How did Janis Joplin inspire Stevie Nicks to write a Fleetwood Mac classic?
When Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac in 1974, they catapulted the band into a completely different stratosphere. Though the blue-rock legends had already enjoyed their fair share of success, Nicks and Buckingham bought a new pop sensibility to the band that would make Fleetwood Mac a household name for years to come.
One of Fleetwood Mac’s most memorable tunes from that newfound Nicks-and-Buckingham era is ‘Gypsy’. Nicks originally wrote the track to use on her debut solo album Bella Donna. However, it was instead held onto for the thirteenth Fleetwood Mac studio record, Mirage.
According to Nicks, ‘Gypsy’ references the Bohemian days of yore. She said: “In the old days, before Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey [Buckingham] and I had no money, so we had a king-size mattress, but we just had it on the floor. I had old vintage coverlets on it, and even though we had no money, it was still really pretty.”
“Just that and a lamp on the floor, and that was it—there was a certain calmness about it,” she added. “To this day, when I’m feeling cluttered, I will take my mattress off of my beautiful bed, wherever that may be, and put it outside my bedroom, with a table and a little lamp.”
Nicks then noted the lyrics of the song, adding: “So I’m back to the velvet underground,” referring to a clothes shop in downtown San Francisco. Nicks went on, “[That’s] where Janis Joplin got her clothes, and Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane, it was this little hole in the wall, amazing, beautiful stuff – ‘back to the floor that I love, to a room with some lace and paper flowers, back to the gypsy that I was.'”
“So that’s what ‘Gypsy’ means: it’s just a search for before this all happened,” Nicks added. However, that was not the only reason that Nicks decided to keep the song back for Fleetwood Mac to use on Mirage. Just before Bella Donna was released, she found out her close friend Robin Snyder had been diagnosed with leukaemia and only had three months to live.
Nick’s felt that she could pay tribute to her friend in the song. She said: “And later, I tacked on a line for my friend Robin, my best friend, who died of leukaemia: ‘I still see your bright eyes.’ But then, Robin wasn’t sick yet. She got cancer and died within a year.” Very moving indeed.
