The song Stevie Nicks wrote about her near-fatal drug addiction
Drugs have ravaged the music industry. So many icons have sadly been lost to overdoses, and Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks was very nearly one of them.
Nicks is very open about the impact drug addiction had on her. In the late 1970s into the mid-1980s, Nicks’ recklessness and dependence grew worse and worse. Developing a heavy cocaine habit, her partying led to several dangerous incidents to the extent that she was once almost blinded.
As her way of coping with crippling stage fright and an exhausting touring schedule, Nicks used drugs to escape. While making her more confident in front of crowds and more social with the hoards of friends that would end up backstage or at afterparties, her partying became unmanageable. It was her drug habit that led to a cocaine-fueled affair with Mick Fleetwood, which she described as “a doomed thing [that] caused pain for everybody”. Almost tearing the band apart, her addiction risked their future.
By 1985, the singer was spiralling out of control. With Fleetwood Mac on hiatus following the release of Mirage, she began working on solo projects to try and keep her mind busy and addiction under control.
For inspiration, one night, Nicks found herself watching a documentary about Mabel Normand, a silent film star who died of tuberculosis in 1930 following years of cocaine abuse. In conversation with HuffPost, Nicks recalls the effect it had on her, stating, “She was really walking on the edge for a lot of her life.”
She added, “And I was walking on the edge, too,” calling 1985 a “dangerous year in my life”.
“The documentary really scared me because I saw this beautiful girl go downhill so fast,” Nicks later told Billboard, as the documentary had a tremendous impact on her.
“Sometimes you can’t see it in yourself, but you sure as heck can see it in someone else,” she added. “I’m basically a happy person. I was a happy person back then. I just got addicted to coke, and that was a very bad drug for me. It was obviously a very bad drug for Mabel too.”
The documentary and Normand’s life planted the seed in Nicks, making her realise that she needed to recover. As if fate stepped in to deal the final blow, the medical news she received only days later sealed the deal.
Doctors told Nicks that she had burnt a hole in her nose the size of a coin through excessive drug use. Recalling her doctor’s advice, Nicks remembered, “He said, ‘Well, I think the next time you do a hit of cocaine, you could drop dead.’” She knew that she needed to listen.
The experience provided inspiration for Nicks’ clearest song about her struggles with addiction. Named ‘Mabel Normand’, after the star who inspired her, the track draws parallels between the actor and the singer. It was an incredibly personal and special track to Nicks, who said, “It’s really about what drugs can do to you.”
It would take a year for Nicks to finally check herself into the Betty Ford clinic rehab in 1986. After a further year of touring and trying to deal with her addiction herself, her bandmates eventually helped her seek out support and get clean. The song ‘Mabel Normand’ was finally released in 2014 as part of 24 Karat Gold, a collection of songs written by Nicks between 1969 and 1987.
“It was really important to me to get this song out,” she told HuffPost. A homage to the film star who helped her move to get clean, writing the song was the first step to recovery, as she added, “I, unlike Mabel, managed to get a hold of it.”
