“Never in a million years”: the singer Stevie Nicks thought was too big to work with
When Stevie Nicks first joined Fleetwood Mac, I’m pretty sure that some of the greatest musicians couldn’t have pulled her away from her band.
As much as she might have resented Lindsey Buckingham for every song that he wrote about her, there was a lot more that she had to offer with the band than leaving all of them behind to work with another group. And while there were options open for her to join other bands every now and again, Nicks never thought that she would have been able to work with some of the biggest pop stars that she ended up crossing paths with.
Because let me be clear: there were more than a few opportunities for Nicks to work with some of her famous friends. She had always said she would have happily joined Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers if Petty had asked her to join, and even Robert Plant was talking about how interesting it would have been to get Nicks to sing with Led Zeppelin on some of their songs. But there was a certain chemistry that came with working with ‘The Mac’.
Part of that did end up coming from them being at each other’s throats during live performances and recording sessions, but Nicks didn’t want that to define the way she performed. She was already getting more than a little bit of help from Buckingham for every one of her records, and even when she started working on some of her solo work, it was only about getting her songs out there the same way that George Harrison was doing at the end of The Beatles.
But when working on building her career up after Bella Donna, she was still wondering which direction she was going to go. ‘Edge of Seventeen’ and ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ were two mammoth singles that didn’t sound all that much like Fleetwood Mac, and if she was going to be a pop star as a solo artist, she was going to find the right people who shared the same outlook on music as she did.
Then again, I’m sure we’d all be happy to call up our favourite artists and ask if we could work with them if we had the chance. Nicks couldn’t spontaneously make all of her favourite singers appear out of the air when she began working on The Wild Heart, but even if Petty donated another song to her record, getting a co-write from someone like Prince felt unheard of by that point in his career.
He was quickly becoming one of the biggest names in pop, but the thought of him helping her flesh out ‘Stand Back’ after she heard ‘Little Red Corvette’ was the kind of collaboration she could only have dreamed of, saying, “I asked him if he would come over to Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. Never in a million years expecting that he would say yes, or that he was even in Los Angeles, and he was there in like twenty minutes. I didn’t have to call and tell him that I kind of ripped off his song, but I did because I’m honest. So it turned into a really amazing relationship. Is my heart broken? Absolutely.”
Maybe Prince was looking for a relationship around that time, but when looking at the way that he helped her later in life, it was never about anything too sleazy. Despite being one of the most sexual beings on the planet, Prince was very protective of his friend, even managing to nurse her back to health when she started to succumb to the effects of her drug addiction later on in her career.
Nicks may have forever been indebted to Prince for helping her on her best records, it was always purely platonic between both of them throughout their careers. She was simply happy to have a friend like that in her life, and when looking through her catalogue, she seemed to have that same sense of mystery that ‘The Purple One’ had, depending on which album you caught her making.
