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.
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).
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.”
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.
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.
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.
(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.”
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.
“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.
“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.’
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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.
“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.”
“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 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.”