The one artist Stevie Nicks called a musical soulmate: “Everything I wanted”
Stevie Nicks didn’t want to settle for anything less than perfect when she started her solo career.
She needed to get her songs out to as many people as possible, and even if the rest of Fleetwood Mac didn’t understand it, that didn’t stop her from trying to make her songs work with anyone and everyone that she came across. But for all of the great moments that she had with Lindsey Buckingham onstage, she knew that she needed the right person who understood her a lot better than anyone else whenever she started working.
And ‘The Gold Dust Woman’ has been lucky enough to have more than a few people to help her finetune many of her songs. She was already making some of the finest rock and roll that she could, but every single one of her albums had people acting as her musical translators in many respects. Jimmy Iovine knew when something sounded right, and even later on in her career, Dave Stewart was the kind of person who seemed to know Nicks better than she knew herself.
But that was nothing compared to what the musicians had to say whenever she made one of her albums. She knew that what mattered most was being able to connect with her band whenever she played, and when she nabbed The Heartbreakers to perform on ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, she felt completely at home. Tom Petty was the person that she always wanted to be, but it’s not like she could suddenly join one of the biggest bands in the world or anything.
She needed something a bit more concrete, and Waddy Wachtel was the perfect foil to her whenever she made her greatest hits. Bella Donna was her excuse to use as many great musicians on one of her records as she could, and while Wachtel didn’t quite have the same kind of electric guitar beauty that someone like Don Felder had on ‘The Highwaymen’, he was the one who had a sixth sense for wherever Nicks was going.
He wanted the chance to show his stuff, but he never forgot about how she was a rocker first and foremost. Any of her songs could have been in danger of getting a bit too mushy behind the scenes, but Nicks knew that she could count on Wachtel to add the perfect riff to any of her songs to tie everything together, whether it was one subtle note or bending the strings until they sounded perfect.
And while Buckingham had a much more volatile relationship with Nicks, she felt that Wachtel was the kind of musical soulmate that worked the best with her, saying, “There was a time when I was falling out of one love and into another, when nothing else seemed to matter except this person. I adored him.”
Adding, “He was everything I wanted to be; a real rock and roller and a lover of The Stones, small and frail sometimes, but in many ways the strongest person I had ever known. His word was law. I became him. He became me, and no one dared intrude upon this union.”
Even in her solo band today, Wachtel is still there to help flesh out a lot of her songs whenever she plays them live. There may have been a few times where they have had a falling-out or two, but at the end of the day, there’s a good chance that she doesn’t want anyone else on that stage playing the main guitar figure in ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ except for him.
A lot of what Wachtel does is a lot more subtle than what the average guitar hero is known for, but as far as he could tell, that was his job. He lived to make songs that didn’t have to smack you in the face, but the more you listen to them, you start to realise the kind of virtuoso he always was whenever he played on Nicks’s tunes.
