LISTEN · EPISODE 8
Stevie Nicks: “I’m not a witch. Get a life!”
In 1998, more than twenty years into one of the biggest careers in American music, Stevie Nicks was still fielding the same question: are you a witch? Her answer was direct: “I am not a witch. Get a life.”
That’s the question behind this episode of Witches, Bitches, and Sluts: how does a working songwriter — someone who waited tables and cleaned houses to keep a musical partnership alive — end up spending two decades explaining her own wardrobe to strangers?
Long before she was a witch, she was a waitress
Before “Rhiannon,” before the black chiffon, Stevie Nicks worked as a waitress, a dental assistant, and a cleaning lady, often all at once, so Lindsey Buckingham could keep working on their music without having to hold down a job. She’d already written “Rhiannon” and “Landslide,” songs that would define Fleetwood Mac’s sound for fifty years, before a single person ever called her a witch. The mystique got layered onto a career that was already working entirely on its own merits.
The double standard nobody asked about
David Bowie played a literal alien onstage in the 1970s, and nobody asked where his spacecraft was registered. Alice Cooper ended his shows with a fake execution, and nobody wrote think pieces wondering if he’d really died. When Stevie Nicks did the same kind of thing — built a persona, performed a character, sang her own mythology in the first person — a significant part of the press and the public treated the performance as a confession rather than a costume.
What the rumor actually cost her
For a year, Nicks stopped wearing the black wardrobe she’d designed herself and switched to apricot, afraid of what people were projecting onto it. She’s talked about real fear of the strangers who showed up at her hotels believing the persona was literal fact. And for nearly two decades, the public conversation about her ran almost entirely on the register of magic, while a genuine addiction crisis — first cocaine, then a Klonopin dependency she’s since called more dangerous than the cocaine — stayed almost entirely off the record.
Taking it back
The turn wasn’t the world changing its mind. It was Nicks deciding that owning the rumor was a better deal than running from it. “OK, just bring it, freaks,” she said, after years of fear. “I’m not going to wear apricot… I’m going to wear my beautiful, long black dress.” That decision eventually led to her playing an actual witch on American Horror Story, being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, and becoming the reference point that artists like Taylor Swift turn to when they want to talk about image, mystique, and control.
So was she ever a witch?
No. She was a songwriter the culture didn’t have better language for. “Witch” was the shorthand people reached for instead of “extraordinarily talented woman who built her own persona and doesn’t feel like explaining herself to your satisfaction.” It took her most of her adult life to write the better language herself.
Listen to the full episode above, and find the complete list of research sources below.
Sources behind the episode
Read or download the Episode 8 source list (PDF).