Fame And Family Collide In A Rock Star’s Life
By CHRISTOPHER MANION
In early 1979, John Howard, longtime president of Rockford College and founder of the Rockford Institute, was invited to speak to a business group in Phoenix, Ariz. Dr. Howard was a real freedom-fighter, and his campus was a haven for solid students and scholars.
As a college president since the 1950s, he had pioneered the policy of refusing all federal aid to education. That theme was very popular with business leaders. In those days many of them still had the temerity and independence to object to the federal government’s intrusion into business and just about everything else. With support of that community, Howard raised millions for that small college in Middle America.
But on that balmy day in Phoenix, Dr. Howard was addressing another favorite theme — how businessmen should recognize the importance — and the danger — of the popular culture.
Back then, nobody was talking about the “culture wars,” so in 1976 Dr. Howard and Leopold Tyrmand founded the Chronicles of Culture (today known as “Chronicles”) and brought me on board to help in the project. Its purpose: to shed a much-needed light on what he considered to be the most important issue confronting the country.
After his Phoenix speech, a businessman had approached him and told him of the bewildering problem he was dealing with at home. Prompted by Dr. Howard’s searing criticism of the popular culture, he unloaded.
His daughter, he said, was a talented singer, but she had taken up with this rock band and was suddenly light-years away from her family, a completely different person. She was going downhill, he said, and felt somewhat helpless — even distraught, it seemed.
Dr. Howard, an educator all his life, undoubtedly gave the best advice he could, but the conversation troubled him. So, when he returned to Rockford, he came into my office and asked, “Have you ever heard of Fleetwood Mac?”
Well, yes, I had. Who hadn’t?
As it turned out, the Phoenix businessman was Jess Nicks, chairman and CEO of Armour Dial and father of Stevie Nicks, the lead singer of one of the most successful rock bands in the world.
A Life Too Busy For Baby . . .
John Howard’s encounter came to mind when I saw a curious full-page ad in The New York Times last week. Sponsored by “Bans Off Our Bodies” and Planned Parenthood, the ad declared: “Our power to plan our own futures and control our own bodies depends on our ability to access sexual and reproductive health care, including abortion.”
“We are artists. Creators. Storytellers,” the ad continued. “We are the new generation stepping into our power. Now our now we are being robbed of our power. We will not go back — and we will not back down.”
I looked for “Stevie Nicks” and didn’t find her name — maybe she doesn’t feel like a member of the “new generation”; but she’s certainly its idol. She was just named the first the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice. And she is an icon of the pro-abortion crowd.
In fact, just months after Dr. Howard met her father in Phoenix, Stevie Nicks had her first abortion.
“I was doing a lot of drugs,” Stevie told Vox Magazine 30 years ago. She had finally sobered up and quit cocaine in 1985 after a stay at the Betty Ford Clinic, but her love life — if you can call it that — was a torrent of rock artists that were almost as famous as she was, and none of the relationships — if you can call them that — worked out.
Was there a common thread among them? “They are all very smart and very loving, and they all had a difficult time with my life and the way that I live it and how busy I am.”
No more difficult a time, apparently, than Stevie had. By 1990, she had had three more abortions.
. . . But Where Is Baby Now?
Stevie made news two years ago when “her hero,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died. “Abortion rights, that was really my generation’s fight,” she told The Guardian in early October 2020. “If President Trump wins this election and puts the judge he wants in, she will absolutely outlaw it and push women back into back-alley abortions.”
[Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed by the U.S. Senate two weeks later. She is one of the five justices signed on to the February draft of the Dobbs decision made public earlier this month. Of course, while Roe essentially overturned all state laws prohibiting abortion, Dobbs will not overturn state laws permitting it. The decision merely returns to the states and to the people the powers usurped by the Supreme Court in Roe and in other related cases.]
Nicks then explained the critical role of abortion in her life. “If I had not had that [first] abortion,” she said, “I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac.”
“There would have been no Fleetwood Mac.”
That line resonated throughout the pro-abortion movement at the time, with radicals raging at the prospect of a “Madame Justice Barrett.”
But that wasn’t enough. . . . Nicks just kept going: “There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly. And there were a lot of drugs. . . . I would have had to walk away. . . .”
And the compensation for this . . . sacrifice?
“I knew that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal so many people’s hearts and make people so happy. And I thought: You know what? That’s really important. There’s not another band in the world that has two lead women singers, two lead women writers. That was my world’s mission.”
She’s world famous, to be sure, but “Stevie’s World” was really mission territory. Her father was right in 1979 — she was really bonkers.
After her abortion that year, she wrote a song painting a stark, haunting testimony to “Sara,” the child she had aborted.
“Sara, you’re the poet in my heart. . . . There is a heartbeat, no it never really died. . . .”
“Sara” became one of Fleetwood Mac’s greatest hits.
They Listen To The Music, But Not The Message
And so we return to last week’s full-page ad. “We are artists. Creators. Storytellers,” they wrote.
But who could imagine being a greater artist, creator and storyteller than Stevie?
“Our power to plan our own futures and control our own bodies depends on . . . abortion,” they wrote.
Well, so did Stevie’s. Lesson learned.
So didn’t any of them get the memo?
And what happened to Stevie’s dad?
Dr. Howard never heard from him again, but apparently Jess Nicks was not bewildered by the popular culture for long. In that same year, 1979, he retired from Greyhound, grew his hair long, and founded an outdoor rock music venue called “Compton Terrace.”
Every great act played there over the years — including Fleetwood Mac.
Stevie loved her father, but her concert schedule kept her far away from home — even during his final illness in the summer of 2005.
She arrived at his bedside just before he died.
“He waited until the Fleetwood Mac Tour was over,” she told Vox. “I asked him for that. He waited until this summer tour was over — I asked him for that. He couldn’t leave us during a tour — he knew that. . . . He waited for me.”
Yes, Stevie’s dad waited.
At her deathbed, her children will be waiting too.
