Why Stevie Nicks Said She Doesn’t ‘Have a Lot of Power’ in Fleetwood Mac
Stevie Nicks once said she doesn’t “have a lot of power” in Fleetwood Mac, even though she helped make the band famous. Here’s what Nicks has said about the power dynamics of the classic rock supergroup.
Stevie Nicks once said she doesn’t have much ‘power’ in Fleetwood Mac
In a 1990 interview with Us Magazine, Stevie Nicks was asked about feeling like the baby sister of Fleetwood Mac.
“Oh yeah. I don’t have a lot of power in this band. I never have,” Nicks said. “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.”
She gave an example of when power dynamics came into play. “I mean, I think this tour is too heavy. I think there’s too many gigs. But 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.”
Nicks also revealed that a lot of the things her bandmates did upset her. “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,” she said. “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.”
Stevie Nicks said Fleetwood Mac would ‘vote each other out’ if they could
When it comes to power plays within the group, Stevie Nicks has said she and her bandmates would vote each other out of Fleetwood Mac if they could. She even compared the band to the reality competition show Big Brother.
“It’s like the TV show Big Brother. If we could vote each other out, we’d all be fine!” she told Rolling Stone in 2002. “My vote would come up ‘Lindsey.’ Lindsey’s would say ‘Stevie.’”
Nicks said that although their egos created conflict, Fleetwood Mac always came back together in the end. “You know, we have a lot of the same problems that we’ve always had, which is our egos,” she said. “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.”
The singer ultimately saw Lindsey Buckingham get fired from the band
Stevie Nicks may not think she holds much power in Fleetwood Mac, but her ex-boyfriend and former bandmate Lindsey Buckingham said otherwise.
Nicks and Buckingham were dating when they joined Fleetwood Mac, and their bitter breakup inspired some of the band’s greatest hits. They continued working together for decades after ending their romantic relationship.
Fleetwood Mac fired the guitarist in 2018, and Buckingham has said in multiple interviews that he believes Nicks was largely responsible for his dismissal from the group. “It would be like a scenario where Mick Jagger says, ‘Either Keith [Richards] goes or I go,’” he told the LA Times. “But I guess the singer has to stay. The figurehead has to stay.”
But Nicks has vehemently denied responsibility for Buckingham’s firing. In a September 2021 statement to Rolling Stone, she wrote, “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.”
