The classic song Stevie Nicks could never play the same again
Part of the magic of recording is finding that one magical take. It might not seem like anything’s coming together, but when the stars align, people can create within a few lines, and while Stevie Nicks had her mystique about her, she knew when he pushed herself beyond her limit.
But compared to every other rock frontwoman, it’s hard to really define what Nicks brings to the table. There are many times in Fleetwood Mac where it feels like a group effort getting every one of her songs off the ground, but even if they had finetuned a track like ‘Dreams’ to sound as perfect as it could possibly be, there’s something about her voice gliding over the top of everything that’s impossible for any other singer to duplicate properly. You’d need the smokiness and the tenderness, and Nicks always found the perfect middle ground on every tune.
Even when she was working on her own, there was hardly anyone who could compete with her. She still had help from people like Don Henley and Tom Petty when working on her first solo album, but even with someone like Petty duetting with her, there was no one paying attention to anyone else but Nicks once she started singing the hook of ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’. She was a magnetic presence every time she sang, which only came from her digging through her record collection.
Some of her biggest inspirations may have come from the old guard of rock and roll, but she was far more interested in the artistic side of everything. She had idolised what Jimi Hendrix was doing with his guitar, and combined with the pure poetry coming out of Joni Mitchell, Nicks figured out the power behind what great rock and roll could do. But if we’re talking poetry, it all comes back to Bob Dylan.
From day one, Dylan was the one making every rock artist think outside the realm of party music, and while Nicks saw fit to pay tribute to him, she knew her version of ‘Just Like A Woman’ could not be replicated, saying, “I told him that this was the take that I did with the original band and I don’t think I can do the vocal like that again. I can’t match the sound of it. And he said, ‘That’s okay’. The good news is that he really liked it, which made me happy, because if he hadn’t liked it, I wouldn’t have put it on the record.”
But listening to the version on her record, it’s hard to hear it through fresh ears. Nicks would go on to say that Street Angel was among one of the worst albums that she had ever made, and while ‘Just Like A Woman’ does stand out as an exception in the middle of the track listing, her inability to get the right tone for the song may have been her medication talking rather than her voice.
Still, Nicks hardly sounds worse for wear when listening to this version of that tune. That sultry power that her voice always had in her early days is there in spades, and while Dylan’s version of the song has been cemented in rock history on its own, it’s a lot better to hear the tune from a woman’s perspective, which helps depict the frailty that can come with someone barely hanging on.
It was much easier for Dylan’s version to become a little too patronising the longer he sang, but in Nicks’s hands, she could transform nearly anything into her style. Dylan may have known more than a few people who lived the life of ‘Just Like A Woman’, but given Nicks’s state when she was singing, it might have hit a little too close to home for her since some of her friends had fallen by the wayside.
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