Stevie Nicks

The Full Biography

Stevie Nicks. Singer. Phoenix and Fleetwood Mac. The woman in the shawl who wrote “Dreams,” survived the band that made her, and then became the first woman the Rock Hall inducted twice.

This is her story.

The image most people still carry is a black hat, a swirl of chiffon, a tambourine, a voice that sounds like a story being told from the top of a stair. The year is 1977. The record is Rumours. The song, more often than not, is “Dreams” or “Rhiannon.” What the still cannot show is Stephanie Lynn Nicks of Phoenix, a vice president’s daughter who followed a guitarist into a British blues band, a woman who built a solo career without leaving the band, and a singer in her seventies who still treats a shawl as working clothes.

She was born on May 26, 1948, in Phoenix, Arizona. Her father, Jess Nicks, worked for the Greyhound corporation and then other firms; the family moved the way a company man’s family moves: El Paso, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, the Bay Area. Her mother, Barbara, taught her that a song could be a private room. A grandfather, Aaron Jess Nicks, had been a country picker; the pedigree on that side is a honky-tonk, not a conservatory. The first pressure was not a record contract. It was a childhood of new schools and a girl who learned to carry a world in a notebook because the address kept changing.

Menlo-Atherton High School, south of San Francisco, is the door most people skip. She met Lindsey Buckingham there, more or less — the social world that became a duo. She went to San Jose State. She waited tables at Bob’s Big Boy and at Clementine’s, a Beverly Hills restaurant, so the music could continue. They played in a band called Fritz, opening for bigger names in the Bay Area, and then they were Buckingham Nicks, a duo with one album on Polydor in 1973 that the company did not know how to sell. The record is now a relic hunters pay for. Then it was a flop. She has said she was ready to quit and go back to school. Buckingham was not ready. Neither, it turned out, was the British band that needed a guitarist.

On New Year’s Eve 1974, Mick Fleetwood heard Buckingham at a studio in Los Angeles and asked him to join Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham said he came with Stevie. The band — Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie — said yes. The 1975 album Fleetwood Mac made the new lineup a fact. “Landslide,” written in Aspen about her father and a future she could already feel sliding, sat on that record like a private letter that radio decided to open. “Rhiannon,” which she had written about a Welsh witch from a novel, became the first public spell. She did not dance like a rock singer. She circled. The shawl was not a costume designer’s idea. It was how she hid and how she appeared at the same time. The British blues band that had been Peter Green’s, then a revolving door, was suddenly an American pop fact with two women in it. Christine played the English clarity. Stevie played the myth. The country bought both.

Rumours, recorded in 1976 and released in 1977, is the civic weather. The band was coming apart in every combination: the McVies divorcing, Buckingham and Nicks ending their romance, Fleetwood in his own storm. They went to the studio anyway. Nicks wrote “Dreams” in about ten minutes, in a room at the Record Plant in Sausalito, on a black velvet bed, while the others argued in other rooms. It is Fleetwood Mac’s only No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100. “I Know I’m Not Wrong” waited. “Silver Springs,” written about Buckingham, was left off the original album for space and became, in time, the song the fans treated as the secret center. The record sold and sold. It is still selling. The country used it as a soundtrack for breakups that had nothing to do with a British-American rock band. The band used it as a reason to stay in the same building.

She could have remained only the witch in someone else’s group. She did not. Bella Donna (1981), her first solo album, went to No. 1. “Edge of Seventeen,” built on a guitar figure and a white-winged dove, became the solo signature. “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” a duet Tom Petty had not particularly wanted to give away, was put on the record by Jimmy Iovine because Iovine feared the album lacked a single; it went Top 3. “Leather and Lace,” with Don Henley, went Top 10. She was now a pop star with a second passport. The Wild Heart (1983) gave her “Stand Back,” a synthesizer song she has said began because she heard Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” through a wall on her honeymoon and called him; he came and played on it. The marriage to Kim Anderson, in 1983, lasted a matter of months. The song lasted.

Fleetwood Mac did not wait politely. Tusk (1979), Buckingham’s strange double album, still had “Sara,” a Nicks song as wide as a California night. Mirage (1982) gave her “Gypsy.” Tango in the Night (1987) gave the radio “Seven Wonders” and “Everywhere” (Christine’s) while the band came apart again. She kept writing for the group while she toured as herself. The labor of being in both rooms is the part the shawl conceals. Rock a Little (1985) and The Other Side of the Mirror (1989) are the solo records of a woman already in chemical weather; they have songs the faithful still stand up for and nights she has said she cannot clearly see. Cocaine was already in the 1970s file. In the 1980s she added Klonopin, prescribed after she tried to get clean, and spent years in a fog she has since described without romance. She went to Betty Ford in 1986. The Klonopin years took more. She got out. She has been blunt, in interviews, that the voice and the catalog survived a decade that could have ended both.

If you have stage fright, it never goes away. But then I wonder: is the key to that magical performance because of the fear?Stevie Nicks

The turn is not Rumours. The turn is the decision to be a solo artist without resigning the band — two careers in one body, two catalogs, two sets of rooms that wanted all of her. Most singers choose. She stacked. The cost was chemical and romantic and, for a stretch, vocal. The gain is a life that does not fit on one side of a record-store bin.

Christine McVie was the other woman in the band, a different kind of English clarity, and the friendship between them is one of the file’s kinder facts. When Christine died in 2022, Nicks spoke like a sister, not like a brand partner. Buckingham was fired and rehired and fired again, a long weather that the 1997 reunion album The Dance only partly settled. She has kept friendships with Petty, until his death, and with a circle of younger women — songwriters who treat her as proof that a girl in a shawl can own the masters of her own myth. She never had children. She has said the work was the child. The sentence is not a slogan. It is an inventory.

The later years

The years after the Klonopin fog have been a long second health. She made Street Angel (1994) in the middle of the worst of it and has not pretended the record is her favorite. Trouble in Shangri-La (2001) was a return: Sheryl Crow in the room, a voice that sounded like itself again. She kept touring as a solo headliner, a decision that looks obvious now and was not. Fleetwood Mac, when it assembled, was still a stadium fact. The 2014–15 tour without Buckingham, with Mike Campbell and Neil Finn, proved the catalog could stand if the shawl and the rhythm section were in place. She did not make a speech about who owned the band. She sang “Landslide,” which she wrote at twenty-seven in Aspen about her father and her future, and let rooms of people in their sixties cry as if the future had arrived on schedule.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Fleetwood Mac in 1998. In 2019 it inducted her as a solo artist — the first time a woman had gone in twice. She stood on that stage in the same weather of chiffon and said the names she always says: her mother, Buckingham, Petty, the band, the girls who write. She has used the late fame of “Dreams” — a 2020 skateboard video sent the song back up the charts — without sneering at the children who thought they had discovered it. She has guest-starred on television as a lightly fictional Stevie. She has sold a perfume and a doll and still treated the songs as the only merchandise that matters.

24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault (2014) took unfinished pieces from the old notebooks and finished them, a woman in her sixties refusing to leave the drafts in a box. She has toured that record. She has toured the hits. She has walked onto other people’s stages — Harry Styles, Taylor Swift’s orbit, a generation of women who treat the shawl as permission — and sung the bridge they came for. When Christine died, the remaining Mac became a more fragile weather; Nicks has spoken of her as the friend who knew the same rooms. She still writes. She still carries a shawl onto a stage as if the cloth were a tool. The voice is drier. The stories between songs are longer. The rooms are still full.

Home has been Los Angeles and Phoenix and the road. She keeps dogs. She keeps a circle. She has had to protect a voice that is now an instrument with a history of strain. She paces a setlist. She sits when a younger woman would still pace the lip of the stage. Fans who have seen her since the 1970s describe the same circling walk, slower, the same story between songs, the same refusal to become a jukebox that does not speak. She is in her seventies. The Phoenix girl, the waitress, the flopped duo, the witch of 1975, the woman on the velvet bed, the solo No. 1, the addict, the twice-inducted honoree, and the headliner who still packs a shawl are the same person. She has never had a child and has said, without asking for a violin, that the songs were the children and that the road was the house. Younger singers still copy the hat and miss the labor: the notebook, the two catalogs, the decade she had to climb out of, the decision not to resign the band when the solo records went to No. 1. The labor is the biography. The chiffon is the advertisement. She still opens a show with a story and a tambourine. The rooms still know the words to “Landslide” without being asked. That is the remaining weather. Phoenix to Sausalito to the Hall, twice: she kept the notebook the whole way.

There is no death date on this life. There is a present tense: a catalog that a teenager can enter through a skate video or through Rumours, a band that has lost Christine and still has Stevie, and a woman who never agreed that the lace was a joke.

After the spotlight moved

It did not move far. It split: stadiums when the Mac assembles, theaters when she goes out alone, living rooms whenever “Dreams” finds a new clip. Buckingham remains in the songs even when he is not in the building. Petty is gone. Christine is gone. The shawl is still at work.

She came out of Phoenix, followed a guitarist into Fleetwood Mac, wrote the band’s only American No. 1 during a divorce, built Bella Donna on top of the band rather than instead of it, survived the drugs, and became the first woman the Hall took twice. If you only remember the hat, you have the still. If you remember the velvet bed, the waitress job, the two catalogs, and the second induction, you have her.

Portrait: Ralph Arvesen · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

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