Random Behind-The-Scenes Stories From Stevie Nicks's Unique Life (14 items)

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  (#4) She Traveled With Her Own Coven

  Everyone interviewed in Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams and Rumours recounts how much Stevie’s first tour with Fleetwood Mac absolutely destroyed her. She became gaunt, and was often seen huddling in a corner, drinking tea, and writing in her journal (to paraphrase Mick Fleetwood).

  Even Stevie herself admits that she almost lost her mind on that first tour, and it wasn't until she made the decision to not curl up and die that she finally started leaning into her witchy ways. In order to combat the loneliness of the road (she and Buckingham already broke up at this point), Nicks forged a strong friendship with bandmate Christine McVie, and began to travel with a group of young, skinny, blonde women who dressed in lace black outfits (just like Nicks) and followed her everywhere.

  Kenny Loggins remembers: “My first impression of touring with Fleetwood Mac was seeing Stevie and her acolytes… She seemed to collect talented, young, beautiful girls who would then dress like her and follow her around all the time.” How cool is that? Don’t you wish you had your own cadre of lookalikes to follow you around and help out with... witch stuff?
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  (#1) Producer Keith Olsen Ditched His New Year's Eve Date To Recruit Her

  On New Year’s Eve, 1974, Bob Welch, longtime guitarist of Fleetwood Mac, decided to quit the band, citing the pressure of their recent, intense lawsuit. In response, Mick Fleetwood put in a call to Keith Olsen, co-producer of the second Buckingham Nicks album.

  Mick instructed Olsen to ask Buckingham to join the band, but Olsen insisted that Buckingham came in tandem with Stevie Nicks. Mick Fleetwood, desperate to keep his band together, told Olsen that he didn't care, he just needed some bodies in his band immediately to record an album.

  So, instead of going to a New Year’s Eve party with his date, Keith Olsen spent the evening convincing Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac.
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  (#12) Lindsey Buckingham Physically Assaulted Stevie Nicks When He Quit The Band

  From the moment that Buckingham and Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac in the mid-'70s, their relationship has been fraught with tension. They broke up after their first big tour, wrote an album about that break up, and then spent the next half-decade touring in support of those songs.

  While much of their tension comes from being in a long-term relationship marred with drug abuse and everything that comes with the rock and roll life, it’s likely that the two also resented each other for having to work together in order to get the sound they needed. In 1987, after recording Tango in the Night, Buckingham announced that he was leaving Fleetwood Mac.

  According to Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams and Rumours, the band, including Buckingham, met at Christine McVie’s house, and after a screaming match between Nicks and Buckingham,  a “physically ugly” fight broke out.

  The book alleges that Lindsey Buckingham slapped Stevie Nicks across the face before pushing her against the hood of his car. Lindsay Buckingham has said that he “doesn't remember” what happened that afternoon.
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  (#2) During The Recording Of “Fleetwood Mac” Stevie Rarely Stopped Dancing

  In 1975, Fleetwood Mac gathered in Los Angeles’s Sound City studios to record their first album with Buckingham and Nicks. Being the witchy flower child that she was, while the rest of the band recorded their parts and the engineers mixed the tracks, Nicks was continually dancing.

  In the book Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams and Rumours, one of the album’s engineers, Ken Calliat, remembers that, while he mixed "Rhiannon," Nicks “whirled” around the studio.

  “She believed she had magical powers. She probably thought she was chanting up a good mix.”
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  (#8) Her Affair With Mick Fleetwood Is All Because Of Cocaine

  Even though Nicks describes Mick Fleetwood (Fleetwood Mac’s drummer) as one of the great loves of her lives, she admits that they never would have gotten together had they not being doing so many drugs. She spilled the beans on her addiction-fueled affair with Fleetwood to Oprah, saying that they were the “last two people at a party,” and that, “It was a doomed thing [that] caused pain for everybody.”

  To underscore how bad her addiction was at the time – as if being in a relationship with someone solely because you both do insane amounts of drugs isn’t enough – Nicks says that when she sees pictures of herself from that era, she only sees someone who is “unattractive and high.”
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  (#7) All Of Steve Nicks’ Furniture Was Made Of Wicker

  So this may not be as crazy as Nicks burning a hole in her nose, or going blind from partying, but this is too weird to not discuss. During a break in Rumours tour, Stevie Nicks played host to Lindsey Buckingham’s girlfriend, Carol Anne, and the furnishings in Nick’s home left such a burn on Carol Anne’s memory that she wrote about it in her memoir, Storms.

  “The room was furnished with light wicker furniture that was almost buried under pillows covered in Laura Ashley fabric.” This brief insight into Nicks’s '70s lifestyle really underscores her good-witch persona.

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