“From my mom I just learned to never back down,” Stevie Nicks says, in a conversation with tavitulle. “She taught me how to maneuver through life without people really knowing that I was so clever, so that I was just moving the chess pieces as I went.”
I know—coming from Phoenix to here. And who knew that the white-winged dove was this bird in Phoenix, or in Arizona, that made its home in the saguaro cactus, because it was protected in there? I didn’t really know anything about doves or pigeons or whatever you want to call them.
What’s it like to be taken back to that moment when you’re onstage, and your lives are different now, and you’re different people—or maybe it doesn’t feel that way? In 1975. And she was an amazing artist from Germany. And it’s funny because I have a deck of Sulamith tarot cards, and I almost brought them today for some reason. And I think they’ve been at the bottom of my purse forever and they’re old; I don’t even know if you can still get them. And I thought, Maybe I should take these and show Tavi, and then I thought, Hmm, oh, no, if we get off on the Sulamith tarot cards then we won’t even finish the interview.
We want to have our serious side and all that, but you can’t take yourself too seriously. When you keep music in your life, I think it just changes you and pulls you out of a deep hole. Whenever I’m depressed, I just put music on. The second I walk into my dressing room, I plug my iPod into my old-fashioned stereo and I just crank the music. That’s just feeding my soul so that I can get ready to walk onstage in three hours.
“We made a pact, in the very beginning, that we would never be treated with disrespect by all the male musicians in the community,” Nicks says, about her friendship with Christine McVie.People reach a point where they’re, like, “I just don’t want to do this anymore.” And it really never occurred to me, because I definitely still want to—I want to sing.
But, you know, the eighties were pretty bad drug years for me. And Prince was very not into drugs. And the fact that he ended up being on a lot of pain medication just blows my mind, because he was so against it, and he gave me so many lectures about it. I’d talk to him every once in a while on the phone, and we’d talk for hours, and he’d go, “You gotta be careful, Stevie.” And I’d go, “I know, I know.
I think, Tavi, when you are really creative, I think that staying in a creative place is the best thing you can do if you have any depression going on. I’m not bipolar, but I’m something. I call it the Nicks crazies. My dad and my two uncles and my grandfather, they all had it too. My brother. And when I have that the least is when I’m really involved in doing stuff.
You know, because you’re asking me about writing, I was thinking today about Rookie. Because that really is when I met you.And it lives so strong in my mind. I wrote down notes and I wrote down, “Rookie,” and then I wrote down, “.” And then, after that, I wrote down, “I still use it.” But just thinking [of the picture from that article], of your room and your window, and that’s where you started this whole thing—and under that, I wrote, like, “Wow, mogul, publisher, empire builder.
Then I got that call from the drummer saying, “You met Lindsey two years ago, and he remembers you, and he was wondering if you’d like to sing in our band.” And I said, “What kind of band is it?” thinking it could be anything, and he said, “It’s a real hard rock-and-roll band and I said, “O.K., I can do that.” And that was it.I think they saw in my eyes that they were not going to deter the singer-songwriting person in me.
And so this really gave me a certain religious thing that I never would have had before. Sometimes when I walk on stage, if I’m really nervous, which isn’t often, I will say to Prince, “Prince, walk with me.” And he does. I believe he just suddenly is there with me. And I feel Tom [Petty]. [The night he died] I was up watching TV in my apartment that has this view all the way to the pier, and then all the way back to Point Dume.