(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 30 December 2025 16:00, UK
When Stevie Nicks first started making classics, she never asked for any favours from the rock and roll elite.
She may have been abnormal for being a female rock and roll star at the time, but whereas Janis Joplin got her point across with pure muscle, ‘The Gold Dust Woman’ practically cast a spell on the audience from the minute she opened her mouth to sing. She wanted the opportunity to be on the same level as the Mick Jaggers of the world, but there were always going to be limits on who thought of her along those lines.
I mean, it was already bad enough trying to get a handle on the respect of her bandmates, half the time she was playing. Mick Fleetwood never believed for a second that she didn’t have the same kind of charisma that Lindsey Buckingham did when he took both of them on in the beginning, but by the time they got around to making Rumours, most of the producers would have been lucky to find a day where they were all cordial with each other.
So if it was bad enough trying to watch Nicks be a frustrated bandmate, the rest of the group was bound to feel some kind of way when she started working on her own solo projects. She was obviously one of the greatest standouts in the group, but since ‘Landslide’ and ‘Dreams’ were already staple hits, seeing her do the same thing with ‘Edge of Seventeen’ had to be a little bit of pressure on the rest of the group.
Then again, it’s not like Nicks got a pat on the back for what she was doing all the time. There were bound to be people who loved the intricate side of her sound, but there were also people who took one look at the lack of special chords in a lot of her tunes and began wondering if she was really the kind of musical wizard that most people claimed that she was when ‘The Mac’ was behind her.
It’s not an unfounded question, either. Nicks did have a lot of great moments with her bandmates, but since a lot of her songs were Frankensteined by Buckingham behind the scenes, it was easy for people to assume that she had a bit of help in her solo years as well. Albums like Bella Donna spoke for themselves, but when listening to her contemporaries, Nicks felt like the other bands in California weren’t exactly seeing her as an equal.
She loved bands like Eagles, for example, but she would have been the first to say that they weren’t exactly treating her the same way as they did their colleagues, saying, “I could only look in awe at all these men because I’m a songwriter and what I really wanted to do was I wanted to be accepted by these people as a lady songwriter and not as just a girl. And I never really got accepted as anything else but a girl by any of them.”
Granted, Nicks’s style of writing is completely different from Don Henley’s, but she still needed to claw her way up. Despite being one of her biggest champions, even Tom Petty remembered telling Nicks that she didn’t have her rock and roll chops when he first saw her, and yet when you see her on her own, she was practically uncaged from the minute she started singing tunes like ‘Leather and Lace’ and ‘Stand Back’.
So, really, the fact that she succeeded on her own terms wasn’t only a way for her to get away from playing with her bandmates. She may have needed a break in many respects, but she wasn’t in it for that one battle. She was going to prove to the world that a girl could become a rockstar songwriter, and by now, there’s hardly anyone willing to argue with her once she steps up to the mic.
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