Credit: Far Out / Stevie Nicks / Alamy
Wed 27 May 2026 19:30, UK
David Crosby didn’t think that music needed to be pitted against each other.
The entire creative process relied on people going inside themselves and pulling out something that no one had ever heard before, so why the hell would you try to measure that next to whatever some other songwriter had going on at the same time? It didn’t make any sense for him to think in those terms, but he could at least observe when some artists were trying their best to follow in their idols’ footsteps.
Then again, everyone is a child of their influence in one form or another. Some of the biggest names when Crosby was growing up were people like The Beatles, and even if he had a more refined palette than most of his contemporaries, there was no way that he didn’t learn his fair share of lessons from what everyone from Joni Mitchell to Bob Dylan had to teach him when it came to writing lyrics.
But what Crosby, Stills, and Nash did in the late 1960s did end up having a bit of an adverse effect on the rest of the world. The entire California rock scene knew that they were the future of what music could be about, and since The Byrds were going in a slightly country direction, there was a lot more rootsiness about everything that was coming out. People like Tom Petty were a breath of fresh air, but that only came after listening to bands like the Eagles try to make their own rootsy rock and roll.
And let’s not forget about Fleetwood Mac, either. Compared to the blues band that they started out as, ‘The Mac’ were virtually unrecognisable when they got Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks into the fold back in the day. They were interested in making music that was a bit more spectral, and while Crosby was interested in seeing where the genre was going, he felt that Stevie Nicks wasn’t all that interesting compared to what he saw back in the day.
You have to remember that nothing could have compared to what someone who played at Woodstock had seen, but Crosby felt that a lot of Nicks’s moves had been secondhand compared to everyone else. No one could have imagined ‘The Gold Dust Woman’ being any more perfect whenever she played, but Crosby was convinced that Grace Slick would have been able to wipe the floor with her.
Slick was one of the most badass singers to ever touch a microphone, and Crosby was convinced that she was in a completely different league than Nicks, saying, “When [Jefferson Airplane] got Grace in the band, that was just beyond belief. She was stunning. She had a power and intensity onstage that Stevie Nicks should only ever dream she could get.” That’s a bold statement, but it’s also one that Nicks might actually agree with to a certain degree as well.
Further reading: From The Vault
There was no sense in trying to top what Slick was doing, but Nicks figured that the next best thing was for her to forge her own path. She was never going to be the same wild frontwoman that Slick was whenever she sang ‘Rhiannon’, so the next best thing was for her to make music that had a bit more atmosphere to it, which probably explains why so many of her songs sound like they’re practically floating throughout their runtime.
So while Nicks could have tried her best trying to be a second-rate version of Slick, she knew that she was better off trying to be herself. No one ever got to the top of the charts trying to be another version of their idols, and if Crosby could take a few cues from Mitchell, Nicks could do the same thing with Slick.
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