The Fleetwood Mac song Stevie Nicks said was ahead of its time
No artist can really plan to be on the cutting edge of history whenever they perform. It’s one thing for someone to make the best that they can with the resources they have, but don’t be surprised when someone goes into the studio dead set on making their own version of Dark Side of the Moon and ends up looking absolutely ridiculous when they embarrass themselves. While Stevie Nicks doesn’t negate the fact that she has had her regrettable moments, she could still look at moments where she managed to be ahead of the curve when it came to rock and roll.
But before she even struck out on her own, she was already changing the game in terms of what women could do in rock and roll. There had been many females who didn’t take shit from anyone like Ann Wilson and Janis Joplin, but listening to ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Gold Dust Woman,’ Nicks seemed to have something magical hidden in her voice whenever she sang as if she could take Lindsey Buckingham’s melodies and sprinkle pixie dust on top of them.
While that pixie dust was actually cocaine back when they were making Rumours, it was never a hindrance to the music. It’s easy to tell when artists are letting their buzz get to them in the studio, but amid all the fighting, the fact that Nicks was able to craft solid gold like ‘Dreams’ or sing on tracks like ‘The Chain’ and ‘Go Your Own Way’ is a happy miracle that somehow found its way onto the tape.
When an album does that well, though, there are only so many places one can go before they want to make something different. And while no one in Fleetwood Mac had any problems with their old sound, Buckingham was convinced that they needed to move forward if they even hoped to stay relevant on Tusk.
And despite the weirdness spread across the double album, it’s not like he didn’t have more than a few points. The band do a fabulous job at maintaining some of their old classics, but the fact that they put something as dishevelled as ‘Not That Funny’ next to perfect tracks like ‘Sara’ is both genius and hilarious at the same time. But even for the album’s signature brand of weirdness, the title track is on another level, turning a Neanderthalic-style guitar riff and bringing in a marching band behind them.
While Nicks was never shy about having reservations about the song, she admitted that Buckingham was onto something there, saying, “When you listen to all those songs together over 13 months, it was a drain. Now I can listen to it, and I really enjoy each song, but when I was there it was one big rumpled-up ball of Tusk-ness. So for me, it was way ahead of its time. I was there, and I sang on it, but I didn’t have a real connection with it. And now, I really, really like it. I have these incredible speakers, I like to just lie on the floor and listen to it. It sounds so cool.”
Then again, it helps when hearing the music through different ears as well. Every member of the band was a lot different than the tension-fuelled bandmates that they were in the 1980s by the time they worked on The Dance, and hearing the song go over well with a marching band is yet another tiny miracle that they managed to pull off.
Even though Nicks’s greatest songs have a more spiritual angle behind them, this is proof that sometimes being direct is the right approach. Anyone could spend their time trying to write an epic that sprawls out, but it takes a lot more artistic guts to hit someone over the head and demand that they pay attention.
