The tranquiliser that cost Fleetwood Mac their final masterpiece
The entire appeal of Fleetwood Mac in their prime was watching all of them working together.
It was practically a miracle seeing all of them work off each other on a normal day, but when looking at the amount of bullshit they had to put up with and still find time to sing along on each other’s tunes is mind-boggling. But for all of the emotional baggage that Stevie Nicks had to plough through, there were many times when she ended up becoming her own worst enemy outside the band.
Then again, it’s not like Nicks was a saint amongst the band by any means. By the time that Rumours began, the band had picked up an unknown sixth member named cocaine, and given the fact that they were seriously considering thanking their dealer in the middle of the liner notes before he passed away, it’s not like they were trying to exactly hide their fiendish habits when they weren’t onstage.
It was completely common for that kind of thing to happen, but there comes a point when something has to give, and as soon as Nicks was told that she could die if she took any more, there was no reason for her to go back to the white powder anymore. She seemed to be reinvigorated as an artist once she stepped out on her own again, but by the time Lindsey Buckingham left the fold, she had picked up another bad habit along the way.
The era in between Tango in the Night, leading up to the band’s return on The Dance, was always going to be tense, but if you listen to Nicks’s solo record Street Angel, something definitely feels off. She was more than happy to put as much as she could into her songs, but by the time she had come off of everything, her doctor had prescribed her Klonopin, which turned her into a walking zombie most of the time.
Despite still having the best female voice in rock and roll, fighting back against this addiction wasn’t going to be an easy feat. Much of the time, Nicks was too sedated to do anything, and once she finally came out of her stupor, all she could think about was how much time she threw away claiming that she was getting better.
There was a lot of work to do after those hard years, and Nicks knew what she had left on the table due to her vices, saying, “The sad thing is, that was eight years out of my life when I could have done maybe three really great solo records maybe one more really great Fleetwood Mac record, so that’s gone. All I did was just lay around and write crappy poetry. And that was all because everybody was worried about me going back to coke—which I wasn’t.”
In a strange way, Nicks also seemed to be on a parallel track as one of her heroes in many respects. She may have been the one to go through her dark night of the soul first, but only a few years after her cleaning up, Tom Petty would end up doing the same thing when he made his divorce album, Echo, which led everyone to believe that he had vanished and started using heroin.
While Say You Will proved to be the return to form that Fleetwood Mac needed to remind everyone what they could do in the 2000s, who knows what could have happened had Nicks been able to get out of her self-induced haze earlier? Perhaps they may have even managed to void whatever the hell was going on on the album Time.
