The one producer Stevie Nicks never wanted talk to again: “Shut up”
No song that Stevie Nicks ever wrote came easy when she walked into the studio.
Aside from her Fleetwood Mac days, when half of her material ended up in Lindsey Buckingham’s hands, Bella Donna was the kind of record almost made out of desperation when every single one of her songs was getting left on the cutting room floor. She needed to take special care of every one of her musical confessions, so when someone didn’t understand what she was going for, it wasn’t long before she started having some issues.
That’s half the reason why her relationship with Buckingham wasn’t working after a while. Even though the guitarist had a good point about Nicks not turning up for some sessions for Tango in the Night, Nicks didn’t want some of her songs to be swallowed up in the production, either. She wanted to have the final say in what her song should be, and whatever delicate touches that Buckingham added to it were not going to fly if she ended up getting a more muted version of what she wanted.
But his dismissal from the band was about more than personal problems. Nicks was having her own issues with drugs around this time, and while The Other Side of the Mirror did result in one of the best albums that she ever made, it only took one more album with ‘The Mac’ before she had had enough. Behind the Mask was a bad sign that the band weren’t the same anymore, but it’s not like Nicks was hitting her stride as a solo artist.
In fact, Mirror was the silver lining before the 1990s started to tear Nicks apart. She had always had substance problems, but after becoming addicted to Klonopin, Street Angel became the album that had no identity to her. She was using tunnel vision on most of the songs, and even though she had a decent producer in Glyn Johns, that didn’t mean that he completely understood what she was going for.
Then again, it’s not like Johns’s track record doesn’t speak for itself. No one gets to work with everyone from Led Zeppelin to Eagles to The Rolling Stones to the goddamn Beatles by being a slouch in the studio, but given his signature sound of keeping everything sparse, Nicks felt that his approach wasn’t giving her the sound that she wanted whenever working on some of her classics.
She fully admitted later that she didn’t have the best judgement, but she wasn’t about to let Johns make something that she wasn’t going to be proud of, either, saying, “I didn’t fix it while I was working with the person that I was working with [Glyn Johns]… who doesn’t like to be talked about because he’s not speaking to me.”
Adding, “I didn’t like it when he was there, and he knew it, and basically he told me to… like, in no uncertain English, very rough terms, to shut up and deal with it, and this was the way it was going to be.”
And when you look at the best producers that she’s had throughout her career, Johns’s approach isn’t exactly ideal. A lot of her best performers were all about looking for those moments when magic is coming through the speakers, and whether it’s listening to Bella Donna or In Your Dreams, Jimmy Iovine and Dave Stewart were the right sets of ears for what Nicks had always wanted out of her own music.
Sometimes you need someone like Johns to crack the whip every now and again, but given how Street Angel is remembered these days, it’s not like Nicks was going to be able to fix every part of the album on her own. This was her personal low point, and she had a real uphill battle for herself if she was going to be able to make a record like Trouble in Shangrila in the next few years following this record.
