Stevie Nicks: Biography

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Stevie Nicks.Image via Wikimedia Commons

Who Is Stevie Nicks?

Stephanie Lynn "Stevie" Nicks (born May 26, 1948) is an American singer-songwriter, known for her work with the band Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist. With a career spanning over five decades, Nicks is widely considered to be one of the greatest rock frontwomen and one of the most influential musical artists of all time.

After starting her career as a duo with her then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham, releasing the album Buckingham Nicks to little success, the pair joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975, helping the band to become one of the best-selling music acts of all time with over 120 million records sold worldwide. Rumours, the band's second album with Nicks, became one of the best-selling albums worldwide, being certified 21× platinum in the US. In 1981, while remaining a member of Fleetwood Mac, Nicks began her solo career, releasing the studio album Bella Donna, which topped the Billboard 200 and has reached multiplatinum status. She has released eight studio albums as a solo artist and seven with Fleetwood Mac, selling a certified total of 65 million copies in the US alone.

After the release of her first solo album, Rolling Stone named her the "Reigning Queen of Rock and Roll". Nicks was named one of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time and one of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time by Rolling Stone. Her Fleetwood Mac songs "Landslide", "Rhiannon", and "Dreams", with the last being the band's only number one hit in the U.S., together with her solo hit "Edge of Seventeen", have all been included in Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Nicks is the first woman to have been inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; she was inducted as a member of Fleetwood Mac in 1998 and was inducted as a solo artist in 2019.

Nicks has garnered eight Grammy Award nominations and two American Music Award nominations as a solo artist. She has won numerous awards with Fleetwood Mac, including a Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1978 for Rumours. The albums Fleetwood Mac, Rumours, and Bella Donna have been included in the "Greatest of All Time Billboard 200 Albums" chart by Billboard. Rumours was also rated the seventh-greatest album of all time in Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", as well as the fourth-greatest album by female acts.

Life and career

Early Life: Where Is Stevie Nicks From?

1948–1971: Early life and career beginnings

Stephanie Lynn "Stevie" Nicks was born at Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona to Barbara (1927–2011) and Jess Nicks. Nicks is of German, English, Welsh, and Irish ancestry.

Nicks had a younger brother, Christopher (1953–2026). Her grandfather, Aaron Jess "A.J." Nicks Sr., taught Nicks to sing duets with him by the time she was four years old. Nicks's mother was protective, keeping her at home "more than most people" and fostered in her daughter a love of fairy tales.

As a toddler, Stephanie could only pronounce her name as "tee-dee", which led to her nickname of "Stevie".

Her father's frequent relocation as a vice president of Greyhound had the family living in Phoenix, Albuquerque, El Paso, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. With the Goya guitar that she received for her 16th birthday, Nicks wrote her first song, titled "I've Loved and I've Lost, and I'm Sad but Not Blue". She spent her adolescence playing records constantly and lived in her "own little musical world".

Stevie Nicks's Career and Major Works

While attending Arcadia High School in Arcadia, California, she joined her first band, the Changing Times, a folk rock band focused on vocal harmonies.

Nicks met her future musical and romantic partner, Lindsey Buckingham, during her senior year at Menlo-Atherton High School in Atherton, California. When she saw Buckingham playing "California Dreamin'" at the Young Life club, she joined him in harmony. She recalled, "I thought he was darling." Buckingham was in psychedelic rock band Fritz, but two of its musicians were leaving for college. He asked Nicks, in mid-1967, to replace the lead singer. Fritz later opened for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin from 1968 until 1970. Nicks credits both artists with inspiring her stage intensity and performance.

Nicks and Buckingham attended San José State University, where Nicks majored in speech communication and planned to become an English teacher. With her father's blessing, she dropped out of college to pursue a musical career with Buckingham.

1972–1978: Buckingham Nicks and Fleetwood Mac

After Fritz disbanded in 1972, Nicks and Buckingham continued to write as a duo, recording demo tapes at night in Daly City, California, on a one-inch, four-track Ampex tape machine Buckingham kept at the coffee-roasting plant belonging to his father. They secured a deal with Polydor Records, and the eponymous Buckingham Nicks was released in 1973. The album was not a commercial success and Polydor dropped the pair.

Stevie Nicks's Personal Life and Relationships

With no money coming in from their album, and Buckingham contracting mononucleosis shortly thereafter, Nicks began working multiple jobs. She waited tables and cleaned producer Keith Olsen's house, where Nicks and Buckingham lived for a time before moving in with producer Richard Dashut. She soon started using cocaine. "We were told that it was recreational and that it was not dangerous," Nicks told Chris Isaak in 2009.

While living with Dashut, Buckingham landed a guitar role with the Everly Brothers 1972 tour. Nicks stayed behind working on songwriting herself. During this time, Nicks wrote "Rhiannon" after seeing the name in the novel Triad by Mary Leader. (Five years later, a fan sent her the Mabinogion novels of Evangeline Walton that featured the legendary character Rhiannon, and Nicks later bought the film rights to Walton's work in the hopes of bringing the epic to the screen.) She also wrote "Landslide", inspired by the scenery of Aspen and her slowly deteriorating relationship with Buckingham.

In late 1974, Keith Olsen played the Buckingham Nicks track "Frozen Love" for drummer Mick Fleetwood, who had come to Sound City in California in search of a recording studio. Fleetwood remembered Buckingham's guitar work when guitarist Bob Welch departed to pursue a solo career. On December 31, 1974, Fleetwood called Buckingham, inviting him to join the band. Buckingham refused, insisting that Nicks and he were "a package deal" and that he would not join without her. The group decided that incorporating the pair would improve Fleetwood Mac. The first rehearsals confirmed this feeling, with the harmonies of the newcomers adding a pop accessibility to the band's former style of blues-based rock.

In 1975, Fleetwood Mac achieved worldwide success with the album Fleetwood Mac. Nicks's "Rhiannon" was voted one of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time by Rolling Stone. Her live performances of the song throughout the decade began to take on a theatrical intensity which differs from how the song plays on the album. The song built to a climax in which Nicks's vocals were so impassioned that Mick Fleetwood declared, "her 'Rhiannon' in those days was like an exorcism." "Landslide" became another hit from the album, with three million airplays.

Becoming aware of her image as a performer, Nicks worked with clothing designer Margi Kent to develop a unique onstage look. Her costumes had a bohemian style that featured flowing skirts, shawls, and platform boots.

Where Is Stevie Nicks Now? Recent Years

While Nicks and Buckingham achieved professional success with Fleetwood Mac, their personal relationship was eroding. Nicks ended the relationship. Fleetwood Mac began recording their follow-up album, Rumours, in early 1976 and continued until late in the year. Also, Nicks and Buckingham sang back-up on Warren Zevon's eponymous second album.

Among Nicks's contributions to Rumours was "Dreams", which became the band's only Billboard Hot 100 number-one hit single. Nicks had also written and recorded the song "Silver Springs", but it was not included on the album because the early versions of the song ran too long, and the band did not want too many slow songs on the album. Studio engineer and co-producer Ken Caillat said that Nicks was very unhappy to find that the band had decided against her song "Silver Springs", which he said was beautifully crafted, and carried some of the band's best guitar work. The song was replaced by another Nicks composition, I Don't Want to Know, which still gave her three tracks on the album. "Silver Springs", written about her romantic relationship with Buckingham, was released as a B-side of the "Go Your Own Way" single—Buckingham's equally critical song about Nicks. Copies of the single eventually became collector's items among fans of Fleetwood Mac. "Silver Springs" was included on the four-disc Fleetwood Mac retrospective 25 Years – The Chain in 1992.

Rumours, Fleetwood Mac's second album after the incorporation of Nicks and Buckingham, was the best-selling album of 1977, and as of 2017, had sold over 45 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time. The album remained at number one on the American albums chart for 31 weeks and reached number one in other countries. The album won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1978. It produced four U.S. Billboard Hot 100 top ten singles, including Nicks's "Dreams".

In November 1977, after a New Zealand concert on the Rumours Tour, Nicks and Fleetwood secretly began an affair. Fleetwood was married to Jenny Boyd. "Never in a million years could you have told me that would happen," Nicks has stated. "Everybody was angry because Mick was married to a wonderful girl and had two wonderful children. I was horrified. I loved these people. I loved his family. So, it couldn't possibly work out. And it didn't. I just couldn't." Nicks ended the affair soon after it began. She has stated that had the affair progressed, it "would have been the end of Fleetwood Mac". By October 1978, Mick Fleetwood left Boyd for Nicks's friend Sara Recor.

1979–1982: Tusk and Mirage

Stevie Nicks's Legacy and Impact

After the success of the Rumours album and tour in 1977 to 1978, Fleetwood Mac began recording their third album with Nicks and Buckingham, Tusk, in the spring of 1978. By this time, Nicks had amassed a large backlog of songs that she had been unable to record with Fleetwood Mac because of the constraint of having to accommodate three songwriters on each album. Tusk was released on October 19, 1979. Mirage was recorded in late 1981 and early 1982.

Backup vocals and duets

While working on Tusk, Nicks sang backup on virtually every track of Not Shy, recorded by musician Walter Egan, a friend of both Nicks and Buckingham's. "Magnet and Steel", inspired by Nicks, prominently featured her backup vocals and became a hit single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart during the summer of 1978. Lindsey Buckingham also produced the album, playing guitar and providing backing vocals on some of the tracks. Nicks recorded the hit duets "Whenever I Call You Friend" with Kenny Loggins in 1978, and "Gold" with John Stewart in 1979. During 1981, Nicks made occasional guest appearances with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on their Hard Promises tour.

Solo career

Nicks wrote and recorded demonstrations for a solo project during Tusk sessions in 1979 and the Tusk world tour of 1979–80. Nicks, Danny Goldberg, and Paul Fishkin founded Modern Records to record and release Nicks's material.

Nicks's first solo album, Bella Donna, was released on July 27, 1981, to critical and commercial acclaim, reaching number one on the Billboard 200 chart, with four singles making the Billboard Hot 100, and Rolling Stone deeming her "the Reigning Queen of Rock and Roll".

The day that Bella Donna reached number one on the Billboard 200, Nicks was told that her friend Robin Anderson had leukemia. Anderson was pregnant at the time and given only three months to live. She gave birth to a son, appointing Nicks as the child's godmother. "I never got to enjoy Bella Donna at all because my friend was dying. Something went out that day; something left." Following Robin's death in 1982, Nicks married Robin's widower, Kim Anderson, believing that Robin would want her to care for the baby. "We were all in such insane grief, just completely deranged," she told the Telegraph in 2007. They divorced three months later.

Bella Donna introduced Nicks's permanent back-up singers, Sharon Celani and Lori Perry (now Nicks after marrying Stevie's brother Christopher), who have contributed vocals to all of Nicks's solo albums since then. In November 1981, Nicks embarked on her White Winged Dove tour, which she had to cut short to record Mirage.Nicks released her second solo album, The Wild Heart, on June 10, 1983. The album went double platinum, reached number five on the Billboard 200 albums chart, and featured three hit singles. It also introduced songwriter and performer Sandy Stewart as co-writer and vocalist.

Nicks performed at the second US Festival at Glen Helen Regional Park in San Bernardino, California, and later toured the U.S. from June 1983 to November 1983. Nicks appeared on Saturday Night Live in December 1983, performing "Stand Back" and "Nightbird".

Stevie Nicks's career continues to be documented by reputable media; the facts above are drawn from Wikipedia's biography and public records.

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