A Magical Life

Sunday, 12 February 2006
By Guy Blackman
The Age (Australia)

Stevie Nicks, 57, says life is a lot calmer now.

One of the many rumors that have trailed along behind Stevie Nicks since she joined an ailing Fleetwood Mac in 1975 and helped to turn them into one of the most successful bands in pop history, is that she is some kind of witch. Some rather credulous people believe her lyrics in songs such as Rhiannon, Gold Dust Woman and even the recent Sorcerer reference a demi-monde of white magic and wiccan ritual. As further evidence they point to her music publishing company, Welsh Witch Music, an allusion to both the song Rhiannon and the Celtic lunar goddess who inspired it.

Perhaps during the heady years of the 1970s and '80s - a time when, as Nicks has admitted, she took so much cocaine that "you could put a big gold ring through my septum" - the singer's lifestyle was wild and magical enough for these kind of rumors to flourish. But now, at the age of 57, Nicks is as far from witchy as you can imagine, and no longer willing to humor such romantic delusions.

"I've become very neat in my older age," Nicks says in her famous husky drawl. The living room in her Los Angeles mansion is all red velvet and hanging palms, she tells me, with a crystal ball on her coffee table and elegant candles on her grand piano. But there is an edge to all this orderliness that is almost compulsive. "I used to be a lot crazier, but now I really want everything to be beautiful, and it makes me nervous when things aren't," she says. "I'll get up and straighten up everything if I have to, even in a hotel room."

That revelation offers a little glimpse of the interior life of Stevie Nicks, but with her solo recording career now a fading memory and the recent Fleetwood Mac reunion a creative disappointment, it seems there's nothing to stop her speaking her mind. So she dismisses the mysticism in her songwriting, arguably the very trait that has earned her millions of fans worldwide, by reducing it to an act of calculation. "I write in codes, because I want my songs to appeal to everyone," she says. "From the beginning, I've had fans that are 20, 30 years older, so those people are now like 102, or dead! The first bright idea for a lyric comes, and then I go back and I say, 'Well, that line is really too heavy, I'm going to take that out, because that line might turn off one generation'. I'm very careful to cover all bases."

Can it really be the case that, beneath the gauzy gold-dust image, the real Stevie Nicks is so careful, pragmatic and razor-sharp? It's worth remembering that in 1973, when her pre-Fleetwood album with boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham stiffed, it was Nicks who worked menial jobs to pay the rent and to keep their dreams alive, each night stepping over the passed-out bodies of Buckingham and his music buddies as she returned home from waiting tables or cleaning houses. In other words, Nicks is a woman who has always known what she wants and is willing to do whatever it takes to get it.

But these days there's not that much left to aim for. Fleetwood Mac have sold more than 70 million records since Nicks joined the group, while her six solo albums (beginning with 1981's now classic Bella Donna) have sold in excess of 20 million. Nicks is an all-pervasive element of modern pop culture, maybe not as influential now as at her height, but still a figure to be referenced (mockingly or otherwise) everywhere from South Park to The Simpsons, and to be covered by artists as young and current as Lindsay Lohan and Joss Stone.

Little surprise, then, that she feels no pressure to produce new material. "It's like, does it really matter at this point?" she says when asked if she is working on a follow-up to her last solo album, 2001's Trouble In Shangri-La. "Do people really want to hear a whole other solo record, when you can get one or two songs for I-Tunes? I'm thinking about a way you could just put out a few songs once in a while, maybe four songs that you loved, instead of having to figure out 16 songs, many of which you might not love."

The singer could be making a backhanded reference to Say You Will, the 2003 Fleetwood Mac album that Nicks recorded without long-time ally and confidante Christine McVie, who left the band in 1998 in favor of a quiet life in London. Originally conceived as a Lindsey Buckingham solo project, Say You Will came to resemble two separate albums awkwardly squashed together, with nine songs apiece from Buckingham and Nicks alternating in strict succession.

"I'd be totally lying if I said that record is what I wanted, because it isn't," she says. "I argued with Lindsey all the way through it, and he argued with me. It wasn't very much fun, and I wasn't that pleased with the music. I felt my demos were better, which of course is easy to say, but I did. And what can I say? It wasn't a lot of fun."

It seems that almost 30 years after the end of her romantic relationship with Buckingham there's still tension. But you would never have known it in February 2004, at the Melbourne show of the 135-date Say You Will tour. Buckingham kissed Nicks' hand several times during the show, while she draped her arms tenderly over his shoulders as he played guitar.

According to Nicks, that tenderness, like her witchy lyrics, was just for show. "We are extremely professional, and when we get up there on the stage we get lost on the fun parts of the show," she explains. "So it's never going to show anything bad, because we're always going to rise above and concentrate on the good things."

Nicks' successful battle against addiction has also improved her ability to rise above. After two decades spent in the thrall of cocaine, alcohol and the prescription sedative Klonopin (which she describes as the worst thing of all), Nicks has been drug-free since 1994. So the past 12 years have been perhaps less colorful, but definitely smoother sailing. "My life is calmer now because I'm not on drugs, but it's also wonderful and exciting because I'm not on drugs. A lot of the time during those last four or five years before I went into rehab, I really didn't think I was going to make it out alive. So I'm thrilled every day that I did."

She lives alone in Los Angeles and has no room for a man in her life, preferring the freedom to be able to take off for Australia for six weeks, fly to Washington to visit injured soldiers, or play a corporate function in New York. "If I meet somebody, that's great," she says. "But if that doesn't happen I'm not lonely. I'm happy and I have lots of fun by myself. I'm not looking for somebody to fill up my life."

Nicks is similarly at peace with her decision to favor her career over starting a family. "I have lots of kids," she says happily, meaning her niece, four god-daughters and one godson. "It's much more fun to be the crazy auntie than it is to be the mom, anyway. I couldn't do what I'm doing if I had kids."

Even the death last year of her 80-year-old father Jess has made little impact on Nicks' serenity. "I have had a very easy time with it, and the reason is that he did 55 of those 135 Fleetwood Mac shows with us," she says. "He had such a great time, he had a little electric scooter and he was buzzing all over the venues."

Six months after the end of the Fleetwood Mac reunion tour, her father joined her again on a short US solo tour with Don Henley. But this time things were very different. "I said out loud to everybody, 'In my heart I really wish that he would just go on to the next plane, because he is not having fun'," Nicks says. " 'He doesn't feel well, he can't buzz around in his scooter any more, someone is wheeling him around in a wheelchair, and he is hating it.' "

The next night, Jess Nicks fell in his hotel room. A week later, he was dead. "I really took it with the grace he would have wanted," his daughter says. "I feel he pushes me towards the beauty in my life. So it's been OK. I'm not sad, I'm just glad that he's not in pain any more."

This confrontation with mortality has led Nicks to review her own life, and the singer is considering writing an autobiography, though she jokes that the people involved aren't yet old enough that she could safely name names. "I have to wait till we're 90, and then nobody would care," she says with a laugh.

And despite the ups and downs, the struggles with lovers, bandmates and addiction, Nicks is well aware that she has led a charmed - some might say magical - life. "I've had a lot of amazing experiences, and it is all good," she says. "Even the bad stuff is interlaced with the good, so it wouldn't be just one depressing monologue. It's a fabulous story. A Cinderella story for all of us, not just me."

Stevie Nicks performs with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at Rod Laver Arena on Saturday.

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