| The enchanting soul we have come to know and love as “Stevie” was born Stephanie Lynn Nicks on May 26, 1948. She was born at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix Arizona, the beautiful daughter of Barbara and Jess Nicks, followed a few years later by her brother Chris. Success and stardom were woven into Stevie’s destiny from a very early part of her life. Since childhood, she has held a fascination of fairy tales and mystical things, instilled in her by her mother.
She was born a performer. "There she was by the window, surrounded by four little girls, and she was singing and dancing. Even the teacher was watching her, not saying a word." said Stevie’s mother, Barbara. |  |
 | She took an early interest in dance, and ballet… and loved to be in the spotlight. Her grandfather, A.J nicks, was a struggling country singer. He nurtured Stevie’s love of performing, and taught her to sing duets with him. She performed locally with her grandfather at the tavern owned by her parents and other similar settings. |
Growing up, Stevie’s family moved several times; the list of places left behind, sounding like a melodic country song. From Phoenix, they moved to New Mexico, to Texas, to Utah, and finally to California. Stevie spent her high school years in Los Angeles and San Fransisco. “I did make friends, I just didn't have time to make too many. So I was very adaptable, I learned to make friends quickly and to be accepted quickly because I didn't have enough time to waste… to be snooty for 6 months until I decided to come down to earth and be a part of everything didn't work at all. So, I just had to be real amiable, and friendly and open to people, Or, I would be alone for a year and then we would move.”
 | For Stevie’s 16th birthday, her parents bought her a small guitar. That very night, Stevie sat down and composed her first song called I’ve Loved and I’ve Lost. “ A month before I turned 16, my mom and dad said I could take guitar lessons. They really didn't know if I was going to like it or not, so they rented me a little guitar, and hired a Spanish classical guitar player, and I took six weeks of guitar lessons, twice a week. And this teacher decided he was going to go to Spain to study, and I loved his guitar so much that they bought it from him for me, for probably a thousand dollars. It was a Goya, a |
| classical guitar; it was very tiny. I still have it. I sat down and wrote a song. It was pretty goofy, but it had a chorus and two verses and it had an end. And from that second onwards, I knew I wanted to be a songwriter.” “I wrote my first song on my sixteenth birthday. I finished that song hysterically crying, and I was hooked. From that day forward when I was in my room playing my guitar, nobody would come in without knocking...nobody disturbed me. My parents were very supportive and wouldn't let anyone disturb me until I came out. They'd even let me miss dinner if necessary, it was that important. They could hear that I was working, at sixteen years old, and they would leave me alone.” |
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At Arcadia High School, in 1965, Stevie joined her first band. It was called “Changing Times”. She spent her upperclassmen years at Menlo- Atherton High School. Then, she met 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.” The two sang a duet together, and became friends. “I went to kind of church meeting that nobody really went to for church; everybody went, to get out of the |
| house on Wednesday night. And it was fun, even I went and I didn't go anywhere. Lindsey walked into the room and sat down and started playing a song. I just happened to know every word and harmony perfect, California Dreaming, and I thought he was absolutely stunning. So I kind of casually maneuvered my way over.... He was somewhat, I guess ever-so-slightly, impressed. Not to let me know it, but he did sing another song with me, which let me know he did like it.” |
| After high school, in 1967 Lindsey remembered ‘the girl with the voice’ and asked her to join his band, called The Fritz Rabyne Memorial Band or Fritz. They did not get a chance to write any of the songs for Fritz, but Stevie says it did give them 3years of practice for Fleetwood Mac. |  |
| After a while, Fritz disbanded, but Stevie and Lindsey stayed together. Using an inheritance of Lindsey’s, they bought some recording equipment, and recorded about 7 demos over the span of a year. However, they were dissappointed when every record company turned them down |
Soon their persistence paid off though. They signed with Polydor records, and released Buckingham/Nicks in 1973. Immediately after the release, Stevie and Lindsey were dropped from the label. “It was like it never existed, and it was worse then before, because first of all, somebody had to go back to work, and second of all you knew who it was going to be…. We had tripped the light fandango, we'd recorded in the studio, we'd had the big sounds, we were happening and all of a sudden we were nobody ... And something in our hearts said 'we'll beat this, we'll sing our songs.' That's really the point were we both became aware that if we didn't fight back, they'd break up our love, they'd break up our house, they'd break up our music. So we walked away from them first."
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Stevie went back to work as a waitress, while Lindsey worked on music at home. On New Years Eve, Stevie got a call from producer Keith Olsen… a phone call that would change their lives forever. "I said, 'Right Keith, they want Lindsey to join the band, right?' And he said, 'Well, maybe, but they know they're not going to get him without you anyway, so you're invited at least.' And i said, 'This is kind of a big band, |  |
| isn't it?' And he said, 'Well, relatively yes, this is a big band, they've been famous for a long time, they're mysteriously occult/English. They're all the things that you love and they want to meet you.' Lindsey talked to him for a little while, and the next day, we pinched every bit of money we could get our hands on. Mind you, we were on cloud nine, because nothing had gone right for us in so long. We bought all the Fleetwood Mac albums and we listened to them, front to back, front to back, again and again, to see if there was any reason for us to make Buckingham/Nicks a part of Fleetwood Mac. And there was a mystical side to it, and there was that guitar, that Peter Green thing that Lindsey is very adept at and that he and I both love. There were a lot of threads that worked for both of us, even though it probably wasn't the perfect thing. But it could have been a band that we absolutely hated. As it was, we were very excited. We went into rehearsal a week later, went into recording four weeks later, finished the album in three months and we were on the road. So it happened overnight." |
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Over the next several years, Stevie toured and and wrote with Fleetwood Mac. Hits such as “Rhiannon” “Silver Springs”, “Dreams” and “I Don’t Want to Know” were born. During this time she became involved with cocaine. By the time Rumours was released, Stevie had amassed a library of |  |
| songs that would never be released with Fleetwood Mac. She focused her energy on creating a solo career as an outlet for her music. “It had nothing to do with me wanting to leave the band and everything to do with me just wanting to have another outlet for my songs, so that I didn't feel like I was writing for nothing. You know, three songs every two or three years is not very much for a prolific songwriter”. Soon Bella Donna was complete. She teamed up with musical legends such as Don Henley for Leather and Lace and Tom Petty for Stop Draggin My Heart Around. Bella Donna would later become triple platinum, selling over 3 million copies worldwide. Stevie’s solo career exploded like an inferno. |
The day Bella Donna hit number one…Stevie received devastating news. Her best friend since her teen years was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. “My very best friend, Robin, called me and told me that she had terminal leukemia and that they thought maybe she might last for three months. So, it, without a doubt was, you know, the absolute high and low of success. I didn't really ever get to enjoy Bella Donna at all, because my friend was dying so it just, you know, something went out that day, something left that day.” In the time Robin was sick Stevie began painting. “I wanted her to have something beautiful to look at when I wasn’t there”, Stevie commented.
Soon, Robin announced she was pregnant. She was only given 3 months to live, but she struggled to survive long enough to have her child. Robin Anderson died a few days later, at the age of 32.
Grieving, Stevie married Robin’s husband Kim Anderson after her death. 3 months after the marriage, Stevie and Kim realized that their marriage was not based on love, but mourning, and ended it. She turned her pain into song as she always did, and in the years that followed, she compiled The Wild Heart, released in 1983, Rock-A-Little in 1985, and The Other Side of the Mirror in 1989.
Laced within the years these albums were released, her relationship with Lindsey deteriorated, fueling her music. “We couldn't be together and also work together. I couldn't have him, you know, telling me that, you know, this song that I wrote wasn't that good and, and knowing he was saying that because he was angry about me because of our relationship. It just didn't leave us anywhere to go, anywhere to grow or get better.”
“Lindsey didn't want this breakup. He didn't want to not be with me. He and, he and I were really, you know, we'd been together for a long time, many, many, many years. We definitely felt married”
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Soon the drug addictions became too much, and cocaine was consuming her life. “In the first couple of years it was very, very much something to get energy from, you know. Oh I'll never get through this if I don't do some coke, you know. I've got 15 interviews, I've got a show, I've got 20 fittings, I've got this, that. I can't do it all, I'm too tired. So yeah it was like, you know, it was like, like taking one of |
| your mom's diet pills." Onstage, she would often collapse, and offstage she suffered from nosebleeds. The realization hit her hard when a doctor told her that she could have a brain hemorrhage and die. “He looked at my nose and he said, ‘You could have a brain hemorrhage, and it could be the next time that you do cocaine. So you should live knowing that. And it won't be pretty. And it won't be nice. And it will be painful.’ That was all it took. Scared me to death, scared me, absolutely scared me to death.”
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In 1986, she checked herself into the betty ford clinic. “Yes, 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. But I got through it, so I was lucky. 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.” Inspirationally, stevie kicked cocaine. She later had another battle with drugs. This time, it was a prescription tranquilizer called Klonopin. The drug was prescribed for stevie to help releive stress, and she developed an addiction. “It just made you a nonentity. It just, you know, valumed you out so much that you didn't really care about anything. But it was hard to know because I was taking it everyday, like you would take a, you know, like you would take vitamin C.” Once again, she committed herself to becoming drug free. As she always does, Stevie overcame this too. Although now completely drug-free, Stevie faced yet another problem. |
Several years of drug abuse had left her unhealthy, and caused her to gain some weight. The press exploited this, focusing more on Stevie’s weight than her talent. “I was never gonna walk on stage at that weight again, period.” “It makes you feel bad. It makes you feel like, Well, I'm not a good songwriter anymore because I'm, you know, 25 pounds too heavy. I'm not a good songwriter, I'm not talented anymore? ”.
Coming offstage in tears, Stevie vowed to never perform in public again. “I just wouldn't go on stage and perform anymore if I didn't lose the weight, if I didn't get back to a fairly normal weight because it was just too hard. It was just too difficult to, to have everybody expect me to be a different way, you know, and, and not be able to get back to that so I just was very depressed about it.” She took some time off to get to know herself again…a period where she lived in sanctuary, away from the public eye.
| Soon, she re-emerged completely healthy and drug-free. With a lot of new material, she headed to the recording studio to release street angel in 1994, and reunited with Fleetwood Mac in 1997 for The Dance. |  |
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Her relationship with Lindsey was now a treasured friendship. “Lindsey and I, you know, we have something very special. We decided to do this a long, long time ago. And we fought for it, you know, we had a pot of gold that we |  |
| were searching for together and we never gave up until we got it. So now that's a pretty great thing. Now the two of us can link arms and walk out on stage and say to everyone without saying it, ‘We worked very hard for this.’” |
| In 1998, she released her most personal project to date…the Enchanted box set. Compiled of 46 songs, Enchanted was her most intimate endeavor. |  |
Now, Stevie is working on a new album, most appropriately titled Trouble In Shangri La “The title song is written -- "Trouble in Shangri-La." It's like Bella Donna; it's a definite concept album. It's about achieving Shangri-La and not being able to handle it.”. Now, Stevie says she has no regrets, and now looks at the world with wiser eyes…focusing only on what Destiny holds for her in the future.“ I am a very different girl from the girl that was so wrapped up in rock and roll and the drugs and everything else. I'll never take it all for granted again, ever. Because I also now really realize how quickly that it can go, and that you can be the darling one year, and be nobody the next year. So you have to learn to accept and deal with that.”
