The only album Stevie Nicks could listen to while on acid: “Pretty dynamic experience”
Despite Stevie Nicks‘ honesty about the varying hardships she faced throughout her career, the one aspect she has always remained remorseful about is her drug use. Not only did it impact her health, but it also affected her image, reputation, and career, pushing her into a darkened haze that was almost impossible to free herself from. After all, she once referred to these moments as her “down and out” years.
For many, Nicks’ journey began the moment she was welcomed into Fleetwood Mac. It’s easy to see why; most of her best work came to the fore during these years, despite some of the more obvious hits being written much earlier during her Buckingham Nicks era. However, it was this moment that redefined her legacy and importance, providing the platform she had long yearned for while working hard to make it in a brutal industry.
For others, however, Nicks’ journey—and experience with industry challenges—began the moment she decided to pour her heart and soul into it without knowing whether any of it would actually pay off. After all, these seminal moments were also the moments she wrote future hits like ‘Landslide’ and ‘Rhiannon’, proving a benefit to the uncertainty that pushed her art and writing to higher standards.
While it’s easy to try to pinpoint the pivotal moments in Nicks’ life and career when things grew particularly difficult, her relationship with and reliance on drugs like cocaine and later Klonopin almost derailed the entire operation, threatening her mental health and artistic momentum in ways she perhaps didn’t anticipate in those early days when the world of success felt new and exciting—not to mention validating.
However, like any other human being, Nicks’ experiences were sometimes more ambiguous, especially when considering the one glaring reason some musicians indulge in recreational or psychedelic substances in the first place—to experience music in a different way. For Nicks, listening to one album by Joni Mitchell opened her eyes to a “dynamic experience”, even if she vowed never to do it again.
“One time I did acid when Joni Mitchell’s record Court And Spark came out,” Nicks once told Q. “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.”
Although Nicks had already realised the fickle and fleeting appeal of consuming music in such an abstract state, it’s clear that Mitchell’s art was intricate enough to smooth the edges, providing the perfect means of unravelling the listening experience with endless layers of creative discovery. This isn’t the only time Nicks looks to Mitchell for getting in the right mindset, proving that, although she doesn’t relate to her story or image, her music grounds her in ways others could never.
