Stevie Nicks Drops Bombshell, Admits To Power Struggles Within Fleetwood Mac

Stevie Nicks Drops Bombshell, Admits To Power Struggles Within Fleetwood Mac

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Her revelation has sparked debate about the power dynamics within the iconic rock band.

Stevie Nicks, a well-known rock legend and a key contributor to Fleetwood Mac’s success, has made a startling admission about her perceived lack of influence inside the influential band. Fans and critics alike have been intrigued by the power dynamics within the classic rock band, and Nicks’ open remarks illuminate the subtle relationships that have formed their path.

stevie nicks

During a revealing interview with US Magazine in 1990, Nicks was confronted with the notion of being the “baby sister” of Fleetwood Mac. In response, she admitted, “Oh yeah. I don’t have a lot of power in this band. I never have.”

“I can jump and scream and threaten to quit and run out of the room and disappear and not accept any calls for four days, and it doesn’t matter. And I really don’t care. I pretty much let Fleetwood Mac be Fleetwood Mac, and I don’t say too much about what they do. Or what we do.”

By relating a specific event in which her thoughts diverged from those of her bandmates, Nicks demonstrated this power dynamic. She raised her concerns about the rigorous tour schedule, saying that it was very demanding.

However, rather than challenging the decisions directly, she revealed, “I get a fax that says, ‘This is where you’re playing,’ and I don’t send a fax back to Mick Fleetwood saying, ‘This is totally ridiculous, what are you doing, trying to kill us?’ I don’t do that.”

The rock icon also said that she was displeased by a variety of her colleagues’ activities, saying, “I just try to do my job and be as good as I can onstage, and be as loving as I can to everybody, and not get angry at the things they do that make me angry. Which are a lot of things.”

stevie nicks singing

“And I do a lot of things that make them angry – for instance, my solo career – and they are pretty cool about it. And we exist. We exist in fairly good… fairly good harmony. And the day that harmony is gone, that’s when it will end.”

Further exploring the power relationships at play inside the band, Nicks startlingly linked Big Brother to Fleetwood Mac. She joked in an interview with Rolling Stone from 2002, “It’s like the TV show Big Brother. If we could vote each other out, we’d all be fine! My vote would come up ‘Lindsey.’ Lindsey’s would say ‘Stevie.’”

On the other hand, Nicks underlined that the band always found a way to resolve its disagreements despite recognizing challenges brought on by their different egos. She saw that they tended to have lengthy chats and compared the band members to a bunch of females having lively debates.

“You know, we have a lot of the same problems that we’ve always had, which is our egos. And we’ve had a lot of fights. But we spend hours talking – we’re like a bunch of girls sometimes. We’ll be putting a guitar part on, and all of a sudden, we’ll be talking about something that happened on the Tusk tour, and two hours later, we’re still talking about it.” 

Nicks views her influence inside Fleetwood Mac differently than Lindsey Buckingham, her ex-boyfriend and former bandmate, who disagrees. When Nicks and Buckingham joined the group, they were already dating, and their painful split influenced some of Fleetwood Mac’s most well-known songs. They carried on working together despite their pasts for a long time.

stevie nicks fleetwood mac

Meanwhile, Buckingham was fired from Fleetwood Mac in 2018, shocking the music industry and sparking questions about Nicks’ involvement. In several interviews, Buckingham has stated his conviction that Nicks had a substantial role in the decision to exclude him from the group. 

Comparing the situation to Mick Jagger hypothetically demanding either Keith Richards’ departure or his own, Buckingham told the LA Times, “But I guess the singer has to stay. The figurehead has to stay.”

Nicks immediately refuted these accusations in return, adamantly denying having anything to do with Buckingham’s termination. She stated to Rolling Stone in September 2021, “To be exceedingly clear, I did not have him fired.”

“I did not ask for him to be fired; I did not demand he be fired. Frankly, I fired myself. I proactively removed myself from the band and a situation I considered to be toxic to my well-being. I was done. If the band went on without me, so be it,” she added.

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