Stevie Nicks Wrote About a ‘Famous Friend’ and a ‘Great Temptation’ on Tour With Tom Petty and Bob Dylan
In the 1980s, Stevie Nicks took a step back from promoting her music so that she could join Tom Petty and Bob Dylan on a tour of Australia. She wasn’t performing with them — she’d later get in trouble with the Australian government for joining them on stage one night. Instead, Nicks was there to support Petty. Still, she worked on her own music on the tour. She wrote one song about a “great temptation” and speaking with her “famous friend” while on the tour with Petty and Dylan.
Stevie Nicks joined Tom Petty and Bob Dylan on tour as moral support
After successfully backing Dylan at Farm Aid, Petty and the Heartbreakers joined him on a tour of Australia. It was difficult to convince Petty to go, though.
“Tom was sitting there on the chair at his house and he says, ‘I’m not going,'” Nicks said, per the book Petty: The Biography by Warren Zanes. “I told him, ‘Oh yes, you are going! You can’t cancel on Bob f***ing Dylan! What, you’re going to call up Bob and tell him it’s off!?’ Tom just goes, ‘I’m not doing it.'”
Petty was dealing with marital problems, and refused to go if his wife didn’t join him. She had no intention of traveling to Australia, so Nicks offered to go in her stead.
“I turn around and say, ‘Well, do you want me to go? Do you need a sidekick, is that what you’re saying, someone to be with you and to make you laugh, and to be there when you’re lonely?'” Nicks said. “‘This is obviously the thing that is scaring you on this tour, and you’re not afraid of anything; you’re not afraid of alligators.’ What the f***, you know?”
She wrote a song about a friend and a romantic interest
While on the tour, Nicks wrote the song “Two Kinds of Love,” which she would eventually duet with Bruce Hornsby for her 1989 album, The Other Side of the Mirror. In it, she sings about a “great temptation.”
“Two kinds of love/One for the way you walk/One for the way you love me/You’re a great temptation,” Nicks sings in the song.
She also writes about a conversation with a “famous friend.” Given her proximity to Dylan and Petty at the time of writing the song, it’s possible that the lyric is a reference to one of them.
“Well I talked to my famous friend last night/My third day up well, his second nighter/He says I don’t know how you do what you do how do you/Let the world in/Well I say well there’s no way out/Then I just play out the game/Well the two of us Widow and a Dove.”
In the book Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams, and Rumours, author Zoë Howe speculates that Nicks is describing her famous friend as the “temptation.”
Tom Petty once addressed rumors that he and Stevie Nicks were a couple
Petty was one of Nicks’ closest friends. Their friendship led to tabloid stories claiming they were in a relationship. Petty’s second wife, Dana York, even wondered if he was dating her to hide his relationship with Nicks.
“So Dana thought I was full of s***, just using her while I was dating Stevie Nicks,” he said. “Dana wasn’t from this world of ours. Trying to take someone who’s not from show business and convince them that this bulls*** goes on all the time, that it’s not real? It takes a minute.”
He confirmed that they never dated, just that they were close.
“Well, we were close …” Petty said. “We were never what you’d call ‘an item.’ But we certainly had our times.”
