FLEETWOOD MAC'S SIREN SOARS WITH HER FIRST SOLO ALBUM, BELLA DONNA
The view from the living room of Stevie Nicks' Marina del Rey condominium is spectacular. As far as the eye can see, there is nothing but an endless expanse of sand, ocean, and sky. It is probably as close to a truly peaceful place as can be found in the Los Angeles area. Inside, golden rays of a late afternoon sun cast a glow on the warm pinks and beiges that dominate the room. Two rooms away is the bustling nerve center of the household, where workers have been handling phone calls and a stream of interviewers awaiting an audience with the hottest-selling artist in rock and roll.
Actually, the word "audience" is terribly unfair, because it implies pretension, and Stevie Nicks doesn't have a pretensious bone in her body. Though she has been a platinum-selling artist for six years as a member of Fleetwood Mac, and her face has been steadily gracing the covers of magazines for just as long, the Stevie Nicks I interviewed for two and a half hours seemed remarkably unaffected by success and candid almost by fault.
Her first solo album, "Bella Donna," is already a smash hit-- it is sitting at the Number One spot on Billboard's chart as this is being written, and it looks like it will be only another week or two before "Stop Dragging' My Heart Around," the gutsy, rock single that she sings as a duet with the song's author, Tom Petty, also hits Number One. A new Fleetwood Mac album is due this fall, too, so it looks as though the airwaves will belong to Stevie Nicks for the next few month.
Nicks' rise to fame was a relatively quick one. She and Lindsey Buckingham moved to Los Angeles in the early '70s after several years as members of the once-popular Bay Area band Fritz. They cut an album as a duo (still available on Polygram) and then were asked to join Fleetwood Mac, which was struggling following the departure of guitarist Bob Welch. The first album the new five-piece made, "Fleetwood Mac," was an enormous hit, thanks largely to the presence of Nicks and Buckingham, whose songwriting and singing totally dominated the LP. "Rhiannon," a swirling Nicks tune about a Welsh witch, immediately established Nicks as one of the top women singer-songwriters in rock.
The follow-up to that album, "Rumours," remains the best-selling rock album of time, as well as one of the best. With front-line songwriting talents of Buckingham, Nicks, and Christine McVie, and the always powerful and inventive rhythm section of bassist John McVie and Mick Fleetwood (who were founding members of the one-time British blues band), Fleetwood Mac was invincible on the record charts. They had one hit after another-- Nicks' "Dreams," Buckingham's "Go Your Own Way," and "Second-Hand News," McVie's "Don't Stop." They seemed to capture a spirit that had been virtually absent to pop bands since The Beatles. And then, of course, there was the personal side of the band, which made Fleetwood Mac so fascinating to the media. During the sessions for Rumours, John and Christine McVie were breaking up, as were longtime lovers Nicks and Buckingham. The songs on the LP "tell all," as the National Enquirer would probably put it. America has always loved soap operas.
Two years later, the band emerged from thirteen months of recording with "Tusk," a double-LP that enjoyed relatively moderate success (abour 4 million in sales; a fourth of Rumours sales) but which showed that the band was not going to be complacent and simply churn out the same-sounding hits forever. It is a dark and moody album, filled with songs that are at once dense and accessible. The band followed the album with a year-long world tour that found them playing with more fire than ever before. A live record culled from the tour, "Fleetwood Mac Live," was released at the beginning of the year.
When the tour ended last fall, the members of the band went their separate ways for the first time in several years. Mick Fleetwood went to Ghana and recorded his solo LP, "The Visitor." Christine McVie produced an album by Robbie Patton. John McVie sailed around the world. Lindsey Buckingham recorded a solo album which should be out in October. An Stevie Nicks made Bella Donna, using top studio players like Waddy Wachtel and Russ Kunkel, "Professor" Roy Bittan of Springsteen's band, and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers.
Bella Donna covers broad territory stylistically. "Edge of Seventeen" is a driving rocker; "After the Glitter Fades" has a country feel; "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" and "Outside the Rain," two tracks featuring the Heartbreakers, sound like songs from a Petty album with a different singer; "Leather and Lace" is a beautiful ballad duet featuring Don Henley of the Eagles, an old friend of Nicks'. The album shows more facets of Nicks' personality than anything she's been involved with before. Certainly it proves her to be more than just the spacy siren in gossamer that she sometimes appeared to be during Fleetwood Mac.
As we sat together on a soft section couch in one corner of her massive living room (which is filled with stereo equipment, a piano, an organ, and a large screen TV on which she watches cassettes of Greta Garbo movies, Roadrunner cartoons and The Muppet Show) the light of the afternoon sun cuts through a glass of white wine she sips from and casts a radiant glow on her face. Our discussions began with Bella Donna and covered various aspects of her career and songwriting craft. For the spacey side of Nicks--a side she makes no effot to hide--I suggest you read Rolling Stone's recent cover story, "Out the with Stevie Nicks" by Timothy White. What follows is Stevie Nicks, singer and songwriter.
BAM: Did it scare you at all to finally take the plunge to record Bella Donna?
NICKS: I'm always nervous about doing something new. I was particularly nervous about making this album because I knew I wouldn't have four other people to blame if it didn't do well. In Fleetwood Mac, if I fail I fail with four other people. Here, if I fail, I fail alone. It's always scarier to be alone. Fortunately, I had great people to work with who always encouraged me constantly. The vibe I got from everbdy was so postive that it made me feel strong.
BAM: From what I can gather by the number of different players you used, it seems not too much was preplanned, that you recorded whenever you could get the players.
NICKS:That's exactly right. It was very, very spontaneous. We did it in sort of a piecemeal way because we'd only get people in for a few days at a time. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers don't exactly sit around waiting for the phone to ring for session work. Russ [Kunkel] and Waddy [Wachtel] have impossible schedules. So we did the album around them. We'd get them for a couple of days and work fast.
BAM: Who worked out the other arrangements for the songs? I know that in Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey would do almost all of the arranging for you, putting on layers of different guitars, and, in a sense, orchestrating your tunes.
NICKS: That's one of the reasons I wanted to see if I could do it myself. When you work with somebody who is that much in control, and who has been that much in control--from like, 1970 on--you forget that you're even capable of doing something yourself. I'd write my song and then Lindsey would take it, fix it, change it around, chop it up and then put it back together. Doing that is second nature to Lindsey, especially on my songs. He does better work on my songs than on anybody else's because he knows that I always give them to him freely. It's a matter of trust.
So it was interesting to work without him, because my songs pretty much stayed the same; the only difference was what happened after I'd written them. When I write a song I sit down at the piano and play it front to back. For Bella Donna I would do that, or have a demo like that, and the other musicians would just listen to it, getting their own ideas of how to fill in the rest. Usually, by a couple of times through the song they had a good idea of what they could do with it. My songs aren't complicated, to say the least. The sessions went very quickly, really.
BAM: You said you'd felt dependent on Lindsey in Fleetwood Mac. Was it difficult for you to think for yourself during the sessions for Bella Donn?
NICKS: No, it was exhilirating! Instead of just sitting around hour after hour, I got to be part of it. Working with Lindsey, it's so easy to just let him take it. On this album I didn't have to fight to do my songs the way I wanted to. The other players just did them the way I wrote them and they came out great. We didn't do a ton of overdubs. We didn't put 50,000 guitars because we didn't have Waddy around long enough to 50,000 guitar overdubs. We were lucky to get him to do one guitar part.
BAM: Stylistically, the album seems very electic to me. There's a little country, some gospel feel, rock and roll...
NICKS: Well, it represents ten years worht of songs. In Fleetwood mac I usually get two or three songs on an album, but here I got to do ten. The album is sort of a chronology of my life. "After the Glitter Fades" was written in '72, making it the oldest song on the record. "Highway Man," "Leather and Lace," and "Think About It" were written in '75. The most recent is "Edge of Seventten," which is also my favorite song on the record.
BAM: Did you change the lyrics to "After the Glitter Fades"? It seems moderately prophetic.
NICKS: Moderately? It's very prophetic! [Laughs] No, the lyrics are the same. Believe me, I'd seen a lot glitter fade by the time I wrote that song, which was two years before Lindsey and I joined FM. That was a tough period for us professionally, because we were very serious about wanting to be professional musicians. And we'd done well in the Bay Area with Fritz, but moving to Los Angeles was a big step and it seemed that we were suddenlt back at point A again. Also, our lives were so different from each other then. I didn't have friends in LA and he made lots of musician friends--Warren Zevon, Waddy, Jorge Calderon. And while he was making friends and playing music, I had to work.
BAM: You sound a little bitter.
NICKS: No, I'm not really. It was the only way we could do it. Lindsey couldn't be a waitress. He didn't know how to do anything but play the guiatr and I did, so it was obvious that I was going to be the one to do the work if we were goin to live. And he didn't want us to play at places like Chuck's Steak House or Charlie Brown's. I would have gone for that in a big way, personally, because singing in horrible places like those for four hours a night is a helluva lot better than being a cleaning lady. That was the only real rift we had then. He won. But I loved him. I loved our music, and I was willing to do anything to get us to point B from point A. It's hard to keep the sparkly going when you face so many closed doors. But somewhere in my heart I knew that it would work out and that if I kept making enough money to pay the rent, that Lindsey would hang in there and get better and better on the guitar and keep learning about the business.
BAM: You mentioned that Bella Donna is sort of a chronological portrait of your life. Do you have any sense of what sort of picture of you listeners will get?
NICKS: Not really. I'm too close to it now. Things that I know are in a song some people might not see. And then I never know how others are going to interpret my songs based on things in their own lives. I just hope people like it and it makes them feel good. My songs talk about problems everyone in the world has. They're not unique to me. My songs don't change much over the years. I write much the same way I did when I was 16. I'm no better on the guitar or piano. I do exactly what I always did: I just write about what's happening to me at the moment. I didn't pick out the songs on Bella Donna because I wanted to document my life. I picked them because I liked them. It just sort of worked out that way. At the same time, though, I like the way "After the Glitter Fades" was premonitory. And "Edge of Seventeen" closes it--chronologically, anyway--with the loss of John Lennon and an uncle at the same time. That song is sort of about how no amount of money or power could save them. I was angry, helpless, hurt, sad. I recorded sixteen songs for the album and I wanted all of them to get on. I agonized about it. If I had put them all on, though, there wouldn't have been room for a label [laughs].
BAM: Well you managed to get "Blue Lamp" on the "Heavy Metal" soundtrack.
NICKS: It was very important that it found a place for itself. I love that song. It was really the beginning of Bella Donna because it was the first thing I'd ever recorded with other musicians, and it was the first time I'd ever recorded by standing in a room singing at the same time that five guys were playing. Fleetwood Mac doesn't record that way. They record more from a technical standpoint. When I'm recording, I like to imagine that I'm at a concert singing in front of thousands of people. I record for feeling. I'm not good at the technical stuff. I don't like standing there in a room, after the tracks have been done, singing the same song fifty times in a row. I hate it. I want to sing a song once, maybe twice, and if it isn't working, maybe go on to another song. Fleetwood Mac is the opposite. They labor over every detail. I care about the final feeling when you hear it on the car radio or your stereo at home.
BAM: In fairness to Fleetwood Mac, Stevie, even though you know what a long process recording is, the group's records don't sound cold or detached. There's plenty of feeling on every record Fleetwood Mac has done.
NICKS: That's true. Don't misunderstand me. I love the way Fleetwood Mac sounds. I wouldn't be in it if I didn't. I'm just saying that on Bella Donna we we managed to make a really good record a different way. We went in and we just did it. Tusk took us thirteen months to make, which is ridiculous. I was there in the studio, every day--or almost every day--but I probably only worked for two months. The other eleven months, I did nothing, and you start to lose it after a while if you're inactive. You see, Lindsey, Chris, John and Micks all play, and I don't. So most of the time I'd be looking at them through the window in the control room. After four or five hours, they'd forget I was even there, they'd be so wrapped up in little details. It was very frustrating.
BAM: There seems to be a bit of revisionism about Tusk going around. When the record came out, you all said you were delighted with it. When it didn't do so well commercially as it was expected, the opinions within the band about the project seemed to turn more negative.
NICKS: I never felt any differently about it. I was always up-front about it. I loved the songs for the most part. I even liked almost all of Lindsey's tunes, which were the most heavily criticized. I did not love sitting around for thirteen months and I nevr said I did. If Tusk had been terribly successful, I wouldn't have taken the credit for it because I was not that much a part of it. It was out of my hands. I didn't want it to be called Tusk. I didn't like the artwork. I'm being totally truthful--I had very little to do with that album.
BAM: How does it sound to you now?
NICKS: I love individual songs. Of my songs, I like "Sara" and "Angel" the best. I liked most of Chris' stuff. Of Lindsey's songs, I guess I like "Save me a Place" and "Walk a Thin Line" the most. Those are beautiful songs. I love Lindsey's work. I didn't hang around with him for seven years for nothing., listening to him play the guitar every single night, watching him fall asleep with his electric guitar across his chest. There were many nights I had to pry the guitar off of him so he could sleep in a normal position. My main complaint with Tusk isn't musical. It just went on too long. I think it could have been done in half the time. But again, I'm not a player. I'm the dancer and singer. I just want to get up there and dance and twirl my baton.
