The “lectures” Prince gave to Stevie Nicks about her drug-taking
“The eighties were pretty bad drug years for me,” Stevie Nicks once said in a dramatic understatement. During a hiatus from Fleetwood Mac, the singer was spiralling deeper into her addiction and further out of control. Her bandmates and friends all tried to help her, including the Purple One, as Prince offered Nicks advice and support.
Drug addiction ravaged Nicks’ life in the 1980s. What had begun as recreational usage with her bandmates, during a time when drugs were part of the rock and roll lifestyle, had spiralled into a complete dependency. Even after Fleetwood Mac took a break, Nicks’ cocaine habit got worse until, in 1985, doctors told her that any further usage could be fatal.
In 1986, her bandmates intervened and took her to the Betty Ford clinic to get clean. However, that stint in rehab led to a nine-year addiction to Valium, as well as other drugs that were prescribed to her by doctors to help her kick her original habit. When she finally realised that this addiction would prove just as fatal, she managed to get fully and completely clean, entering a life of sobriety.
But before that, during those difficult years in the 1980s, she needed all the support she could get. Some of the advice she remembers best came from Prince, the musician she formed a tight friendship and musical bond with. Their relationship was born out of total mutual respect and admiration. Both artists loved each other’s music, inspiring one another in many ways.
Nicks’ track ‘Stand Back’ was the basis of the friendship as she wrote the song while listening to Prince’s ‘Little Red Corvette’ in the car. “All of a sudden, out of nowhere, I’m singing along, going, ‘Stand back!’” she recalled as she tried to find a way to capture the idea. “We career off the freeway to find a radio, record shop or something, and we go in and we buy a little tape recorder.”
When it came to recording the track, she knew she needed Prince to play on it. When she invited him, he famously showed up only 20 minutes later, more than eager to work with Nicks as a musician he loved.
Later, when Prince wrote the instrumental to ‘Purple Rain’, he initially wanted to give it to Nicks. “I listened to it and I just got scared,” she said. “I called him back and said, ‘I can’t do it. I wish I could. It’s too much for me.’ I’m so glad that I didn’t, because he wrote it, and it became Purple Rain.”
But that musical relationship split over into a true friendship, in which Prince always looked out for Nicks during those dark years. “Prince was very not into drugs. And the fact that he ended up being on a lot of pain medication just blows my mind, because he was so against it, and he gave me so many lectures about it,” she said. “I’d talk to him every once in a while on the phone, and we’d talk for hours, and he’d go, ‘You gotta be careful, Stevie.’ And I’d go, ‘I know, I know.’”
The fact that Prince himself later died of a fentanyl overdose, a lethal opioid that is causing an epidemic of deaths worldwide, haunts Nicks. She told The New Yorker, “My one regret with him is that I did not call him up one day and say, ‘Listen, I’m just coming in, I’m gonna fly in and come over to Paisley Park and just hang out with you for two days. Because I just would love to see you.’”
“That’s what I always tell people. Remember, every single day of your life, the people you love could be gone tomorrow,” she said, “If anybody can take away from what we’re talking about right now, it’s the fact that life is very fragile. You can’t count on ever having a lot of time left.”
