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Originally Posted by bombaysaffires
But plenty of people in and around the band have talked through the years about how the Rumours-era success really went to her head and it became harder and harder even for the band to get in touch with her through the layers of sycophants and handlers and a$$-kissers surrounding her starting then. She LOVED being a STAR and moved lock, stock, and barrel into her own Norma Desmond land. Fame and stardom skewed her first and most. Drugs pushed the delusions even further. The real business power didn't come til the 80s, and she was already well and truly skewed by then.
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Her confidence grew by leaps and bounds with the success of “Dreams” on the charts and the celebrity magazine coverage (wasn’t she on the cover of People in 1977?). I think she grew into a narcissist — I don’t think she was one before she was a celebrity. Maybe that’s true of many big stars, I don’t know. (Remember how introverted she sounded talking to both Jim Ladd and Laura Gross in 1976 during studio time? Nothing at all like the celebrity she became only a year or two later.)
And by the late 1970s, when
Tusk was finally out, Stevie was a Grade A narcissist. It was obvious from the way she talked and the fragmented things she said and even the way she posed for photos that she adored the character she created — I think to the point that she could no longer really distinguish between that character and the woman she was deep down. She began to believe her own publicity, as the saying goes. The others may have been amused at first, but I think they grew frustrated with it. They wanted Stevie to come back down to earth once in a while.
The narcissism charge was showing up in concert and album reviews probably before
Tusk. Remember Hilburn’s characterization of Nicks in his review of the Fleetwood Mac 1982 show at Irvine Meadows? By the time this appeared in the paper, it already felt like yesterday’s news.
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Nicks, who appears to have gained enormous confidence from her recent solo success, sang Monday with an intensity that matched Buckingham’s own drive. She even has shed some (though far from all) of that narcissistic aura that has made her something of a caricature in rock.
—“Star Power Sparkles at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre” (Robert Hilburn, LA Times, Oct. 20, 1982)
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