“I was in terrible shape”: The tour that made Stevie Nicks leave Fleetwood Mac
Every single musician in a band has been tempted by the dream of one day going solo. It might not always be in the cards for them to have the same kind of stellar career that Ozzy Osbourne had after he left Black Sabbath or Janis Joplin after leaving Big Brother and the Holding Company, but it’s always worth it to try to see what artists are capable of without that musical safety net. Then again, when Stevie Nicks decided to take some time off from Fleetwood Mac it was out of necessity rather than curiosity.
When looking at her career before the release of Bella Donna, Nicks practically gave her livelihood to music when working with Lindsey Buckingham. She had worked odd jobs to pay the bills when they were Buckingham Nicks, and once they decided to take the chance with the rock heavyweights, Nicks made sure that everything that she was singing on was the greatest it could be, walking away with some of the best material on their debut with the group like ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide’.
But there had to be moments when she began questioning things when working on Rumours. She was always relying on the rest of the band to help flesh out some of her arrangements, but since she was going through her breakup with Buckingham out in the open, it made no sense for her to go into a situation that could devolve into a screaming match at any given moment.
That’s before even having to deal with the lyrics she had to dodge as well. No one was bothering to look into the finer details of most pop tunes, but when people learned that ‘Go Your Own Way’ was about Buckingham smack-talking Nicks right to her face, hearing her combat everything with ‘Dreams’ lived up to the white witch persona that had always come naturally to her.
“I decided to do Bella Donna when I came off the road with Fleetwood Mac at the end of the Tusk tour. I was really in terrible shape. I was so tired and sung out.”
Stevie Nicks
Once the band started work on Tusk, though, there was a definite need for change. Nicks’s songs still sounded fine and Christine McVie was as stable as ever, but the album often feels like a spiritual success to The Beatles’ White Album in the fact that it constantly gives off the impression of three different albums being played together. So, if it already sounded strange coming out of the speakers, it wasn’t going to get any better when they performed the tunes live.
So by the time she got home, Nicks felt that going solo was one of the only ways to hold onto her artistic sanity, saying, “I decided to do Bella Donna when I came off the road with Fleetwood Mac at the end of the Tusk tour. 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..”
And the personnel involved with the album is probably why her work sounded so different from Fleetwood Mac’s. Buckingham may have had a habit of being a perfectionist in the studio, but bringing in Waddy Wachtel on guitar on a few songs and getting a few appearances from people like Tom Petty and Don Henley helped set her apart as a more contemplative songwriter, not having to rely on hitting the listener over the head with a new hook every single time a new section started.
She could have easily rolled with the punches in Fleetwood Mac, but the fact that Nicks had enough bravery to go out on her own and also be a contributing member of the band was the best of both worlds. Because despite everyone else getting pissed about having to wait around, it’s alright to have ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ and ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ in rotation as much as ‘Seven Wonders’.
