The singer that touched Stevie Nicks’ heart the most: “There wasn’t anybody else like that”
For Stevie Nicks, being able to sing a catchy tune was never good enough when she went into the studio to make a record.
Some of the best songs she ever made are ones that she lived through for years before committing them to tape, and she wasn’t going to sleepwalk her way through tunes that she could never give anything to. It was all about capturing a sense of performance, and even when she was just starting, all of her favourite artists were the ones that seemed to be putting themselves on the line for their craft.
Because it’s not like Nicks was going to get anywhere by being the greatest musician of all time. She was fairly limited, no matter what instrument she got her hands on, but even if she only knew a handful of chords, it could sound like the most earth-shattering song of all time if it had the right kind of lyric to it. ‘Dreams’ is only two chords for most of the tune and doesn’t really have any major crescendo or anything, but you can feel the energy in the room change every single time she plays the tune live.
Half of that might be from what she can bring to the song, but it’s also about letting every single word hit as hard as possible when she sings it. ‘Silver Springs’ is still one of the greatest songs that she ever wrote, but it doesn’t get any better than watching her sing that song to Lindsey Buckingham when they played it later on in their career. She needed every single line of that song to hit like a sledgehammer, because that’s what the song demanded.
Then again, ‘The Gold Dust Woman’ is far from the first person on Earth to internalise every song she sang. The greatest blues singers of all time had made their entire careers off of being some of the greatest emotional translators the world had ever seen, but even in an age where rock and roll dominated every other genre, there was no one who could bring as much power to her vocals as Janis Joplin could.
She wasn’t sugarcoating a single thing that came out of her mouth, and even when she started toning things down, you could tell that she was using the same method that Nicks would use years later. It was all about putting people in a trance when they heard a song like ‘Piece of My Heart’ or ‘Ball and Chain’, but ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ could still break anyone’s heart if they weren’t careful.
Although Joplin was one in a long line of great female singers, Nicks felt that no one managed to have as much of an impact as she did when she first started, saying, “Pretty much the one that really touched me the most, the rock and roll singer was Janis. Just her style, her craziness. And she really is the only one that, where I kinda got what I kind of do from her. There really wasn’t anybody else like that.”
Because had there been other rockers of Joplin’s calibre, there’s a good chance any other male singer would be running scared. Countless artists have managed to make a living singing the blues, but if you were to put someone like Robert Plant next to Joplin, there’s no question that Joplin holds the prize hands down.
But the key to what made Joplin great wasn’t about being able to belt to the rafters every single time she sang. No one gets to that kind of vocal without going through a lot of living beforehand, and Joplin was there to teach people like Nicks that it was okay to take all of the pain in your life and throw it right back at the audience.
