Rock Goddess | 03/31/2009 8:05 am
Stevie Nicks: This Is What 60 Looks Like Now (Video)
No computer, no cell phone, no face-lift. ‘I am old-school all the way. School of rock.’
Stevie Nicks is a very busy woman.
Some 40 years into one of the most remarkable careers in music, she is touring the country with her famous supergroup, Fleetwood Mac, which still fills large venues with rapturous baby-boomer fans; she is releasing a new solo CD, "The Soundstage Sessions," as well as a new solo concert DVD, "Live in Chicago."
And that’s just March and April. So what’s with this sudden flurry of activity?
"It wasn’t meant to all be together," Nicks told wowOwow in an interview squeezed in during a short break in the concert tour. "Live in Chicago" was supposed to release last October, but with the Election, it was moved to this two-week period while the tour is on vacation."
What’s it like to be a rock goddess at the tender age of 60? "I would be lying to you if I told you it was easy. Our show is very hard and very long: two hours and ten minutes. Spinning around in seven-inch heels, it’s long. You have to be in really good shape. You have to take care of yourself."
In her new DVD, Stevie Nicks takes to the stage like the gypsy that she was: blonde hair to the waist. Morgane Le Fay wedding dress under a black jacket. Top hat. Feather. Ubiquitous scarves. As The Washington Post said about the Fleetwood Mac concert, "Nicks showed she still knows how to really work a shawl."
"I’ve never had a face-lift and I never will. I stopped laying in the sun at 28. I never go to bed with makeup on. I have creams and lotions and I take 20 minutes of rubbing it in my skin … like a little biochemist." Nicks tells her many female friends now in their 30s, "If you think you’re not going to care how you look when you’re 60, I’m here to tell you: You are going to care more. When you’re young and thin and cute, beauty, it’s your world. You will be sorry, later on, if you don’t take better care."
When asked about her online life, she skips barely a beat: "I don’t have a computer or a cell phone. I am old-school all the way. I am school of rock."
"In 1983 when I was going out with the love of my life, Joe Walsh (legendary rock god of James Gang and Eagles fame), he had built a room in a loft filled with pianos." According to Nicks, the first time she heard a tune she had just picked out on an electronic keyboard instantly played back by Walsh with full orchestration, she realized, "Everyone, even the violinists had been replaced."
Later that year, Walsh told Nicks he couldn’t be with her on her favorite holiday, Halloween, because he had to work on his computer.
"That means I have also been replaced. If computers are going to replace me in a man’s life and replace those violinists …"
That was the end of Nicks’s relationship with computers.
So no Facebook, no tweeting, no MySpacing for Nicks. She does have an official website, a good one — The Nicks Fix — which she infrequently posts to, but is kept up-to-date by her webmasters. (Great pictures, by the way.)
When asked who she wants to come back as in her next life, she says she wants to return as her Yorkie/Chinese Crested mix. "She only wears Ralph Lauren. She always wears Ralph Lauren. She travels like a rock star."
For More:
Stevie Nicks Live in Chicago DVD
Stevie Nicks The Soundstage Session CD
DOWN MEMORY LANE: Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty’s 1981 "Stop Dragging My Heart Around" Music Video:
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63 Reader Comments (so far…) Sign In or Register to comment
Roberta: I agree on everything you’ve said. Including what the doctor said in terms of satisfaction and "breast reduction." I hate assassinations in interviews and (if it were me doing the story,) would be far happier drawing upon the creative aspect of the artist, in this case, how they seek their inspiration, the work process in creation…that type of thing. This is the new 60? My God. Why not focus on the steps in preparing for a new tour, being pulled from your normal life to move from place to place. Study their body of work before you sit and talk with them. Look for some new way to approach them with questions they haven’t been asked a gazillion times over. But aging? And if it must be aging? Then focus on the ongoing struggle as you grow older in continuing to pull art out of you. It is an ongoing process. Not everyone is a Picasso holding a wavering paint brush until the last breath. For some, as they age, it only becomes harder to get into that space they need for the inspiration.
I’ll give you a good example of Stevie Nicks involving creation (and if I err in the repeating, sorry.) Ms. Nicks was on tour, and I believe going around the Washington, D.C. Beltway and saw an exit sign for "Silver Springs" which is a suburb in Maryland. American Film Institute is housed there, now, by the way. Later, remembering "Silver Springs," and how it "sounded" to her; she envisioned her creative silver springs, and of such things art is made. I would much rather hear that, or draw that out, as a reporter, than what we were given.
My sore point in this article was twofold. One: serving us up this version of the aging process. I’ve been bouncing around the various topics on "Wow" for a few weeks, and in reading all of the comments? It’s seems an amazingly intelligent gathering of people following and responding on this site. What’s the old adage? Trust your readership. Don’t dumb down for them. Two: You are interviewing a talented artist, someone with gifts worth exploring. How can you sit there and ignore them?
I agree that no entertainment personality should be held up as a paradigm for aging (or not aging, as the case may be.) It’s of much greater value to readers if Nicks talks about her career and the insights she’s gained from her interesting life. In my experience, people in most areas of show business are bright and observant, and actually have fascinating things to tell us — aside from their beauty, diet and exercise secrets. These days, a person has to be pretty smart in order to get famous and stay famous.
Occasionally, a film star will talk about aging without being prompted. Jane Fonda has been doing this sort of thing, long before aging was a reality for her. On the other hand, I once had an hilarious encounter with the late Ann Sothern, at a point when she was nearly eighty years old, and instead of talking about her new film, or reminiscing about her years on TV, she spent most of the time complaining about how so many articles added two or three years to her actual age.
As somebody who visits Silver Springs quite often, I think that Stevie Nicks’s fantasy about it is hilarious. It’s probably just as well she stayed on the Beltway and didn’t get off to take a look. That might have resulted in one less piece of art.
Not that Silver Springs is a bad, place mind you. It just doesn’t twinkle, flash, or cast a spell.
Sorry, Roberta Wickham and friends, that you don’t look as wonderful as you’d like to at 60. But I think it’s wrong for you to call Stevie Nicks a liar without knowing for sure whether she’s had any cosmetic procedures done or not.
Until you and yours are experts at professional lighting, photography and retouching (as am I), you have no proof or reason to attack Miss Nicks. There is nothing in that photo that can’t be readily accomplished in a photo studio and with post-processing in PhotoShop. A well-preserved subject also makes this easier.
I have seen Stevie Nicks in person up close recently. I hate to tell you because you’re so bitter — but she is in fact a bit of jowely, and could probably benefit — were it her choice to do so — with some work in the neck and chest area. Nevertheless, she is a beautiful woman who looks far younger than her years.