Stevie Nicks and Joe Walsh’s ‘Perfect’ Relationship Ended Bitterly: ‘You Basically Cease to Exist’
Stevie Nicks and Joe Walsh fell in love at first sight. From the moment they met, Nicks knew that she wanted to be with him. She would have even given up her music career for him. Though she considers him one of the great loves of her life, Nicks’ relationship with Walsh ended on a sour note. She explained that after an irritating studio session, she expressed doubt about the future of their relationship.
Stevie Nicks called Joe Walsh the ‘great, great’ love of her life
Nicks has had a number of well-known romances — her longtime relationship with Lindsey Buckingham likely being the most famous — but she said Walsh stands out.
“My great, great love was Joe Walsh,” she told the Telegraph.
She explained that she fell in love with him immediately upon seeing him.
“Why do you love somebody? Why do you love them so much that when they walk in the room your heart jumps out of your chest? I don’t know,” she said. “But I fell in love with Joe at first sight from across the room, in the bar at the Mansions Hotel in Dallas. I looked at him and I walked across the room and I sat on the bar stool next to him, and two seconds later I crawled into his lap, and that was it.”
Their relationship ended after a studio session
Nicks believed that she and Walsh were “complete, perfect” as a couple, but cracks were beginning to show. The couple was heavily using drugs, and Walsh began to fear that one of them would die. One night, after he’d been away for a while, he visited her in the studio and “completely screwed up the session.”
“It would have been fine any other night but I was angry that Joe had done that,” she said, per the book Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams, and Rumours by Zoe Howe. “He had everybody dying laughing because he tells 100 jokes and people were rolling on the floor, everybody was drinking and I’m going, ‘This is not fair, he is not being sensitive at all to this situation. You know I would give up anything for you, I might even give up my damned career for you’ — maybe, if I thought he was serious enough ….”
As Nicks prepared to leave, she asked Walsh if he was going to come home with her. He explained that he couldn’t go with her because he was going to Australia that night, something she hadn’t known before this moment.
“I don’t like where this relationship is going, because it’s not going anywhere and I don’t want to do it anymore,” she told him. “He said, ‘If you walk out that door, you basically cease to exist.’ I just didn’t stop walking.”
Stevie Nicks said it took her a long time to recover from her breakup with Joe Walsh
Walsh believed the breakup was necessary because the couple’s drug use was a danger to them both. While Nicks doesn’t dispute this, she said the split was painful to recover from.
“It took me a long, long time to get over it — if I ever got over it,” she said. “Because there was no other man in the world for me. And it’s the same today, even though Joe is married and has two sons. He met somebody in rehab and got married. And I think he’s happy.’
How to get help: In the U.S., contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration helpline at 1-800-662-4357.
