Stevie Nicks Said She Would Have Left Fleetwood Mac to Join This Band
Stevie Nicks rose to fame as part of the band Fleetwood Mac, and she later found success as a solo artist. But there is another rock and roll band Nicks said she would have left Fleetwood Mac for.
Stevie Nicks was in other bands before joining Fleetwood Mac
Fleetwood Mac wasn’t Stevie Nicks’ first band. She met Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham in high school, and he asked her to join his band, Fritz. They became a couple and formed their own duo called Buckingham Nicks.
“I met Lindsey in high school in San Francisco,” Nicks told Spin Magazine in October 1997. “We had gone to some party and he was sitting in the middle of this gorgeous living room playing a song. I walked over and stood next to him, and the song was ‘California Dreaming,’ and I just started singing with him.”
She continued, “And then I didn’t really see him again until two years later, when he called me and asked me if I wanted to be in his rock’n’roll band, which I didn’t even know existed. And within two or three months we were opening for Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, all the San Francisco bands. Two years later, we packed up and moved to Los Angeles with about 12 demos.”
Drummer Mick Fleetwood heard Buckingham’s guitar playing on the Buckingham Nicks song “Frozen Love,” and was so impressed that he invited the guitarist to join Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham agreed on one condition: his girlfriend Nicks had to join the band, too.
Stevie Nicks said she would have left Fleetwood Mac to join this rock band
Although Stevie Nicks found fame and fortune as part of Fleetwood Mac, she once said she would have abandoned the group to join another band.
Nicks formed a close friendship with Tom Petty that lasted until the “Free Fallin’” singer died. She was a huge fan before they met, and she was even willing to leave Fleetwood Mac for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
“After I joined Fleetwood Mac, I started hearing Tom Petty on the radio,” Nicks said in the book Petty: The Biography by Warren Zanes. “And I just fell in love with his music and his band. I would laughingly say to anyone that if I ever got to know Tom Petty and could worm my way into his good graces, if he were ever to ask me to leave Fleetwood Mac and join Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, I’d probably do it. And that was before I even met him.”
There was another reason the singer said she would have left the band
Stevie Nicks has mentioned another reason she would have left Fleetwood Mac, despite the band’s success. In 1979, Nicks became pregnant while dating the Eagles singer Don Henley. She chose to terminate the pregnancy.
“If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac,” Nicks told The Guardian in October 2020. “There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly. And there were a lot of drugs, I was doing a lot of drugs … I would have had to walk away.”
She continued, “And I knew that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal so many people’s hearts and make people so happy. And I thought: you know what? That’s really important. There’s not another band in the world that has two lead women singers, two lead women writers. That was my world’s mission.”
