by For Stevie Nicks, music has been about more than singing the songs that people want to hear.
She has always had an intimate relationship with her craft, and even if she had to channel a lot of her heartache into her Fleetwood Mac material, it always paid off when she had the right idea to work on for hits like ‘Edge of Seventeen’ or ‘Stand Back’. But for Nicks, songs were also more than emotional exorcisms. They were life lessons, and she had a lot of teachers to learn from before she even sang a note.
It’s not like Nicks was the first one to hit upon the idea that rock and roll could mean something more. The Beatles had already blown away everyone’s expectations for what a rock and roll band could be in the public eye, and the aftermath of records like Sgt Peppers proved that people could make sophisticated music while also being able to cater to the mainstream.
Although Nicks never knew more than a handful of chords when she started, she realised that a lot could be done if she had that same type of artistic fire. There were rarely any women in rock and roll with that kind of power, but everything started to change when listening to people like Joni Mitchell. Artists like her were quoting their own hearts and letting the rest of the world make sense of it, and Nicks was absolutely riveted throughout every line of records like Ladies of the Canyon.
That was clearly an avenue for Nicks to explore, but rock and roll has always been about more than traditional songwriting. Mitchell was never the abrasive stripe of an artist, but by the late 1960s, things had started to change in the music industry. The female rockers had officially come to the table, and while Grace Slick helped break down the doors for what women could do with a mic in their hand, Nicks remembered that everything felt different once she saw Janis Joplin singing.
Joplin already had a habit of grabbing the audience by the throat and not letting go throughout her performance, and when she hit that sweet spot onstage, Nicks was left with her jaw on the floor, saying, “I loved Janis Joplin–the way she sang, the way she performed. I saw her one time and was completely riveted. I never forgot it. I have so many influences, but I can’t really tell where they come from.”
And while a lot of Nicks’s more personal songs read like diary entries in the same way that Mitchell’s work does, Joplin is clearly one of her biggest inspirations judging by her stagecraft. There was always a hint of glamour to what she does, but there’s also an unbridled aggression hearing her sing ‘Rhiannon’ back in the day that sounds like a more mystical version of what Joplin could do.
Nicks was never going to give Joplin a run for her money or anything, but that’s why those performances are stamped into rock and roll history. Joplin was going out there on that stage to etch her name in the massive ‘story of rock’, but by leaving every emotion she could on that stage, everyone was left with a hell of story to to tell their descendants about one of the most unbridled rock and roll singers that ever was.
