“Lightning strikes maybe once, maybe twice”: The song Stevie Nicks wrote as a mental escape from fame
Stevie Nicks never dreamed of becoming famous. She was free-spirited, lived in her “own little musical world” as a teenager, and wanted to become an English teacher.
Then the blinding lights of acclaim and fortune came calling – or, more appropriately in this case, Lindsey Buckingham – and the whole trajectory of the life she had planned was spun onto an entirely different axis. Suddenly, the focus was on recording studios, record deals, and the latest release. Everything about it was somewhat foreign.
Of course, it was far from the case that Buckingham Nicks were an instant overnight success. In fact, they were anything but that, with the commercial flop that was their eponymous debut album, being dropped from Polydor, and Nicks finding herself working various side jobs, including being a cleaner and a waitress.
To most, this would be the down-and-out part of the rags-to-riches tale, but in reality, it was the singer’s most cherished time. “In the old days, before Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey and I had no money, so we had a king-size mattress, but we just had it on the floor,” she later said. “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.”
Obviously, within a few years, everything had exploded. But even though she was the storming frontwoman of the world’s desire, it seemed that at times, there was nothing Nicks craved more than to lie back down on her mattress and escape from the manic fame outside. That’s why she wrote ‘Gypsy’.
When she sings that “lightning strikes once, maybe twice,” it’s her recognition that the act of being a rock superstar is not natural or common, hence her desire to “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” whenever she feels “cluttered”.
There was also the personal lightning strike of the death of Nicks’ best friend Robin Anderson in early 1982, meaning that the lamentations of her carefree style and life before the brutality of fame took on a whole new significance. If she could have stayed in those odd jobs, lying on that mattress forever, she might just have taken the chance.
This is not to say that the life of being an international rock god is a big regret on Nicks’ behalf, but a song like ‘Gypsy’ certainly exposed the vulnerability of her life being upended and tipped into a whole new incomprehensible universe, when all she really yearned for was her homely comforts.
So while the rest of the world fawned after her stardom, her relationships, and her acclaim, would Nicks swap it in a minute to go back to her mundane life before – it’s difficult to say, but whenever she takes her mattress to the floor, it’s the only time she ever feels at true peace.
