Supporting Janis Joplin taught Stevie Nicks the art of live performance: “I thought, ‘Whoa’”
There’s a whole mini-career that Stevie Nicks embarked upon before joining Fleetwood Mac that made her the artist she became.
Nicks wasn’t famous, by any stretch of the imagination, when she was recruited alongside Lindsey Buckingham to join the Mac in the mid-1970s, but she was ready for the big time. Years of honing her craft with various musical outfits, suffering blows and defeats along the way, were all worth it for the eventual payoff.
While her time on the periphery was difficult at times, it was a character-building period which helped Nicks learn how to become a better artist and performer by studying others.
Words of advice from others have changed the course of countless careers, but Nicks preferred to use her eyes rather than her ears. Her first taste of performing came in high school, when she joined Fritz, along with her future Fleetwood Mac bandmate Buckingham. They built a reputation for themselves in the San Francisco scene and, as a result, were given the chance to support future hugely successful acts, which was hugely formative.
Nicks was invited to join the band in 1967. Although success evaded them, they remained active for five years before the candle eventually burnt out, and she pursued a new musical adventure with Buckingham. By the time that their tenure reached its natural conclusion, Nicks was unrecognisable from the shy performer who joined the band.
During her time with Fritz, she learned from the best when they served as the opening act for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin when both stopped through San Francisco. Seeing these future legendary artists in the flesh was majorly impactful on Nicks, who credits watching Joplin sing in San Francisco as being the night that changed her as a performer forever.
Joplin was yet to become a star, but it became immediately clear to Nicks once she heard her sing that she had what it took to be one of the leading lights.
In an interview with Q in 2008, Nicks recalled of her first encounter with Joplin: “The first time I saw here, I didn’t know who she was, because she wasn’t all dressed up. She was screaming at the band that was on before her, who had gone over time. Janis was not a beautiful girl, she was little and she just looked crazy and she was telling them to get the fuck off her stage. And I thought, ‘Whoa!’.”
Joplin’s attitude was impressive enough, but the singing made Nicks’ adoration jump to a whole new scale, adding, “Anyway, they wrapped it up and 30 minutes later on comes Janis, very different, feathers in her hair, fantastic bell-bottoms, really high-heeled shoes and a top with little bell sleeves in silky beautiful material and beads, and wild, crazy, curly hair. I was blown away by her.”
The gravel-voiced sensation may have appeared like an ordinary person when Nicks first caught eyes with her. However, she became anything but a mere mortal once she stepped on stage and adopted her larger-than-life persona that dazzled everybody in the room.
For Nicks, it operated as a transformative evening that changed her perspective on the art of performing, noting: “I learned more from her during that hour and a half—watching how she dealt with the crowd, how she paced herself, how she sang—than any hour and a half in my life.”
When Nicks later joined Fleetwood Mac, she was able to cultivate everything she’d learned from the last decade into her performances and was well-equipped to take on the world.
Fritz may not have carved out a path for themselves made of gold, but those precious years laid the foundations for Nicks to become the first woman in history to be a double Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee.
