By Larry Rodgers
The Arizona Republic
www.azcentral.com
July 26, 2007

With her 60th birthday looming, Stevie Nicks is making some changes.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer has put the Paradise Valley home she has owned since 1981 up for sale, and has expanded her charitable efforts beyond benefits for the Arizona Heart Institute, a favorite of her late father, Jess.

She’s also selling a house in Los Angeles to move to a smaller place on the beach in Santa Monica. “I’m downsizing,” Nicks said in a call last week. “I’m moving into a rock-and-roll penthouse where I can do my work. I don’t want to worry about if the pool is taken care of and the grass is right.”

Nicks, who performs in Phoenix on July 28, said she’s spent only a few weeks annually at her Valley home in recent years. In addition, her brother, Chris, and his family, who shared the two-winged home at the foot of Camelback Mountain, have moved.

“I’ve written many famous songs there, so I hope somebody buys it who appreciates the amazing rock-and-roll history and the legendary behavior that’s gone on in that house,” said Nicks, who successfully underwent rehab for drug abuse in the ’80s.

With the 2005 passing of Jess Nicks, who headed Armour/Greyhound before becoming a concert promoter, the singer has found a new outlet for her charitable side – providing encouragement and music to U.S. servicemen hospitalized in the Washington, D.C., area after tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“They are so banged up. If anyone ever needed help, it’s these guys,” said Nicks, who has visited Army and Navy medical centers since 2004.

Nicks came up with the idea of giving song-filled iPods to the hospitalized servicemen.

“I call it a soldiers’ iPod. It has all the crazy stuff that I listen to, and my collections I’ve been making since the ’70s for going on the road,” Nicks said. “When I’m sick . . . or the couple of times in my life that I have really been down, music is what always dances me out of bed.”

She hit up fellow musicians and friends for money to buy the iPods and has given away hundreds.

Nicks is setting up a foundation that will allow her to accept donations on a wider scale for iPods and medical aid such as prosthetic limbs. The non-profit group will be called Stevie Nicks’ Band of Soldiers.

The voice behind such rock classics as Edge of Seventeen, Rhiannon, Landslide and Stand Back said she still has plenty of energy left over for her music, which is celebrated on her new CD, Crystal Visions: The Very Best of Stevie Nicks.

She acknowledged that the thought of turning 60 next May “blows my mind,” but quickly added, “I think age is definitely a state of mind. Our mothers and grandmothers . . . at 60 were really looking at slowing down. If anything, I’m looking at adding in a lot of stuff.”

Nicks is including video shots of the artwork she has created since the ’70s in her stage show, which features a seven-piece band led by Los Angeles guitar wizard Waddy Wachtel.

She’s also working on a screenplay based on the Menologion, a collection of myths and stories that inspired Rhiannon.

“I want it to be a movie or miniseries. It’s such a fantastic group of stories,” said Nicks, who plans to talk to directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson about the project.

Plus there’s her idea for a cartoon based on a song she wrote called The Ladybug and the Goldfish:

“It will be the love story of this interspecies, interracial kind of thing.”

Nicks’ creative side doesn’t extend to making radical changes to the hits she has recorded with Fleetwood Mac and on her own. She won’t take a page from the Police’s ongoing tour, in which the British band has redone some of its biggest hits.

“We don’t mess with the actual arrangements too much, because people aren’t crazy about that,” Nicks said.

“You can’t change the solo in (Eric Clapton’s) Layla. Lindsey (Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac) can’t change the solo in Go Your Own Way, as much as he’d like to.”

Nicks’ unmistakable smoky vocals and her dramatic stage presence are a combination that needs no refinement, in the eyes of XM Satellite Radio’s Mike Marrone.

“She’s a true rock-and-roll icon,” said Marrone, who programs the Loft, which spotlights singer-songwriters.

“I think it’s her voice . . . and her spirit. People genuinely like her, almost as a member of an extended family.”

By Sylvie Simmons
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, May 13, 2007
www.sfgate.com

A small woman walks into the living room of her Southern California house carrying two mugs of steaming Earl Grey tea. A pair of tiny dogs, barely bigger than fur balls, skitter between her stiletto-booted feet. She is dressed in a floaty chiffon blouse and rock-star-tight black pants, her long blond hair worn loose and to her waist. Her expression, as she offers a mug and sits in front of the log fire, is open, unguarded and, as always, a little stunned, as if she’d just fallen out of a little girl’s drawing of a fairy princess and hasn’t quite got her bearings. She looks, in fact, exactly like Stevie Nicks.

In 1985, when Nicks was in the Betty Ford clinic being treated for cocaine addiction — she was one of the first rock stars, if not the first, she says, to do the now-common rehab thing — they gave her some homework: Write an essay on the difference between being Stevie Nicks, real-life human, and Stevie Nicks, rock goddess. She says it was the hardest thing she’s ever had to do.

It prompts a story about going to her 40th high school reunion earlier this year in San Francisco — Nicks was born in Phoenix, but her family moved West when she was a teenager. One of her close group of high school girlfriends told her, “You know what? You haven’t changed a bit. You are still our little Stevie girl.” Nicks says it made her cry “because it was the nicest thing anybody had said to me, that I’m still the same. Because I’ve always 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 many do, and I think I’ve been really successful.”

That this should be said so guilelessly by a woman who will be 60 years old next year, and who has spent a good three-quarters of those years experiencing the rock ‘n’ roll life in all its often less-than-innocent glories, might sound odd. But with Nicks, what you see really is what you get. Her hobbies include writing children’s stories and drawing sweetly childlike illustrations. A couple of her drawings, still unfinished, are propped up in a corner of the room.

“They’re my Zen thing, what I do on airplanes, what I do when I really think — think about what I’m going to do,” she says.

If she could only “organize my time a little better,” she says, she would have had an art show by now and published the children’s books.

“It’s like Oprah says: If you wait around, you’re never going to get it done,” she says. “So I’ll see if I can’t multitask a little more.”

To an outsider, Nicks’ multitasking skills seem Olympian. For the past three decades she has run, concurrently, two phenomenally successful careers: as a solo singer and songwriter and as a key member of Fleetwood Mac. During a break from touring solo and with the band last year, she spent five months on the road as an unpaid guest member of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers “just for fun.” She’s been writing a ballet and a film based on the Menologian, the mythology book that inspired her best-loved song, “Rhiannon.” Oh, and she also managed to establish the Stevie Nicks Soldier’s Angel Foundation, a charity that helps injured U.S. military personnel.

She was planning a vacation in Hawaii before finishing the last few songs for a new solo album, when her record company called and told her it was putting out a greatest-hits CD and DVD, “Crystal Visions: The Very Best of Stevie Nicks” (“These records are never your idea,” she says). So Nicks dusted herself off, packed her bags and got ready for the solo tour that brings her back to the Bay Area on Thursday.

“Due to the fact that I never got married and never had children, I do have this crazy world where I pretty much continually work,” she says. “But I love my work, and it’s so different all the time that I really can’t complain. And when I do get tired and irritable I get really mad at myself and stop in my tracks and say, ‘You have no right to complain. You are a lucky, lucky girl.’ I always hear my dad, who I lost a year and a half ago, saying, ‘Ninety-nine percent of the human race will never be able to do what you have been able to do, to see all the beautiful cities and meet the people that you’ve met. You’re a lucky girl, Stevie.’ And I just try to keep that very present in my life.”

But it must be hard playing the ethereal fairy princess myth at the age of 59, isn’t it?

She nods.

“It is. Because when you go onstage and perform in front of people, you want to be that person for everybody, but you are getting older, and there’s nothing you can do to stop that,” she says. “That is something I have had really long talks with myself about. All women have to deal with getting older, famous or not famous, and the way I deal with it is, I feel that if you stay animated from within, people don’t see the age. I do my makeup and I do my hair and I try to look as fantastic as I can when I walk out of that bathroom, but once I walk out of that bathroom, I don’t think about it again. I’ve never had a face-lift. The idea of having plastic surgery and looking like somebody else or a caricature of myself is so horrible. So I deal with it by just being me.”

Her aversion to cosmetic surgery might have something to do with her work with wounded soldiers. In 2004, when Nicks was performing in Washington, D.C., her manager got a call from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, asking if she would visit, and she couldn’t refuse.

“You put on a gown and gloves and they say, ‘Well, this guy’s name is John Jones and he was injured in a blast and lost both legs. He’s had a bad day, but he’s very excited to see you.’ And you go in and I just say, ‘My name’s Stevie Nicks. What happened?’ Because they would like to talk about it. I was there from 2 in the afternoon until almost 1 o’clock that night. When I walked out of that hospital, after having seen about 40 guys and girls who’ve lost arms and legs, I was completely blown away by it all, and by how these kids’ lives had been completely changed.”

It changed her, too. She went back, armed with iPods she’d filled with music for the patients. She and her girlfriends dropped by with movies and popcorn and sat and watched the films with the soldiers.

“I’m not a mother, but I feel incredibly motherly to all these kids,” she says. “They are so young.”

She phoned her musician friends and asked for their help with a foundation she was planning. And when she learned that a new facility for amputees and burn victims was opening in San Antonio, Texas, she set up her tour “so that I can hub out of San Antonio and go there and figure out what they need,” she says.

“I’m very, very dedicated to this. It’s nothing that I would have ever in a million years have dreamed that I would have ever become involved in,” America’s rock sweetheart says, smiling, “but I feel like it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Stevie Nicks performs at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Sleep Train Pavilion, 2000 Kirker Pass Road, Concord. $36-$131. (925) 676-8742, www.livenation.com.

Sylvie Simmons is a freelance writer.

By Christina Fuoco-Karasinski
LiveDaily
May 3, 2007
www.livedaily.com

Whether it’s raising money for the Arizona Heart Institute, collecting iPods for injured Iraq war soldiers or writing a song about the plight of New Orleans, charity is important to singer/songwriter Stevie Nicks [ tickets ].

“When you get famous and you get recognized for the work that you do, there’s a lot of good things that you get,” Nicks told LiveDaily. “You get a beautiful house and you get beautiful things, and you get to meet fantastic people. There’s this part of me that’s always thought, ‘This can’t just be a one-way street here. I have to do stuff.’”

While her upcoming tour with Chris Isaak was being mapped, Nicks was spending her time off by promoting her new greatest-hits collection, “Crystal Visions–The Very Best of Stevie Nicks,” and visiting injured military personnel at the Walter Reed Army and Bethesda National Naval medical centers.

Nicks talked to LiveDaily about the long days she spends at the medical centers, raising money in her dad’s name for the Arizona Heart Institute, her greatest-hits record and touring with Chris Isaak.

LiveDaily: Do you still live in the Phoenix area?

Stevie Nicks: I’m in Los Angeles. I do live [in the Phoenix area], but I’m in the process of selling my house because I’m not there enough since 1980. My mom and dad were there, and my dad died a couple years ago. My mom’s still there. I’m not there enough to warrant having a big house there. But that won’t mean that I still won’t be coming home. My brother’s there, my mom’s there, my niece is there. I still have a lot of family there.

I think it’s really noble, all the work you do for the Arizona Heart Institute. My dad had a heart transplant, and my grandfather has heart problems, so our family has spent a lot of time there.

Well, my dad was very determined and devoted to building those hospitals. To stand in the hospital and say, “This was his dream and he did it right down to the very end …” We did the last benefit just last year, and it was the one we needed to do to finish the last hospital of the three that he [helped to raise money for]. He did it. I was standing there going, “I’m so sorry he’s not here to actually be here, because this was his day.” He did it. He pushed it through.

Charity seems to be really important to you. I read about what you did for injured soldiers at Walter Reed.

[With the Arizona Heart Institute,] that was really [my father’s] charity calling because he had an “almost heart-attack” in the ’70s. That’s why he resigned as president of Greyhound. He had a big job working for a big corporation. He had one of the first 1,100 bypasses that were done. This was when I was 22 years old. You probably know this: if you can not have a heart attack, and you can go back and fix it–whether it’s by bypass or a stint or whatever–you can go out and have a pretty long, great life. If you have a heart attack, you’ve endangered the heart muscle, then you’re going to have big problems. So he didn’t. They got it. They did the bypass. He was in his 40s, so he lived another 40 years. That then became his cause. That was even before I joined Fleetwood Mac. That then became my cause, because that was his cause. Then I started to really realize how many people–even people my age–were having all these heart problems. So it was a good thing that he had this cause, because it was a really easy thing for me to step up to and join him. It was a thing that he and I got to do together, which was really great. It was a real bonding thing for the two of us.

With the Walter Reed thing, that just happened very accidentally. I was playing in Washington, DC, two and a half or three years ago, and I just got invited. I had a day off. I was in DC and I got an invitation to go to the hospital from the Army, I guess. I went. I had no idea what to expect, to be perfectly honest. I just thought, “I’m going to go to the hospital, meet a few guys and then I’m going to come home.” I ended up going at 2 [p.m.], and I don’t think I got back to the hotel until 9 or 10. I went into basically every room in the hospital where there was somebody who was well enough to see me. I was really pretty blown away and startled by the entire situation.

When I went home that night, I was pretty stricken, and I cried and I was really upset. I just said, “I have to do something.” So I came up with the idea of buying iPods and putting as many songs as I could stuff on them, because they’re little. When you’re in a little, tiny hospital room, and you don’t have room for a big stereo and all your CDs, this iPod idea would really work out well. That’s what I did. I came back to Los Angeles and called everybody I knew and said, “I need money to buy iPods with, or I need iPods.” That’s how it started. I never went to Steve Jobs, I never went to the iPod people. I just call up everybody I know. Every time I go, and I get 50 or 60. I go now to Bethesda also, which is the naval hospital. We call both hospitals, find out how many people are there, we get a ballpark figure, and we try to take as many [iPods] as there are people there, 60 or 70. If we give them all away, we give them all away. If we don’t, we put them into our stash for the next visit.

It has worked out exactly how I thought it would. These kids need to go get out of that bed and go exercise. They need to go work on their rehabilitation. For me, when I don’t feel well and I’m trying to get better, music has always been single-handedly the thing that gets me back up and into the world. That’s what I tell them: “I hope you use this for your rehab. It’ll dance you out of your bed.” I think it’s working. I think they appreciate it. I think they have a lot of fun. I put all my collections that I’ve been making since 1978, that I think are personally fantastic. Anything else I can think of. All different bands. Everybody knows and is behind me on this. So I put any music that I want on it, and they love it. It’s a little thing, but it’s a big thing in the scheme of their recovery.

On to your music: how did your tour with Chris Isaak come about?

Chris and I have been friends a long time. We are both managed by Howard Kaufman. It’s kind of like we’re all in the same family. I don’t know how it exactly happened, but I’m sure it happened through our management. It was just a good bill, and due to the fact that we are really good friends, it’s not just a good bill, but it’s a really fun thing for the two of us. I know his band really well. He knows everybody in my band really well, so it will be a really fun traveling circus. I don’t usually get to do this. For the last two years I took Vanessa Carlton with me, who did 30 minutes, but that’s one little girl. That’s a whole ‘nother kind of opening act. This is like the old days. This is kind of like two big acts, so you’re all backstage together so it’s fun.

Was it difficult to choose songs for “Crystal Visions”?

When you do this kind of collection, there’s a few that you have to put on. You kind of have to do the singles. Then you go through [what’s left of the] catalog and you figure out things that you think might be fun. We added in several live cuts. “Landslide” and “Edge of Seventeen” are live from Melbourne, Australia, with a 60-piece orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. I sequenced [the album] as if all of the songs were done at the same time. It’s fun to listen to it because of that. It’s trippy, because you hear these songs and you’re like, “When was that?” Even me, and I know when they were. I said to my sister in law Lori, this is kind of the record we always wanted to make. This is the solo album we always wanted to make with all the most fantastic songs on it. I think it came out great. I’m very proud of it, and I think the sequence is really fun. If it has a really good sequence, which is kind of my forte, maybe people will listen to the whole thing instead of just saying, “I want that one song” or “I want those two songs.”

You said you weren’t even sure when the songs came out. That’s a sure sign of how timeless your material is, wouldn’t you say?

Well, thank you. I do. When I was sitting there listening to all of them, I’m going, like, “You know, these songs sound really good today. These songs I recorded in 1981 and 1983 and 1985 and 1987 and 1990, they do, I think, they stand up very well.” I think every time I do this kind of a thing, I hope, anyway, it ends up being a teaching thing for all the new little rock stars that are coming up. This is something they can listen to.

With the live footage on the DVD, that’s the actual recording of “Bella Donna,” because we filmed it. My singer Lori Nicks–she’s my sister-in-law too–her first husband filmed the whole damn thing for three months and edited it down to two hours. We put 25 minutes of the two hours on the DVD. It’s fascinating, because you see Jimmy Iovine, who’s president of the world [he currently heads Interscope Records], he’s producing the record so he’s in there with me, showing me and telling me what to do. He’s such a part of it. He is really producing the record. You don’t see that that much now.

Most of the photographs I used [in the package] were by my friend Herbie Worthington, who did the Fleetwood Mac “Rumours” cover and the first Fleetwood Mac “Fleetwood Mac” record, and almost all of my covers. I went back into all of Herbie’s vault of photos and pulled out many, many pictures that I thought were just so terrific … and tried to fill this little booklet with stuff that was new. Only if you’re doing a photo book would you ever have a reason to go back and pull all those photos. I had a lot of fun doing that.

Have you started writing material for a new album?

I have. It’s not like I’m writing new material for a new album; I’m just writing because I always write. I’ve written a song about New Orleans that I really love that’s kind of about [Hurricane] Katrina. I was going to put it on this record as just an extra, added thing, then I pulled it because I’m not ready to release this song yet. I don’t have the time to go out and find the right producer for this song. I’d like to have it be a real New Orleans flair. I live in Los Angeles. I don’t really know anybody with a New Orleans flair here. I made a really, really good demo of it and it’s sitting in the demo trunk waiting for when I have some time to do it. When this tour’s over at the end of the summer, that’s probably one of the first things I’ll do is find somebody. I want to get this song recorded. I don’t think it will matter if it’ll take another two years to come out, because New Orleans is not getting better overnight. I think it’s going to be relevant for the next 10 years, [so I’ll release it] whenever I get it done to the point of where I think it’s really ready to help that city. That’s what I want to do with it. I want to let it go somehow someway to help them. Whether it’s just giving the song royalties over to the city of New Orleans or what–but something. I’ll figure out something. I didn’t want to take a chance of it not being done, as good as it is. I think it’s one of the best songs I’ve written in a long time.