The nude photoshoot that Stevie Nicks was forced to do: “I felt like a rat in a trap”
Stevie Nicks never wanted to be the traditional pin-up girl when she started making music.
She was one of the greatest presences in California when Fleetwood Mac started taking off, and even if the rest of the world insisted on focusing on the relationships between everyone in the band, there was a lot more that she had to offer than all of the weaponised songs they were directing at each other. But compared to every other album that she ever released, she was always going to have cold feet about the way that the band were introduced to the world starting out.
Then again, the conversation over Fleetwood Mac albums always came down to the way everyone got representation. Lindsey Buckingham already didn’t want to forgive the photographer of Rumours since he was nowhere to be found on the front cover of the record, but it’s not about who is on the cover half the time. It’s about what serves the band the best, but long before Buckingham and Nicks joined the group, they had already started honing their craft a few years before.
Their first album as a duo already had some of the finest songs that they could think of, and while ‘Crying in the Night’ would have been an excellent Fleetwood Mac song, getting Buckingham’s foot in the door was ‘Frozen Love’ was what sealed the deal for Mick Fleetwood to bring them on. If Nicks had had her way, though, she would have never tried to make the album cover that they ended up with.
No matter how much people were talking about free love around that time, Nicks always had a problem with being topless on the cover of her first record, saying, “I’m actually quite prudish. So when they suggested they shoot Lindsey and I nude I could not have been more terrified if you’d asked me to jump off a speeding train. Lindsey was like, ‘Oh, come on – this is art. Don’t be a child!’ I thought, Who are you? Don’t you know me? I couldn’t breathe. But I did it because I felt like a rat in a trap.”
And while there is way too much baggage to unpack between Buckingham and Nicks, chances are their high-profile bickering started right here. They didn’t always see eye-to-eye on everything, but given how much Buckingham was determined to do things his way, Nicks was going to make sure that she wasn’t spending the rest of her career cowering to whatever it was that he wanted for their career.
Sure, Buckingham was there to help structure her songs into some of the best tunes that they ever made, but Nicks was a lot more subtle about her image later on. ‘Rhiannon’ made her look like a witch coming to life onstage whenever she sang, but when she opted for her solo career, she wanted to give everyone a glimpse of the more personal version of who she was outside of the band.
She didn’t want to be defined by being the female counterpart to everyone else in the group, and while a lot of her best moments came from her making love songs, they weren’t always that sexual. Sure, she may have been forced not to have a shirt on for that first record, but her angle was about breaking down the nuances of relationships rather than catering to the meatheaded side of their audience.
So while Nicks had to endure a lot of nastiness whenever she made one of her records, she wasn’t about to live out her life trying to be a sex symbol by any stretch. Her music had to reflect who she was as a person, and it was much more about what she felt in her heart every time she played rather than work in any kind of steaminess into her work just for the hell of it.
