“I was going to go nuts”: the tour that drove Stevie Nicks insane
By any standard, a massive world tour isn’t exactly the life of roses and luxury we imagine it to be. For any artist, it’s months on end of gruelling slog being carted from place to place and basically permanently living in Groundhog Day, all for our viewing pleasure. Inevitably, as part of this, tensions are bound to spill over – that is, except if you’re Fleetwood Mac, who were just at each other’s necks irrespective of whether they were on the road or in the studio. But for Stevie Nicks, there was one particular tour that truly pushed her to the edge.
Of course, it takes no expert to explain that the frontwoman never exactly had the easiest time of it in the band – broiling feuds with Lindsey Buckingham and an odd love triangle with Mick Fleetwood was the famous lore charted in Rumours, but with the dramatic stratospheric success the album brought about, they were at least able to stick things out a little longer.
The result was 1979’s Tusk, from which the British-American fraternity then embarked on a massive world tour from October of that year to the following September 1980, clocking up well over 100 shows in the process. As much as it was a treat for so many fans the world over to finally see their favourite ban in the flesh, it was a tour that, as with so many other occasions, nearly drove Fleetwood Mac to the point of oblivion, and not least Nicks.
She recalled in 1981: “I was really in terrible shape. I was so tired and sung out. I was so ‘Landslide-ed’ out and so ‘Rhiannon-ed’ out that I thought if I had to stand on stage for two and one-half hours and do that set one more time, I was going to go nuts.” The more eagle-eyed among you, however, will notice that the timings of this lined up remarkably well with a new venture in Nicks’s life – all because the depths of hell on the tour had prompted her to make the leap.
“I decided to do Bella Donna when I came off the road with Fleetwood Mac at the end of the Tusk tour,” she admitted. Despite how much of a runaway mammoth hit her debut solo album may have been, though, it was a move that naturally didn’t come without its own massive heap of controversy.
She continued: “The idea to do a solo album came when I was going out with Paul Fishkin [co-owner of Modern Records] about four years [before]. We just sat down one night and decided that it would be wonderful to start a record company that really cared about the artists, had high morals and principles, and was special. And he did it… It was very difficult for both of us. Everybody was angry at us. But we really felt that it was important that we go ahead and do it no matter what.”
It did indeed prove to be extremely important, not just for Nicks’s career but for the fabric of music at large because without Bella Donna, we wouldn’t have such seminal rock anthems as ‘Edge of Seventeen’ and ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’. It does beg the question, however – Fleetwood Mac’s famous fallouts spurned a hell of a lot of hatred and ill feeling, but did they secretly relish in it, given how much acclaim they managed to gain off its back?
