From the outside looking in, Stevie Nicks appears to be a tour de force unhindered by earthly burdens like regret or remorse, but an exception must be made for another otherworldly figure from the rock universe: David Bowie. By the time Nicks got her big break as a new addition to Fleetwood Mac, Bowie had been cutting his teeth across the pond for years. The British rock star had already transitioned from his folky 1960s era to the extraterrestrial Ziggy Stardust persona he adopted in the early 1970s.
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Nicks and Bowie were, for all intents and purposes, major players of the same rock ‘n’ roll scene of the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Unfortunately, that only makes Nicks’ regret about the Starman that much worse.
Stevie Nicks Reveals Major Regret About David Bowie
Stevie Nicks and David Bowie are two sides of the same ethereal coin. Both embodied an otherworldly nature about them, whether on stage or in their writing. The musicians experienced the same transition from the jangly folk-rock of the late 1960s to the increasingly heavier produced rock of the ‘70s into the ‘80s. Despite their seemingly multiple connections, the pair never collaborated. According to Nicks, they never even met.
“I don’t even know that I ever met David Bowie,” Nicks told Dazed in 2020. “Had I ever met him, I probably would have said the first thing I usually say whenever I meet somebody who is one of my heroes: ‘Maybe we could get together and work on a song or something?’ That’s usually my first line because that’s all I really want from all these people, to be in their presence and study what they do. I missed out on that. I loved a lot of his songs.”
Nicks said Bowie was “a great singer-songwriter. He was also a performance artist; he had a lot of talent and in a lot of different ways. He was a special guy. Really special. I am sorry. You look back on your life and think, ‘Why didn’t I get on an airplane and go see David Bowie? Why didn’t I get on an airplane and go see a lot of people that I’ll never get to meet now?’”
A Mutual Connection Between The Two Superstars
It’s impossible to say how many (or how few) times Stevie Nicks and David Bowie found themselves within close proximity to one another. It stands to reason they could have been in Los Angeles at the same time, or perhaps New York or even the U.K. Both musicians were incredibly busy at the time, after all. Nevertheless, it appears that their only connections were distant and in passing—one of which tied itself into place in the early 1980s.
Although Bowie never called Nicks to work with her on a record, the man behind the Ziggy Stardust persona did call up her opening act, Peter Frampton. The “Do You Feel Like I Do” singer opened for Nicks during her 1984 “Rock a Little” tour. While Frampton would later say it was a “great” tour and his “first since 1982” in a 2020 Esquire article, he said the tour came at a time when he felt the public was misperceiving him as a teenybopper artist.
“Dave saw how the perception of who I really was had changed and knew I wasn’t happy,” Frampton said. “He gave me a huge gift by taking me around the world and reintroducing me as the guitar player. I could not and can never thank him enough. That was a huge leg up he gave me, and from that moment on, I started to get my confidence back.”
And while that’s certainly all well and good…we can’t help but wish Bowie had decided to reach out to Nicks, too.
Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images
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