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Stevie Nicks: Rock’s Street Angel

Stevie Nicks: Rock’s Street Angel

By Steven P. Wheeler

Today, on the 38th anniversary of the release of Stevie Nicks’ classic solo debut Bella Donna, it seemed like a good time to go back to the original tape of my lengthy conversation with one of rock’s most captivating performers and mysterious figures and share this time-capsule interview that took place 25 years ago this month.

I spoke with Stevie Nicks from her home in Paradise Valley, Arizona in the early part of 1994. Wearing gym clothes and just in from her treadmill workout, she apologized for being slightly out of breath at the outset. But we dived right into a wide-ranging conversation that touched on her past, her decision to quit Fleetwood Mac three years before, as well as her newly released album, the criminally overlooked gem, Street Angel.

“Blue Denim” from 1994’s Street Angel was written about Lindsey Buckingham.

Six months prior to our conversation, Nicks had completed a 47-day stint in rehab. She originally tackled her demons at the Betty Ford clinic in 1987 to combat her ten-year cocaine addiction. Sadly, in what was an attempt to help wean her off cocaine, a psychiatrist put her on a new pharmaceutical regiment with the controversial prescription drug Klonopin. This led to an even more debilitating addiction, which she would later say left her in a zombie-like state for many years. By early ’94, she was free from her addictions for the first time in 20 years.

In bringing things up to date, Nicks would sell this particular Arizona home in 2007 and she of course rejoined Fleetwood Mac full-time in 1997 for the mega-successful reunion known as The Dance (see my personal memory of that show below). Since that time, she has gone on to once again balance both her solo and Fleetwood Mac careers for the last 20+ years.

Earlier this year, Nicks became only the 23rd artist in rock history to be inducted twice into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; having been inducted with Fleetwood Mac in 1998 and for her solo career this past March. But things were different in 1994, so let’s dive in and take a trip back 25 years when Stevie N. was 46 and Steven P. was 31 (and still with a full head of hair).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94ZQoVoVFe4
Stevie’s powerful and playful rendition of “Gypsy” during Fleetwood Mac’s 1982 tour.

The Eyes Have It

As we sat down to begin, we engaged in a little small talk about her recent eye surgery to correct her eyesight, something she has struggled with her entire life. What might surprise some is just how personable and talkative Stevie Nicks is, as opposed to the media-enhanced enigmatic persona. “I had [lasik surgery] done three weeks ago and the right eye is perfect,” she volunteered. “But I went back in the day before yesterday and did what they call an ‘enhancement,’ which they usually don’t do for a year after the first one, so your eye has time to heal before they cut into it again.

“With me, though, my right eye was really good but my left eye hardly corrected at all, so I was totally flipped out,” she said, her voice rising. “I mean, it’s your eyes! I was like, ‘Fuck, what am I gonna do, ya know?’ So, anyway, I went back in and the doctor pushed the incisions a bit more and I can see better with my left eye but still not as good as my right eye. And I can’t do anything more for many more months, so I need like a big ole magnifying glass to read now.

“I mean, if someone was dying and I had to go through their medicine cabinet to find the pills that will save them I wouldn’t be able to read anything. They would be completely screwed,” she said with a laugh. “So I gave up being really near-sighted to now being really far-sighted, but at least that means I don’t have to wear glasses onstage or when I go out shopping or when I’m dancing around my house or something. But to either read, type, or write I now have to wear big time magnifying glasses.”

“I don’t really like everybody knowing everything about me. I like being a mystery and I think I’m even pretty mysterious to everybody who I know really well. There’s a certain part of me that I don’t share with anybody.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

When I joke that she will now be able to see the faces of her fans from the stage now, she laughs and adds: “You’re right, I will be able to see an audience clearly for the first time in my life. Like, right now, I can see that television all the way across the room, so there are tradeoffs, but it’s really an amazing feeling. Although I’m not sure that one good eye and one bad eye is better than two bad eyes, unless you’re gonna wear a patch for the rest of your life like Captain Hook [laughs].”

As for the previous day’s cancellation of our chat, Nicks said: “Karen [Johnston, her longtime personal assistant] is one of those people who never forgets anything. Unlike me, she is totally organized and totally together, and we’re sitting on this couch last night and she suddenly jumps up and yells, “Oh my god! You had an interview today. I told you about it yesterday.’” Nicks rolls her eyes and lets out a laugh before adding: “I was like, ‘Wait, you told me yesterday? You don’t really expect me to remember something you told me yesterday, do you? That’s why I need you.’”

The Stevie Mystique

If, like me, you grew up listening to the Buckingham/Nicks era of Fleetwood Mac, which exploded onto the music scene in 1975, you were probably instantly struck by the diminutive swirling dervish onstage who sang of mystical worlds, witches and dreams with a unique voice that defies any standard description. Throughout the rest of the ‘70s as Fleetwood Mac became the biggest rock act in the world Stevie Nicks remained an enigma, and an international contingent of followers were born. Was she a sorcerer, a witch? The media went wild with speculation and before MTV brought these artists into our living rooms, no one could crack the mystery.

When I sarcastically say that I almost expected her to appear before me in a cloud of smoke, she laughs, before saying: “I usually shy away from doing a lot of press, but for this record [Street Angel, released in May of 1994] I decided that it would only be to my benefit to talk about it a little bit and get the word out.

“But I don’t really like everybody knowing everything about me. I like being a mystery and I think I’m even pretty mysterious to everybody who I know really well. There’s a certain part of me that I don’t share with anybody.”

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

This need for privacy is even more important when it’s time for her to create the songs that have only grown in popularity over the past four decades. “I also don’t want anyone around me when I’m writing a song or even if I’m just writing in my journal. I have my little writing timespace that I go into that really no one is welcome in. That place is very precious to me. There is a part of me that just isn’t available to the public and I like it that way.”

And so with that fun chitchat out of the way, we were off and running and the rock icon’s personable manner and candid answers continued throughout our time together…

“Bella Donna” Anniversary

Before we go back to the very beginning of the Stevie Nicks story, since today is the anniversary of her 1981 solo debut, which also remains her biggest seller, I’m going to start things out as to why Nicks even embarked on her own career in the first place.

“What happened is that after five years of being in Fleetwood Mac I realized that just getting two or three songs on an album was not going to be enough for me. And not only was it not just two or three songs, it was also not necessarily my two or three favorite songs. I would give the other people in Fleetwood Mac about 15 songs before each album and they would pick out the two or three that they all liked.

“So not only were my favorite favorites not being used but I was getting a really big backlog of songs that I wanted to get out there. So by the time I got to Bella Donna, I had tons and tons of songs that I really loved and no one was ever gonna hear them, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m working for nothing at this point.’ That’s absolutely why I decided to do Bella Donna.”

As Bella Donna hit #1, Stevie Nicks was now a superstar in her own right. The following year she topped the charts gain with Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage album (featuring her hit, “Gypsy”) which was followed by the band’s hugely successful world tour. Then it was back to her solo career with the multi-platinum sophomore solo success The Wild Heart, which was followed by 1985’s hit Rock a Little.

Stevie’s solo hits during this era became standards on radio and MTV and to this day can still transport us right back to that more youthful time: “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” “Leather and Lace,” “Edge of Seventeen,” Stand Back,” “If Anyone Falls,” “I Can’t Wait” and “Talk to Me.”

Despite her early success with MTV throughout the ’80s, a decade later, like most of us in the mid-90s, the music channel had lost its charm. “I don’t like doing music videos,” she admitted. “I liked videos when MTV first came out, for the first two or three years, because it was new and it was a lot of fun. I could just sit in bed and watch MTV for hours,” she said without a hint of exaggeration. “Now it’s just not fun for me and I don’t enjoy it. I guess I feel like just about every single music video that could possibly be known to man has already been done. Now we’re all just re-doing the same videos to a different song.

“I’ve also never wanted to be an actress and I don’t like being filmed that much. I never have,” Nicks continued. “I love performing onstage in front of tons of people and being an entertainer, but as soon as that film camera for a music video goes on I get really intimidated.”

Laughing, she described her issue with videos: “All I can think about are things like, ‘Shoulders back, chest out, chin up’ or ‘Are you walking like a graceful dove?’ It’s no longer about the song or your music, all you’re thinking about is how you look and I hate that. And nowadays it’s so expensive to make the videos and you don’t even have a clue whether or not they’re even gonna play it. So you can be out $500,000 and they might play it once or never. It doesn’t really make sense.”

Return of the Street Angel

This may explain why no plans were being made to go the video route with her then-new album, Street Angel, her first solo release in five long years; which was considered an eternity in the music universe of the ‘80s and ‘90s. But as Stevie pointed out, she was hardly resting on her considerable laurels: “I know it seems like everybody thinks I just disappeared off the face of the earth for the past five years, but a lot was going on. I was on tour throughout 1989 [in support of her hit album The Other Side of the Mirror]. I was also recording songs for Fleetwood Mac’s Behind the Mask album [the first one in 15 years without Lindsay Buckingham]. Then I did the Fleetwood Mac tour throughout Europe, the United States and Australia from March until December of 1990.

“And then when I got home in 1990 I started immediately working on Timespace, my ‘favorite cuts’ record. Even though that wasn’t a full studio album, it still took a lot of time because we went back and dug out all the old master tapes going all the way back to Bella Donna and we completely remixed those songs, and I also wrote and recorded three new songs. Then I went out and did my own solo tour throughout the summer and fall of ’91 behind Timespace.

“So I went into pre-production of this album at the beginning of ’92, then I was recording this album from mid-summer to December. And then in January of ’93, we broke to do the inauguration.”

As many people will remember, the newly elected President Bill Clinton had used Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” as his campaign theme, and Nicks and Buckingham rejoined Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie and John McVie to perform the song live at the inauguration celebration as a one-song reunion.

Fleetwood Mac reunited for a one-song performance at Bill Clinton’s inauguration.

After that hugely publicized Mac event, it was back to the studio. “We went back into the studio for another two months in early ’93 working on this record, and then all the English people went home [a reference to legendary producer Glyn Johns, guitarist Andy Fairweather-Low, bassist Pat Donaldson, and others].

After completing the album, Nicks wasn’t happy with what had transpired under the guidance of Johns. “After I listened to the record for two months and I decided that there were some things that were really missing for me. So I went back into the studio, much to everyone’s complete surprise and did the things that I had wanted to do all along.

“So by the time it was finished and mixed, it was into the late summer of ’93 and I didn’t want it to be a Christmas album,” she explained. “So we thought it would be better to release it at the beginning of this year, but it’s not really a winter album. It was made and created during the summer originally, and it really sounds like a summer album. So that’s why we waited to put it out now.”

“Bella Donna” Part Deux?

When I first listened to Street Angel in preparation for this interview, I was pleasantly surprised to hear a guitar-dominated Stevie Nicks album for the first time since Bella Donna more than a decade before. Stevie’s previous solo album, 1989’s Top 10 hit The Other Side of the Mirror, took the keyboard and synth approach to new heights and I personally wasn’t a fan and told Nicks this to which she responded: “I think it has a lot to do with what you start out with. On the previous album, The Other Side of the Mirror, I started out with Rupert Hine who is totally a keyboardist; piano and synthesizers and all that stuff. So that whole album went the way of the airy, surreal, keyboard thing. I can remember it so vividly when we started, we had the most incredible keyboard sounds; it was totally like being in the Twilight Zone.”

This time around with Street Angel it was back to her roots, as she explained: “With this album I started out with Bernie Leadon [formerly of the Eagles] and Andy Fairweather-Low, who are obviously amazing guitar players. So I had two acoustic guitar players and me for two months at my house in Los Angeles playing all the songs that I showed them, which is many more than the ones that made it on this record.

“The three of us spent about eight weeks playing all the songs and the ones that made it on the album began to show themselves. Those songs sort of came together overnight and became really happening songs, and the ones that weren’t working for that particular group of guys just sort of went out the window.

“So, you’re absolutely right, this album was totally different than my previous record from the very beginning, because it was two acoustic guitars in my English Tudor library in Los Angeles and just me singing. It was almost like we were this little Kingston Trio, who were preparing to go out on the road, playing small clubs, and setting up all the equipment ourselves [laughs]. It was really great and that’s why this album is so different, because we started out from a guitar point of view as opposed to the piano.

“It was a lot of fun making this record because of how it started with Bernie and Andy. We just sat and had a great time for two months playing songs. I mean there is nothing that I would rather do than hangout in my house in front of the fireplace playing music with two incredible guitar players. Who could ask for more?”

In sharing my overwhelming positive view of Street Angel, I was curious to hear what the candid songstress had to say, to which she replied: “It’s really kind of too soon for me to make a judgment about this album, but looking at it from the outside I would probably say that this looks like a really organized piece of work. And then people would say, ‘So Stevie were you really organized when you made this album?’ And I would have to laugh and say, ‘No…’”

“Street Angel” Today

Over the years Nicks has expressed disappointed in the reaction to the album as it was her first solo effort to not attain platinum status after four consecutive million-sellers, although it did become a gold album. Perhaps her dissatisfaction may also revolve around the despicable press coverage of her aborted tour in support of Street Angel.

While the media blew kisses at her excellent performances during the 1994 tour, they disgustingly spent more time poking fun at her obvious weight gain during this period of time. Nicks notes that her weight went up dramatically during her addiction to Klonopin. At only 5’1” tall, she estimated she was then at 175 pounds. Needless to say the media assault was brutal and soul crushing. “I couldn’t handle people talking about how heavy I was,” she admitted in 1997. “You have no idea what it’s like to have people discussing your weight on the Internet. That was the final disgusting blow.”

Nicks vowed to not return to the stage until she managed to get her weight down, which she did, returning in a triumphant manner for the 1997 landmark Fleetwood Mac reunion. But more on that later…

In the Beginning

Born in 1948, the elder of two children to corporate executive Jess Nicks and his wife Barbara, Stephanie Nicks spent her childhood crisscrossing America seemingly planting the seeds of a vagabond angel; preparing her for a career that was yet to take shape. “My father was President of Lucky Lager and then President of Greyhound and then Executive Vice President of Armour,” she explained, “so we moved almost every two years except for five years that we spent in Texas.”

Since our interview, Stevie lost her father in 2005 at the age of 80 and her mother passed away in 2012 at the age of 84. Her only sibling, younger brother Chris was married to Stevie’s longtime backup singer Lori Perry-Nicks. The two divorced but have one child, Stevie’s only niece.

Stevie with her parents and brother, circa 1976.

Always a close family unit, it’s not surprising to hear Nicks reel off the travelogue that was her youth without even pausing for a breath: “I was born in Phoenix and my family moved to L.A. when I was about three months old and we lived there until I was five. Then we moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico for a few years, then to El Paso, Texas for five years, and then to Salt Lake City, Utah for two years, and then back to Los Angeles for my freshman to junior years in high school. And then up to San Francisco for my senior year and my first two years in junior college and then three years at San Jose State, which is just down the peninsula.

When I mention that there have been studies about children in military families who constantly move from one place to another and that some of these kids develop masks of reinvention to protect themselves from the pain of constantly losing friends or become very solitary individuals, she acknowledges the point, but she eventually took a different approach: “Two years in one place isn’t a whole lot of time to get settled in a school so for the first one or two moves you really don’t make many friends,” she said. “But then you realize when you get to the next city that maybe you need to let down your guard and make some friends fast. You know you’re gonna have to leave them sooner or later, so you make the decision to make friends as quickly as possible so at least you’ll be able to have a little bit of fun while you’re there.

“For me, in particular, it worked,” she makes clear, adding that the Nicks family lifestyle perfectly prepared her for what was to come. “It’s very easy for me to be on the road because I’m used to packing up and leaving some place and going to another. I love going to new places, new rooms, new houses, new hotels.

“On the other hand,” she admitted, “my brother didn’t like it at all. He’s five years younger than me, so I got the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh grade while we were in Texas and that was cool for me. Christopher is five years younger than me so he didn’t adapt as well as I did. So I know that it can really go either way, but for me it helped make me very adaptable to things.”

Artistic Birth

In terms of her artistic path, according to Nicks it came pretty quick. “I was never into drawing or painting when I was growing up. Those two things came much later. But I was always writing. I always kept a journal and wrote little essay things.

“As for music, my grandfather was a country-western singer, so he turned me on to music in a serious way. When I was in the fourth grade, he bought out this old funky record store and came home with a truckload of 45s and the two of us went through them all.

Stevie and her musical grandfather, “the first person I ever sang with.”
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

“He’s the first person I ever sang with. He would play guitar and we would do these duets. I loved that. And my mom said at the time, ‘We don’t need to worry about her. She’s going straight from grade school to the stage.’ So my career is something that I think those closest to me kind of expected of me in their heart.”

The Annotated Stevie

“How I usually write my poems is that I keep a journal and if something really spectacular happens I write it up in prose, but if I think it’s a really cool experience I’ll put the journal next to my typewriter, put in a clean sheet of paper, and I’ll type what I’ve already written in prose but making it into rhyme.

“So my songs are actually just the annotated Stevie. Like if I was Lewis Carroll and writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, then there’s the annotated Alice next to it explaining it. That’s kind of what I do in rhyme; I’m breaking down a bigger picture into rhymes. That’s always been the way that I do it.

“When I’m writing I always strive to be totally honest with myself. I never make up stories. All of my songs come either out of my journals or straight out of my head because something is happening. It’s always been important to me that people don’t think of me as just a tunesayer. I told myself early on that if I’m going to be a songwriter, I’m going to be honest with everything I write and I think I’ve done that.”

Stevie performing “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You” on David Letterman in 1998.

Sweet 16

When it comes to actually discovering her own calling in life, it all began when she turned 16 and wrote her first song. While others in their mid-teens are dreaming about getting that elusive driver’s license, for Stevie Nicks it was more about music… well, and perhaps boys. “How it all started for me was that I was taking flamenco guitar lessons when I was 15 from this cool guy and he had this incredible classical Goya guitar. I loved this guy and this guitar, and I took lessons for about two months and then he decided to go to Spain to study. I couldn’t afford to go with him, but, behind my back, he sold this beautiful Goya guitar to my mom and dad and they gave it to me on my 16th birthday.”

Recalling this memorable turning point, Nicks’ voice goes into excited overdrive: “So on my 16th birthday, I sat down in my bedroom in Arcadia, California and wrote the first song I ever wrote, totally in tears. I sat there on the bed with paper and a pen and this guitar, and I wrote this song, ‘I’ve Loved and I’ve Lost,’ about your basic 16-year-old love affair thing.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

“I knew from that second when I played my own song for the first time that was it. This was what I was going to do with my life. I remember that moment to this day, so vividly. I knew that I was always going to write songs rather than record a lot of material from other people.”

Covering Songs of Others

“It’s much harder to find someone else’s song that means something to you than it is to write your own songs,” she said, matter of factly. “I don’t know how people who don’t write their own material stay excited about the business. Those may be the people who have all the commercial hits, but I would hate that. Every once in a while a song like Bob Dylan’s ‘Just Like a Woman’ will come along where I want to record it, or songs by Tom Petty because I love his songs and I love to interpret them. But they really have to be special because I know that if I do someone else’s songs on my album, then one or two of my own songs will get the axe from that record. So they really have to be special.

Tom Petty penned this hit for his close friend and “Honorary Heartbreaker” Stevie Nicks.

“On this album, in addition to ‘Just Like a Woman,’ there are three other songs that I didn’t write [“Docklands,” “Unconditional Love” and “Maybe Love Will Change Your Mind”], but I thought they were better than the three or four songs of mine that I replaced them with. But nobody pushed them on me. Nobody said, ‘Okay Stevie, here’s 25 songs. Take them home, listen to them all weekend and try and pick out 12 of them that are personal to you and that you can convince people that you wrote them, and that will be your album.’

“That is impossible for me to even consider. First of all, I’m not that good of an actress [laughs], so unless I hear something in a song that I think is totally cool and resonates with me in some way, I would rather sing my own words. Rather than people saying, ‘Not only is that a terrible song, but she didn’t even write it.’

The first single from 1994’s Street Angel album.

Enter Lindsey Buckingham

“I met Lindsey at the end of my senior year at Menlo-Atherton High School, which is parallel to Stanford University in northern California. I had only arrived there that year so I had to really make friends quick because it was my senior year, which is a really rotten time to have to move into a new school.

“I had never sang in a rock & roll band before, but I thought, ‘Why not?’ So I ended up being in that band with Lindsey for three-and-a-half years from 1968 into ’71”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

“It was really bad,” she continued, “because you couldn’t tryout for cheerleader, you couldn’t tryout for song leader, you couldn’t try out for flag twirler. You couldn’t do any of those things, because the tryouts were at the end of the previous year before I arrived. So I was totally crushed, because I really wanted to do that kind of thing.

“So I met Lindsey in ’66 at this place, which was actually a religious get-together for young people called Young Life. It was just a place to meet people during the week. Anyway, I met him there and we sang ‘California Dreaming” together and it was very cool.”

Stevie performing with Fritz, circa 1969.

But there was no fairy tale ending. Not at that point anyway as Nicks pointed out: “He was a junior and I was a senior, so I never saw him again until two years later when he called me to see if I wanted to join this band he was in called Fritz. It was Lindsey and three other guys. I had never sang in a rock & roll band before, but I thought, ‘Why not?’ So I ended up being in that band with Lindsey for three-and-a-half years. It was from 1968 into ’71 that I was in Fritz with Lindsey.

Ironically, one of rock’s great guitarists Lindsey Buckingham was only the bassist in the band and neither he nor Stevie were writing material for Fritz. In addition, the romance between the two was put on hold.

“We weren’t going together in those days though,” she makes clear. “He was involved with another lady and I was going with another guy. But we played a lot and we practiced every single day.”

Determined to make it all work, Nicks took on an insane schedule to balance her college work at San Jose State and her band. “I was the only who was going to school; none of the other guys were going to school. So I went to college all day and then I would drive 45 minutes from San Jose back to Menlo-Atherton where we would practice from 5:30 to 10:30 at night. Then I would drive all the way back to San Jose and study all night long. Get about three hours of sleep and then do it all again the next day.”

Sharings Stages with Legends

While the band wasn’t much more than a local act in those days, they were successful enough to find themselves sharing the stage with some of the most legendary rock icons in history. Something that had a huge impact on the budding performer: “During our time in Fritz, we played a lot of big shows. We opened for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Chicago and Creedence Clearwater at The Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom and Santa Clara Fairgrounds.

“If I hadn’t have done all that I don’t think I would have ever been able to just walk into Fleetwood Mac and been cool about being center-front stage. I would have been stage fright’d out if I hadn’t have learned what I did from all these incredible performers that I got to see up close and personal for those years in Fritz.”

Joplin in particular had a major influence on Nicks, which is obvious to anyone who has witnessed Stevie’s charismatic command of the stage. “I mean, we practiced so much and then we would play two or three nights every week for those three-and-a-half years. It was an incredible amount of preparation experience that I could not have gotten any other way. At the time I didn’t know that it was preparation, but that’s what it ended up to be.”

One of Stevie’s most intense and charismatic performances ever captured on film is this rendition of “Sisters of the Moon” in Los Angeles during Fleetwood Mac’s 1982 Mirage Tour.

First Steps to Stardom

The road to stardom is a long and winding one indeed, and there is no such thing as overnight success. For Nicks and Buckingham, it all began while they were still in Fritz, but what started as a golden opportunity for that band turned into something else and ultimately brought the two into a personal relationship.

“[Budding producer] Keith Olsen came down and saw Fritz play and had the whole band come down to Los Angeles. But when we got there, Keith and everybody else set about breaking Lindsey and I away from the other three guys in the band. That’s why Lindsey and I started going out, because we felt so bad.

When I joked that it was the guilt that brought them together, Stevie readily agreed. “Everybody in Los Angeles was trying to kill our band that’s what kind of drove us together. You’re absolutely right, it was the guilt drove us together. I mean, we spent every single day for three-and-a-half years in this band, so the relationships within a band like that are intense. These guys were our best pals in the world, ya know, and they were being shut out and it was very obvious.”

Buckingham/Nicks Album

By 1972, Fritz was no more and with Olsen’s help and guidance the newly dubbed Buckingham/Nicks were signed to Polydor Records. With Olsen behind the console, they recorded what would become their self-titled debut album, which was released to the world in 1973. Unfortunately the world wasn’t listening and the album was completely ignored. To make matters worse, while the duo was touring in support of the record the following year, their record company pulled the plug.

Their dream ended as quickly as it began and Nicks left the stage to wait tables, clean houses, whatever it took to survive as she and Buckingham continued to work on songs despite having no viable outlet in the cards.

One can hear flashes of the magic that Buckingham and Nicks would soon bring to Fleetwood Mac on this lost gem from their first and only album as a duo.

While a few songs from this long out-of-print album have found their way onto various compilations over the years, the album has never been officially released on CD (or even for download to this very day). Nicks blames her former partner for the album not having been re-released. “It’s still the Number One most in-demand vinyl record that has never made it to CD,” she said in 1994. “Atlantic Records wants to release and there are other record companies that are very interested in releasing it, but it’s all Lindsey. If he doesn’t call me back so we can get this released, I’m going to put a big ad in Billboard saying: ‘Lindsey Buckingham is totally at fault for the reason that Buckingham/Nicks is not out on CD. So sign the petition.’ Because it’s all him, I’m doing what I can to get it out there.”

The Song That Changed History

Despite the failure of the Buckingham/Nicks album, fate can rear its head in the most unexpected of ways and the saga of this unknown American folk-rock duo joining the veteran British blues band Fleetwood Mac—named after the group’s rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie—is one for the ages.

In late 1974, Fleetwood happened to be in Los Angeles visiting recording studios in preparation for his band’s next album. When the towering drummer stopped in the now-legendary Sound City Studios, the studio’s engineer Keith Olsen happened to play Fleetwood a seven-minute track called “Frozen Love” from the Buckingham/Nicks album to illustrate the sound of the studio.

This seven-minute epic from Buckingham/Nicks captured the ear of Mick Fleetwood who then asked Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham agreed, but only if he could bring along his girlfriend and musical partner Stevie Nicks. The rest is history.

Ironically, Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist/vocalist Bob Welch had just quit the band, so Fleetwood was also in the market for a guitarist as well as a studio. After hearing Lindsey’s six-string prowess on “Frozen Love,” he offered Buckingham the gig in Fleetwood Mac. Lindsey to his credit refused the gig unless his girlfriend and musical collaborator could join the band as well. Fleetwood agreed and the rest is literally music history.

A Fateful Fleetwood Call

“Mick called us on New Years Eve night of 1974, going into 1975,” Nicks recalled, “and asked if we wanted to join his band Fleetwood Mac. Neither Lindsey nor I really knew much about Fleetwood Mac, so we immediately went to the record store and bought all their albums and went back to our apartment and listened to all of them back to front.

“My mission was finding out whether there was anything I could add to this band. Is there anything I can grab onto here? And I came out of it feeling that there was a whole mystical thing within there; from Peter Green’s bluesy guitar to Bob Welch’s ‘Bermuda Triangle’ and Christine’s kind of airy-fairy voice. So I started thinking that this could work, this could definitely work.”

The couple’s financial situation also played a role in Nicks pushing for them to accept Fleetwood’s offer: “At the time, Lindsey and I were really, really poor. I mean we were really starving. I was working as a waitress, he was working on demos because we had been dropped by our record label, so we were totally disillusioned at that point in time.

“I literally said to Lindsey: ‘I think we should do anything that is going to up our lifestyle, because we’re both miserable right now. We are totally poor and unhappy with each other and the world in general, so we should join Fleetwood Mac.’ And he said, ‘Okay.’

“The weird thing about it is that Fleetwood Mac really didn’t need another girl singer. They only needed Lindsey as a guitar player and singer, but they couldn’t have him without me so they had to take us both [laughs].”

The Mac Girls

At the mention of that other female Mac singer Christine McVie, who had already been in the band for five years, one had to wonder if Nicks had any reservations about any conflicts. “Not really, because Chris is totally practical and she saw what could be with our different voices and how well they magically blended together and that she felt it could really work well. And she is also behind the piano and the organ and the B3 so she could never go out center-front stage anyway. So she never cared that I was out there because that was something that she never wanted to do.

Stevie and Christine during their first year together in 1975.
(Photo: Fin Costello)

“I think Chris and I were the most practical people in that band. Plus, both of us really liked each other from the get-go and we really and truly totally respected one another and felt that the two of us were a really good little team. My relationship with Christine was probably the easiest thing about being in Fleetwood Mac for me.”

From Zero to #1

Within three months of joining, the newly revamped Fleetwood Mac line-up had recorded its self-titled debut, which has come to be known as the ‘White Album.’ With the addition of Buckingham and Nicks, this was the 11th configuration of the band and its 10th album. No one could have predicted what happened next.

Before the new album was released in July, the new outfit hit the road on a blistering touring schedule that saw them clock in 100 concerts over six months. They were on a mission and the result of their relentless touring was the band’s first ever #1 album.

Rarely seen concert performance of Fleetwood Mac less than three months after Nicks and Buckingham had joined the band. Stevie had yet to adopt her boots and cape fashion.

The exquisite material found on that chart-topping album included two of Nicks’ most famous songs that she had written more than a year before joining the Fleetwood Mac. In fact Buckingham/Nicks had played “Rhiannon” during their own abbreviated tour in 1974 (see below).

“I had written both ‘Landslide’ and ‘Rhiannon’ in October of 1973 [a few months after the release of the Buckingham/Nicks album] in Aspen, Colorado. I had written ‘Rhiannon’ on the piano and then Lindsey worked out that guitar thing that he did.

During the 1974 Buckingham/Nicks tour, Stevie introduces her new song “Rhiannon” to the public at this Alabama gig. Funny to hear Stevie tell the band to “not play too fast” although they immediately do. Guitarist Waddy Wachtel, who played on the Buckingham/Nicks album and tour, has continued as Stevie’s guitarist and collaborator throughout her solo career.

“So when we showed ‘Rhiannon’ to Fleetwood Mac when we were making that first album, I just was playing it on piano and Lindsey played his guitar. And then Christine walked over to the keyboard and start playing those arpeggio things that she does, and it just blossomed right there and ‘Rhiannon’ made herself overnight.”

Fleetwood Mac Dynamic

“In the studio, Fleetwood Mac always did work as a band up until the Tango in the Night album I would say,” Stevie said, referencing the 1987 album. “Lindsey would always be the first person to hear my songs because he just had a really great insight into working on my songs. He would even admit that and say that some of his very best work has been with the putting together of my songs.

“He would take one of my songs, pick up his electric guitar and say, ‘Okay, this is ‘Gold Dust Woman’ and he would just start playing it and the other three would listen and say, ‘Cool,’ and then start adding their own parts. John would come up with the bass line and Christine would decide to use this or that keyboard and it would come together. Lindsey is a very good bandleader and he would just call out the chords to everybody as they were playing. He definitely directed the way my songs went and I never said a word.”

Stevie and Lindsey in the studio with Fleetwood Mac in 1975.

“Now Lindsey may think that me and my songs could never exist without him,” she laughs, “but I have managed with the help of these other wonderful musicians. They may not do things exactly how Lindsey would have done it but it’s still really good and magical.”

As if to bolster her point, she continued her line of thought: “On my first three solo albums, Waddy [Wachtel] took over that role. He’s a really old friend who worked with us back in the Buckingham/Nicks days and is also very insightful on my music. Then with The Other Side of the Mirror, it was definitely Rupert [Hine] who took over that role. And with this Street Angel album, it was Andy Fairweather-Low and Bernie Leadon, and Waddy came back and Michael Campbell of the Heartbreakers. It was really all of these great guitarists putting their heads together.”

Songwriting Process

“I almost always have a demo of everything I write and I think my demos are pretty cool because they’re really spontaneous and fun. And whoever is living on the block at a given time I ask to play on it, so they’re really diverse in terms of who’s playing on them.

“So, for example, I would play my demo to Andy and Bernie and then I really don’t give them any more instruction. I basically say, ‘This is how I did it and this is the best I can do by myself.’ And then somebody may say, ‘Hey Stevie, what about a bridge like this’ or ‘instead of going straight from the verse to the chorus, why don’t we do a little four-line something.’ And in two seconds there’s a whole other great little part that takes the song to a new level, so that’s how it works basically.”

This solo demo of the future hit “Gypsy” is a good example of what Stevie presents to her musicians and collaborators to help flesh out and bring to the finish line.

“I think the musicians who play on my records have a really good time because I never ever tell them what to do. Not ever. I want them to be free to share ideas and come up with things.

“Waddy and Benmont Tench [keyboardist for Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers] have been working with me for so long that it’s not unlike Lindsey Buckingham, because they also have a really good window into my soul. I can play them a demo and they kind of like instantly know what I want, even though I never tell them what I want. They know that once I give them a song, it’s kind of their responsibility to find what it needs and I think they enjoy that because they’re not working for me, they’re really working with me and that’s a big thing for a musician. I am dependent on them and I think they like knowing that I am somewhat dependent on them.”

The “Rumours” Soap Opera

With their first Fleetwood Mac album topping the charts, the pressure was on to deliver a follow-up. No easy feat, but when you add in the fact that Nicks and Buckingham had broken up, John and Christine McVie had broken up and Mick Fleetwood’s marriage had dissolved, it would seem impossible. Toss in some volatile artistic temperament (x5), a growing bushel of drugs and you have all the ingredients for an unmitigated disaster.

Instead they released one of rock’s greatest albums in history, Rumours, which would become the biggest selling album for decades. At this juncture the 1977 classic has sold a reported 40 million copies worldwide. A crowning achievement that belies the pain that went into its creation.

“It’s definitely true that great tragedy made for great art,” Nick acknowledged, “but it was an unfortunate miserable thing to live through. The tension between the five high-strung members of Fleetwood Mac was capable of putting any of us over the edge really easy. In that group of five people everybody was screwed up. Everybody was breaking up and all that.

Nicks put the situation into its proper context when she said: “The thing is that in normal life when you break up with someone who you’re in a relationship with you don’t see that person the next morning at breakfast. But within Fleetwood Mac you saw that person the next day, so the sarcasm level would go way up and the little digs would come in by the thousands until people would just slam out of the studio. Lindsey would go outside and play his guitar or I would sit in a corner and write; everybody was just totally freaked out. But we got the world’s greatest rock & roll soap opera out of it.”

“The only thing that Fleetwood Mac did in a lot of abundance was a lot of cocaine and a lot of drinking. During that time, it was a madhouse and everybody was so tired all the time; just really haggard. That’s why cocaine was so much a part of our lives.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

“Tusk”

With the unbelievable global success of Rumours, the band was now under the gun to somehow match that unparalleled musical triumph. Instead, under the guidance of the musically explorations of Buckingham, their next album Tusk would confound critics, some of their recently created fans, and their record label. The massive double-album would keep the band on top of the music world, but their hedonistic lifestyle would also take its toll at this point.

When I spoke with Mick Fleetwood a few years previously to my time with Stevie, he mentioned that it was at this time that the band really was riding in the proverbial rock & roll fast lane. “It was pretty decadent,” the band’s founding told me in 1991. “You’ve got to realize that we had worked for years and years at a very crazed rate of speed, and it was starting to take its toll. That whole lifestyle—the coke, the booze—there was just a lot of consumption of one thing or another.”

Nicks echoed her former bandmate’s sentiments when she was asked the same question. “Tusk took 13 months solid, every day and you had to be there,” Nick said. “There was no calling in sick. We would go from two o’clock in the afternoon until seven o’clock the next morning, and sometimes we didn’t even go home. It was like we all migrated to some secret burial ground at the top of some mountain in Africa. Everybody was totally burnt out.

“Then we decided it was gonna be a double-album because everybody had so many songs that they would never fit on one record. It was really intense, living those 13 months in Los Angeles making that record. Then when it was finished we went out to tour so, yeah, it was probably was the high-point in terms of how nuts we all got.

“The only thing that Fleetwood Mac did in a lot of abundance was a lot of cocaine and a lot of drinking. Luckily we never did anything else and we’ve all quit cocaine, so we all got it together eventually.

Stevie performing “Angel” from the Tusk album during the band’s high-flying Tusk Tour.

“But, during that time, it was a madhouse and everybody was so tired all the time; just really haggard. That’s why cocaine was so much a part of our lives. We were just too tired to go on every day without it. We had commitments here and commitments there and the record company was barking down our backs: ‘How come this record’s taking so damn long! What is Tusk?’ And I never quite understood what Tusk was either. Even to this day, I don’t know exactly what it was. It was just an intense thing. It’s a great story to tell, but it wasn’t much fun to live it.”

Quitting Fleetwood Mac

During my talk with Stevie, I was reminded of an old story about a classical musician. Unplanned, I found myself sharing this tale about a violinist who gives an amazing performance and then after the show, an audience member comes up to him and says: “I would give away my life to be able to play like you.” And the man shrugs and responds: “I did.”

Stevie immediately says, “I like that story and that’s true with me. I can honestly say that I gave up everything to be in Fleetwood Mac for 15 years. That’s not a lie, that’s completely true. You couldn’t have any kind of a normal life to do what I’ve been doing, which is have my solo career and a career with Fleetwood Mac. The writer in me really strove to keep me loving what I do, as opposed to saying, ‘This is really becoming a job.’

“That’s really why I left Fleetwood Mac, because having to go back and forth and back and forth between my career and Fleetwood Mac. This is the first time that I won’t have to go back and forth. Whenever this upcoming tour ends, I’m not going to have to catch a taxi at the airport and go straight back in the studio with Fleetwood Mac and walk into a room full of angry people saying, ‘You’re late!’ And never saying things like, ‘Did you have a good tour?’ or ‘I thought your record was really nice’ or ‘How are you doing?’ None of that; just unfriendly anger.

“I’m so totally excited about this because I won’t be feeling that dread as soon as my tour is over. I don’t have this huge production schedule to go home to. What I’m looking forward to most is the fact that for the first time I can do whatever I want. I may throw myself into another incredibly intense project but it will be of my choice, so I’m really excited about that.”

Balancing Two Careers

After the lengthy Tusk tour, Nicks began her journey on what has become an incredibly successful solo career, beginning with her smash debut Bella Donna in 1981. However balancing both sides of her career has been anything but easy.

“It has always been a pain. I made it work for 15 years but it really took its toll on me. Think about it, when a Fleetwood Mac tour was over, the other people would go to Hawaii or wherever and relax for two months, while I would immediately go in the studio to work on my album and go on tour with my thing. Then my band and those musicians would get to take a few months off, while I would go right back in the studio with Fleetwood Mac. I literally hadn’t had a break since 1975, until I actually quit Fleetwood Mac. Since the first day of 1975, I have put myself in the position of having two incredibly demanding jobs.”

The Voice

Having toured incessantly for more than 30 years, the question of keeping her voice in shape brought out an interesting response: “I have such a strange little voice that my songs really do become signatures,” she said. “I have problems with my voice if we play more than two nights in a row. If we do two nights in a row and then take a day off I’m okay, but three nights in a row really damages my vocal cords and they take a long time to heal. It’s just down to how many times a week I can do a concert. As soon as we cut that down my voice has gotten better.

Nicks also revealed that she had taken up another bad habit in the mid-80s; a habit especially detrimental to singers. “I also smoked for a while and I stopped now, so my falsetto’s coming back and my voice is going to be even stronger because of that.”

As to when and why she began smoking so relatively late in life, she humbly said with disappointment in her voice: “I didn’t start smoking until ten years ago in 1984. I didn’t smoke before that in my life. It was just something stupid I did while I was home in Arizona.

“I was in the middle of recording the Rock a Little album and I had changed producers so I had to wait for four months for Keith [Olsen] to finish his work with Joe Walsh. So I just had nothing to do and I was in ‘go’ mode, and everyone around me smoked and I just started smoking, totally stupid.”

She did keep her it from her fans as best she could, saying, “I never ever smoked onstage because I certainly didn’t want anyone to start smoking because they thought I was cool or whatever. I just never wanted any of my fans to think, ‘Oh, Stevie looks cool smoking that cigarette, I’m gonna start smoking.’ I don’t want to be a bad example for them. No way.”

Trappings of Stardom

While some music icons have been known to fall victim to the Elvis Syndrome of surrounding themselves with “yes-men” and hangers-on, Nicks keeps her circle small: “When I’m on the road I have my three girl singers who are really good friends, one of whom is my sister-in-law. I have a makeup artist and a wardrobe mistress who have been with me for ten years, and they’re really good friends too. I guess if you see us all coming towards you, you might think it’s an entourage, but the fact is all of them are very necessary in my career and more importantly in my life.”

Autobiography?

Since Stevie admits to keeping countless journals throughout her life, and has led a fascinating one at that, she seems to be tailor-made for a self-penned book of all things Stevie. She shrugs it off without any commitment one way or another: “I’m always being asked if I’m going to write my autobiography. I have all the material I would need to do that because I have a journal that goes all the way back to 1975, but it would be a big production for me. I would just have to drop out of sight for a year to do it and I’m not ready to do that. I don’t know if I will ever do it.

“That’s the kind of thing that I’m going to have to just spontaneously jump out of bed one day and say, ‘That’s it, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna rent a house in Switzerland on the top of a mountain and I’m taking my piano, all my journals and my typewriter, and nobody call me for a year.’”

Stevie Song Stories

“Rhiannon”

“Somehow the press turned me into the Great Dark Witch of the North because of that song. It didn’t ruin the song for me though because I know the real story. ‘Rhiannon’ really is straight out of the old Welsh Mabinogion, which goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. Rhiannon is goddess of steeds and maker of birds and her song is a song that takes away pain. When you hear her song, you close your eyes and you fall asleep, and when you wake up your pain or the danger is gone and  you see her three bird flying above. That’s the legend behind it and that’s what I think about when I’m singing that song. I don’t think about all that satanic black arts thing that a lot of people wanted to put on me, because it’s really not true at all.”

“Leather and Lace”

One of the biggest hits from Bella Donna is the hit duet between Stevie and former lover Don Henley of the Eagles. But the song has an interesting history that stemmed from the marriage of country legend Waylon Jennings and his wife Jessi Colter. Jennings, who passed away in 2002, was working on a duet album with Colter at the time, called Leather and Lace.

“That song was actually Waylon’s idea. He came up with the ‘Leather and Lace’ thing and he said, ‘I want a song that me and Jessi can sing together called ‘Leather and Lace.’ I said, ‘Cool, I can write that.’ I really loved that image of Leather and Lace, so I spent a lot of time on that song. Working with that whole philosophy of two people who were in the business together and how sometimes Waylon would be doing really good and then other times Jessi Colter would be doing really good and how you combine those egos in a relationship and be happy.

“So I finished the song and Waylon really loved it and I really loved it and Don Henley really loved it. But then Waylon and Jessi got in a fight and he said, ‘I’ll just record it myself.’ And I said, ‘No way. The only people who can record that song are either you and Jessi or me and Don. And if you’re not gonna record it than I am because I spent way too much time on the philosophy of this thing with both the man and woman’s point of view for you to just sing it by yourself. It just doesn’t work. So that’s why Don and I did it.”

Rare demo of Stevie and Don Henley doing “Leather and Lace”

“Rose Garden”

“That song started from something very personal. I wrote that song when I was 18. I hadn’t graduated from high school yet. I wrote it about a couple, two people. It stemmed from something I saw where a man walked out on his porch from his house and his wife was behind him, and I don’t know if he knew she was there or not, but walked out and the screen door slammed in her face. And she just stopped and the look on her face was like, ‘All these years I’ve been here and I’ve really tried to be the wonderful wife and I just can’t believe that you slammed the door in my face’ [laughs].

“And it just goes on from there: I have this big house and I have this fabulous garden and I have a great car, but you just slammed the door in my face so what do I really have?

“And as the years went by that song became like a scary premonition of myself, because I too have all the accruements that many people think would make them happy. I do have that big house with pillars standing all around, I do have that rose garden, and I do have men who love me, and I do have acres of land. I do have all that, but the one thing I don’t have is that family or those children. I do not have a five-year-old girl running around.

“That’s my one really big regret in my life, that I didn’t have any kids,” she admitted to me in 1994. “I don’t know, I could come off the road next year and maybe decide to adopt a baby or really go for it and have one myself, which would probably kill me, but who knows.”

The brilliant “Rose Garden” written when Stevie was only 18 years old.

“Just Like a Woman”

“I became friends with Bob Dylan when I went along with Bob and Tom [Petty] when they toured together for 32 days in Australia [in 1986]. So I watched and learned a whole lot about people and strategy and egos in watching those two guys share a mic and work out their music onstage. It was totally cool and I became friends with Bob at that time.

“Let me just say that the best way to get to know someone who is hard to get to know is to go on the road with them. When you’re on the road, even if they don’t want to get to know you, they have to get to know you, because you’re just there in their face every day [laughs]. So over those 32 days together, we became fairly cool acquaintances and I told him at that time that I was going to record ‘Just Like a Woman’ one day. I don’t think he believed me though, because when I called him to tell him that I had recorded it for this album, he was really happy to hear that. I think he was kind of knocked out and he agreed to play on it.

“I mean that song has always been one of my favorites. I think all women, who were of a certain age when that song was on the radio in the ‘60s, relate to that song. We all like to think we’re really tough, but we also have that fragile side to us as well and no other song really conveys that as well as Bob did with that song. The ‘Just Like a Woman’ lyric is just a great story. I would always sing along in harmony whenever I heard that song, so I always knew that I would one day record it myself.”

In one of those wonderful “Oops” stories, Stevie got one of the lyrics wrong: “Bob definitely took notice of that line: ‘with her amphetamines and her pills’ [laughs]. The thing is, I always thought it was ‘pills’ and not ‘pearls.’ So for all the years that I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan sing ‘Just Like a Woman,’ which is a lot of years, that’s what I always thought he was singing: ‘with her fog, her amphetamines and her pills.’ It never occurred to me that he was singing ‘pearls.’

So when he heard the song I had already done the final vocal because there was no way I was gonna play an unfinished track for Bob Dylan of one of his songs, so it was finished except for what he would add to it. [Dylan did play harmonica and guitar on the track]. So when we were listening to it and it got to that part, he said: ‘It’s pearls!’ And I said, ‘You’re kidding!’

“I was so embarrassed [laughs]. And I told him that this was the take that I did with the original band and I don’t think I can do the vocal like that again. I can’t match the sound of it. And he just said, ‘That’s okay’ [laughs]. The good news is that he really liked it, which made me happy, because if he hadn’t have liked it I wouldn’t have put it on the record.”

Stevie’s cover of the Bob Dylan classic “Just Like a Woman”

“Destiny”

Crying in the morning trying to be strong
Waiting for the spring to turn into the fall
Love don’t mean what it says at all
My destiny says that I’m destined to fall
*Fans will recognize this opening verse on her 1994 song “Destiny” is the exact same opening verse on her 1983 song “Enchanted.”

“I wrote ‘Destiny’ right after the Buckingham/Nicks album was released in 1973. We did try to record it on The Wild Heart album [released in 1983], which is where ‘Enchanted’ is. I remember that because Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits came in and did some stuff on it, but for some reason it just wasn’t what I wanted and it was such an old and dear song to me.

“I never think that because a song isn’t working for me at a certain time that it will never get done. I always figure that it’s just the people and that if I give a song to the right people, it’s gonna be cool. I never try to push something to make it happen and then end up with a version of my song that I hate for the rest of my life.

“I couldn’t cite any examples off the top of my head where I’ve taken a verse or a chorus of one song and put it into a new song, but I have done that before. The thing is that my songs are like a big long diary, so I don’t have a problem going back and stealing lyrics from myself because it’s still from me. It’s interesting to me that I would pull two or three lines from a song that’s already finished but had never been done.”

“Listen to the Rain”

“I think [Street Angel] is a really good summer driving album. Funny thing about ‘Listen to the Rain’ is that solo that sounds like a really high, intense guitar solo? It’s actually an electric violin. So next time you listen to it, check it out. This guy is amazing. His name is Joel Derouin, and he’s like Jimi Hendrix on the violin. He lives in Los Angeles and is just an incredible violinist.”

“Jane”

“I’m really glad you like that song and I appreciate that because ‘Jane’ is a real person and I was so inspired by this person that I just walked to the piano in Dallas, Texas, and wrote that song in about five or ten minutes.

“Jane Goodall is the woman who has done all the research on chimpanzees. She has really spent her life trying to protect them from being used like guinea pigs and all the other horrible things people do to these little guys. I met her in Dallas through a doctor friend of mine who takes care of my throat whenever I get bronchitis or pneumonia. Anyway, he introduced me to her and I took home some of her books and went back to the hotel. I read them and even just looking the photos of her when she was a little girl where she just had this real determined look on her face, where you can just see her say, ‘I’m really going to be devoted to something in my life.’

“That really struck a chord with me because I always felt that’s how I was too. In my pictures of when I was really little, I looked very determined. I could see that similarity in that both Jane and I seemed to want to devote our lives to something, and we both felt that somehow it was for the good of the planet.

“I like to feel that I don’t just write silly little stupid songs, but that I write songs that hopefully have a little bit of philosophy and a little bit of teaching. I like to reflect in my songs that ‘Yes, you had a really bad thing happen to you, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good experience and that it is preparing you for something even more wonderful and that it doesn’t mean that it will all work out for you in the end.’ So if people can listen to a song and think, ‘Well, if she got through it and she survived, maybe I can survive too.’ So my little teaching thing is somewhere in there.

“Jane, on the other hand, has spent her life trying to get people to understand that the things we have done to these animals is just wrong. I mean, when you take a little monkey and shoot it up full of AIDS and then stick him in a cage with just a little tiny hole that he can see out of, it’s really cruel. It’s like in the song, where I wrote: ‘You might as well put us both into prison,’ it’s just so hard to see that. And even though she has done so much for her cause, she is never going to feel that she has done enough. So I tried to write that song through her eyes and how sometimes how disappointing her fight for them was.

“When you meet her you quickly discover that she must have spent her life around animals and children, because she never makes a fast move in everything she does. Her grace is incredible and she has this really soft voice. She’s just so good. She’s a really good lady and I couldn’t help but be inspired by her to the point of wanting to share her with the world in my little way, because she really blows me away.”

“Jane” which Stevie wrote about longtime animal activist Jane Goodall

Memorable Gigs

Final Concert of First Solo Tour

Filmed for a video release, the final night of Stevie’s first solo tour turned out to be not only a brilliant performance but also an extremely emotional one that was all captured on tape. “It was at the Wilshire Theatre so it was at a magical place and it was an incredibly special night. We only did 12 shows on that tour over a two-week period in late 1981 and it was a very intense time.

“My very best friend Robin [Snyder Anderson] was in about the seventh month of her bout with leukemia that killed her a little while later. She had gotten out of the hospital to come with me on the road for that little tour and that night every song I was singing I was singing for her. And that she had gotten up the strength to get out of the hospital to come out and be with me on my first tour was just amazing.

Stevie with her lifelong best friend Robin Snyder Anderson, who passed away in 1982.

“She was my best friend from the time I was 14 or 15 until the day she died. I couldn’t even enjoy the success of Bella Donna at the time, because she told me that she had terminal leukemia on the same day that Bella Donna went to Number One on the charts. That meant nothing to me at that point. So a lot of that emotion that you see during that performance was all centered around Robin and what she meant to me.”

Stevie’s incredibly emotional performance of “Rhiannon” on the last night of her 1981 tour.

“The Dance” Concert

May 23, 1997. It was my 34th birthday. It was also the first time that the Buckingham/Nicks version of Fleetwood Mac would perform a concert together in 15 years. It was not only a nice musical present but a memory to last a lifetime.

I was one of a few hundred people invited to attend this much-anticipated reunion concert that would later be dubbed The Dance and be aired on MTV (and released on DVD and CD). The “secret location,” which we all had to be taken to by bus from a dirt parking lot in Burbank, California was actually a soundstage at the famous Warner Bros. studio.

Standing in line, sandwiched between some Beach Boy named Brian Wilson and some rocker chick named Courtney Love, there was a tangible anticipation in the air. Similar to the vibe I felt at the Eagles Hell Freezes Over reunion concert three years earlier at this same soundstage, one could almost feel like we were back in the ‘70s when FM and the Eagles ruled the Southern California airwaves. They were as Los Angeles as we all were, even if only a few of them were natives.

Opening with “The Chain,” the moody epic from Rumours, the band seemed to be in top form from the get-go, although Stevie gave the first indication that the performers were as nervous as some in the audience when she stepped to the spotlight for the second song of the evening, her #1 Rumours hit “Dreams.”

Mick kicked things in, the crowd yelled with recognition and Stevie began singing:
“Now here you go again, you say you want your….”

She forgot the lyric and the band came to a quick halt. Stevie apologized and after a moment of awkwardness the band started again, more applause.

“Now here you go again,” she sang, “you say you want your…” Nothing again, and this time Christine McVie shouted out that missing word: “FREEDOM!”

As the band crashed to a halt again, it was obvious that Stevie was having a pretty bad mental block. As she turned toward Lindsey in what seemed to be a need for support, her former partner walked across the stage and gave her a big reassuring hug. The crowd cheered louder than before and we were on to Take 3.

“Now here you go again, you say you want your freedom” and there it was. The momentary nerves were gone and Fleetwood Mac churned out 20 more songs, including Stevie’s Rumours outtake “Silver Springs,” and the night was a resounding success.

The Dance DVD and CD were released three months later and immediately topped the charts. The CD was on its way to selling more than five million albums in America alone (along with more than a million DVDs).

Stevie’s “Silver Springs” was left off the Rumours album and became a cult favorite before this 1997 version brought the lovely ballad into the mainstream.

Stevie Onstage

As one of rock’s most charismatic performers for more than 40 years, one has to wonder how she manages to get up for every single concert she does. It has to get robotic at times playing the same songs for so many years, doesn’t it? “Whenever I perform my songs I really do go back to the moment when I wrote the song and picture myself back there every time I sing it,” she maintained. “So I can always feel that same initial energy of creating the story that I’m telling, and I always feel that every single show is precious because every show can truly be the last one. I always try and remember that every time I walk off stage I may never walk on it again and that’s how I look at it.”

Playing Onstage

During the promotion of Street Angel, Stevie had been playing piano during some of her radio interviews, which led to the question as to whether she would start playing onstage. “I don’t think I have the guts to play piano or guitar onstage, because if I made a mistake I would just die. I can play well enough to write my songs, but it’s not sterling musicianship,” she said with a laugh. “‘Rhiannon’ is one that I can play on the piano in my sleep so maybe I’ll work that into a show some day. I have thought about doing it and I start rehearsals next week for this tour, so I may just bring that up and see what people think.”

Stevie’s solo rendition of “Rhiannon” in 1994.
Happy Byrd-day, Roger McGuinn

Happy Byrd-day, Roger McGuinn

By Steven P. Wheeler

Roger McGuinn with his iconic 12-string Rickenbacker during a Byrds recording session.

Today, we celebrate the 77th birthday of one of rock’s most influential figures. As the founder, lead vocalist and lead guitarist of the seminal Sixties’ band The Byrds, Roger McGuinn helped bring together the polar opposite musical camps of folk and rock, and his place in the annals of music history are cemented in the public consciousness forever.

In 1991, two months after The Byrds—McGuinn, David Crosby, Chris Hillman, Gene Clark and Michael Clarke—were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, I spoke with this soft-spoken rock legend about his illustrious past and his then-current album Back From Rio, which was his first album in nearly ten years.

Roger McGuinn at the time of his hit 1991 album, Back From Rio.

With his granny shades, his jangling guitar sounds and his vocal prowess, McGuinn led The Byrds through a phenomenal evolution from folk-rock to psychedelia to country-rock with equal success. Although they may be best remembered for their Sixties’ classics “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “Eight Miles High” and “So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star,” The Byrds also served as mainstream mouthpieces for Bob Dylan by bringing his songs and lyrical attitudes to the mainstream via the bourgeoning world of rock. Their renditions of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “My Back Pages” created a musical stew that would help change the course of popular music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYLKlgalHMs
McGuinn says of The Byrds first single and classic hit: “I was the only one in the band who actually played on that track. Our producer Terry Melcher brought in his A-Team session guys: Leon Russell [keyboards], Hal Blaine [drums], Jerry Cole [rhythm guitar] and Larry Knechtel [bass] to play with me.”

When it comes to the magical ingredient that The Byrds possessed, McGuinn said: “I don’t know what it was that made The Byrds so special. I think it was just a sense of wonder and a sense of innocence. We were trying to change musical directions all the time. Basically because I wanted to avoid being labeled as any one thing. We were allowed to get away with a lot commercially. We weren’t forced by the record label to do anything that they thought would be commercial, whereas that kind of liberal attitude doesn’t really prevail in the business today.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCcFyR0MITQ

The Folk & Rock Wars

Before The Byrds, the worlds of folk and rock may have well been existing in entirely different universes, according to the Chicago-born musician: “Before the Sixties, there was a tremendous gulf between folk and rock. I think what we did kind of brought them together,” McGuinn explained. “People in the folk circles were really snobs about electric music. So much so that they booed Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival when he went electric, and I remember that kind of thinking being very prevalent. But I never thought that electric instruments were evil or anything.

“It just kind of happened naturally, it’s not really something that anybody put a whole lot of thought into. We were folk singers who were influenced by The Beatles. We loved The Beatles. I think I was truly one of the first people in the folk circles to really pick up on The Beatles and telling everyone that ‘Hey, this is really good stuff.’ But these folkies would be like, ‘No, that’s rock & roll, forget about it.’ But because we were so steeped in the folk tradition, what we did came out differently than what The Beatles were doing.”

The Story of “Eight Miles High”

“I remember the origin of that song very vividly. The inspiration for it was that we had just done a tour of England and we had a tough time over there because the press didn’t like us, because the promoter had billed us as ‘America’s answer to the Beatles’ and that kind of rubbed everybody the wrong way. And we weren’t that good actually, kind of out of tune [laughs].

“So we were feeling pretty bad and wrote a song about the tour. The ‘eight miles high’ was nothing but the airplane ride; the altitude, flying at 40,000 feet. Musically, the inspiration was from John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar. We had been listening to a lot of their records at the time, so when we were recording it in the studio I was actively trying to do a tribute to Coltrane in the instrumental break of that song.

“We ran into [censorship] in 1968 when a radio tip sheet came out and was saying that ‘Eight Miles High’ was a drug song, when it actually it wasn’t. It was about airplane ride. And that really knocked The Byrds out of business for a while. Censorship is a really destructive thing and it smacks of McCarthyism. I just don’t like that kind of mentality.”

“My guitar influences were Elvis’ guitarist James Burton, and Chet Atkins, and blues guys like B.B. King. But I also went to the Old Town School of Folk Music [in his hometown of Chicago]; that’s where I learned to fingerpick, and that’s what you’re hearing from me, that rolling finger picking style. It carries over from my folk banjo and guitar picking styles.

The Byrds

During their turbulent eight-year existence from 1965-73, McGuinn was the only constant as band members came and went and each new musical direction continued to confound critics and fans alike. And while the band’s leader is understandably proud of the group’s legacy, there wasn’t much time spent thinking about The Byrds’ impact on rock’s future. “We didn’t have time to think about stuff like that. I’m really pleased that the music of The Byrds has stood up over the years, but we never really thought about the future much back in those days. Looking back on it now, yeah, it’s really easy to assimilate the whole thing of what The Byrds did, and it’s kind of a neat thing.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WXy-h5scjk

Surprisingly, McGuinn told me that, in hindsight, he wishes that he would have closed the nest much sooner than he actually did. “We all had different ideas of what the band was. Sometimes that worked for us and produced a good kind of tension, but eventually it would become too much pressure and would crack us up. That’s basically what happened.

“I kind of wish I had broken the band up earlier,” he said candidly, “but at the time it was like being the owner of a corner store. It’s a business and you do whatever you can to keep it going. It was kind of lonely when all the guys that I had started the band with were gone and I had to bring in new people. The only saving grace was Clarence White, because I really enjoyed working with him. He was just a wonderful friend and an excellent guitar player.

“I just kind of think that if I had come out with some of the later things as a solo effort—because it was all basically my stuff—it would have been a better start on a solo career.”

The Post-Byrds Era

Between 1973-77, McGuinn released five solo albums that did not do well, so he grabbed two of his former Byrd-mates—Chris Hillman and Gene Clark—and formed McGuinn, Clark & Hillman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9yBJsogcqg
“We did three albums on Capitol Records. We had a hit with the first one, a song I wrote called ‘Don’t You Write Her Off Like That.’ It was a Top 40 hit and we had a pretty good run. We got a lot of exposure on TV and in the press, and it sold a lot of records.

The Troubadour Years

Following the demise of McGuinn, Clark & Hillman in 1981, McGuinn decided to stop making records and adopt the lifestyle of a traveling minstrel. “That was when I decided to take it easy and do the folk thing for a while,” he said. “Just go around like a troubadour with a guitar and play clubs and theaters by myself. The idea came from Ramblin’ Jack Elliot who told me that he had so much fun barnstorming the country in a Land Rover. It sounded so romantic, like a Hemingway trip, so I decided to do that and I absolutely loved it.

“It gave me a tremendous sense of freedom. I was making plenty of money. I had everything I wanted. We had a really good standard of living and I wasn’t beholding to any corporations and didn’t have to do anything that I didn’t want to do.”

Back From Rio

By the dawn of the Nineties, McGuinn decided the time was right to enter the recording studio for his first album in nearly a decade, Back From Rio. “I was having so much fun traveling around and playing solo gigs, I didn’t pursue another record deal. I didn’t put a demo together or anything. But by the end of the Eighties, the musical climate was getting warmer for the kind of music I do, it just kind of fell together. It wasn’t anything I was actively pursuing.”

And in a case of what goes around comes around, Byrds’ devotee Tom Petty joined creative forces with his former mentor on the album’s first single “King of the Hill,” which the two wrote and sang together. “I wrote that song with Petty in Europe when we were on tour together. It was during the Dylan/Petty Tour, and I was opening for them. We had a day off in Sweden and I had this tune and I went up to his room and we came up with the words after jamming with it. It came together really quick.”

When I mention to McGuinn that after playing his new album for a friend, their response was: “Good album, but that guy is trying too hard to sound like Tom Petty,” he laughed at the irony. “That’s funny. That does make me laugh. It’s just amazing, isn’t it [laughs]. But I get it. I remember when I first got into John Coltrane, I didn’t know for years that Dexter Gordon had come first and that Coltrane had been inspired by Dexter Gordon.”

Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue

An interesting sidenote that cropped up during my talk with McGuinn had to do with his being a part of Bob Dylan’s infamous Rolling Thunder Revue Tour in 1975-76. This is especially of interest today in light of the new Martin Scorsese documentary about that tour that was just released.

McGuinn, who was part of both legs of the carnival-like tour, recalls it all with a wry smile and boyish enthusiasm: “It was even wilder and crazier than Larry Sloman wrote in his book [On the Road with Bob Dylan: Rolling with Thunder]. I mean, he walked around around with a tape recorder but he only got bits and pieces of what was really going on. Boy, it was great. It was seriously the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF3mQG7AjLU
McGuinn and Dylan onstage during the infamous Rolling Thunder Revue.

“It was wild. Imagine sitting on a bus with Joni Mitchell on one side and Joan Baez on the other,” he continued. “We were all playing guitars together and talking about things. It was truly amazing. It was just such a flawless tour. It was closer to vaudeville than anything I’d ever seen.”

The Sixties in Retrospect

Decades after the Sixties, one has to wonder if that whole era has been blown out of proportion by a media longing for that magic again. McGuinn, who was a focal point of that musical wonderland, won’t have any of that: “It’s not a myth,” he maintained. “We really did have a strong feeling that we could help make the world a better place through our music. We could educate people and really get together a grass roots movement of people who wanted to try and stop wars or stop big business from polluting and all of those kinds of things.”

Of course, he does admit in hindsight: “It was certainly a very naïve approach to life and some good social changes did come out of all of that, but it was not with the earth-shaking global impact that we had hoped for.”

No matter their intent or ultimate disappointment, Roger McGuinn was a major force in the evolution of rock music. Yet someone who remains modest about his artistic impact, always preferring to let his 12-string Rickenbacker do all his talking for him. We are lucky to still have him as he continues to perform to this very day.

Happy 77th, Roger. You remain a true original whose shadow over the rock world is a large one indeed.

25 Years Ago Today: Dancing Naked with John Mellencamp

25 Years Ago Today: Dancing Naked with John Mellencamp

By Steven P. Wheeler

Back in May of 1994, I sat down with one of rock’s biggest stars of the era and a true legend today, John Mellencamp, to discuss his then-current album Dance Naked, which was released 25 years ago today, June 21. Featuring the hit single, a cover of Van Morrison’s classic “Wild Night,” Dance Naked would become the ninth consecutive platinum album by a man who literally dominated MTV and FM rock radio throughout the Eighties and Nineties.

So I dusted off my old tape of my interview with the man who we first knew as Johnny Cougar, then John Cougar, then John Cougar Mellencamp (with 1983’s brilliant Uh-Huh album), before finally leaving the “Cougar” behind for good in 1991 with the platinum hit album, Whenever We Wanted. But more on that later…

For many rock fans like myself, the Eighties were a time of transition from radio to a new visual outlet called MTV. Not to mention a sea of concerts for various causes, including Live Aid and Farm Aid (which Mellencamp started with friends Willie Nelson and Neil Young after an off-the-cuff onstage comment from Bob Dylan at the previous Live Aid). And John Mellencamp was at the forefront of this changing tide.

Throughout the Eighties and Nineties, John Mellencamp would establish himself as one of rock’s most prominent and often controversial voices. But the road to notoriety was a long one indeed for the often ornery artist, whose own pseudonym for his producer duties was tellingly Little Bastard. And there were some traces of that reputation that seeped through during our lengthy conversation.

Teenage Husband & Father

Back in the mid-Seventies, a young John Mellencamp had visions of making it as a recording artist in the music industry, which was no easy feat for a teenage husband and father working odd jobs in the wilds of Indiana. He might as well have been in India.

In those days he was no different than millions of other musicians trying to get noticed while balancing the realities of life. Or as he would later write in his 1985 hit single “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.”: “Pipe dreams in their heads and very little money in their hands.”

“I don’t feel like I matured any quicker or any slower than anybody else,” he said in response to my question about the impact of marriage and fatherhood at such a young age. “And as far as following any kind of rock & roll dream, initially, I just wanted to make a record. I didn’t really have any illusions of grandeur or any dream about what I should become or what I shouldn’t become. I just had a lot of determination. Hell, I never planned anything in my life.”

Whatever It Takes

Playing by the usual rules of the music business in those days, Mellencamp played the game that the booming industry had established by the Seventies: “I had been in bands for a long time, singing in bars and fraternities, but I remembered thinking at the time that being ‘discovered’ was kind of a joke,” said the longtime heartland resident. “You had to go out and seek them, they weren’t going to come and seek you out.

“So I took every cent I had, sold a bunch of stuff, sold a lot of my record collection, sold a lot of equipment that I had gathered up over the years and raised a couple of thousand bucks and made a demo tape.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

Of course, this was real life and not some Hollywood movie. Success wasn’t sitting around waiting for this small town boy to make his mark on the music world. “I sent that tape out to different managers and record companies, and it was rejected worldwide,” he says, without a hint of exaggeration. “I mean, hundreds and hundreds of rejections came in, and I had worked that tape in all different manners for like a year.”

John Mellencamp turned Johnny Cougar in 1976.

Lowering his goals to perhaps jumpstart his dreams, Mellencamp and his wife ventured across state lines on a day that ultimately changed his life forever. “I decided to go down to small record label down in Louisville, Kentucky, with that tape. I remember physically driving down there that day. And I remember being told that they didn’t think that I was right for their label, and I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, I can’t even get fuckin’ signed to a little local label in Louisville, Kentucky’.”

Despondent over that soul-crushing trip in 1975, Mellencamp recalled: “So I was driving home with my first wife, Priscilla (their 11-year marriage would end in 1981), and I thought I had better start re-thinking what I was gonna do. But when I got home, the phone rang and it was [David Bowie’s manager] Tony DeFries asking me to come to New York, and I said, ‘Hell, I was just in New York and I can’t afford to come again,’ so he offered to pay for a plane ticket.

“I realized that was the whole key,” he said with a laugh. “When they start paying for you to do things, you might have something happening.”

Introducing Johnny Cougar

After meeting DeFries, things moved quickly. Not unlike Greg Brady being told that he would now be named “Johnny Bravo” in that memorable episode of The Brady Bunch, DeFries landed Mellencamp a record deal with MCA Records, although he failed to mention to the young kid from Indiana that he also now had a stage name: Johnny Cougar.

“DeFries started handing me this stuff like, ‘Well, you’re either gonna be Johnny Cougar or we’re not gonna release the record.’ Of course, I had already shot my mouth off to everybody at home, telling them that I had an album coming out and everybody’s going, ‘Sure, sure, sure.’ So I kind of had to get right with the program; I had to kind of get my mind right and get into the Tony DeFries mode of thinking.”

That mode of thinking resulted in a 1976 debut album that died without a trace. Chestnut Street Incident featured Johnny Cougar’s versions of such rock classics as Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” and The Doors’ “Twentieth Century Fox.”

Johnny Cougar’s cover of The Doors’ “Twentieth Century Fox” from his ill-fated 1976 debut.

For someone who grew to become one of America’s greatest songwriters, there was no trace of that to be found on his debut album, which was only half filled with originals. Looking back, Mellencamp freely admits that he had no idea what he was doing artistically on that first recording.

“I had only written a handful of songs when I got my first record deal,” he noted. “In terms of songwriting, I definitely grew up in public. When I made that first record, I just played songs that I liked. That album really had no direction. I was completely lost about what it was that John Mellencamp was supposed to be doing on a record. My dream, or my plan, hadn’t gone that far because my initial quest was just to get a record deal, so once I got that record deal I didn’t quite know what to do with it.”

Phase Two Begins

Not surprisingly, after the failure of his first album, MCA dropped the young artist like a rock, as did DeFries. The following year in 1977, Mellencamp left Seymour, Indiana for Bloomington and quickly formed the nucleus of a band he called the Zone (featuring his longtime guitarists Mike Wanchic and Larry Crane). Songwriting also became a priority and soon afterwards he hooked up with Rod Stewart’s manager Billy Gaff, who also happened to have his own record label, Riva.

The 1978 album, A Biography, was recorded in London, but was only released in the UK and in Australia. Ironically, his song “I Need a Lover” became a Top Ten hit Down Under. With this growing confidence came his 1979 album simply titled John Cougar (no more Johnny), which would get a stateside release and also feature “I Need a Lover,” which became his first American Top 40 hit. Buoyed by much stronger material from Mellencamp’s pen, the album would go Gold.

But the best was yet to come when a young female rocker named Pat Benatar recorded “I Need a Lover” as the first single for her monster debut album, In the Heat of the Night.

Rookie rocker Pat Benatar recorded Mellencamp’s first American hit, “I Need a Lover.”

“Quite honestly, I was happy that Pat Benatar had a hit record with ‘I Need a Lover.’ I knew that it couldn’t do anything but help me, and that song was also a hit in Australia for me. So that song—regardless of what people think of it or what I may think of it today—really helped me considerably at that point in my career. I mean, Pat was one of the biggest breaking female artists at that time, so I was happy with any type of success I could get.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

One Step Up, Two Steps Back

After extensive touring helped build a healthy core of fans for the newly christened John Cougar, the singer-songwriter returned to the studio with legendary guitarist/producer Steve Cropper to work on the all-important follow-up effort after his first taste of success. However Mellencamp says that the title of his 1980 album Nothin’ Matters and What If It Did, pretty much summed up his feelings at the time.

“I wasn’t particularly interested in having a career in the music business at that time,” he said candidly. “I had just met a girl, and I wasn’t too involved with the making of that record. I was either really pissed off or really jubilant during that time.”

Although the album contained two Top 40 hits, “Ain’t Even Done with the Night” and “This Time,” and eventually went platinum, Mellencamp’s ongoing distaste for the business of music came through loud and clear on the sarcastic “Cheap Shot,” which closed the album:

The record company’s going out of business
They’re pricing records too damn high
The boys in the band can use some assistance
Get a daytime job to get by

John Cougar’s 1980 hit, “Ain’t Even Done with the Night.”

The sentiments of “Cheap Shot” aren’t a whole lot different than how the industry veteran feels today: “I have always had a love/hate relationship with the record company; more hate than love,” he smirks. “I wrote that song basically to tell those people to kiss my ass. Young guys tend to do that, ya know.”

Superstardom Comes Knockin’

With two consecutive gold albums now on his resume, and new powerhouse drummer Kenny Aronoff joining the band, the small town rocker began work on his next album, but no one could have predicted what happened next. In fact, when Mellencamp delivered American Fool to his record company in 1982, the suits rejected it.

“The fuckin’ record company hated that album. They hated it!! They wanted ‘Nothin’ Matters’ to continue, and they wanted me to become like Neil Diamond or what that Michael Bolton guy is today. That’s how Mercury Records saw me at the time.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

Standing firm against the powers-that-be, Mellencamp and the naysayers watched American Fool become the Number One Album in America, selling five million copies, on the strength of three hit singles—”Hurts So Good,” “Hand to Hold On To” and a little ditty about “Jack & Diane.”

“Yeah, I was surprised by the success of that record,” he told me. “We had two Top Ten singles and a Number One album at the same time. John Lennon, Michael Jackson and I are the only people that have accomplished that.

“We were just happier during the making of that record. We were a big bar band at the time, playing every club in the world. It was black leather jackets, motorcycles, tattoos, earrings, and that whole bit.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

Tale of a Ditty

The story behind Mellencamp’s only chart-topping hit “Jack & Diane” is the tale of a song that almost never happened. It was guest guitarist Mick Ronson of David Bowie fame who actually saved the song from the dust bin of history.

“I had run into Mick Ronson in New York and he said that he wanted to come down and play on my album. So he came down to Miami, where we were recording American Fool. We had already recorded ‘Jack & Diane’ and it was ready to go in the shit can, because I just didn’t like the way it sounded and I didn’t really care for the song.

“Ronson had previously heard the tape in his apartment and he asked me if we were going to do anything with this ‘Jack & Diane’ song, and I said, ‘Well, it’s really not working for me.’ So he says, ‘Well, Johnny, you need to put some baby rattles on it.’ And I thought, ‘Baby rattles? What the fuck’s this guy talkin’ about?’

Mick Ronson pictured with David Bowie during their Ziggy Stardust period.

“So a couple of days later in the studio, Ronson kept asking to work on this ‘Jack & Diane’ song, and I kept telling him to forget it and to work on something else. So one night when we finished working on what I wanted to work on, he said, ‘Let’s work on this ‘Jack & Diane’ song [laughs].’

“I finally said, ‘Alright, but the middle section, the bridge section of the song isn’t happening at all.’ So what Ronson did was he punched out all the guitars and took them totally out of the mix. So you had this little choir singing, ‘Let it rock, let it roll, let the bible belt save your soul,’ and it sounded great. Then we just beefed up the drums.

“So, yeah, Ronson really turned ‘Jack & Diane’ around by eliminating the guitars in the middle bridge part and the ‘let it rock, let it roll’ part became this male choir, kind of a cheerleading section. And that’s the story of how Mick Ronson saved ‘Jack & Diane’.”

Flexing Some Muscle

With the blockbuster success of American Fool, Mellencamp felt in control of his artistic career for the first time in his life. And the follow-up, 1983’s Uh-Huh album, would be the first to feature his given name, although “Cougar” was still there for the time being.

“I was just tired of fuckin’ around with the ‘Johnny Cougar’ business, it had been an albatross around my neck for years,” he responded when I asked about why he kept his stage name after his initial success. “So I went to the record company and said, ‘Look, I know you guys have spent a lot of dough on this Cougar business but I want my real name on this album.’ They had no problem with it; they were pretty accommodating. It wasn’t any big independence thing, it was just something that should have been done long before that and I just didn’t do it.”

The compromise was to also keep the Cougar branding for the Uh-Huh album, but adding his given name to an album that featured much more personal songs made sense. In fact the first side of that album—”Crumblin’ Down,” “Pink Houses,” “The Authority Song” and “Warmer Place to Sleep”—remains of the greatest album sides in rock music. It was truly as if the Rolling Stones had been transplanted to America’s heartland.

Bolstered by three hit singles, including two more Top Ten hits—the angry “Crumblin’ Down” and the classic tale of small town life “Pink Houses”—Uh-Huh was the first album in which the singer-songwriter put together an entire album with no filler.

But don’t go thinking that Mellencamp has any idea what the magical formula for a hit song is. “As far as ‘hits’ go, I usually don’t start thinking about hit records until the record company gets involved,” he laughs, “because that’s always their first question: ‘How many hits do you got on it?’

“They don’t give a shit if the album’s any good or not, they only care about the two songs that they can sell to radio. It’s really quite an unnerving question to be asked after you’ve made an album because, to me, it really cheapens the whole album-making process.”

Oops!

Although Mellencamp scored nine consecutive platinum albums over the course of 15 years at the time of our interview, the sales of his last four million-sellers were down in comparison to the previous four albums, which had sold between three and five million each. In response, Mellencamp bristled at my question about record sales, with his easy-going demeanor showing signs of annoyance.

“I don’t understand these questions about sales, I don’t relate to them. I don’t understand what the fuck difference it makes. It’s nice to sell records, but, to me, the quality of music has maintained over the years.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
Performing “What If I Came Knocking” from 1993’s Human Wheels album.

“It’s not like I went out and made a shitty record, although Whenever We Wanted probably wasn’t the greatest record. Big Daddy was a good record and I think Human Wheels is the best record I ever made. Even Paul Simon went through a period where he didn’t even sell 150,000 records, and then he makes Graceland in the late Eighties.

“Younger people want to have their own music, and I think that’s the way it should be,” he maintained. “But I don’t think my work has diminished in any fashion. I also think we sold more than three million copies with the last few records, but that’s not even the fuckin’ point. It doesn’t matter.

“The point is that I’m making the records that I want to make, I’m doing it at a pace that I want to do it, and I’ve always maintained that if people want to buy my records that’s great, and if they don’t that’s okay, too, because I do this now because I want to. Not because I have to or I need the money or because I feel like I have to prove something to somebody.”

Art vs. Commercialism

Taking a purely artistic road has its pitfalls for any recording artist. Some fans want to hear the same thing over and over, not unlike the record labels who like targeting a specific market. Artists from Dylan to U2 have all had to deal with this dichotomy throughout their career, and Mellencamp the artist is no exception.

“I don’t mean to sound jaded or mean-spirited,” he said after voicing his strong opinion, “but I’m not looking for a commercial bonanza. I need to make records that are entertaining to me, and to the guys in the band, things that are challenging to us.

“The thing is, I could probably go out and make a very commercial record if I wanted to, drawing on what’s going on today and the experience I’ve gained over the last 20 years in the music business,” he noted, without a hint of cockiness.

“As a matter of fact, I feel like you, Steve Wheeler, and I could go in the studio with you as the lead vocalist and we could probably cut a hit record, but it just depends on whether you want to be that corny or not. Where’s the line that a guy is willing to cross.”

“Radio has become a very throwaway type of situation today. I mean, Janet Jackson has had millions of hit records and I can’t name one of them to you, but I hear them all the time. The music on the radio today is more like elevator music.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

“It’s like my song, ‘Biege to Biege’ says. Songs have to be beige, they have to fit into a very generic format so that these people can sell their advertising. I don’t feel compelled to make a beige record in order to fit into some Program Director’s format. If it happens by accident, that’s fine, but I don’t feel that I should plan it out or calculate it. Those types of things are better left for people like Bryan Adams or Jon Bon Jovi. I’m not particularly interested in that.”

Don’t Call Him a Spokesman

Beginning in 1983, with the popularity of “Pink Houses,” the media began labeling Mellencamp as a spokesman of sorts for those living in middle America’s heartland. This would become even more enhanced with 1985’s monster hit Scarecrow, which featured such hits as “Small Town” and the powerful musical statements targeting the plight of American farmers in “Rain on the Scarecrow” and “The Face of the Nation.”

This massive commercial success would continue with 1987’s The Lonesome Jubilee with classic songs like “Check It Out,” “Paper in Fire” and the fond look back at growing up in rural America on the intoxicating “Cherry Bomb.”

But Mellencamp downplays the media’s attempt to bring him into the role of Spokesman for the Heartland. “I never felt that it was my job to hang on a cross for anybody or to articulate how any particular sector of the country felt,” he explained. “I can only write about what I know about or what I aspire to be. When people did ask me about it, I just kind of laughed it off. I really didn’t pay that much attention to it.”

Wouldn’t that fly in the face of being one of the founders of the long-running benefit concert series known as Farm Aid, which continues to raise awareness and money for American farmers? The summer concert series began in 1985 and has continued for the 33 years with only two exceptions in 1988 and 1991, and has raised more than $50 million in the process.

Not so, says Mellencamp, who is still on the Farm Aid Board of Directors to this day, maintaining that the intent behind Farm Aid was not some naïve or idealistic belief that they would change the world. 

“Farm Aid was put together only to raise awareness. I always knew that we were never going to change any political or social policies, and we didn’t,” he explained. “Back in the Sixties, it took an entire generation of people fighting in the streets to end a war. That’s the kind of participation that it takes to change social policy or to change anything that’s going awry in this country.

“The idea that I could write a song or that Woody Guthrie could write a song that could change political policy is really nonsense. So the idea that writing a song or having a concert is going to do much more than entertain people and maybe raise a few dollars is really silly.”

John Cougar Mellencamp performing in 1985.

“I don’t mean to sound disgruntled or negative, it’s just the reality of the situation. If you look at anything that happened during the Eighties, whether it’s Hands Across America or Farm Aid or Live Aid or This-Aid or That-Aid, I don’t really think any of them made that much of a significant impact on the powers that be.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

Final Thoughts

Since my interview with John a quarter of a century ago, the singer-songwriter has not slowed down in the recording studio, having released 11 more albums. Mellencamp, like Robert Plant, continues to explore new artistic territory when most of his contemporaries have either retired or tour the world resting on their laurels. And that is the essence of a true artist.

A few years ago in 2015, Bob Dylan was honored as MusiCares’ Person of the Year and the ceremony included Mellencamp and other artists performing songs from Dylan’s legendary catalog. And during his acceptance speech, Dylan said: “And like my friend John Mellencamp would sing, ‘one day you get sick and you don’t get better.’ That’s from a song of his called ‘Longest Days.’ It’s one of the better songs of the last few years, actually. I ain’t lying.”

Mellencamp said that this endorsement from The Bard himself was worth more than 10 Grammys. And after a career that now spans more than 40 years, John Mellencamp can indeed be mentioned in the same breath as the greatest American songwriters to have ever picked up a guitar and put a pen to paper. We are lucky he is still around 67 years on.