'Rolling Stone Magazine' review of 'The Wild Heart' (July 7, 1983)

[David]

Originally Posted by Macfan4life

There is a little sexism mixed in there.

The Seventies rock press was a little sexist, yes, but that wasn’t the reason they didn’t gush over Stevie Nicks. She was a narcissist without self-awareness and they immediately saw right through her. She was dead earnest with all her mock-profound poetry and adolescent imagery, and you couldn’t expect Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh and Bob Christgau to fall for any of it. Even Stevie’s bandmates in Fleetwood Mac didn’t fall for it.

Does anyone have the Rolling Stone review of Fleetwood Mac (1975). Stevie spoke ill of the reviewer for calling her singing "callow."

Yep, she got very self-conscious about that, but her singing on that album was callow — her two lead vocals sound like a small parcel of air that her diaphragm can’t quite push all the way up and out. Her songs are super-strong on that album, but her vocals only shine on the chorus/pre-chorus of “Rhiannon.”

I think the first great vocal she provides on an album was her harmony on “Mohammed’s Radio” for Warren Zevon in 1976. I think that’s when John Rockwell at the New York Times first turned on to Stevie as a singer. He wrote an essay about the song, giving Stevie probably her first great review in a major setting. (Probably also the first time that a backup vocal track earned Stevie plaudits and not Lindsey.)