The late 1960s ushered in a musical revolution on the West Coast, with psychedelic rock bands like Jefferson Airplane and Buffalo Springfield blazing the trail while future rockers like Stevie Nicks sat in the audience, dreaming of the ways they could follow these bands’ lead. 1967 was an incredibly potent year, particularly in San Francisco, where the Summer of Love redefined art, music, and community from June to October.
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Nicks was part of that scene, too, albeit a lesser-known part. The then-aspiring musician had just moved to San Francisco with her parents, and while she didn’t have a massive social circle, she did have access to music that would change her life forever.
A Life-Changing Moment At Winterland Ballroom
Before she would become the iconic frontwoman of the British-American rock band Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks was one of countless teenagers populating the music scene of San Francisco, California, in the late 1960s. Nicks had moved to the Bay Area with her parents during her senior year of high school, leaving her without much of a social circle. Luckily, the famous Haight-Ashbury music scene was community enough following the decade-defining Summer of Love.
One fateful night in 1967, Nicks went to catch a Buffalo Springfield concert at the Winterland Ballroom. She described the pivotal moment in a 2011 interview with The Guardian, and while she didn’t specify the exact date she saw the psychedelic rock band, there’s a good chance it was Buffalo Springfield’s Thanksgiving Day show in November. When the musical supergroup started to play their B-side, “Rock & Roll Woman,” Nicks was enraptured.
“Hearing this for the first time was like seeing the future. When I heard the lyrics, I thought, ‘That’s me!’” Nicks recalled. “They probably wrote it about Janis Joplin or someone like that, but I was convinced it was about me. I saw Buffalo Springfield at the Winterland Ballroom at the time, and it could not have been better. They were a very Californian band, and it was the height of the Haight-Ashbury scene. I was new and didn’t know anyone. But music was everywhere. Everyone was listening to the radio all the time. I was living in the middle of a musical revolution.”
Stevie Nicks and Her Favorite Buffalo Springfield Track
Buffalo Springfield’s “Rock & Roll Woman” might have convinced Stevie Nicks of her destiny to be a rock and roll woman herself, but that wasn’t the only Buffalo track that spoke to Nicks in a major way. One year before Buffalo Springfield released Buffalo Springfield Again, which included “Rock & Roll Woman,” the psychedelic rock band released perhaps their best-known and most enduring hit, “For What It’s Worth.”
Like so many other music lovers at the time, Nicks was a huge fan of the song about the Sunset Strip curfew riots in Los Angeles in November 1966. The future Fleetwood Mac frontwoman would sing along to the song on the radio while she drove around California from her jobs to rehearsals to shows. Nicks knew she would cover the Buffalo Springfield classic one day. In 2020, she fulfilled the promise she made to herself decades ago.
“Everybody has their own meaning of that song, but I think that somewhere in Stephen Stills’ amazing songwriting, visionary, whatever you want to say, for what it’s worth, he managed in that song to cover everything. To cover everything that everybody’s complaining about and fighting against in the entire world,” Nicks said in an Apple Music 1 interview. “You wouldn’t have had any idea exactly what it was about, but you could take it all in to be about anything that you personally wanted it to be about.”
“I put everything I have into doing an interpretation of a song written by a man and sung by a man,” she continued, “especially such a famous man and songwriter as Stephen Stills. So, I really did try to stay as within Stephen’s realm as I could.”
Photo by Fin Costello/Redferns
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