The Fleetwood Mac song that references The Velvet Underground
Here’s a fun game: try and name anything that Fleetwood Mac and The Velvet Underground have in common. Here’s what I’ve got: They both have American members. They both had different members who sang lead at different points. They both had multi-gender lineups. And… that’s about it. The gothic New York art-rock pioneers were about as different from the British blues rockers as any two bands can be, but that didn’t stop Stevie Nicks from drawing a direct line between the two.
For anyone who has listened closely to the 1982 Fleetwood Mac single ‘Gypsy’, the first line contains what seems to be a bit of a strange shout-out: “So I’m back to The Velvet Underground.” Could it be that, at one of her emotional lows, Nicks popped in The Velvet Underground and Nico? Was she a fan of the abrasive noise rock of White Light/White Heat? Maybe she appreciated the folk tones of The Velvet Underground or the pop sensibilities of Loaded? As it turns out, the answer is none of the above.
That’s because “The Velvet Underground” doesn’t refer to the band of the same name. Instead, Nicks’ beloved Velvet Underground was actually a vintage clothing store in San Francisco. Located in the famous Haight-Ashbury district that birthed the psychedelic hippie movement of the late 1960s, The Velvet Underground had a famous clientele list.
“That’s the words: ‘So I’m back to the velvet underground’ — which is a clothing store in downtown San Francisco, where Janis Joplin got her clothes, and Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane, it was this little hole in the wall, amazing, beautiful stuff,” Nicks told Entertainment Weekly in 2009. “‘Back to the floor that I love, to a room with some lace and paper flowers, back to the gypsy that I was.’ So that’s what ‘Gypsy’ means: it’s just a search for before this all happened.”
“In the old days, before Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey and I had no money, so we had a king-size mattress, but we just had it on the floor,” Nicks added. “I had old vintage coverlets on it, and even though we had no money it was still really pretty… Just that and a lamp on the floor, and that was it—there was a certain calmness about it. To this day, when I’m feeling cluttered, I will take my mattress off of my beautiful bed, wherever that may be, and put it outside my bedroom, with a table and a little lamp.”
It’s not all that strange that there was some overlap with naming inspirations. The Velvet Underground has its origins in a 1963 book by journalist Michael Leigh describing paraphilia, group sex, and sadomasochism. It was a controversial release, one that made its way to alternative bookstores across the country. It seems more than likely that both the band and the store had gotten their respective hands on copies of the book and took separate inspiration.
Check out ‘Gypsy’ down below.
