Stevie Nicks, Part 1: "Outside the Rain"

for October 31st (Happy Halloween!)

Oh, hi, there—

Happy Halloween! In keeping with the season, I’m releasing Part I of my two-part (maybe three part?) Stevie Nicks deep-dive. This functions as an intro of sorts. Let me know what you think! The next entry will be released (hopefully) this weekend.

The queen and I

Landslide

I took my love, I took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
'Til the landslide brought me down

I saw Stevie Nicks in concert earlier this month.

She was vibrant, strange, and shockingly spry for a hard-living septuagenarian. The crowd boasted a poignant mix of every girlhood demographic—veteran and casual, boomer and school-age, a diversity of acolytes that underscores Stevie's feather-fringed tug at our collective consciousness.  The slow march of acts miming arthritic versions of their greatest hits grows longer as streaming  infrastructure intersects with steely mean-ness of age-advancing medical technology, but Stevie's show felt less geriatric than religious, transforming Madison Square Garden into a liturgy to her living memory.

As Stevie nattered on with giggly, adolescent verve about her inspirations and, of course, the new Rumors-themed Barbie doll Mattel is releasing in her image (the pre-order sold out in a number of hours), her audience stood in reverent silence, broken only by the occasional swell of high-pitched yawps. The diminutive mistress of mysticism brayed over a sea of moms and daughters, and I laughed, and I screamed, and I sputtered through sheets of hot tears, praying that I, too, could handle the seasons of my life.

I Sing for the Things

Have you ever been in love?
Have you touched the soul of someone, baby?
Did the fear inside you make you turn and run?

The organic arc of Stevie Nicks' endurance in the zeitgeist obscures its sheer unlikeliness. 

American audiences never developed much of a taste for girl rockstars, as girl rockstars have a tendency to become women rockstars, a crack in the sexy Trojan Horse of their participation. The self-actualized music idol—leather-bound, snake-hipped, countercultural, but rarely subversive—transforms from a temptation to a threat in the form of a woman, a woman who demands attention, who calibrates the tone of that attention, who sacrifices placid grace for a shot at piracy, or worse, at power. 

“Women, to be in the music business, give up more than you'd ever know”, reflected Janis Joplin in 1972. “You give up a home and friends, you give up children and friends, you give up the old man and friends, you give up every constant in the world except music…so for a woman to sing, she really needs to, or wants to. A man can do it as a gig, 'cause he knows he can get laid tonight”. 

How dare a woman’s artistry have stakes? How dare a banshee look her captors in the eye?

In a September 2023 New York Times interview, Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine, defended the exclusion of Black and women artists from his latest book of interviews, The Masters, by insisting that neither category was “articulate enough on this intellectual level” to be worthy of the “Master” title , in contrast to “philosophers of rock” like Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger. Internet outrage proved swift, and Wenner was forced to apologize after being ousted from the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame’s board of directors. Music critics and Twitter laymen alike railed against Wenner’s bombast and bigotry, decrying his old-fashioned attitude to the canon he helped create.

But…are his opinions all that out of step in 2023? The numbers prove it— as the Spotify economy continues to homogenize top 40’s fragile ecosystem, women and non-men find greater financial success and creative freedom on the Pop charts, far from the withering gaze of grizzled Rock gatekeepers. Who could forget Phoebe Bridgers’ Twitter war with the cantankerous David Crosby, who called her “pathetic” and “wasteful” for smashing a guitar onstage at SNL in 2021? Bridgers and other sad-girl songwriters of her ilk (Lucy Dacus, MUNA, Lizzy Mcalpine, beabadoobee, Mitski) have polished their indie backlogs into major label jewels, invoking the performative lexicon of Rock in concert, but not necessarily in the studio. 

And why should they? Rock audiences, overwhelmingly white and male, see women over 40 as moms and women under 40 as holes,  taking enormous umbrage when either demographic deigns to sing, emote, and shred at the same time. Add in any non-normative optics like Blackness, fatness, or butch-ness, and brilliance must be pushed to the margins at all costs, since public displays of difference are tantamount to mutiny on American radio. 

Tina Turner and Beth Ditto had to flee the States to achieve lasting fame, Karen O plays the Mercury Lounge, not Barclays, Joan Armatrading (one of my personal favorite musicians) has never toured outside Europe, and X-Ray Spex enjoys far more retroactive listicle mentions than industry accolades. Brittany Howard, despite roaring into the charts on Alabama Shakes’ winsome wave of sound in the mid-2000s, is consistently described as an “R&B” artist by Pitchfork and friends. Even legends like Pat Benatar and Ann Wilson are widely considered  products of their time rather than straight-forward geniuses; 80s schmalz is only a crime of taste when inflamed by the infection of femininity, it seems. 

Demi Lovato and Miley Cyrus have recently been christened screaming keepers of the Rock n’ Roll flame, but the singers’ similarities don't end there. Both are millennial former child actors and party girls on similar redemptive public relations tracks, and both pivoted to Rock not as means to rebel, but as bids for wider, more conservative buyer bases. It may not be useful to draw artificial distinctions between Rock n’ Roll and Pop, but it's easy to conclude that Rock’s growing irrelevance as a genre owes its efficacy not just to TikTok's sonic stronghold, but to its own intentional lack of diversity. Even Olivia Rodrigo scalps Paramore chord progressions in order to bait parents into attending her concerts. Hip hop is undergoing a female Renaissance; country and R&B aren't far behind. So…what happened to Rock, then?

Music writer and academic Evelyn McDonnell thinks of “rock” as a verb, not a noun, and applies that logic to the content of her  2018 book, Women Who Rock, an essay compendium on the subject. “Over and over in Women Who Rock, there are stories of women persisting—against all odds”, she writes in her introduction. “Rape, bad contracts, sexual exploitation, addiction, anorexia, corrupt managers, suicide, domestic violence, prison, murder: These aren’t extreme cases; they are recurring motifs. Women have put up with a lot of shit in order to sing their songs and make their records, to walk in this world and live the lives they choose.” Perhaps it’s not a distaste for women’s voices that forces them to the perimeters of their own cultural output, but what those voices actually say—female anger encroaches upon the inner sanctum of bratty, masculine sedition, dirtying Rock with what theorist Hilde Hein terms a “permanent feminine stain”.

Stevie Nicks has been inducted into the Rock n’ Roll hall of fame not once, but twice. She is one of only three women bearing that distinction. She sells out arenas, she chats on TV, she croons alongside Harry Styles. For all intents and purposes, she’s maintained a man’s career, or her own spooky semblance of one. Stevie’s non-stop salience owes its longevity to a splintered joint of factors, sure, but it’s her metabolism for pain that feels most relevant. Her interiority is edgeless, capable of cultivating the rockiest quarries of hurt into fertile grounds for beauty. Her lyrics aren’t rageful, but infinite, self-assured, transforming open wounds into portals. Time has rendered Stevie the Ur-woman, a capacious grand-dame who uses betrayal for gasoline. She is so much more than merely famous.

In 1976, French philosopher and Derrida mentee Hélène Cixous wrote in her book, The Laugh of the Medusa, “By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display…Write your self. Your body must be heard”.

Stevie Nicks writes her self, then, and projects her body into generous dimensions of want for us, her listeners, who lap sloppily from her open palms.

I Wear Boots All Summer Long

And when I call, will you walk gently through my shadow?
It's the ones who sing at night
It's the ones who sing at night

Stevie’s signature aesthetic, dubbed "psychic storefront" by the New Yorker in 2016, emerged from a decidedly apolitical and deeply unserious medieval-lite subculture in early 70s rock, popularized by acts like Jethro Tull, Steppenwolf, and the Incredible String Band. (Since this is Substack and I don't have to edit, I'll also add that the the schmaltzy Stephen Schwartz musical based on Charlemagne's son, Pippin, debuted in 1972).

The decade opened with the dissolution of The Beatles dynasty, ushering in a musical environment focused more on escapism than experimentation or protest. In an era singed by America's imperial failures in Vietnam, humbled by an endless energy crisis, humiliated by Watergate, and scored by conservative backlash to hippie futility, an identity-addled nation turned to disco, arena rock, and the inoffensive, white-bread stylings of acts like Hall & Oates and Peter Gabriel to nurse its ennui. The fact that this proto-internet fantasy immersion outfitted its participants in Renn Faire garb finds precedent with the Victorians; the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of 1840s England believed that art had been corrupted by modernity, urging them, at John Ruskin's perverse behest, to recreate a mythological version of supremacy lost to Raphael and his contemporaries, which produced, in a predictably Foucaultian turn, the most slavishly psychosexual sentiments ever translated to canvas. (Rossetti? Come on).

In times of widespread anxiety, Brits and Yanks alike tend towards what theorist Svetlana Boyim calls "prospective nostalgia", a utopian reverie that transmutes longing into shared pangs for an imagined past. This heart-led translation of hope deferred stems from Boyim's concept of "off-modern critique", the perpetual cycle of grappling with the human condition through the rose-tinted lens of yesteryear. The kids are all right, actually, the world has always been crazy, and we can't, try as we might, make America great again, think-pieces be damned. We might recognize this today in mass media's preoccupation with the "multiverse”, a thin, sweet tonic for the claustrophobia of late capitalism. Somehow, somewhere, something must be going right.

The tree of alternative, courtly desire was planted by my parent's generation—the 70s gave us Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, Monty Python and the Holy Grail,  even the very phrase "high fantasy", which was coined by Chronicles of Prydain author Lloyd Alexander. Disaffected Nixonites searched high and low not for answers, but for Camelot, and if they couldn't have JFK, they'd settle for leather and lace.

While Nicks' personal and lyrical style, awash in black chiffon and references to crystals, may owe its initial spark to her soft-rock California milieu, it was its utility that appealed to her most of all. “I needed a uniform,” she once declared to a journalist. “I’ll be very, very sexy under 18 pounds of chiffon and lace and velvet. And nobody will know who I really am.”

Hers remains an active poetics of refusal—to age, to wither, to succumb—a fanged smirk in the face of patriarchal cannibalism.

She’s a witch among vampires, and she relishes the role.

Mistress of My Fate

It was my fault, my move, my game
If I'd known a little more, I'd a run away
It was dark out and I held the cards
I was the dealer and it wasn't hard

Stevie Nicks and then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975, two years after the original British line-up of the band had collapsed into a tangled net of romantic infidelities and lawsuits.

The rest of the story has been staged and sung for longer than I’ve been alive—after the band’s eponymous introduction to the American charts and subsequent super-stardom, flute-throated ballad broker Christie McVie split with her drunk husband, Lindsey and Stevie hit the proverbial bricks, Mick and Stevie started fucking, and the ensuing coke-fueled turmoil produced one of the most popular albums of all time, 1977’s Rumors, a churning paean to implosive desire.

Nicks contributed what would prove to be Fleetwood Mac’s only number #1 US single, “Dreams”, to the project, a tonal counterpoint to Lindsey’s defiant “Go Your Own Way”. Both songs ruminated on their break-up, but Stevie’s hypnagogic arrangement and foreboding lyrics chafed against Lindsey’s galloping accusations, setting Stevie apart as not just as a writer, but as a rock n’ roll auspex, clutching affect like an augury against her pooling robes.

Lindsey’s public resentment of Stevie is palpable and well-documented. “You know, there was a world where Lindsey and I would have gotten married and had children”, she mused in a mid-aughts Oprah masterclass, “but the music always came first”. More specifically, Stevie always came first, and Lindsey knew it.

Lindsey’s guitar-nerd pretensions, vulpine features and whiny tenor paled in comparison to Stevie’s wraith-like possession behind the mic. Her raw, oracular presence elevated concerts from shows to visitations, relegating Lindsey and his self-important finger-picking to figurative second fiddle. Stevie is the only member of Fleetwood Mac to experience lasting solo success, and while Lindsey struck out on his own with the mediocre Out of the Cradle album in 1988, his consistent return to the band, despite multiple, histrionic attempts to leave, belies both financial and emotional tethers to Stevie’s prowess—he needed the tour money to pay rent, and the crowd was there for his ex girlfriend.

Stevie, on the other hand, struck gold whenever Fleetwood Mac's infighting gave way to a hiatus. 1981 gave us the ethereal rock manifesto Bella Donna, an album replete with sphinx-like allusions and peals of silver bells. It proved a welcome antidote to 1979’s Tusk, Fleetwood Mac's goofy, disappointing follow-up to Rumors. If Tusk represented Lindsey’s hubristic over-estimation of his own taste, Bella Donna did the opposite, enshrining Stevie in the universal imagination as a twirling pop prognosticator. Wild Heart, her 1983 album, reached number 5 on Billboard, earning her the title “Reigning Queen of Rock n’ Roll” by Rolling Stone. 1985’s Rock a Little peaked at number 10. Even her 90s releases, tempered in impact by stints in rehab and a gnarly addiction transference from cocaine to Klonopin, debuted in the top 100. Her 2001 album, Trouble in Shagri-la, ranked at number 5 and went gold within six weeks of its release, no small feat for a 53 year old in an industry that sidelines the women it doesn't destroy at 30.

This irrepressible timelessness is Stevie’s greatest imprint as a public figure, one branded into the hide of rock n’ roll through the force of her own, hot magic.

Christie is dead. So is Tom Petty, her frequent collaborator and presumed paramour, along with her childhood best friend Robin, whose passing inspired some of the most sepulchral lines from “Gypsy”, a rich, speckled gem of a song. Stevie, wiry, small, and loyal to herself above all else, stands alone at 75, swathed in shawls she’s hoarded from sets and tours of heydays past. But wasn’t she always alone, at least in the truest ways? A woman who outshone the men dying to dull her sparkle, a woman who chose art over wife-dom, a woman whose creative generosity braided with her self-possession to create an unbreakable bond with her audience—she’s a New Age transcendentalist, canonized by isolation, preserved in the hermetic air of solitude.

---

Thank you so much for reading! Next entry this weekend. Share and subscribe if you’re so inclined!

-B