Nicks, Stevie (1948—)

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Nicks, Stevie (1948—)

American rock singer and composer who gained fame with the singing group Fleetwood Mac. Born Stephanie Lynn Nicks on May 26, 1948, in Phoenix, Arizona; first of two children of Jess Nicks and Barbara Nicks; married Kim Anderson (divorced).

Taught to sing by her grandfather and was appearing with him informally as early as age four; formed first band in high school and began performing professionally in college, opening in San Francisco rock clubs for such acts as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix (mid-1960s); released one unsuccessful album with co-performer and lover Lindsay Buckingham before the two were asked to join Fleetwood Mac; became one of the band's two lead singers; performed with the band throughout its active life of some 20 years, with several songs written by her among the band's biggest hits; has also pursued a solo career as a songwriter and performer, her work noted for its mystical overtones and complex lyrics.

Stevie Nicks remembers how hard it was making a living in the music business, and how easy it was to accept the offer that brought her to the top of that quixotic industry. She had been working as a waitress for $1.50 an hour, plus tips. After spending the last of her savings to record an album with her boyfriend Lindsay Buckingham that went nowhere, the opportunity came to join Fleetwood Mac. "I think we should definitely do this because we could be dead by next year because of lack of food," Stevie remembers telling Lindsay.

The first of two children born to Jess and Barbara Nicks on May 26, 1948, in Phoenix, Arizona, little Stephanie Lynn Nicks had grown up affluent in New Mexico, Utah, and Texas as her father's successful career as a business executive sent the family all over the Southwest before they finally settled in San Francisco in the early 1960s. Stevie (who had trouble pronouncing "Stephanie" as a youngster and had adopted the more easily pronounced nickname) credits her grandfather, Aaron Jess Nicks, for an early love of music-making. A.J., a country and western singer, was so impressed with his granddaughter's voice that he taught her the guitar and tried to convince her parents to let him form an act with her—a proposal that was swiftly rejected. Even so, Stevie would often accompany her grandfather to local clubs, standing on tables to sing. While A.J. encouraged Stevie's musical talent, it was Barbara Nicks who provided the mystical context of the songs her daughter would later write and perform. Barbara's enthusiasm for reading fairy tales and fantasy stories instilled in Stevie an attraction for the occult. "I love the mysterious, the fantastic," Nicks once told a journalist. "I like to look at things otherworldly and say, 'I wonder what goes on in there?'"

Stevie was writing her own songs by the time she was in high school in San Francisco and had formed her own band, which she called The Changing Times, to perform at school functions. During her senior year, she met and fell in love with Lindsay Buckingham, with whom she would form a long-standing romantic and musical partnership. Stevie and Lindsay, with two other friends from school, began performing professionally as the Fritz Raybyne Memorial Band, which survived even after Stevie graduated from high school, while Lindsay, a junior at the time she met him, still had a year left at Menlo-Atherton High. Nicks commuted from San Jose State University, where she had enrolled, to join the others for rehearsals and for performances in the Bay Area. The band had the good fortune to come into its own when San Francisco was home to such pioneering performers as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin , Creedence Clearwater Revival, and The Mamas and the Papas (which included Cass Elliot and Michelle Phillips ). Fritz opened for all of them at such legendary venues as the Fillmore and the Hungry I. Nicks was particularly fascinated with Joplin. "I was absolutely glued to her," Stevie once said, remembering the visceral connection between Joplin and her audiences. "It was there I learned a lot of what I do onstage."

She learned her lessons well; so much so that by 1970, the male members of Fritz were growing resentful of the fact that their slim, blonde-haired lead singer was getting all the attention. The resulting tensions led to the band's breakup in 1971, although Stevie and Lindsay continued their relationship and she dropped out of San Jose State to move to Los Angeles, much to her parents' disapproval. Two years later, after the couple had signed a deal with Polydor Records and released what came to be known as The Buckingham-Nicks Album, Stevie found the waitressing job. She had spent her last $100 on a blouse to wear for the cover photograph of the album (which, as it turned out, was discarded in favor of a topless shot), but the sales figures were so dismal that Stevie and Lindsay were forced to give up their apartment and move in with a friend. Her parents would only offer help, they said, if Stevie would move back to San Jose and return to school. "I'd get some money from them here and there. But … if I was going to be here in L.A. doing my own trip, I was going to have to do it on my own," said Nicks. Then, along came Mick Fleetwood.

Fleetwood had been one of the three founding members of the English band Fleetwood Mac, with guitarist Peter Green and bass player John McVie, in 1968. All three had met while playing for John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. In 1974, as Fleetwood Mac was preparing to record its first album in America, Fleetwood happened to visit the studio where Stevie and Lindsay had recorded their disastrously received record the year before. When the studio owner played the record as a demonstration of the studio's acoustics, Fleetwood found himself listening more to the music itself, particularly to Buckingham's guitar work. The fact that Fleetwood only accepted Stevie to induce Buckingham to join the band led to some initial tension, but it soon became obvious that Stevie's voice blended perfectly with the band's other "girl" singer, Christine McVie (then John's wife), to help form the distinctive sound of the band that became one of rock's most influential and copied groups for two decades.

The band was famous for its smooth harmonies and tight instrumentation, but as had happened with her old band Fritz, it was Stevie Nicks who got a lot of the attention. Dressed in swirling capes, long skirts and boots, and with her flowing dark blonde hair, she was a magnet for viewers to fix on. And like her idol Janis Joplin, Stevie seemed to connect with the audience on a level much deeper than the music, although the songs she contributed to the band's repertoire were a big reason for its success. Indeed, Nicks gave the band its only song to reach #1 in America, "Dreams," and one of its most durable hits with 1975's "Rhiannon," a song she had written two years earlier based on a story drawn from Welsh folklore. She offered the song as soon as she and Buckingham were hired, after listening to every previous album the band had recorded. "I sat in my room and listened to all of them to try and figure out if I could capture any theme or anything," Nicks once recalled. "And what I came up with was the word mystical—that there is something mystical that went … through all [the band's members]." "Rhiannon" was thoroughly infused with just that quality to such an extent that fans are still trying to decode its cryptic lyrics, which include:

She is like a cat in the dark
And then she is the darkness

Stevie herself has never fully explained her meaning, saying only, "Everything I write comes from reality, and then I throw a little fairy dust over it."

Fleetwood Mac's durability during the 1970s and 1980s was due in large part to the intimacy among its members, although the romantic complications that sometimes developed threatened to upset the delicate balance that held the band together. One band member was fired after it was discovered he was having an affair with Mick Fleetwood's wife; another left after he and Christine McVie became lovers (John and Christine later divorced); and Stevie and Lindsay Buckingham ended their own relationship of ten years just as the band's landmark Rumours album was released in 1977, a project that all would later admit had been almost derailed several times by the band's internal stresses. It was a tribute to the band's cohesion that neither Stevie, Lindsay, John nor Christine, left the group after their mutual breakups. "What would we have done?" Nicks wondered aloud some years after the end of the affair. "Sat around L.A. and tried to start new bands? Nobody wanted to do that. We liked touring. We liked making money, and we liked being around a band. It was just, 'grit your teeth and bear it.'" Still, when Mick Fleetwood rejected her song "Silver Springs," about her breakup with Buckingham, in favor of Buckingham's song about his breakup with her, "Go Your Own Way," Nicks made her displeasure known. Stevie, reported rock journalist Bob Brunning, "screamed with anger, frustration and shock." Since she was having an affair with Fleetwood at the time, the dispute was even more painful.

Dreams unwind Love's a state of mind.
—Stevie Nicks, from "Rhiannon"

Nicks' short-lived marriage to Kim Anderson was also widely reported in the music press. Anderson had been married to a close friend of Stevie's who had died of leukemia, and Stevie at first reported that she had been fulfilling a promise to marry and care for Anderson after she left Lindsay Buckingham. But later, as the pending divorce was announced, Nicks reported she had received a sign "from beyond the grave" to end the marriage. At other times, however, she spoke of her connection to the mystical in more positive terms, especially when it came to writing music. "I feel there are good spirits everywhere, when I'm writing my songs, helping me," she said. "I just feel them and I feel good." Among those inspirational spirits were Oscar Wilde and John Keats, two of her favorite authors whose works she would randomly open to find a line or two as the germ of an idea for a song. Even her brief periods as a child attending Catholic schools were used in crafting her music, Nicks citing her fondness for Gregorian chant as an influence on the structure of her songs. And while her themes were frequently about lost love and its tragic consequences, she insisted that there was a lesson to be learned from them. "I don't write really happy songs," she admitted, "but I don't ever write a song that leaves people with no hope. I try to make it so that people say … life goes on, no matter how bad or what kind of tragedy you're involved in."

By the late 1980s, as Fleetwood Mac seemed to reach a plateau in its development, Nicks released her first solo album, Bella Donna, while continuing to tour and perform with the band. But it was "Silver Springs," the same song that had led to her earlier outburst, that was at the center of her decision to leave Fleetwood Mac for good. By mutual agreement, the band as a group owned any songs its individual members wrote for it; but even so, Nicks claimed that Mick Fleetwood's refusal to let her include a solo version of the song for her 1991 album Timespace convinced her it was time to make the break. For the next six years, she performed and recorded as a solo act, with mixed results, until the announcement was made that Fleetwood Mac would temporarily reunite in 1997 for their Rumours tour, in honor of the album that had made the band's reputation 20 years earlier. The world tour was capped in January of 1998 with a ceremony at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, during which Nicks and the rest of Fleetwood Mac were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Nicks continues to write and perform, still citing her belief in protective spirits and mystical inspiration as sources of her art. "My fantasy is giving a little bit of the fairy princess to all the people out there that maybe don't have Hans Christian Andersen books, and the Grimms' fairy tales," she says. "I dream only of giving a little fairy tale to people."