Stevie Nicks once revealed her biggest regret
After joining Fleetwood Mac in 1974, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham helped to rejuvenate the band’s sound, adding a more chart-pleasing pop-rock aesthetic. The positive reception of the 1975 album Fleetwood Mac was impressively consolidated two years later with the volatile masterpiece, Rumours.
The album infamously showed Fleetwood Mac at their best and worst: “best” regarding the music and “worst” regarding the turmoil the members waded through at the time. The album was fraught with vitriol, reflecting the tension in the band’s various strained relationships and infidelities. The final ingredient added to the chaotic cauldron that spawned Rumours was cocaine. By the late-1970s, the band members had formed a particularly strong relationship with the stimulant.
Entering the 1980s, Nicks looked to spread her wings and pursue a solo career to allow more air time for her lyrics and some much-needed breathing space from her bandmates. She shot straight to number one with Bella Donna, her debut solo album of 1981 and retained a similar level of commercial success with 1983’s The Wild Heart.
By the mid-1980s, Nicks was still seemingly on top of her professional game with the release of Rock A Little in 1985, but this period marked a notably dark spell for the singer. Shortly after the tour supporting the album, Nicks joined Bob Dylan on tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in Australia. Just before leaving for Australia, Nicks was warned by a plastic surgeon of severe health complications or even death if she didn’t stop her cocaine habit.
Nicks recalled the conversation on The Chris Isaak Hour in 2009: “I said, ‘What do you think about my nose?’ And he said, ‘Well, I think the next time you do a hit of cocaine, you could drop dead.'”
In an interview with The Mirror, Nicks once candidly recalled considering a similar fate to those of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. “I saw how they went down, and a part of me wanted to go down with them,” she said. “But then another part of me thought, I would be very sad if some 25-year-old lady rock and roll singer ten years from now said, ‘I wish Stevie Nicks would have thought about it a little more.’ That’s kind of what stopped me and made me really look at the world through clear eyes.”
Nicks ultimately saw value in a longer, healthier life and managed to quit cocaine in the late 1980s. On the recommendation of some friends, Nicks sought a Klonopin prescription from her psychiatrist to subdue cocaine withdrawals. This counterintuitively led Nicks down yet another dark path to addiction. “Klonopin was worse than the cocaine,” she reflected on The Chris Isaak Hour. “I lost those eight years of my life. I didn’t write, and I had gained so much weight.”
In a 2009 Q&A with Women’s Wear Daily, the Fleetwood Mac singer singled out Klonopin as her biggest regret. “Do you have any regrets?” Nicks was asked.
“The eight years I was on Klonopin,” Nicks replied succinctly.
To which the interviewer reacted: “You don’t even drink now, right?”
“No,” Nicks answered. “But not purposely. I used to have a shot of tequila before I went on stage, and it would give me this acid thing. Finally, I said, ‘This isn’t worth it.’ I can’t get a good enough buzz on one shot of tequila to risk having an acid bubble my entire show. And I don’t like watching drunk people. Especially women. My mom always said to me, ‘Everybody forgets drunk men, but no one forgets a drunk woman.'”
