Attitude
Magazine Interview
May 2001
Stevie's Wonder
Stevie
Nicks - floatatious Fleetwood Mac lynchpin and underrated solo
volcano - is back. With some of her best work yet. "Just don't
call
me a legend," she instructs Paul Flynn.
It may be Britain's favourite buzzphrase of the last couple of
months, but "I love the 1980s" is not the sort of statement you're
likely to find rolling off the tongue of the inimitable, esteemable
and frankly peerless Stevie Nicks. Arch-Empress of Fleetwood Mac,
crystal toting sorceress and long-serving lover of suedette she may
have been. Stadium-swelling vocalist of the highest order and unit-
shifting hot ticket, to boot. But beneath the veneer of veils,
cloaks and the kind of hot-tongue curling action that saw her rampant
mane of unruly locks distracted every which way but the head, there
was a tranquilized Klonopin addict struggling to pick up the
telephone receiver. "It was not," offers Stevie, with a rueful
melancholy, "my drug of choice."
No, sir. That was the white dusty stuff of Columbia, a large
percentage of which she hovered her way through, demolishing with
the kind of wilful abandon that could shame the entire South American
population and most her leather faced and leather trousered male rock
equivalents. Stevie nicks and cocaine were more than acquaintances.
They were best of friends. All she will say of her coke years now is
that "at least that was my choice and, yeah, I had a little fun."
It
was when she kicked her habit in '86 and was prescribed the legal
narcotic klonopin that the trouble really started. "The whole
psychiatric world thinks they can cure everything," muses a relaxed
Stevie, "But it killed me. I gained 30 pounds. My creativity
was
sucked out. I didn't write, didn't draw. I was on the wrong side of
living death. I turned into a person without a soul. I take total
blame and responsibility for my drugs of choice because I had fun and
I was an adult. But this! Ah! My skin molted and my
hair turned
grey. The doctor gave me 100 and told me to take 2 every day. I
tried it and I was hooked. I would literally shake. As I went to
pick up the telephone I would see people looking at me, just
staring. I'd sit there thinking 'My God! I'm turning into Katherine
Hepburn.'"
The personal malaise that was tranquilized Stevie resulted in much
soul-searching and a self-diagnosed hospital admission - to
successfully straighten out ends. The professional malaise cul-de-
sac'd Street Angel, easily the weakest of her 5 solo studio albums.
Street Angel arose in 1994, the same year she quit the klonopin.
It's taken 7 stealth-like, busy and life-affirming years to get to
Trouble In Shangri La, her latest opus and unquestionable return to
form. Aided and abetted by sanguine rock chanteuse Sheryl Crow, the
closest Nicks has to a natural inheritor (if you know in three shots
of Courtney Love dysfunction, two of Madonna chutzpah and one of Kate
Bush kookiness to the cocktail), it rocks, unremittingly. It's
closest aural clue is the power ballad/soft rock masterpiece Rock a
Little, but in terms of untrammeled song-writing prowess and
insatiable delivery it's up there with Nicks' gargantuan finest,
Belladonna. Fall From Grace is the most rockbitch she's bled her way
into since Edge of Seventeen, Everyday the sweetest mid-pace
solemnitude since Leather and Lace. Elsewhere there's a treasure
trove of mystic delights that entrance every corner, the type only Ms
Nicks can turn her hand to. Individuality in pop may have all but
disappeared, but there is always a Stevie Nicks tucked away somewhere
to jack-in-the-box back and remind the young charlatans that a
passing acquaintance with the works of En Vogue and a stylist
that 'gets' military did not once pass for raw talent. The much
mooted Rodney Jerkins collaboration does not appear on Trouble In
Shangri La, and the end result is all the better for it. If Stevie
Nicks was a fellow, you just know that she'd be treated with the same
hushed applause as a Mick Jagger.
Welcome back then a living legend.
"I don't like that word."
Huh?
"Legend," cackles Stevie. "It makes me feel so old."
As it happens, Stevie has turned 50, but remains as exuberant and
exuberant as ever.
How did she feel after kicking the tranqs?
" I could never believe that that stuff could be so potent. I woke
up one day after I'd kicked and I thought 'I've turned into this
angst-ridden, bitter, twisted little person again.' And, hey, I like
her."
A little gay context to the Stevie Nicks oeuvre. It ought to be
known, to those that don't, that in Manhattan's fabulously twilit,
drag frenzied gay underworld around the meatpacking district there is
a club - or rather there was a club - called Jackie O. At Jackie )
every year since 1988 there has been one night that is the toast of
the New York gossip calendar. It's called 'Night of a Thousand
Stevies' and everyone, in due, head-bowed reverence to Ms Nicks must
come as either an invocation of the goddess Nicks herself or an
associate thereof. It's a riot. When Jackie O closed at the end of
1999, the organisers agreed to reconvene only once a year for the
night. For Village Voice columnist and queen bee of the NYC gossip
circuit Michael Musto it's a kind of deliciously alternative
Independence Day.
And for Stevie herself?
"Well, I've never been. Obviously. But I've seen pictures and I
think of it as really quite an honour. You know, if people like to
dress up in a little chiffon and soft suede and have some fun, then
who am I to be offended? I am totally, totally honoured."
And, one might add, this isn't the sort of tribute that is afforded
to any other members of Fleetwood Mac.
"Well, no," avers La Nicks gracefully.
The state of play in the land of the real big Mac is all rosy just
now. A far cry from the partner-swapping days of yore when, in a
hazy cloud of Colombian Messrs Buckingham and Fleetwood and Mesdames
Nicks and McVie could barely scrape together the I do's before
collapsing in a marital heap.
"We have an album ready to record," informs Stevie, "and right
after
I've finished touring Shangri-La I'll be in the studio."
Christine McVie has quit, it should be added.
"But she gives us her blessing. Right as soon as we knew that we had
her blessing it was back to the drawing board." With quills. In
an
attic. Probably.
"Christine has this fabulous life in London. She loves it and she
doesn't intend to give up on it for a schedule with the band."
The tour! This is over exciting. You must come to the UK.
"How couldn't I? Half of the band was from England. I have such
fond memories of the place that it only seems...fair to show up for a
little rocking."
Can she explain what exactly the trouble in Shangri la might be?
"This," she says with due authority, "is a concept album.
It's album
paradise. Trying to achieve paradise. And the way we can never keep
up the illusion of paradise even when we get what we thought of as
paradise. I began writing it during the O.J. Simpson trial. I'm not
commenting on the outcome of that at all, but it made me wonder how
this incredible man could fall so low. How he could become on the
scandal of America where once he was America's sweetheart... For
every major high there is a major low."
Stevie: she knows it. She's lived it. You just know that it's the
greatest rock'n'roll story half-told.
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