The artists that convinced Stevie Nicks to be a rock star: “I wanted to be like them”
When looking through all of rock and roll, it can easily become a male-dominated industry when talking about the legends.
Sure, there were people like Tina Turner out there flying the flag for what women could do in rock and roll, but it seemed that for every one female rock star, there would easily have been eight more male rock stars that everyone praised to the moon and back. But even with the odds stacked against her, Stevie Nicks always made sure to leave audiences awestruck whenever she stepped onstage.
Even though Fleetwood Mac was a democracy in many ways, it’s easy to see what made Nicks the most important member of the group when she joined. Other legends like Lindsey Buckingham and Peter Green had given their magic to the group, but even when she was writing songs aimed at Buckingham, there was a certain spectral quality to the way she sang that made every one of her songs feel like it was floating on air when she played.
With ‘Dreams’, ‘Storms’ and ‘Landslide’, the list is really endless for her ballads, but that was only one small part of her sound. Admittedly, it was the one part that many people cared about, but when listening to her playing a song like ‘Rhiannon’ live, she turned into a completely different being half the time, usually getting immersed in her performance and turning into the embodiment of that old Welsh witch she sang about.
Putting on new personas onstage was nothing new for performers at this point, but Nicks had only received the courage thanks to the women who came before her. She may have had a gentler approach to rock and roll, but when looking at people like Janis Joplin, Nicks found the kind of rock and roll icon who seemed as driven to deliver her music as any of the greatest frontmen in California.
Compared to what Mick Jagger and Robert Plant were doing at the time, Nicks said that healing Joplin and Grace Slick is what convinced her to start honing her chops as a singer, saying, “I was going to keep up with the rock stars of the world that were men, because there weren’t very many women once. Janis was really the last, and Grace is still alive, so. But music, Grace Slick and Janis Joplin were the ones that I loved. I wanted to be like them.”
And given what Nicks was listening to, her story could have been very different had she not chosen to go with rock and roll. She had already cut her teeth singing along to old country tunes and Everly Brothers songs, and while that does show up occasionally in her music, her best songs for Fleetwood Mac are the ones that manage to strike a balance between the rough side of her sound and the tuneful side.
That’s probably why she had so much contention with ‘I Don’t Want To Know’ being featured on Rumours. The song itself is excellent, but given how well ‘Silver Springs’ toes the line between being a rustic epic and a beautiful ballad, trading it in for a peppy pop song doesn’t really tell the whole story of the artist that she wanted to be.
She wanted to leave people stunned the same way Joplin did whenever she sang ‘Ball and Chain’, and when combined with Slick’s wild persona off the stage, Nicks knew that women could be as in control of the audience as every guitar god claimed to be. Having the chops for it is one thing, but Nicks knew that the power came from the emotion she was sending into the crowd every night.
