Fleetwood Mac - happy at the top (Rolling Stone 1982)

[David]

When David Gans interviewed the band in 1982 for Rolling Stone's Record (a sister publication), Stevie's absence from the interview and the room was one of the big points of the interview: "Where is Stevie?" Each band member in turn tried to answer. Chris and Lindsey both agreed that Stevie was grinding an ax of some sort within the band politically, but Stevie herself said later that she was really down on Rolling Stone and the music press. It wasn't her Timothy White cover story she didn't like - it was the lead review of Bella Donna that ran in a different issue. The copy desk called it "Gifted Dreamer or Airhead's Delight," and the review (by Parke Puterbaugh or Stephen Holden or Steve Pond, I forgot) wound up by asking, "How can someone so hip also be so incredibly silly?" You found that perspective on Stevie a lot in those days - she was a ditz, an airhead, a "blanded-out blonde musher" (as Sylvie Simmons called her). I remember Rolling Stone reader letters after Stevie's cover story calling out Stevie on her airy-fairy image and her musical blandness: "Sure, Nicks is great, but Ann Wilson is the Queen of Rock" and "Give me a break - Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders could kick that wimp's ass any day."

I think Stevie was absenting herself deliberately from All Things Rolling Stone in those days because their first-string and second-string reviewers wrote that she was insubstantial and a musical lightweight. In 1983, Steve Pond reviewed Stevie's Los Angeles concert: "She is simply too fluttery and flighty to command a stage." Robert Hilburn wrote of the 1982 benefit concert in Southern California: "Nicks has even shed some - though far from all - of the narcissistic aura that has made her something of a caricature in rock."

The ironic thing is that, in retrospect - especially after the past ten years or so of solipsistic diva behavior - that even Stevie's closest fans agree with the rock press in 1981. Every new article that someone posts exemplifies like clockwork Stevie's tendency to frame every world event or every celebrity death as an effect on HER in some ostensibly momentous way. It's uncanny just how solipsistic Stevie actually is, and that's exactly what the rock press was saying about her forty-five years ago, when we fans were all mad at them.