A STEVIE NICKS JOURNEY PART3

[Mixed Titles]

One rarely finds a role model who snorted so much cocaine she tore a permanent hole in her nose. Nicks has made no secret of her years on blow—complemented with alcohol and pot, and fostered by long hours, stage fright, stress over her relationship with Buckingham, sudden immense wealth, and fatigue from the Epstein-Barr virus she’d contracted following complications from leaking silicone breast implants—an addiction that she kicked at Betty Ford in 1986. Or of her eight years on Klonopin, the benzo she’d been prescribed to make sure she wouldn’t go back on coke, for which she checked herself into a hospital for 47 days in 1993.
“She’s had a life, a dramatic life, and she came out the other end,” says former Interview editor-in-chief Ingrid Sischy when I ask her to explain why Nicks has such an avid following to me, a non-­devotee born too late to have witnessed the history. In other words, she survived when she probably shouldn’t have, in an era when many didn’t—not just the drugs but the Shakespearean love affairs, with Buckingham, Fleetwood, and Iovine, along with two members of the ­Eagles (Don Henley and Joe Walsh), ­Eagles songwriter J. D. Souther, and a you-go-girl list of countless others. “She hasn’t airbrushed her life at all,” Sischy says. “She gets out there, and she’s the weight she is, she’s the age she is, and she’s still got so much dignity and class and humor. Stevie Nicks is not about repentance; I always thought she was about consciousness. But to know there’s different chapters and different battles at different moments in your life that you have to make peace with so you can take on new battles is a pretty great thing for kids to see.”
Fellow 65-year-olds who turn into lighter-waving teenagers in her presence know Nicks as the breezy feminine antidote to the harder-edged women of rock: Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Joan Jett. “She was like a feminine version of Mick Jagger,” says Sheryl Crow, a good friend and collaborator, who joins Beyoncé, Mary J. Blige, Florence Welch, Sandra Bernhard, and Taylor Swift on a long list of performers who see Nicks, with her singular, sexy-Gollum voice, as a musical superhero. (Lindsay Lohan has expressed interest in playing her in a biopic, to which Nicks has responded, “Over my dead body. She needs to stop doing drugs and get a grip.”) Nicks spent the months leading up to the tour gigging with Dave Grohl and considers herself an honorary member of Foo Fighters, Lady Antebellum, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Her look, created with her costumer Margi Kent, has influenced fashion designers from Anna Sui to somebody’s brother’s girlfriend who gave her an organically dyed silk poncho during tour rehearsals because Nicks had inspired her to go into fashion (“So attractive on somebody skinny and 18,” Nicks says of the poncho). A woman in the U.K. named Johanna Pieterman paints Celtic-style portraits of Nicks with your spirit animal of choice (usually an owl, wolf, stallion, or unicorn). And for 23 years, a collection of drag queens, costume enthusiasts, and Nicks fanatics whose lives she’s touched have been gathering at Night of a Thousand Stevies, a New York dance party and revue in which participants twirl to techno versions of “Sara” and “Edge of Seventeen” and shake tambourines adorned with ribbons rather than applaud. “I love being the reason that people gather and have a good time,” says Nicks, who’s been too scared to attend but did record a video message telling them to “sing your little wild hearts out” two years ago. “But I’m completely befuddled it’s still going on.” A creature from a bygone era of celebrity that is both pre-sarcasm and pre-confessional, Nicks will invite you in to feel her feelings with her, but wouldn’t dream of tweeting about the pint of ice cream she ate to get her through it.