LEATHER AND LACE

When newbie singer Stacy DuPree meets the one and only Stevie Nicks

The “Queen of Rock and Roll” penned her first song at age 16 and went on to have a widely successful career with Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist. She’s one of the most prolific and iconic female songwriters in American history to date. It’s no wonder people look up to her, especially young, rocking female singers.

For Foam’s first annual music issue, we asked 18-year-old Stacy DuPree of Eisley if she would interview Nicks, one of her musical idols. Naturally, the answer was an emphatic yes. While on the edge of the release of Eisley’s highly anticipated new album, DuPree had the chance to get advice and speak candidly with Nicks about her astonishing career and new greatest hits CD/DVD, Crystal Visions: The Very Best of Stevie Nicks.

SD: You’re coming out with a greatest hits album. What does it mean to have your greatest work on one record?
SN: This is kind of a fun record. I think it’s a little bit revolutionary in that there’s a DVD with it, and on the DVD are my 12 videos that I’ve done since 1981. I actually do a commentary like a director’s commentary, and I talk about each video, how it was made, and why it was done the way it was done. It tells a lot of really funny stories on what was happening while it was all happening.

I was on the Net trying to find any videos I could of your band live and I was wondering, how do you prepare for a show?
It takes us a while, maybe even a few weeks before our vocals are really strong and feeling good.
I still get very nervous before I go on stage. I don’t think that is ever going to go away. I mean, it’s not gone away yet.

You seem so confident, though. I mean, that’s the first thing I thought—that you’re so confident in who you are.
You know what? It’s kind of like this: I’m nervous all day long and I’m not in a very good mood, but when I walk on stage and the show starts, then I calm down. It’s very interesting to me because the nerves don’t carry into the show, but they almost kill me all day long. As far as preparing the vocals, we rehearse for several weeks, and we sing over and over again. The two girls that were singing with me in Bella Donna, the movie [footage] that you’ll see on this record, are still the same two girls that are singing with me now.

Wow. That’s amazing!
Our blend together is very distinct that it makes people feel good. It’s like a warm bowl of soup. It makes people feel good that our singing love affair is still lasting today. So you and your sis should just keep on rocking because eventually it will make people feel good to know that you guys hung together.

Yeah, we’re so close. She just got married, my sister, Sherri, but it will always be the same.
And it just gets better. Your singing just gets better, especially when you sing with somebody.

Yeah, and Sherri and I both have our strengths. There are different things about our voices so that you couldn’t take one of us away.
Right. Well, see you have a really good foundation. It’s extremely important especially now in this day when the music business is, in my opinion, in trouble. The more of a foundation you have, the more clout you have to push yourself through because it’s not easy now. If Lindsey and I were to move to Los Angeles today to get a record deal, I think we’d have a very hard time. I think people would say, “Who are you guys? Are you rockabilly? Are you rock and roll? Are you country rock? What are you?”

I think that’s something that we’ve found, too, and still trying to figure out—what our place in the music industry is. When we got signed, we were a bunch of young girls. I mean, my brother and my cousin are in the group too, but people in the music industry said, “Where are we going to take them?” We had tons of showcases, and finally we ended up going with Warner because we felt a sense of family there.
That’s really good. Warner Bros. is a great label and they certainly have a lot of experience, and you know, just getting a record deal of any kind these days is hard. So if you have a record company behind you, you are certainly on the right track.

We could’ve been forced to do the pop thing and it was really scary for a while not knowing what they were going to want from us. But I’m pretty pleased with how we’ve been treated. You’re such a huge female figure in rock music. Do you feel young female pop singers are altering or taking over the raw beauty of rock and roll? Everything today seems so immediate…
And so manufactured.

Yeah, it gets so annoying. You can only go so far in that direction.
I think that’s what has happened to most of the female artists in this day and age, say in the last five to ten years. I think they are very manufactured, and I think that it probably wasn’t even their own idea. But when people are telling you this is what you need to do…you need to be sexier, you need to wear less clothes…I mean I can’t even imagine somebody saying that to me. I would get up and walk out of the room.

You’re known for your mystique in both your fashion and your music image. Did you ever feel the pressure to be more sexually revealing?
The only time I had that pressure was the Buckingham Nicks cover. I was really pushed into doing that. I didn’t want to do it, and Lindsey, my then-boyfriend, was not very nice about it. I ended up doing it, and I’ll tell you something; when I showed it to my dad six months later, I said, “You know I didn’t want to do this, Daddy.” And he said to me, “Well why didn’t you just say no?” I said I just felt like I had no choice. I’m an extremely modest woman. I guess you can probably see it through my clothes all down through the years with my long chiffon skirts and my big wispy sleeves. I always looked at it like, people wondering what was under all that was much sexier than having all that out there.

That’s one thing I love about you. Mystery can be so powerful.
Yeah, and it always works, and now it’s gone so far beyond that; I think it’s got to come back now because I really don’t think they can go any further. But I will tell you, stand up and say, “I’m not doing that!”

We haven’t gotten much pressure at all, so I’ve been really thankful for that.
I know Warner Bros. is a good label and I wouldn’t think they would push that down your throat, but it certainly has been pushed on a lot of people. It has happened to a lot of those women out there, and once you’ve gone into that, I believe it’s hard for people to take you very seriously. I always said, in my musical life I will never be treated like a second-class citizen. And you know what? I never was. I have never experienced being treated poorly except for the time when we did the Buckingham Nicks cover. So from that day onward, I walked out of that studio a different woman. Today people still tell me, “We loved that cover and it was just so amazing and so beautiful,” and I’m like, “Yeah, it was, I guess.” But the grief it caused me was certainly not worth it. So you still really need to hold your ground. You always need to do that.

Edited by Nadine Cheung