The guitar riff Stevie Nicks called the greatest in her career: “The most spectacular”
Stevie Nicks didn’t usually need to have the best musicians around her to create absolute magic.
Make no mistake, she was always going to surround herself with people that could play some of the greatest rock and roll of all time, but if you look at many of her greatest songs, it wasn’t about showing off and playing the most technical solo of all time. It was about capturing a feeling whenever someone got up to the microphone, but Nicks never forgot about the power that came from one great guitar riff.
I mean, having worked with someone like Lindsey Buckingham, Nicks practically had a crash course in what a good guitar part was supposed to sound like. Buckingham was the kind of person that could make one guitar sound like three whenever he played his tunes, and while it took two people to replace him when he left Fleetwood Mac, Nicks felt like her solo career needed to be something different whenever she stepped up to the plate.
She had spent her entire career having Buckingham help her flesh out her songs, but Waddy Wachtel had the sixth sense for what she needed every single time she sang. Bella Donna sounded so much better when listening to what he could do behind the fretboard, but Nicks didn’t want to spend her solo career tied to one person, either. She wanted to explore, and every single record she made was an experiment in working with different songwriters.
Prince already gave her one of her best songs in ‘Stand Back,’ but if you look further in her back catalogue, every single one of her records had a specific muse that she was after. She always said that she was desperately in love with Joe Walsh during the 1980s, and if that didn’t last, it didn’t take long for her to listen out for what people like Sheryl Crow were doing once she reached the 1990s.
But there was something about Dave Stewart that clicked with her from the minute that she saw him. Stewart already had a hand in turning Tom Petty’s Southern Accents into one of the most eclectic records of his career back in the 1980s, so when Nicks was thinking about throwing in the towel, Stewart was the one that convinced her to get back to basics and make music that she loved again on In Your Dreams.
And while every song is a snapshot of what Nicks’s life was like at the time, ‘Ghosts Are Gone’ was one of the few times that she felt that the guitar line was perfect, saying, “Right at the last minute, Dave came up with that riff that is so Led Zeppelin ‘Kashmir,’ right off the top of his head. He just put on his guitar, and I said, can you explain something at the end? Do another lead part or something, and he did. He just started playing that part, and I just went like (hand gesturing for more). That rock and roll thing that I love so much, I think, is the most spectacular musical riff I’ve heard in a long time on my record.”
What makes the song work, though, is that it’s not made in the same way that Buckingham would have approached any of his parts. Buckingham wanted to play with his fingers through his entire career, but sometimes you need someone like Stewart that can grab a pick and a little bit more bite to every single song whenever it calls for it.
Nicks didn’t really need to have every one of her songs sound as harsh as this, but it was all done in service to making the song better. ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ needed that chugging rhythm, ‘Dreams’ needed those aching chords that fade in throughout the song, and when you have someone like Stewart in the mix, you’re going to need something that has a bit more energy behind it.
