Christine & Stevie

[UndoingTheLaces]

Does anyone know what the nature of Christine and Stevie's relationship was? In recent years Stevie has talked very positively about their friendship and how it was nice to have another girl to hang out with and how different it is now without her in the band. But when you look at the unreleased footage of the Tusk documentary it always looks like Christine is just annoyed with Stevie. And some of the interviews I've read she always seems very dismissive and saying things like "we never knew what Stevie was singing about" (totally misquoted, I'm sure). I just wonder if anyone has any idea if they actually did get along really well or not.

[michelej1]

Does anyone know what the nature of Christine and Stevie's relationship was? In recent years Stevie has talked very positively about their friendship and how it was nice to have another girl to hang out with and how different it is now without her in the band. But when you look at the unreleased footage of the Tusk documentary it always looks like Christine is just annoyed with Stevie. And some of the interviews I've read she always seems very dismissive and saying things like "we never knew what Stevie was singing about" (totally misquoted, I'm sure). I just wonder if anyone has any idea if they actually did get along really well or not.

Well, she did say she never knew what Stevie was singing about, but she also said it sounded good even if the lyrics didn't make sense. So, it wasn't exactly dismissive.

They got along. I'm sure it was like sisters. Some squabbling, general affection and tolerance.

Michele

[Villavic]

I think they were like sisters during the 70s. Stevie said so in the Classic albums - Rumours special. But during the 80s I think they went different ways (but still friends).

Bob Brunning wrote also that Christine didn't socialise that much with Stevie during the 80s: "she seems to have developed her own fantasy world somehow, which i'm not part of". Can't remember when or where Christine said that but it's a quote from Bob's book.

[drzubritsky]

Bob Brunning wrote also that Christine didn't socialise that much with Stevie during the 80s: "she seems to have developed her own fantasy world somehow, which i'm not part of". Can't remember when or where Christine said that but it's a quote from Bob's book.

That quote came from a Rolling Stone article that came out at the time of Christine's solo album (June 7, 1984 issue). The complete quote from the article is as follows:

More recently, Christine admits that she found her cohort Stevie Nicks' marriage "very, very bizarre" as well. Nicks married Kim Anderson, the widower of her best friend, Robin Anderson, early in 1983; they are now divorced. "She thought it was what Robin would have wanted," says Christine. "But they'd known each other for a long time, and it didn't seem like crazy love to me. I didn't buy her a wedding present."

Indeed, a touch of sadness creeps into Christine's voice when she discusses the transformation of Nicks' personality over the last ten years. "Ten years ago, she really had her feet on the gound, along with a trememdous sense of humor, which she still has. But she seems to have developed her own fantasy world, somehow, which I'm not part of. We don't socialize much."

Undoubtedly a pretty accurate observation of the state of Stevie's life at that time.

[louielouie2000]

I think the main way they really related was as women in a famous band during a time when women didn't wield much power in the entertainment industry. They kind of had to be allies, because otherwise who was going to stand up for their interests?

Christine has always said she felt like one of the guys in the band... and indeed she was a very serious force in Fleetwood Mac. She was the only trained musician in the Rumours group, probably the only one in the whole band who could read music, and like the guys in the group, was a very active & key figure in shaping the sound of Fleetwood Mac. Christine was in the studio every day when albums were being recorded because she did play an instrument.

Stevie really wasn't a huge part of the creative process from all the sources we've heard from over the years. She didn't play an instrument, and basically hung around in the studio when it was her turn to lay down vocals (which is really a finishing touch). On stage, Christine preferred to be pushed into the background because she wanted to be a part of the rhythm section of the band; Stevie was out front because she wanted to be a star.

There is no doubt in my mind that Christine & Stevie weren't friends so much as they were allies. They probably did bond during their respective breakups while Rumours was being recorded; there are the stories of them hiding out in each others condos. But I think any depth of friendship they had was probably pretty fleeting. After Rumours hit it big, every single member in the band started charting their own paths. The individual limos going to individual hotels & the like started, and eventually everyone only communicated through their respective managers.

Stevie & Christine undoubtedly will always have some sort of bond due to the extraordinary situation they were both a part of for the better part of their adult lives. But do they still talk on the phone these days? I kinda doubt it.

[On Ice]

I agree with Louie, probably more allies than actual friends, I can't see them actually having all that much in common. I doubt they've spoken more than a handful of times since the Dance days.

[michelej1]

Really, I think Christine thought Stevie was kind of silly, which is not to say she didn't value Stevie's contributions to FM, but she was just a little too flighty for Christine to have a lot in common with her. And the cocaine made Stevie even sillier. Of course, Christine herself was always drunk, but she wasn't given to constant nattering.

I do think it's rather how you feel about a little sister that you feel affection for, but you think they're kind of immature, a bit pesky and you're always having to tell them to shush and settle down.

Michele

[michelej1]

One of my favorite memories from the Dance tour is when Christine would go to get her tamborine and Stevie had lots of them, so she would be there trying to hand three different ones to Christine and Christine didn't need any help getting one in the first place. She certainly wasn't looking for a selection of tambos and she'd kind of have to bat Stevie's hand away just to get a tamborine, because Stevie was just being officiously helpful.

You know, it's one of those tolerant relationships where you are constantly wishing the other person would calm down a bit. But you like them well enough.

Michele

[HomerMcvie]

Really, I think Christine thought Stevie was kind of silly, which is not to say she didn't value Stevie's contributions to FM, but she was just a little too flighty for Christine to have a lot in common with her. And the cocaine made Stevie even sillier. Of course, Christine herself was always drunk, but she wasn't given to constant nattering.

I do think it's rather how you feel about a little sister that you feel affection for, but you think they're kind of immature, a bit pesky and you're always having to tell them to shush and settle down.

Michele

I agree, 100%. It's how I've always viewed their relationship. Sometimes, your friends are that, merely because you're in the same room together. But I don't think they have much in common, so once they're out of the same room, they go their separate ways.
Plus, Stevie's always had such an entourage, and I never thought of Christine enjoying that.

[MacShadowsBall]

I agree with what louie said. :cool:

[Fannymac]

Paul Fishkin once told me that a comment that Christine made (circa '81) that a lot of Stevie's songs were "rubbish" really hurt Stevie, but I think their relationship had highs and lows....I think they were close early on, say, the first year or three, just because it was a new adventure for both of them, then I think they went their own ways in the 80's, rebonding (albeit in a different way) in the 90's.
That said, I would bet they haven't talked in years now.

[UndoingTheLaces]

She certainly wasn't looking for a selection of tambos and she'd kind of have to bat Stevie's hand away just to get a tamborine, because Stevie was just being officiously helpful.

Michele, I have never heard the term officiously before and I know many people who are officiously helpful. I will use that term all the time now. Thank you for that.

Thanks for all the responses. This is really fascinating to me. I've never really thought about it before. I had a friend who is a lesbian and she always loved the photos of Christine and Stevie in the Tango book because they were being very close and intimate with each other and she thought they would have made a really nice couple had they been gay. I saw one of those pics recently and it got me to thinking about what their actual friendship must have been like. You hear stuff in interviews but you never know if they are expressing true feelings or just telling fans what they think they want to hear.

[michelej1]

Paul Fishkin once told me that a comment that Christine made (circa '81) that a lot of Stevie's songs were "rubbish" really hurt Stevie, but I think their relationship had highs and lows....I think they were close early on, say, the first year or three, just because it was a new adventure for both of them, then I think they went their own ways in the 80's, rebonding (albeit in a different way) in the 90's.
That said, I would bet they haven't talked in years now.

Yes, I guess when you start out and you are all traveling in one car and sleeping on instrument cases, that you're close one way or another, like it or not, especially if you're the only two women.

Then when you all experience success together, there's no one else in the world who knows what that feels like and can share the emotion with you and that creates a bond. It's like you have this joint foundation between you, even though your personalities are quite divergent.

Christine would say how in the studio they'd have to tell Stevie to stop singing. She couldn't play the instruments, so she did not take part in the song building musically. She wanted to sing right away, when the rest of them were still working through the sound. And they'd tell Stevie "not yet." Stevie said she'd be waiting in the sound booth and sometimes they would just forget about her. She'd be waiting for hours.

You're a part of the same family, but not really on the same mental wave length.

Michele

[Etisl]

I think they were like sisters during the 70s. Stevie said so in the Classic albums - Rumours special. But during the 80s I think they went different ways (but still friends).

Bob Brunning wrote also that Christine didn't socialise that much with Stevie during the 80s: "she seems to have developed her own fantasy world somehow, which i'm not part of". Can't remember when or where Christine said that but it's a quote from Bob's book.

I did see an interview, it might have been on behind the music...but not quite sure, where the band members talked about Stevie being hard to connect with during her drug years.........and how great it was to have Stevie back, now that she was sober.

[aleuzzi]

This has been talked about a lot before. Not sure where the threads are.

Perhaps in the 70s and early 80s the two were more allies than natural friends. But even then there appears to have been genuine warmth.

When Lindsey left, the two women seemed to have grown a lot closer as friends who had been through times together and apart. There is no doubt Stevie valued Christine as a friend and as a big sister throughout all of her years in the band. Stevie credits Christine with having a guiding hand over everything. If Christine comes off as sarcastic or ironic about Stevie in interviews one should remember she does that a lot about a lot of the band members. And she does it about herself too. It's part of her personality. Stevie demonstrates her affection for people far more readily than Christine.

[aleuzzi]

Paul Fishkin once told me that a comment that Christine made (circa '81) that a lot of Stevie's songs were "rubbish" really hurt Stevie, but I think their relationship had highs and lows....I think they were close early on, say, the first year or three, just because it was a new adventure for both of them, then I think they went their own ways in the 80's, rebonding (albeit in a different way) in the 90's.
That said, I would bet they haven't talked in years now.

That was in a feature piece on the band with Mick, Christine and Lindsey. They were all peeved that Stevie wasn't there because she was touring her new solo album (Bella Donna). (The journalist did not fail to note that no one was giving John a hard time for is absence.) I forget the magazine but I remember the article. I was actually astonished by the hurtful things Lindsey in particular was saying about Stevie in a print publication. Then Mick added that one of her annoying characteristics is that she emotes all the time. Christine's comment about Stevie's songs was actually far more gentle than the others! It went something like this: Stevie is far more prolific a songwriter than I am. Admittedly some of the songs are rubbish, but she writes a lot more than I do.....

In truth, Christine's assessment is pretty sober and accurate. Some of those Stevie demos are pretty slight and only became songs in a real way after a great deal of conception and arranging.

[michelej1]

Christine's quote was from 1982 in The Record interview:


"Stevie's very prolific. She writes constantly, and all her songs are like babies to her, even though some of them are rubbish. When I write, I sit down and work on an idea until it's finished, but Stevie cranks out songs all the time."

[michelej1]

This is the full interview:


The Record, September 1982, Where's Stevie?
http://bla.fleetwoodmac.net/index.php?page=index_v2&id=184&c=11

[aleuzzi]

This is the full interview:


The Record, September 1982, Where's Stevie?
http://bla.fleetwoodmac.net/index.php?page=index_v2&id=184&c=11

Yep, that's the one!

[michelej1]

Rookie Magazine by "Jessica"

http://rookiemag.com/2013/02/literally-the-best-thing-ever-stevie-and-christines-friendship/

Literally the Best Thing Ever: Stevie + Christine

These ladies’ relationship survived Fleetwood Mac, and that’s effing amazing.

In 1977, Fleetwood Mac released Rumours, a magical, haunting, complicated album detailing the breakups of the two couples in the quintet, and it quickly became the best-selling record of that era. The band had begun in the ’60s as a dude-ish blues-rock outfit, but in the early ’70s two women were added to the lineup: the British keyboardist/singer Christine McVie and a California-by-way-of-Arizona singer called Stevie Nicks.

From the band photo on the back cover, the two look like the same stripe of hip and witchy gals, but in their music they were quite the opposite. Christine’s songs were breezy, romantic, direct—all smiley faces and hearts. Stevie’s songs were plodding, mysterious, and bittersweet—she sang about drugs, the man she’d loved (Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham), and her best girlfriends (she wrote the demo “Think About It” to support Christine during her divorce from Mac bassist John McVie). The two wrote an equal number of songs on this album, but the only number one hit (“Dreams”) was Stevie’s. Onstage, Christine sat behind the piano, while Stevie, who couldn’t play any instruments and so was given a tambourine, took center stage, twirling in her diaphanous gowns and enchanting the audience. She was the spectacle. Christine was the background.

In any true girl best-friendship, I think it’s natural to feel like one of you is the Christine, the competent one behind the shadows, while the other is the Stevie, the dazzling rock star with natural charm. If you’re the Christine, your friendship is like a passport to another life, and you feel extra-lucky that you get to know the private, life-size version of your sparkly friend. I know, because in seventh grade, I was the Christine, and my best friend, Jennifer,* was Stevie.

Jennifer was a master flirt who didn’t seem to come with the default mortal fear of boys that the rest of us did. She barely cared what anyone thought of her, period. And, of course, since she didn’t care whether the boys paid attention to her, that’s all they wanted to do. They’d even meet up with her at the mall, which all the other girs in our junior high marveled at (the boys never wanted to go to the mall).

I was not a girl that boys wanted to get to know, but being Jennifer’s sidekick meant fielding endless questions about her from them, and there was a funny power to that. I was the one she hung with on the epic boring days, the one who knew whom she really had a crush on. Friendships can be wholly different on the inside, and privately, Jennifer and I were equal. How other people saw us had no bearing on our closeness.

Christine had been in Fleetwood Mac for about five years before Stevie joined. When the band’s sole original member, drummer Mick Fleetwood, proposed adding the songwriting duo Lindsey and Stevie to the lineup, he arranged for Christine to meet them. Musical prowess was secondary to personal chemistry. Recounting that meeting in the Fleetwood Mac bio The First 30 Years, Christine says, “The last thing I was thinking about at that point was another girl in the band. I had been so used to being the only girl!” But Stevie and Christine hit it off from the beginning. “I liked her instantly,” Christine said. “She was a bright, very direct, tough little thing. I liked her not because she was like me—quite the contrary. We’re complete opposites…. The one thing we had in common was a good sense of humor.” If the two women hadn’t become friends, the band wouldn’t have become what it did.

The first Mac record that the pair made together was 1975’s self-titled album, and listening to Christine’s congenial “Over My Head” vs. Stevie’s brooding “Rhiannon,” you can already sense the difference in personality. Then came Rumours. During the making of it, both Stevie and Christine broke up with their dudes, who were obviously still in the band—and in the recording studio, and in their faces all day every day while they were working in Sausalito, California. The ladies rented a condo overlooking the San Francisco Bay and retreated there while the rest of the band stayed up all night partying in the studio accommodations/rock & roll frat house. Christine and Stevie talked through their heartbreaks and hopes for the future, encouraged each other, and hid in each other’s rooms when their exes showed up drunk and yelling in the driveway, according to Ken Callait, who produced Rumours and co-wrote a book about it.

The band toured sporadically during the recording, and while “Over My Head” had given Fleetwood Mac their first hit in America, “Rhiannon” made it so girls started showing up to the shows in flowing lace dresses and silk hats and screamed when Stevie came on stage. When Rumours came out, it made the whole band hugely famous, but Stevie became an icon; the press dubbed her the “Queen of Rock.” Christine got no such honorific—she wasn’t the co-Queen, or the Queen of Piano Rock, or even, like, the Princess.

You’d think that sort of thing would cleave even the most solid of friendships, especially given that the women were also creative collaborators making art that was all tangled up in self-expression and ego. From the outside, you might assume that there was some competition between them, and that Stevie was winning it, because Christine seems subdued and plain and, well, Stevie is Stevie. She wore a top hat. But you never hear anything about jealousy or resentment between them, and if there were even a drop of it, don’t you think you would? People love to discover this type of tension, as if there can never be two of anything when it comes to women. It’s possible that Christine saw in Stevie what I saw in Jennifer: a rare person naturally suited to the spotlight. And maybe Stevie saw in Christine a genuine talent who didn’t crave or need fame.

The band reunited for a tour in 1997, but a year later, Christine, who had developed profound anxiety about air travel and performing, quit the band for good. Now Stevie was “the only girl” in the band, but she wouldn’t accept the mantle without Christine’s blessing (which was freely and gladly given). To this day, Stevie laments her friend’s departure. A month ago, she told the Guardian, “I’d beg, borrow, and scrape together five million and give it to her in cash if she would come back. That’s how much I miss her.” ♦

[WildHearted]

I know the article is meaning to be complimentary to the two of them and their friendship, but they way some of it is worded I found it unintentionally demeaning, superficial... and also confusing. What is the point?

That said, I know it's written by a teenage girl so I guess that explains it (says the teenage girl..).

[cantgoback]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZSp9TjVlKM

It's too bad about what happened in the 80s between the two. I think now they're friends for the most part. The video I posted is one I'm sure some of ya'll have seen it, I love that video, it shows how good of friends they were in the 70s.

[bombaysaffires]

I love that behind the scenes video from the 70s where Chris and Stevie are in the studio trying to record a video happy birthday message to Warner Bros. Both high, and they can't get thru it. At one point they are trying to pose and Stevie says to Chris something like "I'll be Marlene Dietrich and you'll be Greta Garbo" And she was very Stevie-serious about it and Chris was just "ah, no" and almost kinda embarrassed by the notion. Always seemed to crystallize their differences somehow.