‘Mabel Norman’: the song Stevie Nicks wrote after the doctor told her cocaine was killing her
Almost every song Stevie Nicks has ever written feels like an extract from her own personal diary. When she sings them today, her voice—slightly richer from the passage of time and the weight of a thousand lives—carries the depth of her resilience. She understands this perhaps more than anybody else, especially as her talent always seems to emerge from a place of unwavering strength.
Like most women in rock, Nicks’ rise to fame coalesced with the relentless challenges of a male-dominated industry, where she not only had to fight for creative control but grapple with the prospect of unguaranteed success. After all, when she was working hard with Lindsay Buckingham, trying to make it in the early days, the scales seemed to tip in the other direction, leaving Nicks to channel her frustrations into her music.
While this period also birthed some of Nicks’ best songs, including ‘Landslide’, the peak of her struggle had yet to arrive, starting when she recreationally started doing cocaine before it became a far more intrinsic and unavoidable reliance. The horror stories seem never-ending, from how it would alter her demeanour in the studio to almost leaving her blind, but none of which seemed to slow her down until, one day, she received a rather hard-hitting wake-up call.
Around the same time, Nicks had watched a documentary about the silent movie star Mabel Normand, who died from tuberculosis following years of cocaine addiction. Nicks knew that her life was heading down a one-way street and that she was walking on thin ice, and the documentary made her begin to reflect until the doctor told her that she had given herself a hole in her nose from her excessive drug use.
After learning about Normand’s story and how things could “go downhill fast”, Nicks was told by the doctor that she would likely suffer from a brain haemorrhage if she continued taking the substance. “I’m basically a happy person,” she later reflected to Billboard. “I was a happy person back then. I just got addicted to coke, and that was a very bad drug for me. It was obviously a very bad drug for Mabel too.”
Her connection to the star compelled her to write ‘Mabel Normand’ before checking herself into the Betty Ford Clinic to get better. Unlike Normand, however, Nicks was given a second chance and was able to get away from the darkness before it consumed her. “It was really important to me to get this song out,” Nicks said during a video for HuffPost Entertainment. “It’s really about what drugs can do to you.”
While her admission to rehab wasn’t a cure-all, and she later developed a harmful addiction to Klonopin to help ditch the cocaine, she would eventually become clean, taking control of herself and her life in ways she never knew was possible. Now, as she sings out to crowds of overwhelmed masses, she holds herself with the strength and resilience of someone who has felt it all and lived to tell the tale.
