Stevie Nicks: A Rock Goddess Looks Back

Stevie Nicks got to sleep at home last night for once, her skinny, half-blind, half-hairless 16-year-old dog, Sulamith, snuggling at her feet, in a four-poster bed too tall for either of them. "I have to take, like, a running jump to get up there," says Nicks, who, for all the potency of her presence, is five-feet-one without heels. She lives in an oceanside condo in Santa Monica, a "space pad" with floor-to-ceiling views of half of Los Angeles County. Her bedroom décor is spare: a Buddha statue on the polished hardwood floor, a vintage globe on a stand, a white stuffed rabbit perched on some pillows, a modest flatscreen, a rack of stage clothes in the corner that serves as the only reminder that she's actually still on tour. Nicks made it back from a Fleetwood Mac show at the Forum around 4 in the morning, managing six-and-a-half hours of sleep. She has another concert tonight, with no day off in between. Her back hurts. "We're tired," Nicks says, brightly, "because we're very old."

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Today's show is in an Anaheim arena, an hour from home. Nicks, her long blond hair wrapped in yellow, blue and purple plastic curlers, has flopped onto a well-worn black leather massage chair, feet up, at the rear of her backstage dressing room. It's early December, and the sun is setting in pastels among the palm trees outside. There are only a couple of hours left before Nicks has to be back onstage in her black corset and skirt, harmonizing once more on "The Chain" with a guy she dumped during the Ford administration.

The ex in question, Lindsey Buckingham, is a formidable frontman, a virtuosic guitar innovator, an obsessive studio genius à la Brian Wilson, a snappy dresser with first-class cheekbones. He would be the undisputed star of almost any other band. But Buckingham had the mixed fortune to join Fleetwood Mac with his beautiful girlfriend, an intuitive, mystical, prolific composer (she used to write a song a day) with a hoarse, trilling miracle of a voice and an unearthly, shamanic stage manner – a maker of myths, a wearer of shawls, a genre unto herself, a woman taken by the sky.

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At the moment, Nicks is wearing black leggings, fuzzy, UGG-like black boots, and a selection from what may be the world's leading collection of diaphanous black tops. She is gurgling scales along with a recording of her vocal coach while flipping through a new memoir by Janis Joplin's road manager. "Look," Nicks says, perking up, "I knew Janis wore sling-back heels." Joplin was a formative influence, but Nicks has found a different, frillier balance between toughness and vulnerability. "I think Janis was not as comfortable with herself as a woman," says Nicks' close friend, singer-songwriter Vanessa Carlton (who had Nicks conduct her wedding). "But Stevie understands how much power there is in the feminine, and she's not afraid of it."

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"Stevie is strong-willed," says Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, a longtime friend and collaborator, "and at the same time, she's vulnerable and fragile. And that's a really great combination. She became this icon for girls – and probably most guys in the Seventies wished they had a girlfriend like Stevie Nicks."

Stevie Nicks in her formative years. Courtesy of Stevie Nicks

Nicks stands and plugs her iPod into her road-case enclosed stereo, via a cord with a cute furry covering. "I have so many playlists," she says. She selects one that kicks off with a deep cut from Aretha Franklin's Who's Zoomin' Who. Nicks heads over to her makeup table, beside a klieg light, and points out a framed black-and-white picture by the mirror, in which a bright-eyed little girl stares down the camera with a defiant smirk. "This is me in third grade," she says, "right before getting kicked out of Catholic school." (In fact, she explains later, her parents let her quit, though she clearly prefers the version where she's expelled.)

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The dressing room is more utilitarian than vibe-y, which seems rather un-Stevie: no candles, no drapes, no incense, just a dog bed for Sulamith, a Yorkie-Chinese Crested mix who truly fits into the "tired because she's old" category. While Sulamith rests, Mana, a younger, more energetic little dog, does laps around the room, offering a rubber frog to visitors. Mana belongs to Karen Johnston, an unflappably loyal and good-humored brunette who's been Nicks' assistant for the past 26 years (Nicks treats that as a semi-official title, as in "This is Karen, my assistant of 26 years"). Johnston is also in all black and wears a helpful lint brush on her belt.

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There are a couple of other pictures leaning against Nicks' makeup mirror, each meant to inspire. One, taken in the late Seventies, shows a pigtailed Nicks writing a never-to-be-released song with a tan, shirtless, hunky-looking George Harrison. The other is a recent shot of a beaming Nicks posing with a veteran from the war in Iraq, Pfc. Vincent Mannion, one of the many injured servicemen she's befriended during her visits to the Walter Reed hospital. When they first met, Mannion wasn't expected to survive, but now he's doing fine.

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Nicks is, in her own way, also a survivor. She endured two rehab stints for two life-threatening addictions in two different decades; lost her best friend, Robin, to leukemia, which so rattled Nicks that she briefly married Robin's widower in hopes of raising their child; faced numerous other deaths and illnesses around her, including the recent passing of her mother, and an 18-year-old godson from an overdose; and came to terms with the apparent inability of any man to live in the shadow of her career, leaving her to "depend on her music like a husband," as she once sang.

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Nicks made it through all of that and more to find herself, at age 66, an idol among millennials, and not just the women. Harry Styles went to two Forum shows in a row, paying homage to Nicks backstage. The latter-day L.A. band Haim unabashedly worships her, and Nicks reciprocates, hoping to work with them. "You can't help but be in awe of her presence," says Alana Haim. "She's the most powerful person I've ever seen onstage." Generational arbiter Tavi Gevinson, 18, declared, in her TED Talk, that "the lesson of all of this is to just be Stevie Nicks ... because my favorite thing about her – other than, like, everything – is that she has always been unapologetically present onstage and unapologetic about her flaws." Indie-pop singer Sky Ferreira got her record deal partly on the strength of a "Stand Back" cover. "I'm heavily influenced by her," Ferreira says. "And if other people are influenced by her, thank God, because that means there's going to be better music."

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