The singer Stevie Nicks felt always looked down on her: “How dare you”
Stevie Nicks already had an uphill battle before she even sang a note with Fleetwood Mac.
She was already trying her best to fit in with the other legends in the band and her boyfriend, Lindsey Buckingham, but the idea of someone taking her seriously wasn’t going to be easy in an industry dominated by the best frontmen of all time. Nicks was willing to do whatever she could to work on something great, but she did admit that there were a few people who didn’t exactly have her best interests at heart, either.
She had already been told that some of her greatest works would never make it onto an official album, and she wasn’t going to roll over and accept that. She was absolutely pissed to find out that ‘Silver Springs’ wasn’t going to make it onto Rumours, and since she wasn’t getting the proper outlet on an album like Tusk, either, she knew it was better for her to try for a solo career and get her songs out in that way.
In fact, Nicks seemed to be having one of the same problems that George Harrison had in The Beatles. Both of them needed a chance to grow as artists, and while Harrison had a lot of friends on his side to help flesh out his material, Nicks had the perfect confidante in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. She was in love with their sound, and ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ gave her the edge that she needed on those first records.
But the more that she started doing her own thing, the more that Petty seemed to peel back in a sense. He knew that she was coming into her own as a songwriter, and there was no doubt that she could carry on doing whatever the hell she wanted to do, but if you look at the way that both of their careers went, Nicks was absolutely livid when Petty told her that she was nowhere near the rockstar that she thought she was.
He wasn’t trying to be derogatory in any way, but Petty remembered Nicks being absolutely furious with him when she found out about his perspective, saying, “She got really mad at me. [I said something like] ‘The Heartbreakers are a rock and roll band. [She said] ‘I’m in a rock and roll band.’ Not really. [She said] ‘How dare you say that?’ I love that band, and have the greatest respect for [them], but I didn’t see them as a rock and roll band. I thought her journey was different than mine.”
If you look at what she had been through, though, it’s not like Nicks didn’t do all the same work that Petty had done. If anything, she actually was able to do more since she wasn’t coming from a position of strength in her old band, and the fact that she has kept up the momentum for as long as she has hasn’t been an accident when looking at how many people still see her as one of the best singers of her time.
To be fair to Petty, there are some songs that got a little bit poppy in the 1980s, but are we really splitting hairs here? There’s no reason to think that a song like ‘Little Lies’ or ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ is any less rock and roll than what Petty would be doing on ‘Runaway Trains’ or ‘Southern Accents’, and by the time that Nicks had a few years under her belt, it was no longer about her trying to be one of the biggest names in music anymore.
She took her rock and roll credentials very seriously, and even if Petty didn’t see her in that way, that wasn’t going to matter to her. She wanted the chance to wow people at every opportunity, and there was nothing standing in her way of becoming one of the quintessential frontwomen that the world had ever seen.
