Why Stevie Nicks Plays the Tambourine During Performances
Stevie Nicks is known for playing the tambourine during performances. This musical instrument is associated with her just as much as her shawls. Here’s the reason the Fleetwood Mac star plays the tambourine on stage.
How Stevie Nicks got her start
Before joining Fleetwood Mac, Nicks was a member of a band called Fritz. Her former love and bandmate, Lindsey Buckingham, joined the group before her.
Nicks met Buckingham at a party in the 1960s when they were in high school. She walked up to him and started singing while he was playing “California Dreamin’” on his guitar. “I just threw in my Michelle Phillips Harmony, and he was so beautiful,” Nicks tells Courtney Love during a Spin magazine interview.
Nicks ran into Buckingham again two years later. His band, Fritz, needed a singer after two members left. Nicks joined the band, but the arrangement didn’t last long. She and Buckingham eventually left and formed their own group called Buckingham Nicks. After their first album flopped, they joined Fleetwood Mac.
Why Stevie Nicks started playing the tambourine
During a Q &A, Nicks explains why she picked up the tambourine. She says the tambourine gives her “something to do” during a performance. If she doesn’t have a singing part in a song, she still wants to be able to participate. The tambourine gives her that opportunity.
“Well, I started playing tambourine in Fritz,” says Nicks during a fan Q and A on rockalittle.com. “The reason I started playing was so when I wasn’t singing, I had something to do. It became more important in Fleetwood Mac, because I only sing a third of the time, so I had more time to perfect my tambourine playing.
Nicks says she can’t see herself standing in one place during a performance. She needs to move around and make big gestures. (She even talks to Prince.)
“I’m very practiced at twirling,” Nicks tells Rolling Stone. “I would be so bored if I was up there just standing. I took a lot of ballet — I always wanted to work the dancing in. The reason I wear the ponchos and the big shawl-y chiffon things is because I realized from a very young age, if you were 5 foot 1, and you wanted to make big moves and be seen from a long way away, if you weren’t twirling a baton of fire, you needed something that was gonna make you show up. Like a Las Vegas showgirl, really. You need big moves.”
Stevie Nicks says her Fritz bandmates didn’t like the attention she received
Nicks’ style and performance were so captivating that she received a lot of attention while she was a member of Fritz. According to her, this didn’t go over well with the group members. “We were being booked like crazy,” Nicks tells Rolling Stone. “But they’d all say, ‘We want to book the band with the blondy brown-haired girl.’”
According to author Stephen Davis in the book Gold Dust Woman, audiences would clap “politely” for the Fritz band members when they were introduced after their set. However, when Nicks was introduced, the crowd went wild. He says she “provoked a roar and general cheering.”
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