By Sylvie Simmons
Mojo Magazine (UK)
September 2007

Living in “heavy obscurity,” Stevie Nicks was a just a humble waitress with a failed debut album to her name. Then she joined Fleetwood Mac. Cue instant superstardom and its attendant lifetime of sex, drug and suspended reality. But what of her biggest regrets? “Curse the day I did cocaine!” She tells Sylvie Simmons…

The living room is dimly lit, cosy. At one end of the floor, propped against a wall, are some paintings—works-in-progress—that could pass as illustrations for children’s books. At the other end is an open fireplace with logs blazing, the California sunset having given way to a chilly ocean breeze. Two tiny dogs, neither much bigger than a hairball, one of them clad in a little pink overcoat, skitter between the stiletto-booted feet of a small woman dressed in a floaty chiffon top and tight black pants, her loose blond hair hanging down to her waist. The expression on her face is unguarded and, as always, a little bit stunned. She looks less like a major rock star who’s one year off turning 60 than someone who just fell out of a little girl’s drawing and hadn’t quite got her bearings yet. She looks, in fact, inarguably and utterly Stevie Nicks-ian.

In 1985, when Nicks was in the Betty Ford Clinic being treated for addiction to cocaine, she was set some homework: to write an essay on the difference between being Stevie Nicks real-life human, and “Stevie Nicks” rock icon. She says it was the hardest thing she’s ever had to do. It prompts a story about going to her fortieth high school reunion last month. One of the group of girls she used to hang with in her teens told her, “You know what? You haven’t changed a bit. You are still our little Stevie girl.” She cried on the way home. “It was the nicest thing anybody had said to me,” she smiles. “That I’m still the same. Because I’ve tried very hard to stay who I was before I joined Fleetwood Mac and not become a very arrogant and obnoxious, conceited bitchy chick, which may do. I think I’ve been really successful.”

She says all of this guilelessly. For someone who’s served nearly 40 years in the crazy world of rock, more than 30 as a major star and indulging in her fair share of the sex and drugs, it’s innocence more than experience that comes across. As her close friend Tom Petty (with whom she completed a five-month US tour as unpaid guest singer in 2006) said of her, affectionately, “It’s like when you’ve got a sister in the family that nobody want to talk about much.” Meaning someone you love but who’s, well, different. “Stevie,” he added, “does not live in the real world.” Continue reading California Dreaming – Stevie in Mojo Magazine (Sept 2007) →