Stevie Nicks Lost Her Best Friend After a Betrayal by Mick Fleetwood
Though Fleetwood Mac is one of the most successful bands of all time, the band was a mess of arguments, affairs, and barbed lyrics behind the scenes. One of many sources of drama was Stevie Nicks’ affair with bandmate Mick Fleetwood. The relationship created tension both during and after its run. Nicks was distraught after the affair ended because it lost her a close friend.
Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood had a lengthy affair
Though the timeline is foggy for Nicks and Fleetwood, they agree that they entered into a relationship while they were with other people. Fleetwood was then married to Jenny Boyd, and Nicks was dating Don Henley. Because of this, Nicks believed that the relationship was doomed from the start.
“Mick and I would never have had an affair had we not had a party and all been completely drunk and messed up and coked out, and, you know, ended up being the last two people at the party,” she said for Oprah’s Master Class. “So guess what? It’s not hard to figure out what happened — and what happened wasn’t a good thing. It was doomed. It was a doomed thing, caused a lot of pain for everybody, led to nothing.”
She felt betrayed by her bandmate
When Fleetwood’s second marriage to Boyd broke down in 1978, he leaped into a new relationship with Nicks’ close friend Sara Recor.
“I had started to see Mick Fleetwood romantically,” Nicks later told The Independent. “I had a very dear friend whose name was Sara [Recor] who just went after Mick. And they fell in love, and the next thing, Sara’s husband is calling me to say, ‘Sara moved in with Mick this morning. And I just thought you might wanna know.’”
According to Nicks, this bit of drama happened three months into the “13 months of hell” that was recording the album Tusk.
“So I lost Mick, which honestly wasn’t that big of a deal because that was a rocky relationship,” she said. “But losing my friend Sara? That was a huge blow. Sara was banished from the studio by the rest of the band … No one was speaking, and I wouldn’t even look directly at Mick. That went on for months.”
Still, Nicks said something good came out of the situation.
“It was great fodder for writing!” she explained. “The songs poured out of us.”
Stevie Nicks says the song ‘Sara’ is not about the end of her affair
Though Nicks wrote a song called “Sara,” she says it is not about Recor, even though “everybody thinks it is.” Instead, she called it “Sara” because she liked the name. The song is about the time period in general.
“It was about Mick’s and my relationship, and it was about one I went into after Mick,” she told EW. “Some songs are about a lot of things, some songs only have one or two lines that are that main thing, and then the rest of it, you’re just making a movie, writing a story around this one paragraph, that little kernel of life.”
