Stevie Nicks Shared How a Moment With Her Boyfriend Made Her Distrust Computers Forever
Stevie Nicks has had several great loves and has shared moments with them that will stay with her forever. These memories are not all positive, though. During her relationship with Joe Walsh, a brief disagreement over synthesizers turned into a lifelong distrust of computers.
Stevie Nicks began dating The Eagles’ Joe Walsh
In the early 1980s, Nicks began touring for her second solo album, Wild Heart. Walsh was on tour with her as the opening act. After a show in Dallas, Nicks went to the hotel bar to greet Walsh. Though she only intended to meet with him for a moment, she felt a lightning bolt of connection with him.
“I walked across the room toward him,” she said, per the book Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks by Stephen Davis. “He held out his hands to me, and I walked straight into them. Two seconds later I crawled into his lap, and that was it. I remember thinking, I can never be far from this person again.”
They began a passionate but secretive relationship. Looking back on it, Nicks refers to him as her “great, great love.”
“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, but I fell in love with Joe at first sight from across the room,” she said. “It went from 1983 to 1986. It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
She began to distrust computers after a moment with Walsh
Though they were deeply in love, Nicks noticed that Walsh sometimes paid more attention to his music gadgets than to her. He had samplers, drum machines, and synthesizers to work on electronic songs. The first time Nicks visited his house, Walsh took her to his music room to demonstrate what he’d been working on.
After playing a tune on his keyboard, Walsh turned a knob and played Nicks back the same melody with full orchestral accompaniment. She was stunned.
“I looked at him and said, ‘So — we’ve all just been replaced by … whatever this is?’”
The comment irritated Walsh, who continued to work on music for the rest of the day and pointedly ignored Nicks. The moment, though brief, sparked a lifelong distrust of computers in Nicks.
Stevie Nicks doesn’t like technology in general
To this day, Nicks is not a fan of modern technology like computers and cell phones.
“I believe computers have taken over the world,” Nicks told the Associated Press. “I believe that they’ve really, in many ways, ruined our children. I believe that kids used to love to go out and play. I believe that social graces are gone because manners are gone because all people do is sit around and text. I think it’s obnoxious.”
Nicks has said that she doesn’t want a smartphone, but she has a cellphone in case of emergencies.
“I’m super old-school,” she told Us Weekly. “I have a red Nokia flip phone for emergencies, I call it the ‘fire phone’ because I had to be evacuated from the Latigo Canyon Fire in Malibu a few years back. I was alone and terrified, so I thought, okay, I need to get an emergency little cell. Otherwise, I’ll only talk on the phone if I’m near a landline and really have the time.”
If she does ever get a smartphone, she explained that it would be to take better photos, not to text.
