back to the velvet underground: stevie nicks, “gypsy," and ghosts
i literally wrote this sitting on my floor
people keep telling me (really) that now that my first book is done, my next should be about stevie nicks, even though i keep saying that, one, i don’t ever want to write a book again (i am only half kidding!), and, two, if anyone is more difficult to write about than miss elaine may, it’s miss stevie nicks. (also: the market is oversaturated with fleetwood mac books—all of which i hate but that’s beside the point—already!)
but the gag is, i can’t stop writing about stevie, try as i might. i love her, and am fascinated by her work and the way it keeps pulling me back. i was going to do a whole stevie week on bed crumbs, in honor of miss nicks’s 75th, with a lot of silly pieces to balance out this classic bed crumbs kind of long one, but then that seemed a little much! even for me! so idk find me in the dms if you want to talk about how stevie is our greatest living comedienne (sorry elaine) or her love for Storks (2016) or how she simply must release “julia” before all is said and done or! or! or!—or that’s it! this is long enough as it is!
In the stretch of fall and winter of my 23rd year, I spent six months following Fleetwood Mac up and down the East Coast. It’s a longer story than I can tell here, one I keep promising, or maybe threatening, to write about a time in the twilight of the Obama era and the dawn of my young adulthood when I saw the classic Rumours five perform more than half a dozen times in the span of just a few months.1 That summer, I had gotten my first credit card to buy floor seats I couldn’t afford for Madison Square Garden that fall. By the following spring, I had become so adept at finding a spot at the foot of the stage that it didn’t even matter what was printed on my ticket.
As the number of shows racked up, it wasn’t the 15,000 person sing-along to “Landslide” or the chance to reach out my little hand and “play” Lindsey Buckingham’s outstretched guitar during “Go Your Own Way” or even the return of Christine McVie and her soaring love songs after a 16 year long hiatus that I looked forward to the most. It wasn’t any song at all, actually.
Stevie Nicks likes to tell stories, long-winded meandering ones, full of stardust and grit in the same sprinkle, stories that have grown the haze of faded film across them as the years have stretched on. “Gypsy” is both a song that is a story and a song that has a story, one which she shared before every performance in an ever-lengthening introduction. Across two, three, four—sometimes even five—minutes, she’d wax nostalgic about being in her early 20s in San Francisco, her earliest dirt-broke years with Lindsey Buckingham in a local psych-rock band, her younger and more starry-eyed self’s dream of what success would look like, and her fierce belief that she’d get it. Nostalgia warps memory; in recounting our past, every most mundane experience is luminous and prophetic. We are always our most confident and least-doubtful selves. Our raw, naked ambition doesn’t embarrass us. We always arrive at an epiphany at once, and never little by little. Even when the band cut her off or told her to wrap it up, even as she announced she was going to get to the point sooner this time, not wander off so much this time, be brief this time—a hopeless endeavor—the story still always ended the same. Well, not the same same; every night it varied just enough to seem like I was hearing it for the very first time, and that each time it was meant for just me:
If you have a dream, and you believe in yourself, and you know you’re good, and you have a passion — and hopefully you do have a passion — you follow that passion, because otherwise you’re gonna be so bored in your life. You need to do what you love. And you need to not let anyone get in your way and tell you it can’t be done. So do it. Follow it. Love it. Be it.
At least, that’s how one of them went.
I think, now, that I kept going back just for that. Because I so badly needed to hear those words, needed to hear someone tell me that it was going to be okay, that I had time, that no person is built in day. I needed to hear, from the source herself, that Stevie Nicks wasn’t always Stevie Nicks. I needed to hear someone say “I have no fear” to someone who had so much of it in order to think that may someday be true for me, too.
Of course, I had no right, at 23, to feel like I had all this ambition and nothing to show for it. I had no right to be frustrated by the fact that I wasn’t where I wanted to be yet. I had no right to feel like I was running out of time, and that none of the doors I was banging on would ever open for me. I had no right to feel like anything I had to offer the world at 23 deserved to be heard by other people; I was a fresh and unformed infant. I was, in short, stupid, and there are so many people walking around this world who will only ever know that version of me.
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I think a lot about a TikTok that made the rounds last year where someone admitted: “I believed in God as a kid bc I always felt so moved during worship songs at my megachurch and then I went to a One Direction concert and felt the same thing and realized I just like live music”
I had made a religion out of music. Maybe it was because I had no other form of religion in my life. Or maybe I knew then what I know now about music’s power as a force greater than you, but didn’t exactly know how to articulate it. Loving anything is so dumb, but I loved a band with such eager and earnest ferocity I refused to be embarrassed by. When I was young and naive and vulnerable, the way other people turn to god or read the bible or something for guidance or wisdom, I turned to the songs of Stevie Nicks, and the idea of her.
I say idea because it was just that: an idea. The concept of “Stevie Nicks,” not Stevie Nicks, the person. I was stupid then, yes, but still knew enough to know that to deify is to flatten, to lose sight of a person’s very real humanity, of their very real imperfections and inadequacies, fumblings and failures—and to invite your own inevitable heartbreak.
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Ten years ago, I moved into a minuscule bedroom in an overpriced apartment belonging to a neurotic woman twenty years older than me and her small dog that was perhaps even more anxiety-riddled than she in a pocket of the Lower East Side I did not know was referred to as Hell Square long after I had left. I ran by the East River every morning at dawn, walked to my marketing job across town, then walked home in the evening to sit in my shoebox room and write a lot of drivel that I called work. I was so focused on trying to make it that I never slowed down enough to realize I was lonely.
Scotch taped on the blank wall next to my door was a black and white tabloid-sized photo of Stevie Nicks looking impossibly, effortlessly cool in the late ‘70s. I had printed it at work one day in fitful desperation for something, anything, to liven up my cell, but soon it started to feel like a talisman. The tight quarters made it feel like she was watching over me, imploring me to be brave every day when I walked out into the world.
I carted that crappy computer print with me to three more apartments. Even as it frayed and faded and folded in on itself to the point that its only decent place was hidden inside my closet, I was convinced that parting with it would be bad luck.
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“There is a part of me that has to depend on fantasy, because if you can’t be somewhat of a fantasy person, then you can’t write. If you can’t believe in dreams, then you can’t believe that things will work out, so what are you going to write about?”
– Stevie, 1989
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A lot of songs make me feel safe, but the only song that I have ever wanted to truly climb inside and live within is “Gypsy.”
And, I mean, how could it not? The four minute long track is pure shimmering sparkling splendor; you can practically hear the glitter in the tape deck. “Gypsy” is a room where nothing very bad could happen to you there. It’s the great dream you squeeze your eyes shut to try to continue when you hit snooze in the morning. It’s coming across the bridge to Manhattan at night, when the city has quieted but before it has completely hushed, and the moon reflects off all the tall glass buildings you could never afford to live in even if you wanted to but can imagine for a moment you might. It’s the weightlessness of running the outer loop of Central Park, down the hill that curves by 83rd Street and spits you out past the Delacorte, on an early summer morning when all the green is still wet with dew. It’s the light on in other people’s windows. Because “Gypsy” is a memory, and therefore it is a fantasy, one in which we are all allowed to be whatever we want to be, including the unreliable narrators of our own lives.
In memory, Stevie gets to be the hero of the story. In memory, she can give in to the romantic pull of nostalgia. In memory, the floral wallpaper is better than fresh flowers she can’t afford to buy. In memory, the bed on the floor is grounding, and never cold or hard. In memory, the girl she once was has too much love to be afraid: not of her parents’ looming deadline to send her back to school; not of her desperate hunger for success; not of her brooding boyfriend; and certainly not of the possibility it all might be for nothing—that she may end up having thrown away years of her life cleaning houses and waiting tables and splitting single hamburgers for dinner and driving a beat up car with a broken reverse, all for a dream she would give up on to return home with her tail between her legs, never having made it to the Velvet Underground after all. Nothing has to be sad in the memory, not if you don’t want it to be.
That’s the fantasy that writing promises, the thing that keeps us coming back to be humiliated by the blank page. Even when all the details remain true, we can choose how to tell them.
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“When I say the word ‘romantic,’ I don’t necessarily mean romantic as far as having a guy or somebody in your life. I mean just the halcyon days or, just, remember the way that the air felt on your skin, or the way your hair felt when the wind blew through it, or the way that the trees sounded, or that kind of thing. So, if my journal entry has a romantic tinge to it, I might thumb through it and go, ‘This entry would make a really good poem,’ which could then be made into a good song.”
– Stevie, on her songwriting process, 2022.
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In those same younger years, when I was caught up in a first-blush phony sort of deepness, I thought every feeling had to be big in order for it to be genuine. I couldn’t just love something; I had to let it consume me. Once, I burned my best friend a CD with at least ten versions, maybe more, of “Gypsy” on it. “What the hell is wrong with you,” she texted me. She was kidding, but she was also right.
I like to say that songs don’t change, people do, and that’s true, but not the entirety of it. Songs do change. Those too-many tracks, to me, told a story, painted the evolution of a song we both loved, and all of the possible versions that it could be. They were all the same picture, but viewed in different aspect ratios, peered at through your fingers, or upside down, or from across the room. The point was that “Gypsy” wasn’t always the sort of light FM pop-rock song that felt destined to forever play in a CVS, lifting your spirits briefly while you went through the routine mundane motions of life, and it didn’t always stay that way.
Before the death of Stevie’s best friend Robin Snyder, before the drugs stopped being fun and started being scary, before the band fell apart for what seemed like good, before Stevie had been put out to pasture a punchline, before she stood on a Warner Brothers soundstage and reclaimed it all and then some—all events that would go on to color the track with new layers of meaning as time went on—it was a song steeped in wistfulness and grief.
In its earliest demos from the late 1970s, whether recorded alone or with the Heartbreakers,2 “Gypsy” veers between a spare piano ballad and an angst-ridden rock jam, and everywhere in between: all variations on mourning the loss of her youth and freedom. Fame and poverty are just different corners of the same hell. Decades later, a therapist would tell her that the day she joined Fleetwood Mac was the saddest of her life. Things had gotten too big, too fast; she needed to make her life small again. Small like it was in her memory, more safe than suffocating. In that memory, she didn’t have to be the hero of the story. She could be just another girl.
But the thing about memories is that we can’t live there. The past is the past, and to attempt to relive it is to be humbled by our hollow reproductions. Stevie could never go back to that apartment. All she could do was move her things into her small guest room and hope that it would be enough.
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There is a video from 2015 of Stevie Nicks performing “Gypsy” for Rolling Stone, alone at a piano in a tiny black box studio, plunking away at the rudimentary three chords she used to write the once-and-now-again ballad. It’s one of the most punk things I’ve ever seen—punk as in someone with little technical skill expressing herself through music anyway—and it’s also one of the saddest. Its sparse and intense intimacy is the draw, I know, but watching it almost feels wrong, like I got lost on my way to the bathroom in a stranger’s house, and any second they’ll catch me standing in their bedroom.
Stevie is so much older than she was when she first sang the song. Her life is even bigger than it was back then, bigger than maybe she even could have anticipated, and filled with so many more paths she could have taken. Her voice is ragged and worn and weary. There are no soaring notes left anymore. Heavy is the weight of all the old versions of ourselves we carry inside of us. And when she adds extra lines to the bridge—and you still miss her, and you still want her, and you can still remember her—I almost can’t breathe.
That’s the other thing about “Gypsy”: it’s a haunted house. To see one’s gypsy is to see one’s own ghost.
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“This song has so many different stories and goes into such a deep world of our life a long time ago that you really have to just pick and choose your stories.”
– Stevie, in one of the earliest “Gypsy” set-ups from Fleetwood Mac’s 2014 tour
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One of my favorite sub-genre of Stevie Nicks songs (among greats like “heard about this witch,” “read this Victorian novel,” “had a torrid love affair with this rock dude,” “watched this movie at 3 a.m.,” and “i can yeehaw too”) is “Rorschach test where I’m not really sure what, exactly, the fuck she’s talking about.” Of course, this applies to a wide swath of Stevie Nicks’s songs—the fairly literal tracks in her vast catalog are few and far between. That’s maybe the thing I like best about her songwriting, the way it so rarely can be deconstructed entirely and correctly. Her songs are about everything and nothing at once, mosaics crafted out of old abandoned choruses paired with new verses, recycled lines from other songs in new contexts, fragments of thoughts, repetitions, and strings of words that must mean something to her but come across as nonsense to us. Try to read into them too hard and, more often than not, they fall apart a little; the writing skews toward the mystic, the threadline becomes nonexistent, clouded with different stories and settings, changing tenses and narrators and characters that come and go as they please.
When I say that Stevie’s songs are a Rorschach test, what I mean is that they are what you want them to be. All these years and all these listens later, “Gypsy” continues to shape-shift. With so many different stories behind it, I still can’t land on one right answer of who or what she’s talking about. It’s about herself, but it’s also about Lindsey Buckingham, and it’s also about her friend Robin. It’s about an idealized childlike version of herself, but it’s also about a real child, and it’s also about a hypothetical child she chose not to have in order to focus on her career. And, of course, it’s about you.
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Eventually, I had to throw that print away. The whole thing was falling apart, and I have been so many other girls in the time since I was that girl.
I keep telling myself that I’ve grown out of this, that I am too old to still love people I don’t even know so deeply, much as they helped me know myself. I’m more jaded now, quicker, for better or worse, to see people’s faults. Things don’t seem as fun as they once were, but they’re not as serious as they were either. But here I am. I have been so many girls since I was that girl, yes, but I still am that girl in some ways. We’re on nodding terms, you know?
And I still believe every apartment needs a Stevie Nicks to stand guard, no matter how silly or superficial, symbolic or superstitious it may be. I know better than to turn a person into an idol, but there has to be some sort of middle ground. People may not be gods, but they can be lighthouses. And that’s got to count for something.
a short selection of more of me on stevie:
and i would ask for you to consider the fact that your icons were not always icons, words and guitars reading series, 2018
am i the drama? notes on fleetwood mac on film, bright wall/dark room, 2022
Did I think I was in a millennial version of Almost Famous? Yes. Was I delusional? Also yes.
The thing I love so much about the Heartbreakers version is how it feels a little like she's doing a bit of a Tom Petty drag, and it grounds what could be—and did become—a prototypical glimmering, mystical Stevie Nicks song. Every detail feels less like a dream world; it feels real, and true. The flowers are a scratchy, the floor is far from comfortable, the ceiling fan can barely get a breeze going—but you sleep well anyway because you're so bone tired. She sounds absolutely furious that it isn't her reality anymore. It completely changes the vibe and meaning of the song.
This could be an entire other essay but I will spare you and just say: I think Stevie Nicks was meant to sing with two people in her life: Lindsey Buckingham, and Tom Petty. She and Petty are separate sides of the same coin, the same but different. Petty pulled out her straight roots-rocker energy; his down to earth, no bullshit attitude couches her more dippy inclinations. And she could bring just the right touch of etherealness to level one of his cuts up to a "this is a religious experience" level. See: “Learning to Fly,” live 2006). They also always sounded like they had so much fucking fun singing together. With Fleetwood Mac, and solo, she could be a pop star. As an honorary Heartbreaker, she got the chance to live one of her sister lives, to imagine what it'd have been like if she achieved success with Buckingham Nicks and became a salt of the earth, god honest, workman-like rock singer.