The one female singer Stevie Nicks said matched Janis Joplin: “So knocked out to be alive”
Most people can’t hope to touch the legends that they’re trying to emulate. Anyone who ever tried to copy what Stevie Nicks does live is always going to be in the shadow of the ‘Gold Dust Woman’ for their entire career, but Nicks could tell when some people were doing something different with their approach to the stage.
Then again, Nicks will probably tell you that she only got to where she is by emulating her heroes as well. Most of her muses came from listening to records or singing along to music that she heard as a kid, and whether that was harmonising with her grandfather during her youth or playing her Joni Mitchell record, she knew there was a place for her alongside the other giants of rock and roll. The only problem was there wasn’t an outlet for someone like her.
You have to remember that during the glory days of the 1960s, female rockstars didn’t exist all that often. There were one-offs like Tina Turner that straddled the line between rock and roll and R&B by some people’s definitions of the word, but whenever Janis Joplin got up to the microphone, no one questioned what she was doing. This was real rock and roll, and no one was going to get in the way of her shouting out her pain with a bottle of whiskey in her hand.
But looking at Joplin’s performances, it was hard for any woman to try and improve upon what she had done. This was the musical equivalent of seeing Jimi Hendrix in his natural element, but Nicks found out the best way for her to break through was to be herself. No one had ever heard the kind of spectral beauty of her voice onstage before, and when she sang ‘Rhiannon’, she could practically perform her own mystic rituals onstage half the time.
And that left the world wide open for the Lilith Fair crowd to come seeping in during the 1990s. There had been countless female rockers that wanted a festival of their own, and while everyone from Patti Smith to Nicks herself helped lay the groundwork for something like that to happen, Nicks was transfixed when she first heard what Sarah McLachlan could do in a concert setting.
Despite everyone knowing her more for the charity commercials these days, Nicks felt that McLachlan had the same energy Joplin had in her prime, telling her, “You remind me so much of the first time that I went to the Fillmore in San Francisco. I was in a band that was the opening act on a show that had about seven acts in it.
“And there were red velvet drapes and you knew that Janis Joplin had sat in this dressing room, and there was something about your music that reminded me of how I felt about Janis. When I heard your music, I thought, ‘Somehow this woman reminds me of the incredible music that came out of San Francisco when all of us were so knocked out to be alive.’”
Although McLachlan doesn’t typically go for the same booze-filled high notes that Joplin did on ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, there are pieces of her music that hit that same deep note. The beauty of hearing Joplin’s greatest ballads was hearing the person underneath it all, and whether she was singing the song ‘Possession’, there was some kind of energy that made everyone zero in on what she had to say. Hell, even when she sang songs Randy Newman wrote for Toy Story, her version of ‘When She Loved Me’ is enough to bring someone to their knees.
McLachlan, Nicks, and Joplin are all completely different voices when you break them down, but when praising the balladeer, Nicks understood a lot more about what she was going for. There are a lot of people that want nothing more than to hit the listener with as much power, but both of them knew that the quickest way to someone’s heart is to get them to feel the emotion in your voice.
