Happy birthday, Stevie Nicks! Look back at our 2015 cover story on the rock goddess
The ex in question, Lindsey Buckingham, is a formidable frontman, a virtuosic guitar innovator, an obsessive studio genius à la Brian Wilson, a snappy dresser with first-class cheekbones. He would be the undisputed star of almost any other band.
There are a couple of other pictures leaning against Nicks’ makeup mirror, each meant to inspire. One, taken in the late Seventies, shows a pigtailed Nicks writing a never-to-be-released song with a tan, shirtless, hunky-looking George Harrison. The other is a recent shot of a beaming Nicks posing with a veteran from the war in Iraq, Pfc. Vincent Mannion, one of the many injured servicemen she’s befriended during her visits to the Walter Reed hospital.
Nicks rolls her eyes, her expression matching the little girl’s in the photograph. “OK, maybe we should go into a different tape, since he’s next door,” she says. “We can go with something that doesn’t have quite that much bang. All he’s probably hearing is the drum, like in a car. This is the first time he’s ever been next door to us. That can never happen again!”
“I’m a tomboy,” says McVie. “I love men. I love hanging around with men. And Stevie is kind of a girly girl.” “Stevie is very direct, very honest, very self-obsessed in a way. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. She has her brand, you know? She’s an icon. She’s a genius. She’s a lovely, kind, beautiful woman, and I love her to death.”tour, as McVie and Nicks simultaneously weathered their intra-band breakups.
Truth is, there was one offer that might have gotten Nicks to leave: “Had Tom Petty called me up one day and said, ‘If you want to leave Fleetwood Mac to be in the Heartbreakers, there’s a place for you,’ I might very well have done it. Anytime. Today! Because it’s my favorite band.” For years, Petty told her that the Heartbreakers had a “no girls allowed” rule, but he recently gave her a platinum sheriff’s badge with the engraving, TO THE ONLY GIRL IN THE HEARTBREAKERS.
Nicks grew up upper-middle class in Arizona, California, Texas, New Mexico and Utah, moving constantly, thanks to her father’s burgeoning career as a corporate executive – he eventually became president of Greyhound’s Armour-Dial. She went to two different high schools, first in an L.A. suburb and then in what is now Silicon Valley.
She’s never really had “crystal visions,” but there are times when lyrics come to her unbidden, as if she’s “channeling some poet.” She’s confident she’s lived before this life: “I was definitely a performer in another life. Maybe I was in vaudeville or a ballerina. I’m too comfortable onstage.” And more to the point, there have always been moments in her performances when she taps into the ineffable, when something … odd seems to happen.
In any case, she was a mess by 1986 or so, and her friends were scared, even if they shared her habits. “All of us were drug addicts,” says Nicks. “But there was a point where I was the worst drug addict… I was a girl, I was fragile, and I was doing a lot of coke. And I had that hole in my nose. So it was dangerous.”
It’s the day after the Anaheim show, and Nicks has some errands to run at the big house before heading off to the next concert, in Arizona. There, she’ll have a chance to see her brother, who recently recovered from bladder cancer. She’s wearing prescription sunglasses and more silken black. On her neck is a diamond-encrusted version of her trademark moon necklace, given to her by the jeweler father of a young fan named Sara, who became a friend before she died of cancer in her early twenties.
But lately, she’s been hearing her mother’s voice again. “She says stuff to me that nobody in my world who’s alive can think of to say. And I now know there’s the other side, because of my mother. I know my mom’s tone, and I know her philosophy, and when I hear her answer a question for me, I go, like, ‘There is another world.’ I am no longer thinking what people tell you, like, ‘There’s nothing.’ Well, there is. There is totally something, and Mom is on the other side.
So she’s ruled out younger men and doesn’t particularly want to date older ones: “What if I fall in love with somebody and they die?” And she doesn’t hold out much hope for guys her age. “They wanna go out with somebody that’s 25,” she says. “That has been going on since the Bible, and I haven’t even read the Bible, but I know that. So what am I gonna do, compete with that? I’m not a competitor. So I don’t even wanna be in that situation.
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