The music video that almost killed Stevie Nicks: “It was insane”
At one point in the tumultuous ride of Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks believed that all of the band were certifiable drug addicts. In fact, Mick Fleetwood claims to have snorted seven miles worth of marching power during his time upon the throne of the band. Thus, it is perhaps no surprise that scrapes with death were commonplace for the members. However, you wouldn’t imagine that Nicks’ would arrive via a Civil War reenactment.
When MTV arrived in 1981, it transformed music overnight. Everyone wanted airtime on it. Even the avant-garde madman Don Van Vliet of Captain Beefheart kicked up a feud with them when they said his video for ‘Ice Cream For Crow’ was “too weird”. So, it’s unsurprising that a commercially inclined artist like Nicks got hands-on with her music videos as she attempted to launch herself as a solo artist.
But her 1983 single, ‘Stand Back’ soon called curtains on that after she called it her “first and last foray into writing a video”. The reason being that it was almost bloody fatal. “I decided it was going to be a Civil War scene,” she recalled regarding the creation of the video on I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution. “It was insane.”
She continued: “It didn’t go with the song at all. It was so bad, it was almost good. I tried to act, which was horrific. We used a house in Beverly Hills that we accidentally set on fire.” But that wasn’t even the dangerous element. No, sadly, that came when they decided to put a drug addict with no equestrian experience atop a horse on a set that was already going haywire.
“I almost got killed riding a horse,” Nicks exclaims. “He went straight into a grove of trees and the crew in the car driving alongside screamed, ‘Jump!’” So, Nicks leapt from the bolt-away steed and somehow survived largely unscathed. The video, on the other hand, was quickly condemned. “we watched it back and I said, ‘This can never come out. I don’t care if it cost $1 million.’ Irving Azoff, my manager, said, ‘You’re an idiot.’”
Worse still, MTV was such a force at that point that if ‘Stand Back’ was going to be the big hit that Nicks and her management had correctly predicted, then they would still need to complete a video for it. The medium was simply essential back then. “So we hired another director and I paid for two complete videos,” Nicks concludes.
At the time, the original director, Brian Grant, was only three years into his directorial venture. In the documentary, he reflects on the bold early assignment by explaining: “As a director, it was like somebody else was paying for me to attend film school. For Stevie Nicks’ ‘Stand Back,’ I dreamed up the idea of doing Gone with the Wind in three minutes. I wanted to direct feature films, and I thought this would help prove myself. When Stevie watched the video, she hugged me and said, ‘I look fat.’ And she redid the video with somebody else – a simple, boring, dance-routine video. Such is life.”
Thankfully, despite nearly killing off a beloved pop star in an attempt to vacuum pack a classic movie into a condensed commercial in a manner that AntMan would marvel at, Grant got plenty of other bites at the cherry, working with the likes of Tina Turner and most recently writing, directing and editing Lennon’s Last Weekend. Sadly, what might be his finest work remains lost to the world; the whereabouts of the footage of Nicks’ own Civil War remains a mystery.
