The two artists Stevie Nicks modelled her career on: “Fantastic”
It’s never easy to tell a band that you don’t want to play music with them anymore. It’s one thing to say that things are growing apart for a while, but to just say on a whim that you aren’t interested in making music together anymore is like telling your significant other that you need a divorce with no prior warning. Although Stevie Nicks graciously got the blessing of the members of Fleetwood Mac for her solo career, she admitted that she based her entire solo career on Crosby, Stills, Nash and Tom Petty.
This is strange because when she debuted her first album, Bella Donna, in the early 1980s, the glory days of CSN were a thing of the past. The group had already gone through its trials and tribulations with Neil Young in it, but the massive toll that drugs were having on David Crosby could no longer be ignored.
If anything, Fleetwood Mac was filling that niche of laid-back, rootsy rock and roll better than their idols ever could. They certainly shared the same level of volatility as their heroes, but that didn’t make albums like Rumours and Tusk any less fun to listen to, especially if you knew the drama going into songs like ‘Dreams’.
When Lindsey Buckingham began taking over the studio during the making of Tusk, though, Nicks knew that she needed a better outlet to get out her songs. She had seen what Tom Petty had been doing and wanted to make something similar, but she still had her vocal idols in mind when putting together her first album.
During her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech, Nicks remembered going up to one of her bosses and telling them that she wanted to make something that could match her heroes, saying, “We went to Doug Morris at Atlantic, and I said, ‘Doug, what I want to do is make a Tom Petty album. Straight-up rock and roll. And I have two great girl singers, Laurie and Sharon, who are amazing, and we’re going to be Crosby, Stills, and Nash. I’m going to be Stills.’ And Doug’s like, ‘Fan-fucking-tastic’.”
While Nicks got the ultimate producer in Jimmy Iovine and even a token song from Tom Petty in ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, hearing those harmonies is much closer to the 1960s style that CSN were always so good at. A work like ‘Edge of Seventeen’ may be centred around that bulletproof chorus and the non-stop guitar line, but hearing that wall of voices behind Nicks as she sang was something too good to pass up.
In fact, Nicks’s solo career is probably one of the few that managed to eclipse the older band she was in. Say what you want to about the solo records by every other member of Fleetwood Mac, but chances are Lindsey Buckingham is known to the general public more for his Fleetwood Mac classics and maybe the song he did for National Lampoon’s Vacation, ‘Holiday Road’.
It’s not exactly fair when Buckingham has some truly incredible songs in his solo catalogue, but Nicks was more interested in building something bigger. Outside of Fleetwood Mac, she would always be an artist, and that meant never sacrificing the power of the piece.
