Some hit songs look forward. Gypsy looks back — deliberately, longingly, and from the very top of the world. Stevie Nicks wrote it around 1979, when Fleetwood Mac had become, in her words, “very famous, very fast,” and everything in the song reaches in the opposite direction: to a San Francisco apartment, a mattress on the floor, and the penniless young singer she had been before the fame arrived. She nearly kept it for herself, demoing it for her first solo album. Instead she saved it for the band, and by the time Fleetwood Mac released it in 1982, the song had quietly taken on a second meaning — as a farewell to the best friend Nicks was losing to leukemia.
It became the second-biggest hit from Mirage, the album that put Fleetwood Mac back at number one in America, and the subject of what was then the most expensive music video ever made. Few records so gentle carry so much.
Back to the Floor
Nicks has explained the song’s imagery many times, and it is all autobiography. Before Fleetwood Mac, she and Lindsey Buckingham were a struggling duo in California, getting by on her wages as a waitress and cleaning lady. They could not afford a bed frame, so they slept on a king-size mattress placed directly on the floor, dressed with vintage coverlets, a lamp beside it. “Back to the floor, that I love,” she sings, “to a room with some lace and paper flowers — back to the gypsy that I was.” Even the song’s “velvet underground” is literal: the Velvet Underground was a clothing store in downtown San Francisco where Janis Joplin and Grace Slick had bought their clothes.
The habit never left her. In a 2009 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Nicks said that when her famous life starts to feel cluttered, she still takes her mattress off its frame, puts it on the floor, and decorates it with lace and paper flowers. Gypsy, written in 1978–79 at the height of the Rumours whirlwind, is that gesture turned into a song: a superstar crawling back, in her imagination, to the last place she had been simply herself.
The Song She Saved for the Band
The song almost belonged to a different career. In early 1980, Nicks demoed Gypsy with Tom Moncrieff while preparing Bella Donna, her debut solo album. Bella Donna, released in 1981, became a multi-platinum number one and proved she could thrive outside the band. But Gypsy stayed in the drawer — she ultimately decided to save it for Fleetwood Mac.
Her other new songs for the album underlined where her head was: That’s Alright, another of her three contributions, dated all the way back to the Buckingham Nicks days of 1974 — a survivor from the very era Gypsy was looking back at.
The band she saved it for was regrouping. After the exhausting Tusk tour, Fleetwood Mac had taken a year-long hiatus during which Nicks, Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood all made solo records. For the follow-up, Fleetwood wanted two things: to record outside Los Angeles, and to retreat from the wilful experimentation of Tusk toward the polished, commercial sound of Rumours. The result was Mirage, the band’s thirteenth studio album — and Gypsy would be its emotional centrepiece.
Five Weeks at the Château
Mirage was recorded between the spring of 1981 and March 1982. The band spent five weeks at the Château d’Hérouville in France — the residential studio Elton John had made famous — before finishing the record at Larrabee Sound and the Record Plant in Los Angeles. The château was producer Ken Caillat’s find, chosen to satisfy Fleetwood’s wish to work somewhere new; the band even hired a chef, though Caillat later recalled that Nicks and Buckingham complained about the food and the absence of television until he imported video machines loaded with taped baseball games. Production was credited to Buckingham, Richard Dashut, Caillat and the band, the same team that had built Rumours and Tusk, and Caillat has said his technical ambition this time was simple: to make an album that sounded even better than Rumours.
On Gypsy, that team wrapped Nicks’ backward glance in the full Fleetwood Mac shimmer: Christine McVie’s keyboards, the Mick Fleetwood–John McVie rhythm section playing with what Cashbox called a lovely eloquence, and Buckingham — the man the song’s memories are shared with — supplying the chiming guitar lines and lacy backing vocals that Billboard praised in what it called an archetypal Stevie Nicks performance. The song is four and a half minutes of polished soft rock, but its polish serves a daydream, and everyone in the studio seems to have understood that.
For Robin
What the polish could not hide was grief. Robin Snyder Anderson had been Nicks’ best friend since the two met at Arcadia High School in Los Angeles at fourteen or fifteen; she became Nicks’ vocal coach — footage survives of her preparing Nicks before concerts on the Rumours tour — and her closest confidante, the one person who, by all accounts, could calm the singer down in a matter of seconds. The night before Bella Donna was released, Nicks learned that Robin had leukemia and perhaps three months to live. Robin was pregnant, and chose to carry the baby; her son Matthew was born three months premature, and Robin died three days later, in October 1982.
As her friend was dying, Nicks dedicated Gypsy to her. The song she had written about one vanishing world had become an elegy for another, and Nicks found it extremely difficult to sing in concert for a long time afterwards. It gives the record’s famous refrain — “lightning strikes, maybe once, maybe twice” — the weight of someone counting the moments that cannot be repeated.
The Most Expensive Video Ever Made
Mirage was released on 2 July 1982 and returned Fleetwood Mac to number one on the Billboard 200 for five weeks, their first American chart-topping album since Rumours; it was eventually certified double platinum in the United States. Gypsy, issued as the album’s second single on 18 August 1982, peaked at number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, number 4 on the Mainstream Rock chart and number 9 on the Adult Contemporary chart, while topping the contemporary hit radio chart compiled by Radio & Records — second only to Hold Me among the album’s singles. Its B-side was a curiosity: Cool Water, the old Bob Nolan standard, featuring a rare backing vocal from John McVie.
Then came the video. Directed by Russell Mulcahy, the Gypsy clip — an elaborate forest fantasy full of costumes and dancers — was the highest-budget music video ever produced at the time, and it became MTV’s very first “World Premiere Video.” Behind the gloss, the shoot was miserable: Nicks had entered rehab for cocaine addiction shortly before filming and had to leave to make the three-day shoot, and she dreaded the scene in which she had to dance with Buckingham, her ex. “I certainly didn’t want to be in his arms,” she later said. The video received a Special Merit award at the 1983 American Video Awards.
Critics heard the craft in it. Mike Mettler of Sound & Vision has called Gypsy one of Nicks’ finest songs, singling out its wash of wordless harmonies and Buckingham’s understated guitar solo, and Buckingham himself named it, alongside Eyes of the World, as one of the two tracks that best showed off Mirage‘s production. The Guardian and Paste both placed it in their top tens of the band’s greatest songs, and in 2017 Nicks recorded a new acoustic version to serve as the theme of the Netflix drama series Gypsy — the songwriter, decades on, singing her younger self back to the floor one more time. That may be the secret of the record’s durability. Other Fleetwood Mac songs dramatize the band’s famous fractures; Gypsy is the one about what existed before the fractures, and about holding on to it while everything — fame, money, a dying friend — pulled the other way.
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