The one song Stevie Nicks said started her solo career: “It was really the beginning”
Going solo after being in a band is still one of the most terrifying things any artist could ask for. There’s a certain degree of safety in being in a group, so to have someone deliberately kneecap themselves and force everyone to pay attention to them runs the risk of looking like they have some gigantic ego behind them. As long as they have the tunes to back it up, there’s usually no problem, and Stevie Nicks knew that she could become a fine solo artist when she put out the song ‘Blue Lamp’.
Because as scary as going solo was, it was probably a lot better than having to put up with three different songwriters in Fleetwood Mac. There had been chances for Nicks to contribute to every album she worked on, but Tusk was a bit of a departure where the group almost turned into ‘The Lindsey Buckingham Show’, with most of the songs focusing on his strange fascination with punk and new wave.
Nicks’s tracks like ‘Sara’ were still the highlights of the project, but she didn’t sign on to be a member of the group if she would only get a handful of songs on their double album’s worth of material. There had to be a shortcut to get her works out, and ‘Blue Lamp’ was just a humble start that she submitted to the soundtrack of the film Heavy Metal.
The film itself is one of the more dated pieces of rock and roll pop culture, but the soundtrack is still one of the most eclectic. It’s not often that people get to hear Nicks and Black Sabbath on the same record, but ‘Blue Lamp’ still has a lot of punch behind it, almost like Nicks didn’t have to care about Fleetwood Mac if she didn’t want to.
The idea of releasing an album like Bella Donna would still be scary, but Nicks thought that the success of ‘Blue Lamp’ helped her push forward as an artist, saying, “It was very important that it found a place for itself. I love that song. It was really the beginning of Bella Donna because it was the first thing I’d ever recorded with other musicians, and it was the first time I’d ever recorded by standing in a room singing at the same time that five guys were playing.”
That kind of internal chemistry comes across a lot more once Bella Donna was finished. There was still a lot to be done with tracks like ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ and ‘Leather and Lace’, but when you look at the deeper cuts like ‘Beauty and the Beast’, Nicks was channelling a lot of her emotion onto the tape that couldn’t be translated by just punching in her vocal on a track that the rest of the group recorded a few weeks before.
For all of the great success that came from the album, it would be a lie to say that there wasn’t a little bit of bad blood. Fleetwood Mac still managed to continue on, but the raw wounds of having to work around each other started to get to Buckingham, eventually culminating in him having a huge argument with Nicks years later that forced him out of the group.
Then again, Nicks probably needs this kind of production style a lot more than Buckingham’s need to make everything perfect. Rumours may have risen to the upper echelons of rock stardom because of how airtight it is, but there’s something about capturing a raw performance amongst an entire group that’s never going to be solved by working at it for seven hours at a time.
