Revisiting Stevie Nicks' 1983 'Saturday Night Live' Performance (original) (raw)

On Oct. 12, Stevie Nicks will finally return to Saturday Night Live, over 40 years since her only other appearance on the show on Dec. 10, 1983. This year, she'll serve as the musical guest while pop star Ariana Grande plays the role of host.

What songs Nicks will perform next month remains to be seen, but now feels like a good time to revisit that 1983 episode, which featured Flip Wilson as host and saw the Fleetwood Mac singer showing off two of her then-recently released solo songs, "Stand Back" and "Nightbird." Both came from The Wild Heart, Nicks' second solo album.

It may have been a "solo" album, but The Wild Heart — and specifically those two songs Nicks performed on SNL — did not come to be without the help of friends, several of them brand new to Nicks.

"Stand Back" featured none other than Prince, whom Nicks called up one day when he happened to be in Los Angeles. He agreed to get together, picking her up at nine a.m. and driving to his house at breakneck speed.

"Once we're there, he just wrote the song, playing the piano, saying to me, 'You're writing the words,'" Nicks told MTV in 1983, noting that Prince insisted his piano playing be left uncredited. "It was amazing. Then the air conditioning broke down, and I'm sitting in front of a fan telling him, 'You have to make me a cassette — I'm not going back without it.' He did, we left, and the recording studio broke down completely. But the song's really neat. It was interesting because it was real ... disciplined. Neither of us felt like rocking and rolling at nine o'clock in the morning with no air conditioning, but we just...did it, and we're real proud of ourselves."

And then there was "Nightbird," a song Nicks co-wrote with another new friend, albeit a far less famous one named Sandy Stewart, a singer, songwriter and keyboardist from Houston. Nicks' had received a tape of Stewart's via a friend and immediately wrote the lyrics to "Nightbird" that same day.

"From that day onward, Sandy and I considered ourselves...kind of the Rodgers and Hammerstein of rock," Nicks explained to MTV. "I've never really written with anyone before. But now...we wrote 'Nightbird' in a couple of hours, sitting in my living room, with her synthesizer and me pacing."

Watch Stevie Nick's Perform 'Stand Back' on 'SNL' in 1983

Watch Stevie Nick's Perform 'Nightbird' on 'SNL' in 1983

Stevie Nicks, Proven Solo Artist

As a band, Fleetwood Mac never appeared on SNL, though Lindsey Buckingham did twice – once in February of 1982 and again in November 1983, just about a month before Nicks went on herself.

"You always have to please somebody," Nicks told The Arizona Republic (via stevienicks.info) in September of 1983. "[_The Wild Heart_] is letting me go. I'm all right. This is two records now. So the first record wasn't just a fluke accident. And I can go and write and dance and do children's stories and do whatever I want now and no one is going to be saying to me: 'You still aren't a proven solo artist.'"

At present, Nicks only has two live concerts scheduled for the rest of 2024: Sept. 24 in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Sept. 28 in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Ranking Every Stevie Nicks Solo Album

Fleetwood Mac made her a star, but her own records also helped seal her legend.

Gallery Credit: Annie Zaleski