The Ledge - Stevie

A download for this morning's interview with Jane Garvey on Woman's Hour on R4. Will have a transcript up soon, too, when I've finished a few chores around the house...

https://app.box.com/s/6ys70b6kuo2z0r4vfsrg

And ta da!!! Starts with Jane talking and...

Now, originally Lindsey and Stevie were a duo in the States. So, how was that decision made to ask the two of them to join Mick Fleetwood and John and Christine McVie in the British band Fleetwood Mac?

That was left up to Christine the first night that she met us. They called us on the last night of 1973 and asked us if we’d like to have dinner with them and we knew that they were probably going to ask us to join the band and we found out later that Christine and John and Mick had decided that if Chris didn’t like me that they wouldn’t go forth with it because it was bringing another woman into the band. And if she didn’t like me they wouldn’t do that because they’d been a band for awhile and they weren’t going to do that to Chris.

And they were successful, weren’t they?

They were successful, yeah. So they just needed a really great guitar player which they had in Lindsey but, you know, adding another woman is risky, you know. So we went out to dinner and we just had a blast and Christine and I just got on like best friends, like we had known each other forever. Two days later we went into rehearsal for a record. We went in right away in January 1975, went into rehearsal, made Fleetwood Mac Fleetwood Mac, we went on the road for probably four months. When we came home in October, Lindsey and I were, together, a millionaire. From the sales of the record and the tour. And then we started writing for Rumours which we started the following year. People loved it, people took it to their heart. We went from being nobody to joining a band that was somebody and becoming huge over a two year period. Exactly two years after I gave notice at a restaurant.

You and Lindsey Buckingham were a couple, of course. In some ways you’re the heartbeat of Fleetwood Mac and your relationship is still a really important one and is part of the whole mythology of the band, isn’t it? He wrote Go Your Own Way and you wrote Dreams.

Both the same songs. Through the eyes of two different people. I love performing Dreams. It was our only number one Top 40 hit and I have it in a little pink, pink and gold frame. At the same time I love Go Your Own Way. It has always been the last song in our set. It’s the big song.

What about the credit, or lack of it, that you get for your songwriting? How important is it? Did you fight for credit?

Very important. And very important for Chris too. Both of us in a man’s world from the very beginning we made a pact that we would be a force of nature together. And we were.

How?

Well, because we had a lot of power when there were two of us. That wasn’t really so noticeable to us because we just had it. Until she left. And then when she left I realised the power we had when she was there and how, when she left, she took 50% of that power with her. I felt powerless in many ways.

Will she perform with you while you’re in Britain?

She is going to come and, uh, do a song on the second two shows. I think it’ll probably be Don’t Stop. I don’t know. But she’s coming to Ireland to rehearse with us.

That’ll be great news for everybody.

Yeah.

Well, she lives here now. She’s British, she’s gone back to the countryside. And she just doesn’t want to do it anymore, is that right?

Well, she just doesn’t or she would be, you know. I understand when she told me in 1998 when we finished forty shows of The Dance. And we could’ve toured for another on that record and when she looked at me and said ‘I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t do it’ I just knew her so well that I knew that she was not kidding. And everybody tried to talk her out of it and I really didn’t try to talk her out of it because I could see it in her eyes. She said ‘I’m quitting’ and then she like sold her car and her house and her piano and it was like, she was packing her bags. So it didn’t take very much to realise that this was not a joke.

But this was the woman who’d meant so much to you as your companion and your ally-

And my best friend, yeah.

You deciding that you would operate as a unit and taking this decision to ‘float into rooms like goddesses’ so guaranteeing then that you were treated like goddesses.

Well, we just said ‘we’re never going to stand in a room full of Eric Claptons and Jimmy Pages and Robert Plants and Stevie Winwoods and Peter Townshends and feel like we were less than they. Because we’re not’.

And how did they treat you?

With complete and utter respect.

But that’s because of the way you conducted yourselves, I guess, partly. You’re a petite woman, aren’t you? Can you remember how you carried yourself? What it was like?

Very tall boots. All the time. I say that laughingly but it’s really actually not such a laughing matter. I did wear high platform boots all the time. They were my normal shoes I wore everyday. And so I wasn’t five foot one and a half. I was like five foot eight. And so I looked like a tall, slender girl that could be carrying a sword. So did she. She was really the mother earth in our band. And she was the only person that could really like nail the guys, you know, and say ‘knock it off’. I was never really any good at it. When I said ‘knock it off’ it didn’t seem to have the same power as when Christine turned around and went ‘You! Stop that!’ People went like, threw their hands up.

And they did.

Right. When I said that they were just like ‘oh, really?’ So when she left it was so noticeable to me that she was gone.

What about the fact that you had such a tough time addicted to cocaine and then, after that, addicted to a drug you were prescribed in order to help you get off cocaine?

Yeah.

You lost a long, long period of your life, didn’t you?

Yeah. The cocaine years, well, most people when they do coke they’re very impaired and they wouldn’t have been able to make a good record. Well, you know, in Rumours it hadn’t taken over yet. The cocaine was good until it wasn’t and then it really wasn’t. But we skated through luckily for Rumours. It was there and we were doing it but it hadn’t become more important than the music. It started to become more important than the music during Tusk. It slowly started coming in through Rumours. But we were able to get Rumours done before it became destructive, super destructive. The valium was more –

The tranquilisers?

Yeah. This psychiatrist just wrote on the side of the bottle ‘take as needed’. It’s like addiction in a prescription.

How did you get out of all of this?

I went to Betty Ford for cocaine for thirty days and I did what they said and I learned all that they taught me. When I came out of Betty Ford I was in great shape and then I went to see the psychiatrist that everyone was kinda seeing at that point. And I think that he was just a groupie. He just wanted to put me on something that would bring me into his office whenever I was in town, once a week, for an hour, and he could get all the scoop on what was going on in the rock and roll world. And he just kept upping my dose.
And I have no regrets in my life. Except one. And that’s that eight years. Because during that eight years, as much as I say to people, you know, ‘I have chosen not to have a boyfriend, I chose not to have kids, I’ve chosen to follow my muse and be an artist’ and all that blah, blah, blah, but during that eight years which was late 30s to like 45 who knows what could’ve happened during that eight years. I might’ve met someone. I might’ve even had a baby. So I will go to my grave angry at that man for that because he took 8 years of the prime of my life away. I could’ve done 2 or 3 more Fleetwood Mac records. I could’ve maybe done 2 or 3 more solo records. Think of the music that could’ve been made during those eight years.

You did marry your best friend’s widower, didn’t you?

That was all the way back to 1981.

But you must’ve thought at the time that that was the right thing to do.

I did. That wasn’t so much drug-fuelled as just terribly sad. Because my best friend Robin had died and she was pregnant. I didn’t really get to say goodbye to her. And I just felt that she would want me to take care of the baby which was crazy because he had a dad.

But you were motivated by your love for her, really.

I was. I just thought that’s what she’d want. And then 3 months later I could hear her saying to me ‘that was a big mistake’.

Your relationship with Lindsey Buckingham is the one that the fans care about. There’s a period during, I think, every live show that you hold hands with him and you’re together onstage.

A year and a half ago in like 2011, November, Lindsey and I sat down at my house and I had a talk with him. And I told him everything I’d really wanted to say since 1968 and I said to him, you know, ‘Do you remember who we were? Do you remember how cute we were? And how sweet we were? And how funny we were? And how compassionate we were?’ I said, ‘Lindsey, we need to go back there. We need to be those people again. And if we can’t be those people again, we cannot walk on stage again.’

And what did he say?

He was very quiet, he listened, he didn’t yell at me. And that was in November. A year later, at the end of the year, I went up to his house and we recorded four songs and we had a great time. And we laughed and we told my assistant all the crazy stories about the beginning and I thought ‘You know what? He heard me’. So on this tour we have been very aware of our old relationship and we talk about it onstage and we laugh onstage. And I have this one story that I tell that’s like nine minutes long, explaining a lost song that we recorded on those four days. And I’ve said to Lindsey several times ‘I know it’s long, the story’ and he looked at me and he said ‘No, Stevie, it’s charming’. And I’m like ‘Do I know you?” There’s a different, certain kind of love that’s going on onstage that has not been there in thirty years.

You have also had a brief relationship with Mick Fleetwood as well. My understanding is that he actually left for one of your best friends.

He did.

And your sadness is not that you lost Mick but that you lost the friend.

Kind of. I was betrayed in a way. But isn’t it funny? Because all these years later, Mick and I are best friends. I mean, I go to Maui and hang out with Mick and his family. If we weren’t in the rock and roll business, we would be those families who go on vacation together, on a Disney cruise or something crazy like that. Mick and I are friends in a way that Lindsey and I could never be friends. We’re just best friends. Our relationship didn’t last a long time, Mick’s and mine. It was a year. And Lindsey’s and mine’s relationship lasted from when we first met in 1968 and I joined his band up until now. Mick and I will be best friends when we’re 90. But Lindsey’s and mine’s relationship is different.

More complicated?

Much more complicated, yeah.

And that, of course, is the mythology of Fleetwood Mac-

Right.

-and it’s what the audience wants, isn’t it? They don’t really want you to have an uncomplicated relationship.

No, there’s never going to be an uncomplicated relationship so they can be happy in the knowledge that our relationship will always have that little moment of romance. And I said that to him. I said ‘You know, when we walk on the stage, Lindsey, we are a power couple. You have a wife and three kids. There’s nothing going on between you and me except that there will always be something going on between you and me. Until the day we die.’ Seventeen and sixteen. We’ve been together that long. There’s not many people that we have known as long as we’ve known each other.

Your image, you are still Stevie Nicks. You’ve worked that same look but it’s brilliant for you for many years and today you’re Stevie Nicks. You’ve still got the long blonde hair and everything looks great. How much of a part has feminism and the fact that you’re female played in the way you’ve had to handle yourself in what is still a pretty male world, the rock industry?

You know, I decided on my outfit right from the beginning cos I wanted a uniform. So I said I wanted black fringe-y, black chiffon skirt and I want a good leotard and I want a little black riding jacket and I want black platform boots and I want a scarf and I want a hat. And then I want you to make three more sets of that. And I’m off because I would rather focus on my music than what I wear. So I came up with something that looked great on me and looked thin and looked feminine and then I put really heavy boots with it so that that would calm down the ballet skirt-ness of it all. And I said ‘I’m not going to worry about it because I’m not here to be a sex symbol. I’m here to be a writer and a really great performer.’ In the first ten years people, mainly men, would say to me, when they were interviewing me, ‘So how does it feel to be a sex symbol?’ And I’d go ‘So that’s what this is about, this interview’s about, me being a sex symbol? Cos if it is, I don’t want to talk about it. Because that’s not what I am.’

Well, they wouldn’t have asked that of Mick Fleetwood, would they?

No, they wouldn’t. He would’ve liked it if they had. He would have said ‘I LOVE being a sex symbol. It’s fantastic!’ But I’m saying that is not what I am. I did not come to this world to be a sex symbol. I came here to a be a great writer and somebody that is greatly respected in the writer’s community and also in the community of performers.