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In the 1980s, Stevie Nicks, like many other musicians, began embracing the music video to accompany their songs. With the rise of MTV, it became a necessary way to promote music. Nicks put a great deal of effort into her videos; one required extensive shoots, costumes, and acting on Nicks’ part. It didn’t make it far, though. When Nicks first viewed the video, she decided she didn’t want anybody to see it. She thought it was a disaster. 

A black and white picture of Stevie Nicks singing into a microphone.
Stevie Nicks | Paul Natkin/Getty Images

Stevie Nicks filmed an expensive music video for ‘Stand Back’

The initial vision for the “Stand Back” music video was a Gone With the Wind-style story. Nicks wears a green velvet gown, rides a horse to a mansion, travels through a war-torn town, and meets a wounded soldier at a saloon. According to Nicks, the process of making it was disastrous.

“I tried to act, which was horrific,” she said in the book I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum. “We used a house in Beverly Hills that we accidentally set on fire. I almost got killed riding a horse; he went straight into a grove of trees and the crew in the car driving alongside screamed, ‘Jump!'”

When she watched it back, she realized she never wanted anybody to see it.

“So we watched it back and I said, ‘This can never come out. I don’t care if it cost $1 million.’ Irving Azoff, my manager, said, ‘You’re an idiot.’ We knew ‘Stand Back’ was gonna be a big hit and we had to have a video, so we hired another director and I paid for two complete videos.”

Director Brian Grant found the second video disappointing.

“For Stevie Nicks’s ‘Stand Back,’ I dreamed up the idea of doing Gone with the Wind in three minutes,” he said. “I wanted to direct feature films, and I thought this would help prove myself. When Stevie watched the video, she hugged me and said, ‘I look fat.’ And she redid the video with somebody else — a simple, boring, dance-routine video. Such is life.”

Would Stevie Nicks’ 80s song have worked better with the more dramatic music video?

Grant said Nicks rejected the video because of her appearance in it. She explained that she saw it as an overall mess.

“It was insane — it didn’t go with the song at all,” she said. “It was so bad, it was almost good.”

Nicks is right. The song is all 80s synth; she was directly inspired by Prince’s “Little Red Corvette”. She even had his help in the studio. While a juxtaposition between modern music and a period music video may have been fun, the second version of the video works better.

Stevie Nicks had a bigger problem with a different music video

For all the chaos and money that went into the “Stand Back” music video, it didn’t cause Nicks nearly as many problems as “I Can’t Wait” in 1985. While the video became popular, Nicks can hardly bear to watch it. She feels that the influence of drugs is too apparent in it.

“‘I Can’t Wait’ is one of my favorite songs, and it became a famous video,” Nicks said. “But now I look at that video, I look at my eyes, and I say to myself, ‘Could you have laid off the pot, the coke, and the tequila for three days, so you could have looked a little better? Because your eyes look like they’re swimming.’ It just makes me want to go back into that video and stab myself.”

Still, she said she was using drugs while making most of her music videos from that era.

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