Friday quotes - Stevie Nicks

"If you think you know the truth about this band, you can think again.  Other than the people involved, nobody knows what really went on.

One day, when I'm an old lady, I'm going to tell the whole tale and people will be amazed.  The truth will blow your mind.

The story is deep, dark and heavy.  But it's also beautiful, sexy and more romantic than you could ever imagine.  Now's not the time, though.  You'll have to wait ten years for that one"

Stevie Nicks
(b. 1948)

I started doing this post on Friday and overwhelmed myself with the amount of quotes and pictures I'd collected so have only had time to finish it now.  There are lots of pictures I like but some aren't of the best quality but I've used them if they show off Stevie's costumes.

I grew up on their Rumours album and will always have a soft spot for Fleetwood Mac, one of the most brilliantly bonkers and excessive bands of all time.  Stevie Nicks has said a lot over the years, here's some of her story in quotes.  Apologies for the spacing Blogger won't let me correct it.

“It was my 16th birthday - my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day.  I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do - write songs and sing them to people."

"I only saw Janis Joplin one time - on a hot summer day in San Jose, California, at the Santa Clara Fairgrounds.  Lindsey and I were opening a big outdoor show for her, and because of that, I got to stay on-stage and watch the other bands. I don't exactly know what I expected, but I didn't expect what I witnessed.

Janis was extraordinary.  She had a connection with the audience that I hadn't seen before, and when she left the stage I knew that a little bit of my destiny had changed - I would search to find that connection that I had seen between Janis and her audience.  In a blink of an eye she changed my life."

"Lindsey and I got a record deal with Polydor and made our first album, Buckingham Nicks.  We had a taste of the big time.  We had great musicians in a big, grand studio.  We were happening.  Things were going our way.  But up until that point I had been thinking of quitting it all and going back to school 'cause I was sick of being miserable and I hate being poor.  When Polydor dropped that record, we were completely depressed.  Then three months later Mick Fleetwood called"

"I was twenty-seven when I joined Fleetwood Mac.  Everybody thought I was this teenager, but I had already lived with Lindsey for five years.  While doing our music I'd been a cleaning lady and worked at the Copper Penny, Clementine's and Bob's Big Boy restaurants.  I supported Lindsey and I for years, cause he never worked or had a job.  I was pretty grown up when I joined Fleetwood Mac.  I was glad because I would not have been able to handle that kind of overnight success."

"Mick is the king.  He's the head of the band.  He comes in and you think you ought to curtsy.  In the studio, Lindsey's word was law.  Christine almost always delivered the hits.  She's like an earth mother, and I'm her little sister.  John is the other fixed point around which the band revolves.  Sometimes it got really funny, this giant percussionist and two couples in front of him.  Especially when all the relationships broke up."

On style

"I've always liked long, flowing clothes,...I used to rummage around in my grandmother's trunks trying to find them.  I love the feeling of chiffon and lace."

"The clothes I wear... that doesn't change.  I love long dresses.  I love velvet.  I love high boots.  I never change.  I love the same eye make-up.  I'm not a fad person.  I still have everything I had then. That's one part of me... that's where my songs come from.  There's a song on the new Fleetwood Mac album [Mirage] that says, 'Going back to the velvet underground/back to the floor that I love,' because I always put my bed on the floor. 'To a room with some lace and paper flowers/ back to the gypsy that I was.'"

"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."

"I love leather and I love lace, but not necessarily together.  I'm probably happiest in a long black velvet dress, black suede boots, and some kind of really beautiful wrap than I am in anything else.  I don't even own a pair of jeans."

"The outfit I wear on the cover of Bella Donna is the same as the one I wore on Rumours, except it's opposite, it's white.  It's a strange turn-around that I've come from black to white... The outfit was my idea and Margi Kent designed it.  She just keeps making it longer.  She makes everything, and these are my boots that my little Jewish cobbler who's seventy years old makes.  A five-foot one-inch-tall person needs six inches.  Onstage especially.  Standing next to Mick Fleetwood is ridiculous.  Anybody standing next to Mick is ridiculous, so imagine a five-footer.  You blend into his drums, which he loves because then he's the star.  So I say, 'Wait a minute, Mick, I'm going to get tall.'  I get far on these boots.  They are very out of style and I don't care.  I love them.  They are beautiful suede and they are soft.  I tried to get this boot a long time ago, and it was going out then.  We searched London, and I found one pair that was a size five, and I wear a five and a half or six, but I bought them anyway and stuffed my little feet into them."

"Believe me, when I stop singing I'm gonna have a garage sale like you're not gonna believe.  We're talking chiffon, chiffon, and more chiffon."

[On female singers today] “I think they all went too far.  Their jeans got too low, their tops got too see-through.  Personally, I think that sexy is keeping yourself mysterious. I'm really an old-fashioned girl, and I think I'm totally sexy.”

"I'm the original hunter-down-of-fabulous-things.  Twenty years ago I sat down and decided that I would create a really wonderful image, an unforgettable image.  And now I'm kind of stuck with it.  It's like when I don't wear my fringy, gypsy stuff, people kind of look at me like, 'What's wrong?"

On Lindsey Buckingham

"When I first met him, he was going with somebody and so was I, but I fell totally in love with him.  I was captivated."

"Lindsey and I were as close to married as I'll probably ever be.  I took care of him, I cooked for him, I ironed his jeans, I embroidered stars and moons on them, I adored him, I took care of him."

"My relationship with Lindsey was tumultuous.  He and I were about as compatible as a rat and a boa constrictor.”

"You know, when Lindsey and I go back and forth on the songs that were written between the two of us, for that moment, we are back in love again."

"These days Lindsey deals with me on a much kinder level.  And I'm more willing to be open with him.  It's nice to think I might go to my grave being Lindsey's friend and not a thorn in his side for all eternity."

"I know that when I'm 80 and hes 79 and I'm on my walker, I'll be swinging my walker at him!"

On Mick Fleetwood

"And then I fell in love with Mick [Fleetwood].  That went on for two years.  Never in a million years could you have told me that would happen.  That was the biggest surprise.  Mick is definitely one of my great, great loves.  It was not good for anybody else in the band.   Everybody was so angry, because Mick was married at the time to a wonderful girl and he had two wonderful children, and I was horrified.  I loved these people.  I loved his family.  So it couldn't have possibly worked out.  And it didn't.  It just couldn't.

"I wasn't displeased by anything Mick said about me in his book, I knew the truth would come out someday.  It was a great love affair - something I would never trade in a million years."

"If you've never experienced the really dark and deep lows of love, then you can never really experience the real highs of love.  Just to know that I am capable of feeling that strongly about another person.  Because some people I know aren't capable of that"

"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 always come a point when they say, 'I can't deal with your life.'"

On children

"I really understand what an incredible commitment it is to have a child, and how difficult it is.  I know I could not have done both.  I'd have ended up having to stop doing my music, or pretty much letting someone else raise my child which would have made me very unhappy.  Or I'd have ended up kind of a half-assed mother and a half-assed rock musician."

“Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover?  With kids, your focus changes.  I don't want to go to PTA meetings.”

On drugs

[On what Gold Dust Woman is about] "Well the gold dust refers to cocaine, but it's not completely about that, because there wasn't that much cocaine around then.  Everybody was doing a little bit - you know, we never bought it or anything, it was just around - and I think I had a real serious flash of what this stuff could be, of what it could do to you.  The whole thing about how we love the ritual of it, the little bottle, the diamond-studded spoons, the fabulous velvet bags.  For me, it fit right into the candles and incense and all that stuff.  And I really imagined that it could overtake everything, never thinking in a million years it would overtake me.  I must have met a few people who I thought did too much coke, and I must have been impressed by that.  Because I made it into a whole story."

"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."

"I think a lot of us realise we're really lucky to be alive.  The ones of us who did make it pretty much cherish the fact that we are alive. You have to learn if you can't depend on yourself without chemicals, you might as well stop doing it and go do something else, because it isn't worth dying for.  But it is difficult, and probably always will be difficult to accept this whole life in a different way.  Because for so long it was lived under that dream cloud, dream child world of different kinds of drugs."

"If there's money and high powered people around, it's pretty easy to do drugs.  It wasn't just the tenor of the times.  It was just everybody did cocaine.  everybody.  Nobody ever told us how dangerous it was.  If somebody ever sat me down and really told me the repercussions of doing too much cocaine over 10 years, I know I would have been more careful.  But nobody ever did. I absolutely remember people saying: It's recreational, it's not addictive, it's excessive.  It's the rich man's drug.  It's something you do once in a while and have a good time.  Nobody ever said anything about that it could remove your brain from your head.  It was OK.  And then, of course, it wasn't OK but it was too late."

"The drugs were bad and they got everybody sick and made a lot of problems.  However there's the tragic artist drug syndrome that sometimes makes for great art.  So I would go back and change any of it?  No I wouldn't.  I think it all happened for a reason.  I'm alive today and I'm fine and I'm in fairly good health. So I got through it.  I wouldn't go back and change anything.  I'm not disappointed with it and I'm not sorry about it.  It is the way it was.  And I'm OK now.  If I was dead now, we wouldn't be doing this interview.  But I got through it and I was lucky."

"I really did go crazy.  For several months I was completely nuts"

"I would never lecture anybody because I don't think that's the way to get to people.  It certainly wasn't the way to get to me.  I decided to go to Betty Ford. Nobody came and threw me in a van and took me. That was my decision.  I booked the room. I paid for it.  So I really think when it comes down to that stuff, it's really all up to you."

On Fleetwood Mac

"No matter how fabulous and big time Fleetwood Mac were, there was always a really dark edge to it. Fleetwood Mac were anything but a happy soft-rock band.  There was a lot of darkness and a lot of dark stuff going on.  And so maybe people relate to that darkness because they knew it wasn't easy for us and that we went through the drugs, criticism, the big success and the dropping down and going back up."

"I remember the night I wrote Dreams. I walked in and handed a cassette of the song to Lindsey. It was a rough take, just me singing solo and playing piano. Even though he was mad with me at the time, Lindsey played it and then looked up at me and smiled.  What was going on between us was sad. We were couples who couldn't make it through.  But, as musicians, we still respected each other - and we got some brilliant songs out of it."

"During the late 70s Fleetwood Mac was a huge moneymaking machine, with limos and jets and drugs and crazy people all around all the time.  That's why I really hated that time in my life, because the spiritual sort of went away.  It's taken a while to get it all back."

"Oh I've been close to leaving Fleetwood Mac ever since I joined Fleetwood Mac.  But so has everybody else.  To be in Fleetwood Mac is to live in a soap opera.  And it has been pretty scandalous and pretty incestuous, and pretty wonderful in a lot of ways.

“For 70 nights, right across America, I've been getting out there with two ex-lovers and we've been playing songs which are so specific about each of us, you just wouldn't know. We're friends now but we can't forget what happened between us.”

“The truly incredible thing is we're realising that you can perform a two-and-a-half-hour gig without being high and still have a fantastic time.”

“Singing is the love of my life, but I was ready to give it all up because I couldn't handle people talking about how fat I was.”

“Rock and menopause do not mix.  It is not good, it sucks and every day I fight it to the death, or, at the very least, not let it take me over.”

On Love

“You know, the man of my dreams might walk round the corner tomorrow.  I'm older and wiser and I think I'd make a great girlfriend.  I live in the realm of romantic possibility.”

“Right now I'm not involved with anybody, but I hope by 75 I will be again.”

"I totally believe in magic. Because my life, I think, has been very magic, and magical things have come true for me time after time after time."

Stevie Nicks

(b. 1948)

Well done if you got through that lot.

I hope you have a brilliant weekend xxx