The album that got Stevie Nicks through her “down and out in Los Angeles” years
Carving her own lane in the world of rock ‘n’ roll, Stevie Nicks has always been a defiant voice of feminine independence and life’s transcience. Held in high regard amongst musicians and fans alike, she’s widely considered a tastemaker responsible for inspiring much of what we see in modern-day pop music.
Her dedicated fan base has largely been garnered due to her music’s unflinching honesty. It shares the story of a life lived through turbulent romances, drug addiction, and music mega-stardom. Within that, her music consistently weaves a sense of shared humanity that has resulted in her back catalogue becoming somewhat of a life mantra for adoring fans.
Before joining Fleetwood Mac in 1975 and establishing herself as one of music’s most influential frontwomen, Nicks was pursuing a music career with partner Lindsey Buckingham. As part of the duo Buckingham Nicks, they released music together and endured the intense life experiences that later became the compelling narratives of songs on Fleetwood Mac’s opus, Rumours.
While mildly successful in their own right, they weren’t exposed to the levels of success they both dreamed of. Their record gained over a few sales and no real dedicated fan base to boast of, despite a small ripple of support in Birmingham, Alabama, thanks to airplay on WJLN-FM.
For a young Nicks, whose deep belief in the universe’s cosmic powers, the prospect of being faced with desperate career failure and subsequent return to a conventional life was sickening. In her suffering, she penned one of music’s most iconic tracks in ‘Landslide’, an achingly sad finger-picking ballad that muses on lost dreams and youth. While it didn’t receive widespread acclaim under Buckingham Nicks, it was later repurposed in Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 self-titled album.
And it was in that very year when Nicks’ fate changed forever. When Buckingham was scouted as a potential frontman for Mick Fleetwood’s ever-changing band line-up, he accepted on one condition: that Nicks join along with him. During a 2009 interview with Jimmy Fallon, she said: “It was like we had a real life. We were 28 and 27 when we joined Fleetwood Mac. So we were — we were established people when we joined Fleetwood Mac. We didn’t get famous at 17.”
While her destiny revealed itself in the formative year of 1975, Nicks’ journey to that point still lives firmly in her memory, despite the drama of what followed in the years after.
In a 2011 interview with The Guardian, she listed the albums that soundtracked her early life. Within that, she reflected on 1974 in particular and how Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark kept her company in the void of artistic loneliness. “It was the only time I ever felt music might not work out. I talked to my parents about going back to school, because I was tired of being a cleaning lady, a waitress and a rock’n’roll star at the same time. We were really poor.”
Mitchell’s record was a contemplative exploration of a woman caught between love and freedom and compromising and maintaining values that would have spoken deeply to a young Nicks caught at a crossroads.
Compounding that would have been Mitchell’s portrayal of how casual affairs and forbidden lust frame the deeply personal issues that face young people confronted with the realities of their failed dreams. In the interview with The Guardian, Nicks explained that during that time, “Lindsey and I were coming to the end of our relationship, and I’d met someone else.”
To cut and run may have been the more convenient relationship choice for Nicks at that time, but what instead followed was a commitment to Buckingham through the pursuit of their careers with Fleetwood Mac. And as great artists do, Nicks indeed suffered for her art as what followed was a messy and complex relationship that existed within a band, serving it song after song of deeply personal yet undeniably compelling lyricism.
