“An important part of this”: The tour Mick Fleetwood thought Stevie Nicks wouldn’t survive
The touring lifestyle is never easy for anyone. Even for artists who claim to live and die onstage half the time, it’s easy for them to get winded in a business without time for any sick days or time off to see their family. It can be hard on anyone who’s at the peak of health, but when Fleetwood Mac took to the road, Mick Fleetwood remembered more than a few times when he felt that the rest of his band were teetering on the edge of collapse once the stage lights went out.
At the same time, Fleetwood Mac was always barely holding it together before they reached their classics. Peter Green had started to become more and more unreliable after losing his way to LSD, and while Bob Welch was certainly a step up in many respects, it was hard to take the band seriously when they had to keep changing band members left and right. Once Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined, though, everything started to make a little more sense.
Buckingham had introduced some more pop-friendly styles into their repertoire, and in Nicks, the band had one of their greatest frontwomen and cheerleaders. For a group that was initially all about the blues, songs like ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Gold Dust Woman’ didn’t even feel like they came from this plane of existence, especially when Nicks played up her theatrics during the live show and transformed herself into the spirits she sang about.
That was what the music was bringing out of her, but there were also more than a little bit of chemical assistance. Although the romantic turmoil drove most of the sessions for Rumours, cocaine may as well have been the unofficial sixth member of the band at the time, and by the time that Nicks started working on the road, she had become a full-blown addict behind the scenes.
While that cocaine may have revitalised her every time she took to the stage, her definition of touring was a lot different from what she ended up dealing with. The band were already legendary for songs like ‘Oh Well’, but now that they were starting back at zero with new singers, Nicks had reached the point where she had started to crack under pressure, and Fleetwood remembered pulling her aside to make sure she could finish the tour in 1975.
Since Nicks wasn’t that strong to begin with, Fleetwood had to sit down with her to make sure she didn’t crack under pressure, saying, “I kept telling her, ‘Come on, Stevie, you’ve got to eat and stay fit. You’re an important part of this band now. We need you. And she’d say, ‘Mick–when I joined I didn’t have a clue it would be like this. No one told me. I didn’t know me and Chris [McVie] would be sleeping on amps in the back of the truck.”
But this was a lifelong commitment, and Nicks wasn’t going to let a little discomfort get in the way of her becoming a rockstar. Every musician has to pay their dues in some way, and since she had supported herself and Buckingham when they were still a duo, she was more than willing to do whatever she could to get back on the stage every single night, no matter what was in front of her.
While that may have led to her picking up some bad habits along the way, Nicks never forgot the meaning of being a professional. Others might try to weasel their way out of gigs because they have a minor sore throat, but Nicks knew that she never did her job properly until she wowed everyone in the crowd every night.
