Stevie Nicks is back on the road and looking foward to making new music

[MacMan]

With the dark days behind her, Stevie Nicks is back on the road and looking foward to making new music

By ALAN SCULLEY / CORRESPONDENT, The Virginian-Pilot
© June 27, 2007
Hamptonroads.com

Stevie Nicks says life on the road - and life in general - is great. Her biggest problem these days is the occasional need to scale back her set list.

For most of her current tour, which includes a date tonight at the Ted Constant Convocation Center in Norfolk, she's been appearing with Chris Isaak. He needs a little elbow room, so Nicks has had to trim her set.

Cutting three or four songs from what has traditionally been nearly a two-hour set is about the only thing that draws a complaint from Nicks these days. (And it's not even a factor for her show tonight because Isaak won't appear here because of a scheduling conflict. Instead, Vanessa Carlton is opening.)

Her life and career have recovered from prescription-drug induced stupor that lasted for years.

Today, she said, her life is fantastic. And why shouldn't it be? The last decade has seen her on a successful world tour behind the 1997 Fleetwood Mac live CD, "The Dance." That was followed by the 2001 solo CD, "Trouble in Shangri-La," which critics called her strongest solo effort since the mid '80s. Then came a second reunion with Mac - this time without keyboardist/singer Christine McVie - that resulted in a 2003 studio CD, "Say You Will," and another blockbuster world tour that stretched 135 dates.

Now comes Nicks' greatest hits CD, "Crystal Visions" - and for the second consecutive summer an extensive solo tour of amphitheaters.

"Crystal Visions," Nicks said,

symbolizes her creative renewal.

"I guess if I could say anything about this 'Crystal Visions' thing, (it's that) I've never lost that sparkle of doing these songs, and I've never lost the sparkle for writing new ones. The sparkle is so lovely and so wonderful, and I get to experience it every day."

Not only does she get to perform those songs, "all the time I'm going back to my hotel room and writing new poetry. It's like my life is really, truly fantastic."


Life was anything but fantastic for the 58-year-old singer/songwriter in the years leading up to the Fleetwood Mac reunion for "The Dance."

In the mid-1980s, she kicked a long-running cocaine addiction. However, at the urging of friends who worried she would relapse, Nicks agreed to see a Los Angeles psychiatrist, who put her on an antidepressant.

From 1986 to 1994, as she took a drug that Nicks said almost killed her, that sparkle was almost snuffed out.

Gone was the energy that had made her a key part of Fleetwood Mac, the band she joined in 1975 with her then-boyfriend, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham.

With that band and as a solo artist, with hits such as "Edge of Seventeen" and "Stand Back," she sold millions of CDs.

She said the antidepressant hurt her career.

"It just makes you not care. And when you don't care, you don't write songs. You don't write anything. You don't write in your journal. You just don't write period. So that was a very sad eight years for me."

Nicks didn't stop making music during this period. She remained in Fleetwood Mac until 1990. She also released two solo albums, "The Other Side of the Mirror" (1989) and "Street Angel" (1994), but they were artistic and commercial disappointments. Nicks said she realized the antidepressant was taking a huge toll on her life.

"Ultimately that's what brought me out of it. One day I woke up and called up my best friend and said come and get me and take me to a hospital because I cannot do this anymore. This is killing me. I am so miserable without my singing and my love of what I do because it's just been eaten away by these drugs.

"I went straight to the hospital the next day, and I was in the hospital for 47 days, and I detoxed off of it, and I was fine. Within two weeks I was writing again."

Nicks has sustained that old level of energy and creativity for 10 years now.

After this tour, she hinted that she's eager to return to making new music.

Another round of recording and touring with Fleetwood Mac isn't out of the question either, although she said she would dearly love to see McVie - who essentially retired from music after The Dance tour - participate if there is another reunion.

"It was kind of like Chris was the boss.... So when she wasn't there, we were all like. 'Where's Mom?' Where's the person who tells us what to do?' It was a little bit like we were a bunch of kids let out of recess with no teacher.

"I don't know whether I could do it again without her. That does not mean that the door is closed. It does not mean that the decision has been made. It just means that it's hard for me to not have her there."


Alan Sculley,

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