The “vile” move Stevie Nicks never forgave Mick Fleetwood for
Stevie Nicks wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty to try to get what she wanted.
Fleetwood Mac may have been a soft rock outfit when she first started, but she wanted the chance to leave everyone stunned whenever they heard her sing any number of her songs live. But even if a lot of that pent-up anger came from her being pissed at Lindsey Buckingham, she knew that the harsher moments tended to come from when she was off the stage.
I mean, it isn’t all that hard to see why Nicks was getting more than a little pissed off at Buckingham when she worked on Rumours. No one would have wanted to make songs that called them out for being a cheater, and while Nicks could handle that with grace, she had less time for when Buckingham would go out of his way to try not to work with her behind the scenes.
No one would have wanted to work with their ex on fine-tuning their songs, and after one too many bad arguments with Nicks, Buckingham’s decision to leave might have been the smartest thing for both of them. Nicks was willing to carry the load in ‘The Mac’ and balance out her solo career at the same time, but that’s a lot easier said than done when you look at her track record in her solo career.
She seemed to be devoting all the time in the world to working on some of her best songs, but when looking through some of her greatest-hits packages, ‘Rhiannon’ seemed to have just as much resonance with the public as ‘Edge of Seventeen’. She wasn’t going to ignore that side of her sound by any means, and when she ended up working on Timespace, her vision for the album was to give every single song a home.
That did include many of her classic tracks, but there was one notable absence that Nicks couldn’t handle. ‘Silver Springs’ had been tucked away as a B-side during the Rumours sessions, and while Nicks knew that it always deserved better than being treated as an afterthought, she wasn’t going to stand for Mick Fleetwood insisting that she not use the song on Timespace.
Fleetwood knew that they needed to use ‘Silver Springs’ for the right moment in time, but as far as Nicks could tell, the drummer was practically holding her song for ransom, saying, “I have told the world what a vile thing it was that Mick Fleetwood had done to me, who has fought like a dog to keep this band from breaking up. I don’t really know what’s going through Mick’s mind. He never returned a phone call, and he never felt it was his duty to sit down and write a letter to tell me why.”
To Fleetwood’s credit, though, he wasn’t exactly wrong when they finally did unveil the song during the album The Dance. Every single person in that crowd was absolutely stunned to see what Nicks could do with that song live, and hearing her and Buckingham singing in harmony about how much she resented him after their breakup is the kind of moment that will never happen again whenever they play live.
It was a bit evil for Fleetwood to hold the song at bay like that, but he was thinking about the long time whenever he performed. He knew that there was a right time for every one of those songs to see the light of day, and Nicks only needed to catch up to what the rest of the band was doing before she found the time to sing her masterpiece live.
