A romance that would lead her to both international stardom and prolonged heartbreak.
Struggles with addiction. Stevie Nicks has been through a lot over the course of her career,
and she’s still going strong. Let’s take a look at her stunning transformation.
Stevie Nicks is one of the most famous rock stars in the world and has been quite open about all
that this has entailed — including the many highs and the devastating lows. But once upon a time,
Stevie was nothing more than a little girl who lived what some might call a sheltered life.
Author Stephen Davis, who penned the authorized Stevie Nicks biography “Gold Dust Woman”,
explained to Interview Magazine that Stevie’s sheltered childhood was something her mother
prioritized on purpose. Davis explained to the publication,
"Her mother, Barbara Nicks, kept Stevie at home. She signed Stevie up for a lot of classes,
like tap dancing, plays and drama, but when it was over, Stevie Nicks went home."
He went on to add that Stevie's first real boyfriend was Fleetwood Mac guitarist and
singer Lindsey Buckingham. In the same book, Stevie admits that her family
moved around quite a bit, which meant she was constantly making and leaving friends.
Stevie Nicks and her grandfather Aaron Jess Nicks, commonly known as A.J.,
though A.J. would never come close to achieving the kind of success that his granddaughter did.
"He really wanted to make it in the music business."
However, as Nicks’ biography reveals, A.J. is the person who first introduced
a very young Stevie to harmony and song. As author Stephen Davis notes,
A.J. came up with a clever way to teach his granddaughter these fundamentals.
He first had her sing a song as he sang it at the same time but in a higher harmony, and then
had her sing the song again but in the opposite way. Davis notes that Stevie got it right away.
Despite her mother's best efforts, fate stepped in and changed the course of
Stevie Nicks' life during her senior year of high school. She was at a party when she
spied a young Lindsey Buckingham playing a song on his guitar while seated in the
middle of the living room of the house. As she told SPIN Magazine, Buckingham began
playing "California Dreamin'" and she knew exactly what to do. Nicks told the outlet:
"I just threw in my Michelle Phillips Harmony, and he was so beautiful."
The pair would go nearly two years without seeing much of one another before Buckingham
called Nicks up out of the blue and asked if she wanted to join his band,
which was called Fritz. The pair became bandmates — but nothing more — until Fritz disbanded in the
early 1970s, and both Buckingham and Nicks decided to move to Los Angeles.
All of a sudden, they were together. Once the twosome made it to the city,
people began to notice them. As Stephen Davis wrote in his 2018 biography of Nicks,
"They were Mr. and Mrs. Intense, he in his curly locks and icy blue eyes and
she in her long straight hair and her piercing gaze when you talked to her."
"I always wanted to be a singer. I always wanted to be a songwriter."
Things between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham got serious quickly.
Nicks explained to Courtney Love for SPIN Magazine that she spent a few years working
as a waitress so that Buckingham could pursue his art. As she related the story,
doing so didn't even feel like a sacrifice — it was just what she wanted to do. Nicks said,
"I didn't want to be a waitress, but I believed Lindsey shouldn't have to work,
that he should just lay on the floor and practice his guitar and become more brilliant every day."
Eventually, the two formed their own duo and began releasing music under the name Buckingham Nicks.
Things didn't pan out for that particular configuration,
but once they joined Fleetwood Mac in 1974, things began to soar professionally — though
personally they began to fall apart. In the biography, Nicks admits that joining the
band together was a crucial moment for the pair. As Nicks put it, she told Buckingham,
"We have too much to lose here. We need to put our problems behind us."
Nicks and Buckingham were no longer in a romantic relationship.
"And I said, 'We're done.'"
While likely challenging for the two, their split produced some of
the band's most prolific and beloved songs, including "Go Your Own Way" and "Dreams."
Before Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, the band had a sound that has been
described by the Los Angeles Times as "rooted in the blues" and anchored by former guitarist
Peter Green. The pair changed things up for the group, and when their debut album “Rumours” was
released in January 1978, it shot all the way up the charts to the top spot immediately.
In the years that have followed the record's release, Nicks has been open about the fact that
the album is largely the result of the fact that so many relationships within the band,
including her own with Buckingham, were falling apart.
"We are an intense group of people."
However, she told Australia's Thewest.co.au
that recording the album was actually a fun, even joyful, experience, saying,
"So, it was huge and it was a lot of fun and it was very exciting — and
the songs were brilliant. We were just having the best time ever doing it."
After her break-up with Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks briefly dated fellow Fleetwood
Mac member Mick Fleetwood, but she soon moved on to another classic rock heavyweight:
Don Henley of The Eagles. Things between the pair reportedly got pretty serious,
and Nicks later admitted to Billboard that she got pregnant by Henley in 1979. In fact,
the two had a name picked out for the baby they conceived if it was a girl:
Sara. But Nicks decided against giving birth, ultimately choosing to have an abortion instead.
The relationship ended not too long after that, but the pair reunited in
1982 on the song "Leather and Lace." Nicks told High Times that she'd penned the song
for Waylon Jennings and his wife Jessi Colter, but she and Henley recorded the duet instead.
Nicks admitted that while the song was about Jennings and Colter and what it's like to have
a relationship when both people are famous, to a degree she also wrote about her own
relationships with ex-boyfriend Buckingham and then-boyfriend Henley. Nicks added that
even though Jennings and Colter ended their own relationship when the song was ready,
she felt strongly that the song still needed a home. Nicks told High Times:
"I felt in my heart that either I had to do this song with Don,
or Waylon had to do it with Jesse, or Waylon and I had to do it."
Thus, Henley and Nicks' enduring version took off.
Stevie Nicks was still in Fleetwood Mac and going strong with the group when she released her first
solo album, “Bella Donna”, in July 1981. Nicks teamed up with two women, Lori Perry-Nicks and
Sharon Celani, telling NME that they thought of themselves as a kind of female Crosby, Stills,
and Nash, and that their primary goal was to produce an album that didn't have any echoes of
Fleetwood Mac. Nicks also told the publication that the album was incredibly personal,
with the title track becoming the foundation of how she considered life and love. Nicks told NME:
"It broke my heart and gave me the strength to fight for it.
It was a fine line to walk between love and hate and passion and the girls and I loved it."
The record took three months to complete, and in the end Nicks
says that even Fleetwood Mac was stronger for the experience — though the rest of the band
had nothing to do with creating the music. The 1980s were a pretty rough decade for Stevie
Nicks, and the Landslide singer battled drug and substance addiction for years. While being
interviewed by country singer Tim McGraw for his show "Beyond The Influence Radio," Nicks explained
that ultimately, she didn't survive addiction — she survived herself. Nicks told McGraw:
"I managed to save myself. I got through some pretty scary moments,
but I saved me, nobody else saved me."
Nicks went on to add that she has contemplated writing a book about her trials and tribulations,
but that she believes the story would actually need to be told in four different books.
She also said the process of creating the book would be collaborative,
and she would want to include friends who experienced the journey with her. Nicks said:
"I might sit down at some point across the kitchen table with some of my girlfriends who have been
there for a lot of it and put on a tape recorder and just start talking from the very beginning."
The story of Fleetwood Mac is one that is filled with break-ups — both in terms of relationships
and of the band itself. In 1997, the band had been missing in action for about ten years when
they returned to the stage for the MTV special The Dance, which turned out to be almost as successful
as the release of the band's first record, “Rumours”. Nicks was joined onstage by Christine
McVie, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, and Lindsey Buckingham. Society of Rock reviewed the special,
celebrating the band's decision to open with the all-important and celebrated song "The Chain."
We Are Classic Rockers revealed that the reunion came about after
Nicks and Buckingham decided to work on a song for the 1996 movie Twister together.
The publication also notes that the band sold five million copies of The Dance,
and they even returned to touring following the completion of the special.
Lindsey Buckingham was ultimately fired from Fleetwood Mac in 2018,
and many believed that Stevie Nicks had issued an ultimatum:
"Either I had to go or she was going to go."
Billboard wrote that the issue seemed to be about tour dates.
Buckingham had released a solo album he needed to tour for,
and he asked the band if they could push back their own planned tour to make that happen.
While most of the members of the band agreed, Nicks reportedly did not. As Billboard claims,
after months of unanswered emails and discussions that went nowhere, the members of the band all
reunited to receive the MusiCares Person of the Year award in January 2018. That night,
Buckingham and Nicks butted heads, and Buckingham was out a week later. Bucks told Billboard,
"I think she wanted to shape the band in her own image,
a more mellow thing, and if you look at the last tour, I think that's true."
Nicks countered with her own statement released via Rolling Stone in which she explained,
"His version of events is factually inaccurate,
and while I've never spoken publicly on the matter, preferring to not air dirty laundry,
certainly it feels the time has come to shine a light on the truth."
While speaking to the New Yorker, Stevie Nicks revealed that she has no plans to quit creating
and singing any time soon. As she put it, while some people hit a wall and decide they
no longer want to sing or perform, that's not an experience she's had. Nicks reveals that she
enjoys being famous for a very important reason: It gives her the ability to explore the full reach
of creative outlets. As Nicks said, her life isn't just about singing songs. She explained,
"There are so many other creative things that give me a happy state of mind when I need it,
that are in the future for me, that I really am excited about."
In the same interview, Nicks reveals that she's coming out of the global pandemic having written
what just might be her best song yet, and she still doesn't believe there are limits on what
she can achieve. She says there's no limit to what a songwriter can create, explaining,
"You have memories for days. Go open your memory library and check in there."
If you or anyone you know is struggling with addiction issues,
help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).