The album that reduced Stevie Nicks to tears: “Lindsey was mad at ...

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Stevie Nicks has always kept her greatest songs close to her chest whenever she sang. Even if she had to collaborate with the members of Fleetwood Mac to help flesh out her material, it was always in service to her getting the sounds she heard in her head down on vinyl. But there’s more to a record than sitting in a studio hashing out every tune, and when Nicks started taking her first steps into the industry, she wasn’t safe from a few records that left her in tears during production.

Then again, there’s a chance that no one was going to be safe when the band were making Rumours. Every member was going through their own messy separation from their partners, and when sessions didn’t end in people cracking up, it wasn’t unusual for them to result in screaming matches, someone storming out, and maybe even the odd moment where things managed to work themselves out.

Before Nicks had even made her first record, though, she and Lindsey Buckingham were joined at the hip musically. Even if they didn’t see eye-to-eye on everything, their collaborations were half the reason why Mick Fleetwood saw something in Buckingham at the time, having been knocked out by what the guitarist could do without a pick when listening to the song ‘Frozen Love.’

Although Buckingham Nicks managed to sink like a stone on the charts, the album itself is far from a trainwreck. There is the odd moment where things don’t work, but Nicks was already on the verge of greatness with ‘Crying in the Night,’ and given the fact that a lot of the tunes here ended up getting folded in Fleetwood Mac’s material, it wasn’t like they were in shaky hands when they started off.

When it came time to shoot the cover, though, things were bound to get uncomfortable really fast. Whereas most people had either something artsy or a traditional band shot for their covers, the choice to make their first record erotic but having both of them without clothes on was mortifying for Nicks, who had absolutely no time for it when it came time to shoot the shot that appeared on the record.

Despite Buckingham pressuring her to do it, Nicks didn’t mince words about being in tears after the whole thing was over, saying, “It has never mattered to me to be a sex symbol. I mean, that cover is about as close to selling the music on sex as you’ll ever get, and I was crying when we took that picture. And Lindsey was mad at me. He said, ‘You know, you’re just being a child. This is art.’ And I’m going, ‘This is not art. This is taking a nude photograph with you, and I don’t dig it.’”

Regardless of whose definition of the word “art” won that day, that was never how Nicks saw her music. Every song might be in the ear of the beholder half the time, but Nicks was never someone who relied on her sexuality to sell records. It was all about the songs, and even in Fleetwood Mac, people were more focused on the spiritual aspect of songs like ‘Gold Dust Woman’ and ‘Dreams’ half the time.

While Nicks’s relationship drama couldn’t be avoided on Rumours, she was not going to let that define her career. She was as much of a songwriter as Buckingham was, and even if she didn’t have the same musical chops, she was going to make sure that everyone remembered her for her songs before anything else.

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