Stevie Nicks Timespace: The Best of Stevie Nicks. Modern-Atlantic. **
Stevie Nicks is the most potent distillation of that psychic blend peculiar to pop culture celebrities: titanic ego and an awesomely regrettable fashion sense.
Both trademark qualities are represented here, the cover photo capturing her in all her mystic, witch-like finery while the breathy solemnity of her notes on each song underlines just how seriously — despite all the magical mumbo jumbo and mawkish sentiments — Nicks takes herself.
More than any release that comes to mind, this project points to the laughable irony that has made best-of compilations the last resort of faded performers who didn’t have far to fall in the first place — something like “The Love Boat” of pop music.
But this album is a strikingly apt representation of the Fleetwood Mac superstar-turned-detox gypsy who inspired a generation of teen-age girls to wear silly, floppy hats and way too many scarves.
It has a few genuinely transcendent highs — “Rooms on Fire,” “Talk to Me” — and a lot of dreadfully misconceived lows. That’s especially depressing when one considers that the lowest of those occur on her new material.
Tom Maurstad / Lexington Herald / October 18, 1991
Rock’s ‘funny little voice’ sings a strong solo on pains and pleasures of her life
(ENCINO, Calif.) The French doors leading from Stevie Nicks’ six-story manse to her pool are open to catch a breeze. But dusk’s cool air can’t relieve the singer’s watery eyes.
“My allergies are killing me tonight,” she sniffles, lighting a cigarette, then dabbing her big baby browns.
“My feet are killing me, too.” She frowns at her size 6, copper-colored Nickels heels, kicking them off in favor of comfy white Reeboks — “and my white socks.”
They don’t go with her Betsey Johnson black velvet mini, but “it’s OK,” she quips, “there are no men here.”
That may be a first for Nicks, 43. Hailed as the queen of mystic rock ‘n’ roll, the lyrical blond muse with the self-described “funny little voice” has had a wild 18-year ride, recording with bigwigs Lindsey Buckingham, Tom Petty, Mick Fleetwood, Joe Walsh and Don Henley.
Now, it’s time for a look back at her decade as a solo artist. Her new album, Timespace: The Best of Stevie Nicks, is a collection of personal favorites. Among new songs are “Desert Angel,” which she wrote for the gulf war troops, and “Sometimes It’s a Bitch,” by Jon Bon Jovi.
The lyrics personify Nicks’ pleasure-and-pain life:
Sometimes it’s a bitch, sometimes it’s a breeze Sometimes love’s blind and sometimes it sees Sometimes it’s roses, sometimes it’s weeds.
“I felt that if (Bon Jovi) knew nothing else about me … he knew I had a strong instinct to survive,” writes the former Fleetwood Mac singer in her album’s song-by-song liner notes. Nicks decided to reveal “a lot about my life … things I’ve never told before,” she says, “so that (people) might understand a little bit more why I am the way I am. And why I don’t change very much.”
Indeed, neither Nicks’ ethereal image nor her wispy, indelible sound has been updated much for the ’90s. She doesn’t fret about the current crop of cookie-cutter female singers.
“They do what they do and I do what I do. I’m timeless. I got that Dickensian, London street-urchin look in high school. I’ll never be in style, but I’ll always be different.”
Her trademark collection of chiffon and velvet dresses, platform boots, fringed capes and shawls – all painstakingly mended and cleaned by hand – is kept in an air-controlled closet. “I’ve had this one black skirt for eight years and I keep wearing it,” she says. “I have to. It’s like the ruby slippers.”
Nicks’ wardrobe was forced into flexibility. In her early days with Fleetwood Mac, she weighed 105 pounds; several years ago the scales shot to 130. “It’s a lot of weight if you have teeny, tiny bones like I do,” says the 5-foot-1 pixie.
Her fluctuating weight spawned rumors from health problems, to kicking her longstanding cocaine addiction, to simple overeating.
“I didn’t gain it from (kicking drugs). I gained my weight from pneumonia during the (1987) Tango in the Night tour,” she says. She was given steroid shots to keep her vocal cords from swelling, and to keep the tour going. “And I was on antibiotics the whole time, in addition to serious asthma treatments.”
She talks softly, curled on a couch with her favorite white blanket. “I’m getting skinny now. I’ve lost at least 20 pounds. The only way you stay thin — and I’m not thin, I’ll never be thin — is to change the way you eat.
“I haven’t had a hamburger in four years. For me, not to have had a cheeseburger is like an amazing thing ’cause that was probably — sans drugs and everything else — my favorite thing in life.”
No more burgers. No more drugs.
When she joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975, drugs were part of the rock ‘n’ roll life. “It was like being swept up on a white horse by a prince. … There was no way to get off the white horse – and I didn’t want to. It took over my life in a big way.”
In 1986, a doctor friend scared her so straight she immediately checked into the Betty Ford Center. “Oh yeah,” she recalls. “I made the famous pact with God.”
She confesses she sometimes misses the drug lifestyle, “how crazy it was.”
But she’s proud to have stayed only 28 days at Betty Ford. “That’s not very long to break a 12-year habit.”
She does have an occasional drink. She offers wine while rummaging through cupboards for a little rum, which she can’t find. She won’t drink much, she says, ” ’cause it’s too fattening. I’d rather eat a piece of cake.”
Dinner this evening is buffet style, chicken or steak. “Where’s mine?” Nicks asks the five women — ever-present friends and aides — already at the rough-hewn kitchen table. “Get up and get it yourself,” teases Wendy, the cook, and Nicks does.
Talk turns to the videos on a nearby TV. “Cher looks terrible in that red wig!” someone says. “But Madonna, she looks great,” says another.
So does Nicks, in the many pictures that adorn her castle walls — portraits, paintings, family snapshots, album covers. On one wall of her white-on-white living room is a huge print of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album cover. It features Nicks and Mick Fleetwood, for whom she wrote “Beauty and the Beast.”
After 15 years, her split from the band was less than amicable. “Mick and I are not speaking,” she says, still miffed over a business dispute. Never, she says, will she record with him again.
She denies the rift occurred because of Fleetwood’s tell-all 1990 autobiography, which detailed his liaison with Nicks. “I didn’t read it,” she says crisply. “I don’t need to read about something I lived.”
She lived, too, with former Mac member Lindsey Buckingham, for almost seven years. “I cooked and cleaned and took care of him. I mean, my mom and dad considered Lindsey and I married. So did I. So did he.
“(Now) Lindsey and I don’t speak at all and I wouldn’t bother to call because … if he did pick up the phone and it was me, he would hang up.”
“It’s a sad way to end a long, wonderful relationship,” she says. (Neither Fleetwood nor Buckingham could be reached for comment.)
Nicks is used to endings. “In almost every relationship I’ve had, my career has ruined (it). I will never be able to stay with anyone really long, because there will come a point when they say ‘I can’t deal with your life.’ ”
Maybe that’s why she has considered adopting a baby girl. “I could do that on my own. I could spend a lot of time with her. Just because I have those shows at night doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t take all my other time and put it into that baby. This would never be a lonely or unhappy baby.”
She concedes that adopting as a single parent is hard. “I don’t know if it’s possible,” she sighs. “If I wanted to really have one, I could do that, too. But I’m booked up for the next couple of years. So someone would have to come into my life that is so intense that I’d be willing … to make serious changes.”
Her work future is easier to predict: a new solo album; possibly more touring; and a book of letters, poetry and photos. She’s saving “the really serious biography for later. It’s a little bit much now.”
Still, Nicks isn’t likely ever to swap her cape for a pen. “I love making people happy with music. I don’t know what I’d do without that. You give up a lot to get a kingdom, but you get an awful lot back.”
THE INSIDE TRACK: Stevie Nicks will pay her own personal tribute to celebrated environmentalist Jane Goodall at The International Tribute to Jane Goodall in Dallas on Oct. 25. The former Fleetwood Mac member has written “Jane’s Song,” a special tune for the event. Nicks says she was moved to write a song in Goodall’s honor after becoming aware of her research into the cruelty experienced by chimpanzees in scientific experiments, which include shooting the primates with the virus of acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
“Jane’s Song” will appear on Nicks’ next solo album, with proceeds to go to the Jane Goodall Institute.
Stevie Nicks fans get more than a greatest hits album with Timespace. They get an explanation.
In the liner notes, the ever-mysterious Nicks reveals, finally, where her biggest hits (and there are some outstanding ones) came from and what they mean. “Stand Back” is about a “crazy argument,” “Edge of Seventeen” is about the death of Nicks’ uncle, and “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You” was written to soothe the soul of Joe Walsh, who lost his 3-year-old-daughter in a car accident.
Casual listeners may not care, but the rabid fans of the bewitching Nicks can finally put meanings to her obscure lyrics.
In addition to the above, Timespace includes the stellar tracks “Talk to Me,” “If Anyone Falls,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” “Leather and Lace,” “I Can’t Wait,” “Rooms on Fire” and “Whole Lotta Trouble.”
Also included are three unemotional new songs — comparatively awful against these illustrious hits. Without the new tracks, Timespace would be a tremendous chronicle of an intriguing, distinct and important pop icon.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) – Stevie Nicks’ new album, Timespace: The Best of Stevie Nicks, is a first for the diminutive, doe-eyed queen of mystic rock ‘n’ roll. She has decided, after 10 years, to let her audience know what her favorite songs are about and for whom they were written.
In the record’s liner notes, the former lead singer of Fleetwood Mac has explained the whys and wheretofores behind her dusky-voiced classics like “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” “Stand Back,” and “Edge of Seventeen.”
It was time to explain the songs, she decided, because “everybody’s had 10 years to interpret them themselves.”
The album contains three new songs, including one she wrote herself in tribute to the veterans of the Persian Gulf War. But the emphasis is on her old standbys, which she illuminates in the liner notes.
“I spent about a month in Phoenix (her hometown) writing out all these 13 vignettes,” she said in a telephone interview. “When I first started doing it, I thought, ‘Do I really want to do this?’ and then I thought, ‘Yeah, I really do want to do it,’ because I really do want people to understand a little bit about what this has been like for me.”
The vignettes are tender, deeply personal tales about the songwriting process, the men in Nicks’ life and the tragedies she has experienced.
One of the most touching stories is the one behind “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You” from her third solo album, 1985’s Rock A Little. It was written for and inspired by singer Joe Walsh after she learned of the death of his 4-year-old daughter in a car accident.
The death “has been an absolute taboo subject,” Nicks said. “I had to immediately call Mr. Walsh and clear it with him or it could have never been printed, because that is not a subject that is talked about at all.”
The vignette describes Walsh taking Nicks to a park where he and his daughter had spent a lot of time. He told her his daughter’s only complaint was that she couldn’t reach the drinking fountain to get a drink.
After his daughter’s death, Walsh built a tiny silver drinking fountain in the park. A plaque on it reads, “Dedicated To HER And To All The Others Who Were Too Small To Get A Drink.”
“As soon as we got there (to the park), I knew there was going to be a tiny little drinking fountain in that park,” she said. “Everybody thinks Joe was so nuts, and he is, but Joe has a sensitive side that goes far, far beyond that. I just knew that the one thing that she asked for was the thing that he would put in her park.”
Nicks tells of another tragedy, this time in her own life, in her signature song, “Edge of Seventeen,” from her first solo album, “Bella Donna,” released in 1981. She describes how helpless she felt when her uncle died.
In the song, she sings: “Well then suddenly, there was no one left standing in the hall / In a flood of tears that no one really ever heard fall at all / Oh I went searching for an answer up the stairs and down the hall / Not to find an answer, just to hear the call of a nightbird / singing, come away, come away.”
Explaining it now, she says she and her cousin sat with her uncle and saw him “just slip away from us in about three hours.”
“Nobody came, nobody was there, and I did go screaming out into the hallway, and there was no one there, so we just had to sit there with him and wait until somebody got there. Nobody in the whole family realized he was dead.”
Afterward, she said, “I went straight home and wrote `Edge of Seventeen.’ ”
The new songs on Timespace include her ode to the troops of Operation Desert Storm, “Desert Angel,” and two songs that were written for her, one by Jon Bon Jovi and one by Poison singer Bret Michaels.
Nicks left Fleetwood Mac after 15 years with the band, and at 43, credits sturdy genes and a “strong instinct to survive” with keeping her going through the stress of two careers, one with the band and one on her own.
“All the women in my family live to be very, very old,” she said. “I had my picture taken with my great-great grandmother when I was in the eighth grade, and she was 106. She was the only survivor of the last Colorado massacre, the last wagon train that came over the Rockies. She jumped in a little trunk and just stayed in there for four days and the soldiers found her.
“I think maybe that’s where I get it. You just can’t kill us Nicks women off.”
Nicks titled her collection Timespace because she wanted to avoid a “greatest hits” or “best of” title.
Stevie Nicks