Pop music, at its finest, is a province of mythmaking, speculative fiction, reality-reshaping, and trying on and then discarding mask after mask. And few do this as effortlessly, to the point of unintentionally, as Stevie Nicks. Over a five-decade-plus career in music, either with Fleetwood Mac or fearlessly solo, Nicks has inspired fervent sing-alongs, fervent album sales, fervent devotion and fervent mystique. How do you untangle the myth from the reality of the singular art and life of Nicks? Who cares! We don’t have any time for that today. Instead, we’re here to revel in the enigma and lore of Nicks, and maybe do some conjuring of our own. Here are three headlong dives into the grimoire of Stevie Nicks ahead of her Thursday show at the Amway Center.
Gold Dust Woman
Where to begin with the Stevie Nicks era of Fleetwood Mac and the spells she cast through those early albums? The “beginning”? Sure, (winks) we can give that whole thing a go.
A young and impossibly beautiful duo of wayward elven hippy lovers, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, show up on Mick Fleetwood’s doorstep and immediately turn his band of bluesy belters into mysterious rock megastars, complete with near-Shakespearean levels of band intrigue, doomed romance and Bacchanalian lifestyles.
If you have a vinyl copy of Rumours in your home, congratulations, you have the equivalent of a ouija board. How else to explain the wild, incantatory magick of Nicks’ spotlight numbers like “Dreams,” “Gold Dust Woman” and the wracked “Silver Springs” (magically materializing on reissues, still drawing in unsuspecting listeners like a siren to crash hopelessly against the rocks of unrequited love). And if you mimic her pose on the album cover, stare into the mirror and whisper the name “Rhiannon” three times, well … you’ll have to find out for yourself.
At the height of Mac fame, Nicks was a (possibly) benevolent magus: decked out in capes, top hats, lace, swirling dresses, talismanic jewelry; entrancing whole stadiums in ways that a hack like Jim Jones could only dream about. Then Tusk, and by that point, the gonzo capitalist overload of Fleetwood Mac — double albums, studio overkill, band infighting, commercial suicide — and its deleterious impact on Nicks — blizzards of cocaine, a tortured secret affair with the married Fleetwood — led Nicks to quietly gather up her crystal ball and tambourines, and fly away like a … nightbird? Maybe. Maybe not. — MM
Leather and lace
Queen of the night, sovereign of serenity, goddess of the moon, ruler of the stars. Like a Greek goddess of myth, Nicks is often depicted as covered in the mists of midnight, a shawl of dust reflecting the glimmer and glint of nuclear fusion light years away.
The enchanted Stevie Nicks, clad in myth as often as chiffon, velvet, leather and lace … her armor of the night. The enchanted Nicks, in the sweet and sticky summer of 1981, with the release of her debut solo album, Bella Donna, declared her devotion to darkness, “Like the moon that she loved/ don’t you know that the stars are a part of us?”
Bella Donna, though still rooted in mystic California vibes, has a tougher, more rock sound. Shorn of the Mac’s excess, Bella Donna and The Wild Heart were like disquieted muses drifting along the Sunset Strip, conjuring fishnet-clad hair-metallers and pale death-rockers from thin air, before repairing to a castle deep in the Hollywood Hills just before dawn. Or so a story goes.
A fighter for love and language, Nicks keeps her coven close. She’s known to bestow golden crescent moons to young people she sees herself in, that look up to her, or that she’s worked with: Tavi Gevinson and Taylor Swift are among these acolytes.
These intentional gestures of community gifted by the sorceress of sound and stage, of self-appointed lore, are a testament to her alchemy of the night. — NS
‘She is like a cat in the dark’?
Those of us who came of age in the era of Rumours spent more time than we’d like to admit debating the question “Is Stevie Nicks a witch or isn’t she?”
Nicks certainly seemed happy with the insinuation: “All your life you’ve never seen/ A woman taken by the wind,” she’d purr. Whereupon the more cynical among us would opine that we were instead witnessing a woman being taken by several pounds of Peruvian floor cleanser.
It took decades for us to see our folly. And for that we have to thank the renowned documentarian Ryan Murphy, who in his landmark white paper American Horror Story: Coven, proved that Nicks had been a genuine practitioner of the dark arts all along.
Like a Nick Broomfield of the small screen, Murphy laid out his thesis in a dramatic fashion and with a real flair for storytelling. He planted the seeds early in the season by introducing us to one Misty Day, a humorously addled bayou witch whose obsessive consumption of Fleetwood Mac had convinced her that Nicks was a member of the tribe.
The idea was submitted as patently ridiculous — a nostalgic callback to innumerable crocheted hopheads whose company we had to endure back in the ’70s. But it was just a feint, because several installments later, Nicks herself appeared onscreen, in a cameo that revealed she is indeed in command of mystical powers far beyond the reckoning of us humble mortal types.
She was even shown gifting Day with one of her trademark shawls, to wield as a totem!
Case closed, gentlemen of the jukebox jury. I have no idea how Murphy convinced Nicks to put an end to 37 years’ worth of innuendo and declare her spiritual gifts in such an ironclad, undeniable manner. But I guess nothing is impossible to the guy who was finally able to prove O.J. murdered Versace. (We think that’s how it went.)
Documentary is the gatekeeper of truth, and by capturing Nicks on camera in her full bedknob-and-broomstick glory, Murphy showed he is the master of it. — SS
Kia Center
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This article appears in May 24-30, 2023.