11 Photos of Stevie Nicks That Prove She Was Always a Rock and Roll Legend

Two-time Grammy winner Stevie Nicks has certainly left her mark on the music industry, first as lead singer and tambourine player for the classic rock band Fleetwood Mac, and then for sustaining a very successful solo career. But the road to stardom wasn't always easy for her, the gathered information on Stevie Nicks young serving as proof of that.

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Stevie Nicks young

The singer was born Stephanie Lynn Nicks on May 26, 1948, in Phoenix, Arizona. However, her father, Jess Nicks, was the vice president of Greyhound buses, so they moved around a lot.

One of the places they ended up was Arcadia, California, where Nicks joined her first band, the Changing Times, its focus on folk-rock music.  After that, the Nicks family moved to Atherton, California where a young Stevie met Lindsey Buckingham, her future boyfriend and fellow Fleetwood Mac member.

The two started dating when they were high school seniors and would also go on to attend San José State University together. Nicks studied speech communication in the hopes of becoming an English teacher, but dropped out to pursue her musical career.

Then, in 1967, Buckingham asked Nicks to join his rock band, Fritz. They would go on to open for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin from 1968 until 1970. The band broke up in 1972, but Nicks and Buckingham stuck together.

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Stevie's first album

After Fritz broke up, Nicks and Buckingham continued to stay in California and work on securing a record deal.

Then, in 1973, the two signed a contract with Polydor Records, and the Buckingham Nicks album was born. It featured 10 songs in total, one of which — "Frozen Love" — was 7-minutes-15-seconds long.

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Buckingham Nicks didn't do as well as they'd hoped, though, and Polydor soon dropped them from the label. With no money left, Nicks began to work three different jobs, including waitressing. That was also around the time she began using cocaine.

"All of us were drug addicts, but there was a point where I was the worst," she later recalled. "I was a girl, I was fragile, and I was doing a lot of coke. And I had that hole in my nose. So it was dangerous."

Then, in late 1974, Keith Olsen played "Frozen Love" for drummer Mick Fleetwood, who was in California looking for a recording studio for his band Fleetwood Mac.

Fleetwood loved it and called Buckingham, asking him to be in the band. Buckingham said yes, but only if Nicks could come as well. Fleetwood agreed, and they began to record their album soon after.

The band consisted of Buckingham on lead guitar, Fleetwood on drums, Christine McVie on the keyboard, John McVie playing bass and Nicks playing the tambourine. Additionally, they all served as vocalists for the band.

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The Fleetwood Mac era

In 1975, the widely praised album Fleetwood Mac was released, containing nine songs, among them "Landslide" and "Rhiannon," both written and sung by Nicks.

And while her professional career was thriving, Nicks' personal life was not. She and Buckingham were on the outs.

"I broke up with Lindsey in 1976. We'd only been in Fleetwood Mac for a year and a half, and we were breaking up when we joined Fleetwood Mac," she recalled in 2022. "So we just put our relationship kind of back together, because I was smart enough to know that if we had broken up the second month of being in Fleetwood Mac, it would have blown the whole thing."

Instead of letting those feelings deter her, Nicks put them into her songwriting.  "You just have to throw yourself into your song," she said.

And it worked. In 1977, Fleetwood Mac's best-known album, Rumours, was released. It had 11 songs, including "The Chain," "Dreams," "Go Your Own Way," and "Gold Dust Women." It also had Nicks on the cover.

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Rumours won Album of The Year at the 1978 Grammys and was home to the band's only Billboard Hot 100 song, "Dreams," which was written and sung by Nicks.

"I can just go right back to what pushed me toward writing those words. And I always laugh because Lindsey's 'Go Your Own Way' and my 'Dreams' are like counter songs to each other," she said in 2022.

"I'm, like, 'When the rain washes you clean, you'll know,' and he's, like, 'Packing up, shacking up's all you want to do.' Both songs kind of mean the same thing — it's really about our breakup," Nicks continued. "He's looking at it from a very unpleasant, angry way, and I'm saying, in my more airy-fairy way, we're gonna be all right. We'll get through this."

Nicks was also on the 1979 Fleetwood Mac album Tusk. It had 20 songs, making it the band's longest studio album. Then, in 1982, she appeared on their fourth album, Mirage — which featured "Gypsy" — as well as the 1987 album Tango in the Night, the 1990 album Behind the Mask and the 1997 album The Dance. 

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The 'Silver Springs' controversy

Perhaps one of the biggest scandals to come out of the band's time together was over the song "Silver Springs."

It was written by Nicks and originally supposed to appear on Rumours, but Fleetwood and Buckingham cut it. The song did appear on the B-side of the album's first single, "Go Your Own Way," though, but Nicks was not too happy about the changes.

"I started to scream bloody murder and probably said every horribly mean thing that you could possibly say to another human being and walked back in the studio completely flipped out," Nicks recalled in 2022.

"Go Your Own Way" later became one of the band's best-known songs, serving as irrefutable proof of the chemistry that still existed between Buckingham and Nicks despite the fact they'd broken up.

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Stevie Nicks solo career

In 1981, Nicks released her first-ever solo album, entitled Bella Donna, which had the song "Edge of Seventeen" on it.

Her second studio album, 1983's The Wild Heart, was followed by 1985's Rock a Little, 1989's The Other Side of the Mirror and 1994's Street Angel.  Heading into the 2000s, she released Trouble in Shangri-La (2001), The Soundstage Session (2009), In Your Dreams (2011) and 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault (2014).

Nicks was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 for her work in Fleetwood Mac and then again in 2018 for her solo career.

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What is Stevie doing now?

Today, Nicks is actively touring alongside Billy Joel today and recently wrote Taylor Swift a poem that appeared as the foreword to Swift's newest album, The Tortured Poets Department. Nicks is also mentioned in the song "Clara Bow."

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