow fanatics, let me spare you some opening-credit sweats — the Stevie Nicks that appears on Chris Isaak’s retro-cool sofa in Thursday night’s episode of BIO’s The Chris Isaak Hour is exactly the one you are hoping for.

The outfit is black — form-fitting and plunge-y on top and flowly below. The gloves are leather and nearly to the elbow. And the boots — also black — are just platform enough to allow for that dainty, rocker-chick goosestep that’s as much a part of Nicks’ stage performance as her helium rasp of a voice.

’Course you may be thrown a little by the fact that she’s currently warbling neither a Fleetwood Mac smash, nor one of her own haunting post-Mac ballads, but rather a rousing duet of Ricky Nelson’s “It’s Late” with her host, snappy little jazz hands and all (and, to close, a mournful “Red River Valley.”)

But then she settles into conversation with the amiable Isaak about the song’s significance to her chosen career path and you can go back to marveling at how impossibly young and unabashedly lovely the 60-year-old songstress  looks — with no obvious signs of the nips, tucks and Botox plenty of stars her age rely on to mixed effect.

Or in my case, you can do that after you play, “Where’s Rodney,” and locate Isaak’s unofficial guest host/comically zen Maltese zonked out near the guitar on the green sofa to the right of his master.

That foofy white thing under Stevie’s foot? A rug, not a Rodney. Relax.

Like Isaak’s inaugural guest Trisha Yearwood (whom he fed brownies baked from a recipe in her new cookbook “Georgia Cooking in An Oklahoma Kitchen”), Nicks has something to shill, so the episode forgoes a few of its usual live performance segments for clips from her new DVD “Live In Chicago.” But no harm, no foul, for it’s still great fun to see the Gold Dust Woman doing her thing so much like her 25-year-old incarnation.

Isaak has taken some guff for his show closely following a path already blazed by Elvis Costello’s recent and brilliant Spectacle, but I say there is plenty of happy difference — and more than enough room for both. Because, where both Costello and his Apollo venue courted a sort of New York cool, Isaak’s natural warmth and retro-cozy set seem to bathe his guests in a companionable ease that lends even tales fans may have heard before a charming immediacy and genuineness that make you perfectly happy to hear them again.

Still, there’s plenty of new to learn, from the lyrics of the first original song Nicks penned at age 16, to the fact that she proudly owns neither a computer nor a cellphone, to the 12-hour days she routinely spends at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in DC and Bethesda’s National Naval Medical Center, listening to soldiers talk about their injuries and handing out hundreds and hundreds of music-crammed iPods she purchases herself.

See Stevie for yourself on BIO’s “The Chris Isaak Hour” Thursday, March 5, at 10pm ET.