Fleetwood Mac - - They Dared to Be Different (Rolling Stone 1980)

[SmileAtYou]

Last night my roommate and I visited our local record store. I discovered the February 1980 issue of Rolling Stone in a pile of old magazines, the kind printed on newspaper. It's the one with Mick on the cover, holding Stevie on his shoulders! It was only $2! Needless to say, I was thrilled. (I posted about this in the Rumours section, but I wanted to start a thread here to share the Stevie parts of the article.)




Here is a b&w pic from the article that I had never seen before...


I found the article a fascinating read. It is available on NicksFix.com for those who haven't read it before. Here is the part about Stevie... the rest of the article is awesome as well, it's very long so I am only posting the Stevie part:

"I feel a little like Alice in Wonderland up here." Stevie Nicks is in bed, recovering from a root-canal session, propped up in a mountain of pillows. You have to take a running jump to get up on the bed with her---it is an antique four-poster, with a thick mattress about three feet high. I sit across from her, at the foot, and think of The Princess and the Pea. And of the nineteenth century, for Nicks has a lot of the qualities one generally associates with ladies who wrote sentimental fiction and poetry in Victorian England. She is the kind of woman who keeps a journal. She is the kind of woman who wakes up too early in Buffalo, New York, on the morning after a concert, and so writes a long verse about what she sees outside her motel-room window. She believes in fairies, runs a large, mock-Tudor house in the hills above Sunset that's always full of visiting friends and relatives; she studies ballet and composes songs about seeing her "reflection in the snow-covered hills." She is thirty-one years old. Nicks grew up in California and Arizona, the only daughter of a well-to-do corporation president. Her grandfather, A.J. Nicks, a country & western singer, sparked her love of music, and her mother, Barbara, introduced her to the world of fairy tales and fantasy. "She was very protective of me," Stevie says. "All out of love. But I was kept in more than most people were." Years later, Nicks is still protected from the outside world-- -only now, her guardians are road managers and friends. "I don't want to be so spoiled that I can't carry on my life when there's no more Fleetwood Mac. I'm not gonna stop doing things. I don't want to be Cinderella anymore," she tells me. A tiny poodle jumps into her lap. The puppy coughs, piteously. "Poor Ginny...she just can't get used to this air in Los Angeles. I'm real nervous about her."

She lifts Ginny, gently, by the neck. There is a thin, pinkish scar across the poodle's belly. "She just had a hysterectomy, and I'm afraid she's gonna open up the incision from all that coughing." A few minutes later, Stevie's younger brother, Chris, comes in. They confer briefly and come to a decision. That night, Ginny is put on a plane and sent to their mother's house in Phoenix. Stevie takes me downstairs to her music room because she wants to show me what her songs sound like before they are arranged by Buckingham. "I write my songs, but Lindsey puts the magic in, and there's no way...well, I could pay him ten percent. I could walk up to him and thank him. If I were to play you a song the way I wrote it and gave it to them, and then play you the way it is on the album, you would see what Lindsey did."

The music room is dark; there are antique lamps draped with shawls, but she does not turn the lights on. And the tapes she ends up pulling out of her library are not rough Fleetwood Mac demos but works-in-progress for her solo project, a film and soundtrack album based on the myth of Rhiannon, the Welsh witch. Earlier in 1979, Nicks signed on as a solo artist with Modern records, a label headed by former boyfriend Paul Fishkin and Danny Goldberg. For a while the move prompted rumors that she was preparing to leave Fleetwood Mac.

"The legend of Rhiannon is about the song of the birds that take away pain and relieve suffering," she says. "That's what music is to me. I don't want any pain." She puts a cassette in the deck and sits down cross-legged on the carpet, between the stereo speakers. The music begins; a gentle roll of piano chords. Nicks' own version of "Rhiannon" is softer, more emotional than Fleetwood Mac's. "It's not a rock & roll song," she says, closing her eyes.

When the tape ends, she rummages in a drawer and pulls out a collection of photographs, her "private stash." "This is Rhiannon, without a doubt." The picture is of Nicks, onstage with the rest of Fleetwood Mac, in her witch costume. But it does not look like her, and I say so. "Well, you see, it turns. It goes right into..." She pulls out another photograph, of herself onstage with Lindsey. "This is the killer. And the pale shadow of Dragon Boy, always behind me, always behind me." She is speaking almost to herself, in a hoarse whisper."You see, I just want to make you realize that when I get carried off, really carried off into Rhiannon, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm not carried off into Fleetwood Mac. 'Cause I'm just as carried off into them. Rhiannon has to wait. She just has to wait; that's all there is to it." I ask Stevie why she refers to Rhiannon as she. "Well, because...I don't know why. She is some sort of reality. If I didn't know she was a mythological character, I would think maybe she lived down the street."



... haha I love that part where Stevie refers to Lindsey as "dragon boy".