All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t make Stevie Nicks’ latest a worthy listen. All is the operative word.
On Street Angel (Atlantic), Nicks is championed by singers and musicians such as Bob Dylan, David Crosby, Waddy Wachtel, Bernie Leadon, Michael Campbell, Andy Fairweather Low, Benmont Tench and Roy Bittan. Stalwarts all, but they’re not enough to carry inadequate lyrics and a voice that bleats as though it inhaled a dozen party balloons.
Campbell is game. For those selections on which he composed the music, it is a guitar power punch reminiscent of his work with Tom Petty.
When Nicks steps to the microphone and spews gibberish with unbearable vocals, all is for naught. Whether simpering or grandstanding, Nick’s Street Angel is headed for a roast.
★★★ Street Angel – Stevie Nicks
Modern Records/Atlantic
13 tracks
CD/cassette
Stevie Nicks’s ambitious Street Angel takes flight thanks to her willingness to tackle tough subjects, her stellar guest list, and her voice — sometimes sweet, sometimes raspy — which shines through.
The former voice of Fleetwood Mac is adept at being wistful (“Listen to the Rain”), downright sad (“Rose Garden,” which brings to mind the country classic “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”) or properly respectful — in the case of two of her heroes, actress Greta Garbo and naturalist Jane Goodall, who are the subjects of different songs.
The guest list is an impressive one topped by Bob Dylan, who helps out on his song “Just Like a Woman,” which Nicks decorates with some Dylan-esque inflections. Guitarists Bernie Leadon and Waddy Wachtel make shimmering/ ringing contributions and David Crosby effectively sings backup, but no one gets in the way of Nicks’s generally understated delivery.
Longtime fans may be ambivalent about the two tribute songs — the lyrics are rather lightweight — but Nicks makes them listenable, although neither is as interesting as the title track, a semi-romantic anthem for the homeless. It’s a reach for Nicks to move into social commentary — and to tackle a Dylan song in his presence — but her singing and the music make Street Angel an entertaining flight.
Since she first exploded on the rock scene in 1975 as the seductive focal point of Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks has been as much an enigma as a consistent platinum-selling act.
While her star may not be as high in the black night sky as it was in the late Seventies and early Eighties, Stevie Nicks’ career has spanned three decades — twenty years (including eight platinum albums) with Fleetwood Mac and five multi-platinum solo albums — with her latest, Street Angel, likely to follow suit. In short, the lady still commands respect.
Now, five years after her last solo album — the rather lackluster The Other Side of The Mirror — the 46-year-old Nicks has returned to her roots. A sparkling album, Street Angel, harkens back to her Number One solo debut, Bella Donna, and even more so to her days as rock’s reigning queen at a time when her former band, Fleetwood Mac, was the biggest act in the music world.
Recovering from recent eye surgery to correct her lifelong poor vision, we spoke with Nicks from her home in Phoenix, Arizona, where she has been since the infamous Northridge quake earlier this year.
While Nicks may have kept busy with a greatest hits album (Time Space), two solo tours, one Fleetwood Mac album (Behind the Mask), as well as a Mac tour over the past half-decade, the somewhat reclusive superstar agrees that with such a long period between albums, it was time to speak up with the release of Street Angel.
However, she did make clear that there are certain things she never wants to share with her public. “I usually don’t do a lot of press, but with this record, I figured that it would only be to my benefit to talk about it a little bit. But I don’t really like people knowing everything about me. I like being a mystery, and I even think I’m pretty mysterious to the people who know me really well.
“There is a part of me that isn’t available to the public, except in my songs. When I’m writing I really do strive to be totally honest. I never make up a song. They either come right from my journals or straight out of my head because of something that is happening. It’s always been important to me that people think of me as more than just a ‘tune-sayer’.”
I don’t really like people knowing everything about me. I like being a mystery, and I even think I’m pretty mysterious to the people who know me really well.
The obvious difference between Street Angel and her more recent solo projects is the abandonment of a synthesizer-based sound in favor of the more guitar-oriented influences of her past.
“I think it has a lot to do with what you start out with,” states Nicks in a girlish voice which moves in a machine-gun rhythm at times. “On The Other Side of the Mirror, I started out with Rupert Hines, who is an amazing keyboard player, so that whole album sort of went the way of the airy, surreal keyboard and synthesizer thing. It was like being in the twilight zone at times [laughs]. This album was started with [former Eagle] Bernie Leadon and Andy Fairweather Low. So I had two acoustic guitar players and myself for two months at my house in Los Angeles, playing all the songs that I showed them, which was many more than the thirteen on the record.”
“The ones that ended up on the album started to show themselves,” continues Nicks. “We were sitting in my English Tudor-style library playing my songs and it was almost like we were preparing to go out on the road as a Kingston Trio kind of act, where we would go out and play little clubs and set up the equipment ourselves [laughs]. So this album just started out from a guitarist’s point of view, as opposed to piano or synthesizers.”
For her part, Nicks hasn’t made any final assessment about the album, saying, “I think it’s too soon for me to make a judgment, but I think it’s a great driving album.”
While she has spent the last twenty years in the often-blinding media spotlight, little is known of Nicks’ formative years when she lived like the gypsy that she would sing about decades later, and something which obviously set the pace for her professional life.
Born in Phoenix, Nicks’ family moved to Los Angeles (her other hometown) before popping into a succession of cities due to her father’s successful executive career. The cities flew by like the pages of a calendar — first there was Albuquerque, New Mexico, then El Paso, Texas, and Salt Lake City, Utah. The clan headed back to Los Angeles for Stevie’s first three years of high school, before heading north to San Francisco for her final year of high school.
“It was my senior year, which is a really rotten time to have to move into a new school,” recalls Nicks. “You couldn’t try out for cheerleader. You couldn’t try out for song leader. You couldn’t try out for flag twirler. You couldn’t do anything because they had all tried out the previous year. So I was totally crushed because that was my dream at that point.”
While Nicks’ voice seems to carry a twinge of childhood regret, it’s hard to imagine what would have happened if she had been twirling flags on the gridiron, instead of crossing paths with another flower child of the Sixties, Lindsey Buckingham, during the summer of 1966.
“I met Lindsey at the end of my senior year,” explains Nicks. “We were at a party and Lindsey and I sang ‘California Dreamin’ together that night.”
However, it wasn’t until two years later in 1968, when the twenty-year-old hippie girl would speak with Buckingham again, this time it was over the phone as her future love interest asked her to join his band Fritz. “I had never sang rock before,” admits Nicks, “and I certainly had never been in a rock band, but I thought, ‘Why not?’ So I ended up being in that band with Lindsey for three and a half years. We practiced every day, and we played some really big shows.”
Those early years with Fritz turned out to be perfect training for the future, but Nicks admits that she had no idea of it at the time. “I don’t think I would have ever been able to just walk into Fleetwood Mac and been cool about being center front stage if it hadn’t been for those three and a half years in Fritz. I would have been totally nervous and ‘stage-frighted-out.’ But Fritz was like an incredible amount of preparation experience, which I didn’t really know was preparation at that point.”
Like many unsigned bands, it was the very goal of being discovered which ultimately led to the demise of Fritz, as Nicks and Buckingham got a quick lesson into the ways of the music business. “This producer named Keith Olsen [who would go on to work with Fleetwood Mac and Nicks during her solo years] invited the band down to L.A. to do some recording, but it was very obvious that everybody wanted to break Lindsey and I away from the rest of the guys in the band.”
In fact, Nicks now says that it was the dissolution of the band that brought the musical partners into a more personal relationship. “It was the guilt that drove us together,” Nicks says with a laugh. “That’s why Lindsey and I started going out. We just felt so bad because everyone in Los Angeles was trying to kill our band. I mean, after three and a half years together, these guys were our best pals in the world and they were just being shut out, and it was very obvious.”
With the other Fritz members gone, Buckingham/Nicks made their first and only album. While this self-titled cult classic has grown to become one of the most in-demand vinyl albums, it was anything but a commercial success at the time of its 1973 release.
Buckingham Nicks, 1973
As for the possibility of the album ever coming out on CD, Nicks points an accusatory finger at her former partner. “If Lindsey would just call me back, we would release the album because there are a lot of labels, including Atlantic, who are very interested in it. But Lindsey has just been incommunicado lately, and if he doesn’t call me back soon I’m going to put a huge ad in Billboard that says, ‘Lindsey Buckingham is the reason that Buckingham/Nicks hasn’t been released on CD,’ because it’s all him. So sign the petition because I’m doing what I can.”
As their debut album basically flopped, the two struggling musicians had no indication of the stardom that was just around the corner. In fact, Nicks was working as a waitress in Hollywood, while Buckingham worked on the music at their apartment near Canter’s Restaurant on Fairfax in the heart of Tinsel Town.
Meanwhile, in another part of town, as Buckingham and Nicks struggled through this period of shattered dreams, an English blues drummer by the name of Mick Fleetwood happened to be visiting Sound City Studios at the tail-end of 1974.
Fleetwood was searching for studios to record what would be Fleetwood Mac’s next album, while at the same time searching for a new guitarist to replace the recently departed Mac guitarist/vocalist Bob Welch.
During his trip to Sound City, producer Keith Olsen wanted to show Fleetwood the sounds that the studio was capable of producing, so he grabbed a tape that happened to be laying on the console and turned it up.
The song that came on was the seven-minute epic “Frozen Love” from the Buckingham/Nicks album. Fleetwood was instantly grabbed by the guitarist on the tape and inquired as to who it was. Olsen explained that the guitar player was part of a duo, who probably wouldn’t leave his musical partner, who also happened to be his girlfriend.
Not to be dissuaded, Fleetwood made the call anyway. Nicks picks up the story from here: “We got a call from Mick on New Year’s Eve night of 1974 going into ‘75, asking us to join Fleetwood Mac. At that time, Lindsey and I were really poor, I mean, we were like really starving. We were totally disillusioned, we were both miserable, totally unhappy with each other and the world in general, and I told Lindsey that I thought we should do anything that was going to raise our lifestyle, and he agreed.”
Ironically, Nicks had no idea who or what Fleetwood Mac was at the time. “I went down to the record store that night and bought every Fleetwood Mac album and we listened to all of them from front to back. I was looking to see if there was something that I could add to this band, and I felt that there was a kind of mystical thing throughout the band’s history from Peter Green’s bluesy guitar to Bob Welch’s “Bermuda Triangle” to Christine’s sort of ‘airy-fairy’ voice, and I thought that it might work. Of course, they didn’t need another singer, they needed a guitar player, but they couldn’t get Lindsey without me, so they had to take us both.”
As the band hit the road for an extensive tour behind Fleetwood Mac (which, unofficially, became known as the band’s White Album), their powerhouse performances brought more converts to the band, with the charismatic and mysterious singer with the strange little voice quickly becoming the center of attention, as the album eventually topped the charts fueled by the Top Ten single “Rhiannon.”
However, success didn’t come easily, as a series of internal breakups threatened to destroy the band before it had a chance to discover its full potential. First, the marriage of bassist John McVie and keyboardist/vocalist Christine McVie dissolved, as did drummer Mick Fleetwood’s marriage, and finally Nicks’ long-term relationship with Buckingham.
As Nicks explains, it was anything but a walk in the park during the making of their classic album Rumours in 1976. “In a normal situation, you don’t break up with someone and then see them the next day for breakfast. But within Fleetwood Mac, you saw that person the next day, so the sarcasm level went way up and the little digs got to be thousands a day, and people would just slam out of the studio.”
Then, Nicks adds this obvious aside, “Great tragedy definitely led to great art. You had five people who were very high strung and over the edge really easy. Everybody was really screwed up, but we got the greatest rock & roll soap opera out of it.”
The result of this personal turmoil was an album that would spend an incredible 31 consecutive weeks at the top of the charts. In the process, Rumours became the biggest-selling album in history at the time with more than 20 million copies sold to date.
Following the seemingly endless touring that helped propel Rumours into the record books, the band returned to the studio for work on their Sgt. Pepper-like opus, simply entitled Tusk.
The recording took longer than the previous two albums combined, as Buckingham’s creativity took on a meticulous, almost scientific approach, something that didn’t exactly endear him to the rest of the members.
Yet, a steady diet of booze and Peruvian Marching Powder enabled the group to get through it and may go a long way in explaining the double album’s somewhat scattered focus.
“Tusk took thirteen months to make, and you had to be there every day,” Nicks says without a hint of exaggeration. “There was no calling in sick, you were there from two in the afternoon straight through to seven the next morning, and sometimes we didn’t even go home. It was really intense, and it probably was as nuts as we got. The only thing that Fleetwood Mac ever did in abundance was a lot of cocaine and a lot of drinking, and luckily we never did anything else.”
Nicks goes on to say that the pressures of following up two consecutive Number One albums, along with the band’s notoriously intense touring schedule, led to a lengthy ride in the fast lane. “Everybody was so tired all the time and really haggard. That’s why cocaine was so much a part of our lives; we were just too tired every day to go on. We had commitments here and commitments there, and the record company barking down our backs, asking why the album was taking so damn long. To this day, I don’t even know what Tusk was; it was just this intense thing. It’s a great story to tell but it wasn’t much fun to live.”
Following another extensive worldwide tour behind the multi-platinum Tusk, which failed to top the charts like its two predecessors, Nicks began to look seriously at a solo career. After five years with Fleetwood Mac, Nicks had amassed a large backlog of material and presumably an equal amount of artistic frustration, which became obvious when the down-to-earth singer explained the reasons behind the launching of her hugely successful solo career.
“I realized that two or three songs every two to three years wasn’t enough for me,” states Nicks. “Not only was it just two to three songs, it usually wasn’t even my favorite two to three songs. The band would hear fifteen to twenty of my songs when we’d do a Fleetwood Mac album, and they’d invariably pick out the two songs that were my least favorite. So my favorite songs would never get used.”
Nicks goes on to say, “By the time I got to Bella Donna, I had tons of songs that I really loved, and nobody was ever going to hear them. It was like I was working for nothing. That’s absolutely why I decided to do Bella Donna; to look for other avenues outside of Fleetwood Mac.”
What that solo debut did was show that Stevie Nicks was not some sort of Lindsey Buckingham puppet, as the album topped the charts in 1981 on the strength of three Top Ten hits — “Leather And Lace,” “Edge Of Seventeen” and the Tom Petty-penned “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.”
Returning to the Fleetwood Mac fold a year later, Nicks began to feel the strain of balancing her solo career with the band that made her famous.
“I had to give up everything to be in Fleetwood Mac for more than fifteen years, and that’s not a lie, that’s really true. You couldn’t have any kind of a normal life to do what I’ve been doing all these years.”
Nicks goes on to cite the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. “The reason I finally left Fleetwood Mac was that having to go back-and-forth, and back-and-forth got to be too much. This is the first time that I won’t have to go back-and-forth. It was always a pain. I made it work but it really took its toll on me because when Fleetwood Mac got to go to Hawaii for two months and rest, I had to go in the studio for my own thing. Then to take some time off, I had to go back in the studio with Fleetwood Mac. This will be the first time in fifteen years that I haven’t had two demanding jobs.”
Having officially quit Fleetwood Mac after their much-publicized performance at the Clinton inauguration, Nicks seems more than a little enthusiastic at the prospects of the future. “I’m totally excited about this because I don’t have to be dreading the fact that I have a whole other job to go home to.”
In the meantime, it’s nice to know that Stevie Nicks has returned with arguably her finest album ever, and is set to hit the stage in the coming month and embark on a whole new chapter of her solo career.
Like that cherub of the title track, Nicks’ ethereal drift on her new album is firmly tethered to an altogether solid collection of pop-rock songs. That always pretty, gritty voice is perfectly paired here with attractive melodies and grumbling guitars, as on highlights “Maybe Love Will Change Your Mind,” “Blue Denim,” and slightly offbeat “Rose Garden” a country-flavored ballad lightly peppered with Hammond organ.
Finding inner peace has taken years for Stevie Nicks. She didn’t find it in her longtime base of Los Angeles, which she left after January’s earthquake. She didn’t find it in the later years of Fleetwood Mac, which she left after the group sang at President Clinton’s inauguration.
Finally, though, Nicks has found a measure of peace from living in the desert beauty of Phoenix — and from concentrating on a solo career that for years she had to juggle with Fleetwood Mac commitments.
“I gave it the old college try. I gave it everything you could give it,” she said of Fleetwood Mac, for which she sang such hits as “Rhiannon,” “Gold Dust Woman” and “Dreams.”
Nicks, who headlines Great Woods July 22, is back with a new album, “Street Angel,” which is rich in rock-survivor wisdom and features a haunting version of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” with Dylan on guitar and harmonica. There’s also a passionate tribute to biologist Jane Goodall and several of the straight-from-the-heart love songs for which Nicks is known.
“I’m a much happier person now,” Nicks, 46, said recently from Arizona. “My life is easier and I’m really looking forward to going on the road this time. Probably that has a lot to do with the fact I haven’t just come off the road with Fleetwood Mac. Whenever I’d come off the road from Fleetwood Mac, I’d be exhausted.
“Not being with Fleetwood Mac has made more of a change than I ever expected,” Nicks said. “To not be on call to Fleetwood Mac is really something, because up until the inauguration, I was. There was no getting out of a call from Fleetwood Mac. If they needed you, you had to go, no matter what else was in your life or what was planned. There was nothing else that came first. I look at that now and I’m kind of amazed that I let that go on for so long. And I don’t mean `Why didn’t I leave?’ I just mean that I could have been not as wimpy a person.”
Nicks has a new song, “Greta,” about a restless wanderer who “packs her bags and she goes back to the Valley of the Sun.” Which is what Nicks did after last winter’s quake in LA. “There was no possible way I was going to wait around for another earthquake,” said Nicks.
Nicks still maintains a home in LA, but her heart is clearly in Arizona. “It’s hot here — it’s 106 degrees today. But when the sun goes down, I sit outside and it’s so beautiful. If you have any problems, you go outside and they disintegrate. I’ve grown to really depend on my desert-sky time. . . . I guess that’s why the Indians became very spiritual, because it’s very easy to get into a spiritualistic kind of mode here.”
Her more relaxed life has also enabled Nicks to feel better about the aging process. “I’m enjoying the wisdom of getting older,” she said. “I look at it that you’ve become a wiser woman, more of a teacher, more of an adept person. . . . I really dislike all the `I’m getting old’ complaints from people who are bothered by it. In other cultures, the older people were the most revered.
“Personally, I still feel that I can do all the things I could when I was young and still have just as good a time, like riding around the desert in a Jeep or climbing Camelback Mountain. I can still do all that, but there’s a certain wisdom I didn’t have before. Like the thing about going outside. Rather than going to a psychiatrist, I can look up at this incredible red mountain, watch the sky and feel how good the air feels on my face. And {unlike therapy} it doesn’t cost $150.”
Nicks’ newfound confidence led her to approach Dylan to play on “Just Like a Woman,” a song she always wished to record, she says. Its verse of “She makes love just like a woman / But she breaks just like a little girl” had long resonated with her.
“Bob Dylan and I met about eight years ago. I went along on a tour he did with Tom Petty when they went to Australia,” she said. “My friend Rebecca and I just decided we were going to watch because we knew Tom wasn’t even going to get a microphone, that anything he sang he’d have to sing with Bob. This was going to be an incredible blending of egos. So I went there for 32 days and became good friends with Bob — as good a friend as you can be with Bob, that is. He’s very much a loner, very much by himself. You don’t run up to Bob and say, `Hi, Bob.’ You kind of wait for him to even notice that you’re in the room. You just let him come to you at his own time.
“During that period, I told him that I was going to do Just Like a Woman’ one day, and I don’t think he believed me. He just said,Cool. If you can do it from a woman’s point of view, then great.’ So I called him when the song was pretty much done and he came down to the studio to listen to it. I said, You hate it, right?’ And he said,No, I don’t. I really like it.’ I said, Well, would you consider singing on it?’ And he said,No, I won’t sing on it, but I’ll play some guitar and maybe some harmonica if you want me to.’ And I thought, `Well, praise God.’ It was really important to me that he liked it. . . . I never would have put that song on the record if I didn’t think he was pleased.”
A friend more recently acquired is Jane Goodall, the famed, tireless defender of chimpanzees. Nicks has a new song, “Jane,” which pays this tribute: “She is never gonna feel like she’s done enough.” It sounds like a mystical Van Morrison tune.
“I met Jane in Dallas at the end of 1991. I came back, got all her books and I was just so impressed. She was a lot like me when she was young. She definitely was going to be devoted to something and so was I. I think that some kids are like that and some aren’t. We were both diligently looking for something to devote our lives to — and we both found something.
“Her stories of what some people do to chimpanzees are so horrible. They shoot them full of AIDS, put them in a little cell all by themselves and let them die of AIDS, alone. With no human touch, with no love. . . . She told me she would go and visit some of these little monkeys that were dying. And when she would hold them, tears would come down their faces. Actual tears.”
At the moment, Nicks is rehearsing for her first tour in three years. She’s enlisted a band featuring drummer-musical director Russ Kunkel, who has toured with James Taylor and Jackson Browne. Other notables include guitarist Rick Vito (who was in Fleetwood Mac) and saxophonist Marty Greb, who toured with Bonnie Raitt.
“I’m getting ready to go out and do a really fun tour. Things couldn’t be any better,” she said. “And they wouldn’t be any better if I was 10 years younger, because physically I don’t feel much different than I did then. If anything, I probably feel better because I’m not so pushed to be going and going every second. I can choose how fast I want to go now.”
Steve Morse / Boston Globe Newspaper / June 17, 1994
“Understanding me is not an easy thing to do,” sings Stevie Nicks in “Blue Denim,” the vibrant lead track from Street Angel, her first studio album in five years.
No kidding.
Interpreting Nicks’ confessional, sometimes mystical, lyrics has often been a formidable task — both in her solo work and her days with Fleetwood Mac. So it’s a relief to find Nicks sticking to a common theme on Street Angel — love. And plenty of it.
There’s “Kick It,” the set’s most infectious track, a spry, harmonious number with an uplifting sing-along chorus. And “Maybe Love Will Change Your Mind,” the first single, is another charmer, thanks to Nicks’ relaxed vocals and its seizing and chipper pop-rock nature.
But the CD’s standout is its title track, a haunting ballad that ranks among the songwriter’s finest moments on record. “Street Angel” tells of a homeless woman who must choose between the love of a wealthy man and her family on the streets. The exquisite melody and detailed harmony by David Crosby lend the tune a grace you don’t often find in today’s pop market.
Nicks’ only misstep here is an unnecessary and overly reverent cover of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” (with the man himself playing harmonica behind her Dylan-aping vocals).
Street Angel is Nicks’ most consistently tuneful solo set to date. Moreover, it equals her first two — and previous best — LPs, Bella Donna and The Wild Heart. (Three cuts — “Greta,” an ode to screen legend Greta Garbo, and the country songs “Destiny” and “Rose Garden” — predate 1981’s Bella Donna and find a fitting home here.)
With ample guitars erupting all over Street Angel, Nicks finds her wings as a rocker and reminds us why we fell in love with her when first she spun her tale of a Welsh witch named “Rhiannon” 19 long years ago.
Howard Cohen / Knight-Ridder Newspapers / June 10, 1994
★★★ (Three stars) STEVIE NICKS: Maybe Love Will Change Your Mind (4:12) PRODUCERS: Thom Panunzio, Roy Bittan WRITERS: S. Stewart, R. Nowels PUBLISHERS: MMA/Sweet Talk/EMI-Virgin/Future Furniture, ASCAP REMIXER: Chris Lord-Alge
Modern 5638 (c/o Atlantic) (cassette single)
Enduring rock poetess is back with a breezy, finger-poppin’ pop gem. That raspy voice is like a visit from an old friend, and she twirls her way through this sing-along preview from the forthcoming Street Angel with a playful energy that will leave die-hard fans smiling from ear to ear. Already picking up play at album rock radio, single is light enough to make the grade at top 40 and AC formats as well.
The release of Stevie Nicks’ fifth solo album, Street Angel, has been delayed. The album had been expected to arrive in music stores on Tuesday of this week. The new release date is June 7, according to Atlantic Records’ Modern imprint.
NEW YORK — Eyeing the May 3 release of her fifth solo album, Street Angel, Stevie Nicks views her status in the music industry with a seasoned, philosophical sensibility — and a dash of good humor.
“I have no false illusions,” she says with a chuckle. “I know that I’m like this little dinosaurette, truckin’ and stompin’ around. And you know, every once in a while I have to come out and have tea with my fellow dinosaurettes, Ann and Nancy [Wilson] and Pat [Benatar]. But I am not going anywhere. I’ve earned my place as an enduring woman in rock’n’roll, and I’m not about to give it up–not as long as I still feel inspired by music.”
Actually, Nicks’ rich musical history is a key element in the promotional campaign behind her latest effort for the Atlantic Records’ Modern imprint. At a time when veteran rockers are sprucing up their sound and image to link up the current trends, Street Angel shows Nicks in classic and familiar form. She co-produced the set with Thom Panunzio, weaving her signature pop poetry into familiar fabric of steady rock rhythms and fluttering melodies.
Val Azzoli, executive VP/GM of Atlantic Records, says the release “will be a dream to work. Album rock radio loves Stevie Nicks — and so does AC and pop. The direction is clear with a record like this. You give them a great song, do a beautiful video for VH-1 and MTV. You let the word out, and a lot of people are instantly interested.”
Retailers appear to agree. Neil Connor, senior buyer for Record Runner in San Francisco, says he has been answering consumer requests for Street Angel for months now. “As soon as people started to catch wind that Stevie Nicks had something new coming, they started popping into the store and phoning regularly to see if it had arrived. Her fans are really devoted. This record cannot come out soon enough for them.”
Nicks fans have not only been phoning retailers. According to Paul Fishkin, Modern’s president and co-founder, the label gets “an extraordinary amount of fans calling daily, wanting to know how Stevie is doing and when the record will be released.”
He adds that Nicks has captured a “particular sound and feeling that was a trademark of her earlier records, yet fits perfectly with today’s market. Street Angel will sit quite nicely next to the numerous multiplatinum, 25-plus artist successes that we have seen recently on the charts.”
While everyone handicaps and interprets Nicks’ musical choices, the artist herself says she simply does what comes naturally. “You can’t calculate art and stories and life experiences–or, at least, I can’t. It has to be real or it just doesn’t. I also think people come to expect certain things from you after a while. They want you to be honest and sincere with them, and they want to connect with you. It’s like they’re visiting an old friend. They love all of those beautiful old shawls and platform boots, and so do I.”
In assembling Street Angel, Nicks visited with a number of her own old friends, using such veteran session players as Waddy Wachtel and Kenny Aronoff, as well as Heartbreakers Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell, who co-wrote the first single, “Blue Denim.”
“This album reminds me of when I was manager with Bonnie Raitt,” says Atlantic Records president Danny Goldberg. “You have an artist who is still an extremely recognizable figure, and she has a reservoir of good will from a lot of different stations. She is also someone with whom people continue to have a strong emotional connection. This album proves that she’s really grown and matured as an artist. Our job is to market this album to best reflect that.”
To that end, Atlantic is forging a multimedia campaign that focuses as much on television and print as it does on radio. “Blue Denim” arrives April 11 at album rock radio, with add dates at AC and top 40 formats tentatively planned for shortly thereafter.
An additional component in the push behind Street Angel is a lengthy concert tour. Although no dates have been confirmed, word has it the tour will begin early summer, and will likely take the singer to amphitheaters throughout the U.S. and various parts of Europe.
“I absolutely cannot wait to get back out there,” Nicks says. “The fact there are people interested in me coming to play for them means so much to me. The thrill never goes away.”
For Doug Morris, co-chairman/co-CEO of the Atlantic Group, the return of Stevie Nicks strikes a personal chord.
“She is the first artist I ever signed to this label,” he says, “She holds a very special place in my heart. It’s great to see her in shape and ready to roll. I can’t wait for her to go back on tour. I’ll be at the opening date.”
“My life is easier and I’m really looking forward to going on the road this time,” says ex-Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks.
Finding inner peace has taken years for Stevie Nicks. She didn’t find it in her longtime base of Los Angeles, which she left after the Jan. 17 Northridge Earthquake. She didn’t find it in the later years of Fleetwood Mac, which she left after the group sang at President Clinton’s inauguration.
Finally, though, Nicks has found a measure of peace from living in the desert beauty of Phoenix — and from concentrating on a solo career that for years she had to juggle with Fleetwood Mac commitments.
“I gave it the old college try. I gave it everything you could give it,” she said of Fleetwood Mac, for which she sang such hits as “Rhiannon,” “Gold Dust Woman,’ and “Dreams.”
Nicks is back with a new album, Street Angel,” which is rich in rock-survivor wisdom and features a haunting version of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” with Dylan on guitar and harmonica. There also is a passionate tribute to biologist Jane Goodall and several of the straight-from-the-heart love songs for which Nicks is known.
“I’m a much happier person now,” Nicks, 46, said recently from Arizona. “My life is easier and I’m really looking forward to going on the road this time. Probably that has a lot to do with the fact I haven’t just come off the road with Fleetwood Mac. Whenever I’d come off the road from Fleetwood Mac, I’d be exhausted.
“Not being with Fleetwood Mac has made more of a change than I ever expected,” Nicks said. “To not be on call to Fleetwood Mac is really something, because up until the inauguration, I was. There was no getting out of a call from Fleetwood Mac. If they needed you, you had to go, no matter what else was in your life or what was planned. There was nothing else that came first.”
“I look at that now and I’m kind of amazed that I let that go on for so long. And I don’t mean ‘Why didn’t I leave?’ I just mean that I could have been not as wimpy a person.”
Nicks has a new song, “Greta,” about a restless wanderer who “packs her bags and she goes back to the Valley of the Sun” — which is what Nicks did after the Northridge Earthquake. “There was no possible way I was going to wait around for another earthquake,” Nicks said.
Nicks still maintains a home in Los Angeles, but her heart clearly is in Arizona. “It’s hot here — it’s 106 degrees today. But when the sun goes down, I sit outside and it’s so beautiful. If you have any problems, you go outside and they disintegrate. I’ve grown to really depend on my desert-sky time. I guess that’s why the Indians became very spiritual, because it’s very easy to get into a spiritualistic kind of mode here.”
Her more relaxed life also has enabled Nicks to feel better about the aging process. “I’m enjoying the wisdom of getting older,” she said. “I look at it that you’ve become a wiser woman, more of a teacher, more of an adept person. I really dislike all the ‘I’m getting old’ complaints from people who are bothered by it. In other cultures, the older people were most revered.
“Personally, I still feel that I do all the things I could when I was young and still have just a good time, like riding around the desert in a Jeep or climbing Camelback Mountain. I can still do all that, but there’s a certain freedom I didn’t have before. Like think about going outside. Rather than going to a psychiatrist, I look up at this incredible mountain, watch the sky and feel how good the air feels on my face. And (unlike therapy) it doesn’t cost $150.”
Steve Morse / Boston Globe / Sunday, January 23, 1994
★½
