Stevie Nicks could only handle LSD with a Joni Mitchell record at hand
The iconic singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks found fame, fortune and emotional turmoil as the mystical co-songwriter and vocalist for Fleetwood Mac in the mid-to-late 1970s, but her musical ambitions began long before. From a young age, Nicks was deeply inspired by country and folk music, especially that created by the Eagles and Joni Mitchell.
In the early ’70s, Nicks ran into her future colleague and lover Lindsey Buckingham while in senior year at Menlo Atherton High School in California. She was out one night at the Young Life Club, where she bore witness to Buckingham covering Barry McGuire’s ‘California Dreamin’ and she decided to join him in harmony. This romantic image would set the wheels in motion for one of the most successful yet notoriously tempestuous musical relationships in living memory.
Throughout much of 1972, Nicks and Buckingham lived at their producer Keith Olsen’s house, where Nicks would regularly find herself cleaning the house to pay her way. Towards the end of the year, Buckingham found work as a touring guitarist for the Everly Brothers. While Buckingham was on the road, Nicks took to her notepad and wrote what would become two of her most enduring and beloved songs, ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide’.
During this pre-Fleetwood Mac period, Nicks tried LSD for the first time and recalled a positive experience indebted to the comforting sound of Joni Mitchell’s 1974 album Court and Spark.
“One time I did acid when Joni Mitchell’s record Court And Spark came out,” Nicks told Q Magazine. “I was with my producer at his house, with a set of speakers that were taller than the fireplace, and I was in a safe place, and I sat there on the floor and listened to that record, and that was a pretty dynamic experience, but it didn’t erase the fact that the other two times were not. So I never did it again.”
As it transpires, Mitchell’s music wasn’t only of comfort to Nicks during psychedelic trips. In a 2011 interview with The Guardian, Nicks revealed that she likes to listen to Mitchell’s ‘Blonde in the Bleachers’ just before she enters the stage.
“This is about a girl who [sings] tapes her regrets to the microphone stand,” Nicks said of the track. “She says, ‘You can’t hold the hand of a rock ‘n’ roll man for very long’. I never saw myself as the girl in the song – I identified with the rock’n’roll star. So I was never gonna be the groupie. I was the star, I was sure of that. I listen to that song to this day. It’s on the playlist I have for when I’m preparing to go on stage.”
Listen to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blonde in the Bleachers’ below.
