Nicks, Stevie

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STEVIE NICKS

Born: Stephanie Lynn Nicks; Phoenix, Arizona, 26 May 1948

Genre: Rock

Best-selling album since 1990: Timespace: The Best of Stevie Nicks (1991)

Hit songs since 1990: "Edge of Seventeen"

Singer/songwriter Stevie Nicks rapidly gained international prominence in 1975 when she became a vocalist for the supergroup Fleetwood Mac. She followed Janis Joplin as one of rock's leading female singers and enhanced that credential by forging a successful solo career despite suffering personal chaos. Famous for her unique stage presence and an inimitable voice, Nicks has managed to juggle a solo career with occasional dalliances in Fleetwood Mac.

Nicks lived in more than a half-dozen major cities during her formative years. Her father was a successful businessman whose career required that the Nicks family move wherever his promotions took him. Consequently, she spent a great deal of time with her grandfather, a colorful character, who in his earlier days made his living as a pool shark and moonlighted as a country and western guitar player and singer. He taught Nicks to sing duets with him, and when she was sixteen, her parents bought her a guitar. She wrote her first song, about a relationship with a boyfriend that went awry, soon after.

Nicks first met guitarist/singer Lindsey Buckingham while attending high school in Palo Alto, California. They played together in a band called Fritz, became lovers, and in 1970 moved to Los Angeles, where Nicks cleaned houses and worked as a waitress to support Buckingham's songwriting career. After hearing their debut album duet, Buckingham/Nicks (1973), Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood invited them to join the band, which at the time was in shambles. Fleetwood Mac became an immediate sensation with the addition of Nicks and Bucking-ham, whose soft-rock talents proved to be a perfect tonic for the band's discordant chemistry. (Fleetwood did not originally want Nicks and agreed only because Bucking-ham refused to join the group without her.)

Thrust into the role of singer and focal point of Fleet-wood Mac, Nicks captured her essence as a freewheeling mystic sorceress of rock. Clad in flowing chiffon gowns with wispy blonde hair floating about her head, she danced and grooved emotionally to each song. Her sense of style influenced an entire generation of women's fashion tastes. Nicks's unrestrained alto possesses a distinctive rasp and folksy phrasing that perfectly suited the moody rock sounds of Fleetwood Mac in hits such as "Dreams" and "Rhiannon." In 1977, during the tour for the monumentally successful album Rumours (1977), she and Buckingham acrimoniously split up. Yet, both persisted on in the band. During this time Nicks developed a cocaine habit.

The 1980s were both flourishing and tumultuous for Nicks as she made successful strides in her solo career but suffered several personal setbacks. Her first solo album, Bella Donna (1981), immediately went platinum and contained several hits, including a duet with rocker Tom Petty, "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," and another with then-boyfriend, singer Don Henley, "Leather and Lace." In the 1980s she recorded three more solo albums, all of which went platinum, and recorded two with Fleetwood Mac. The decade was a whirlwind of touring and recording. Nicks's messy breakup with Buckingham was further complicated by her affair with Mick Fleetwood and an eight-month marriage to Kim Anderson, the widowed husband of her best friend who had died from leukemia. Nicks's million-dollar cocaine use began to wear down the cartilage in her nose, threatening her singing voice. She finally checked herself into the Betty Ford Clinic and emerged clean, only to become addicted to prescription drugs. She entered the 1990s as a rock superstar, but overweight, broken-hearted, and drug-addicted.

After recording Behind the Mask (1990) with Fleet-wood Mac and releasing a compilation album of solo work, Timespace (1991), Nicks sought help in another rehabilitation stint and finally conquered her drug addiction. She began to reclaim her health and was able to lose the weight, which had begun to make her too self-conscious to perform.

In 1993 Nicks, having announced that she had left Fleetwood Mac for good, began aggressively moving on with her solo career. Her fifth studio release, Street Angel (1994), put her back on the scene, although the album's sales paled in comparison to her earlier releases. She also performed a track, "Somebody Stand by Me," for the soundtrack to the 1995 film Boys on the Side.

In 1996 Nicks returned to Fleetwood Mac as the core members of the group—including Buckingham—prepared for a 20th Anniversary Tour of the album Rumours, which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. To kick off the tour, Fleetwood Mac held an intimate concert on a Los Angeles soundstage in 1997 and released a live recording of that show in an album titled The Dance (1997). One of Nicks's noteworthy Fleetwood Mac songs, "Landslide," came from that album, giving the pretty ballad another turn as a hit single. This, she announced, was to be her last foray with Fleetwood Mac.

Nicks revisited her signature sound in the solo release Trouble in Shangri-La (2001). The album features work from her new pal, singer Sheryl Crow, who co-produced five songs from the album. Nicks called on several cronies to guest on this thirteen-song album, such as singer/songwriter Sarah McLachlan, singer Macy Gray, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, and Tom Petty's guitarist, Mike Campbell.

In 2002 Fleetwood Mac regrouped and Nicks found herself once again on stage with Buckingham. The band released a studio recording, Say You Will (2003), and supported it throughout the year with an extensive tour.

Stevie Nicks survived the excesses and trappings of rock stardom and remains an important contemporary artist into her fifties—not an easy feat, especially for a female in an industry that promotes youthful stars as intensively as it devours them.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Bella Donna (Atlantic, 1981); Wild Heart (Atlantic, 1983); Rock a Little (Atlantic, 1985); Other Side of the Mirror (Atlantic, 1989); Timespace (Atlantic, 1991); Street Angel (Modern Atlantic, 1994); Trouble in Shangri-La (Warner Bros., 2001).