The 1994 album Stevie Nicks called too bad to save: “I hate this record”
There are plenty of times when Stevie Nicks has done everything she could to save one of her songs.
Even when ‘Silver Springs’ had to be demoted to a B-side during the Rumours sessions, Nicks wasn’t willing to go down without a fight, even if it meant rolling her eyes all the way through the song ‘I Don’t Want to Know’. Her songs were like her children, and she was never going to see them get hurt, but there were also more than a few times where she felt that her tunes weren’t exactly worth bringing out of the darkness.
Granted, it’s a lot easier for her to talk about the problems with her albums whenever it comes to Fleetwood Mac’s discography. Every single record she made with them had to come with some sort of compromise, and even though she had brilliant tunes on every one of those records, it’s hard to look back on the ending of Tango in the Night and say that she had the best time when it ended with Lindsey Buckingham getting into a full-on fight with her once the album was finished.
But it’s not like Nicks is completely in the clear here, either. It’s easy to forgive the behaviour of every member of the band during the Rumours sessions since all of them were out of their mind on cocaine behind the scenes, but when Nicks finally kicked her habit of booger sugar, her trading it in for being addicted to Klonopin was never going to work out in her favour when she stopped showing up to some of the sessions.
She wasn’t going to be treated the same way as the band that spent months in the studio trying to make everything work, and when she did decide to go back out on her own, Street Angel was the first time where her instincts failed her a bit. It was bad enough for her trying to stick around and make tunes for Behind the Mask, but since she always felt comfortable as a solo artist, the fact that she was able to come up empty on the record spoke volumes about her state of mind at the moment.
And once she got clean, she didn’t mince words about how the record was too far gone for her to look at it as some misunderstood classic or anything, saying, “The record was finished in November; I went into rehab on the 12th of December and got out on the 27th of January. So I listened to the record – I’m off all the drugs – and I knew it was terrible. It had cost a fortune. I tried really hard to fix it, but I couldn’t. So I had to go and do interviews for it, just like I’m doing right now, and it was everything I could do not to say to the interviewers, ‘I hate this record.’”
Then again, how bad could it be? This is one of the greatest songwriters of her generation, so surely some of the project is salvageable, right? Well, yes and no. Her voice is certainly in fine form throughout the record, but considering what she had worked through on the record, there’s not enough potential in any of the songs to make them look like an absolutely essential piece of her discography.
The album does have a decent cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Just Like a Woman’, but the fact that Nicks sounds more than a little bit disinterested doesn’t do the song any favours. Dylan has the kinds of tunes that often live and die on the way they are sung, and while Nicks could bring her own experience to some of her tunes, it was borderline impossible to find that kind of drive when she was out of it.
So it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that some of the greatest-hits packages that came out after Street Angel include next to nothing from the album. Each one of Nick’s best albums is supposed to be a window into where she was at any given time, and since Trouble in Shangri-la was all about her kicking her habits, it only made this record look all the worse for being one of her darkest times.
