“I was really so bummed out”: The musician who saved Stevie Nicks from retiring
No one can harness the same magic Stevie Nicks has forever.
There comes a moment when even the legends have to hang things up, and while Nicks is more than happy to keep up her ‘Gold Dust Woman’ persona for as long as she can, there’s got to be a point where it can be exhausting looking that effortlessly cool every single night. But even during her most uninspired times, all that Nicks needed was the right partner to snap her back into gear and remind her why she wanted to make music in the first place.
In all fairness, that person was Lindsey Buckingham for a while, but when you hear the stories of their various fallouts, it’s not like they are on the same creative page most of the time. They are perfect complements to each other when they are onstage, but when you listen to Buckingham’s cynical bent next to Nicks’s more spectral music, it’s not like they are exactly seeing eye-to-eye on every single thing. Which probably explains why she ended up going solo only a few years into Fleetwood Mac.
She was never going to leave the band, but when you hear Bella Donna, it’s pretty clear why the band needed to let her go. These were fantastic songs, and the thought of leaving a song like ‘Think About It’ off of a proper Fleetwood Mac album would have been borderline criminal had she decided to stay in the group. And for every major step she took, she always surrounded herself with the best friends anyone could ask for.
No one in their right mind would have been able to ask Tom Petty to help her with her first hit the same way that Nicks did, but it’s not like the heartland rocker held her hand through it all, either. All the tougher parts of her career were things she needed to accomplish herself, but around the time that she started working with Sheryl Crow on Trouble in Shangri-La, she had to have been thinking whether it was really the time for her to go quietly into the night after one too many albums at the top.
She had beaten her addictions and become a star in her own right, so it’s not like she needed the attention by any means, but Dave Stewart was the one who brought out the other side of her. There were pieces of her career that had yet to be touched on, and while she did eventually go back to her old ways when working on some of her later records, In Your Dreams was the first time she truly felt inspired with a writing partner in a long time.
After years of having to ask Buckingham to help her finish tunes, Stewart was the kind of Lennon/McCartney partner that made her come back to the fold, saying, “Before I started this record, I wasn’t gonna make another record. Because I was really so bummed out by people trying to explain to me why the music business wasn’t the same. [Dave said] ‘It doesn’t matter Stevie! We’re in our 60s. If this whole record goes to hell, it doesn’t matter! We’re OK! We’ll be just fine. So we can do anything we want. We can try anything we want.’”
And that kind of freedom gives a much better silver lining to a lot of what Nicks works on. Anyone else would have been worried about getting their album in the charts, but even if the album didn’t sell a thing, Nicks was finally happy to be in the spot she always wanted to be in: making music because she wanted to.
Some of those early songs on Rumours might have felt like pulling teeth, but all of it was a test for her to get to this point in her career. There was never any point in trying to becoming the next big pop star all over again but if she could manage to make her tunes and maybe collaborate with some of her friends along the way, she would have gladly stayed a musician for the rest of her life.
