The first band that made Stevie Nicks love rock and roll: “I’m going to do this”
Stevie Nicks didn’t want to approach rock and roll like every other frontman that she saw onstage.
She had the potential to become one of the best singers of her generation, but she didn’t want to see music as any sort of competition every single time she went into the studio. What she was doing needed to come from the heart before anything else, and that extended to all of the greatest artists that she found when she first started falling in love with performing with Lindsey Buckingham.
Then again, Nicks knew that she was going to be a singer before she had even reached her teens. She had been singing anything and everything that struck a nerve in her, and while she had a partner in crime when she joined Buckingham in her first band, Fritz, the guitarist had a much different perspective on what their music was supposed to be every single time they performed.
Buckingham was meticulous about every solitary instrument in the mix of one of their songs, and he was striving for perfection at all costs. Nicks even remembered getting tired of listening to The Beatles after Buckingham told her to study every single one of their tunes to understand what the song needed, but the idea of jamming was right up her alley when she first saw a band like Santana.
If you picture the version of Fleetwood Mac that Nicks joined, though, they weren’t always known for jamming on their records. They weren’t known for stretching their songs to crushing lengths or anything, but when listening to the kind of energy that Carlos Santana could bring out of every member of his band, Nicks realised that was the music she was always meant to be making.
She wasn’t going to be making songs that went on for eternity, but the idea of capturing a moment in the studio that sounded like a Santana show made a lot more sense to her after hearing them when she was working in Fritz, saying, “I stood on the stage with Carlos Santana in 1970 and watched him play in the very, very beginning. For me, that was one of the first really big, live, San Francisco bands I ever actually saw. We opened for them, we actually got to stand on the side of the stage and watch them. Two weeks later, the movie Woodstock came out. Then I got to see them on the big, huge screen, and I think that’s when I said to myself, ‘Oh, I’m going to do this. I’m definitely going to be a rock star. This is what I want to do.’”
But instead of the traditional soundscapes that Santana created, Nicks was going to make people feel every single word she sang through the pure emotion in her voice. ‘Silver Springs’ may have been too long to fit on Rumours, but when you listen to her and Buckingham harmonising with each other on that song during The Dance, she was trying to recreate the same energy that Santana could when she saw him.
And considering how simple a lot of Nicks’ songs are, did you ever notice how some of them are a bit long by the standard singles that they put out? That was because of how much she revelled in creating a mood, and even if ‘Dreams’ wasn’t the most complicated song in the world, it was important for her to set a certain atmosphere long before she even sang a single note.
Because as much as Buckingham was worried about making everything sound perfect, Nicks realised that Santana was looking for the spaces in between the notes as well. Every single piece of the sonic puzzle isn’t always about what someone is “supposed” to play, and the best musicians know how to play off each other and react the same way that Santana did in their prime.
