Stevie Nicks was yelled off a stage by Janice Joplain. She has been telling this story for 55 years. She says, “Being yelled off the stage by Janice Joplain was one of the greatest honors of my life. Not one of the most embarrassing moments, not one of the most frustrating, one of the greatest honors. This is the story of why.
” 1968, San Francisco, Stevie Nicks was 19 years old. She had dropped out of San Jose State University to pursue music full-time. She was singing with a band called Fritz, a California rock band that included a young guitarist named Lindseay Buckingham, who would become her musical partner for the next 50 years.
Fritz was a good band, not yet a great one. They had a small following in the Bay Area and were building something the way bands build things. slowly, show by show, learning their craft in real time. And they got the opportunity to open for Janice Joplain, not once, multiple times between 1968 and 1970. Fritz opened for Janice Joplain and Jimmyi Hendris at concerts in San Francisco, at the big shows that the city was producing in those years when the scene was at its peak and the stages were full of people who were changing what American music was. For Stevie Nicks, these shows were school. The first time she saw Janice Joplain, she did not recognize her. This is what Stevie Nicks told Q magazine in 2008. She said, “The first time I saw her, I didn’t know who she was because she wasn’t all dressed up. She was backstage
in ordinary clothes, small and wild-haired and not performing. and she was telling the band that was on before her, who had gone over their time to get off her stage. The specific language Janice used by Stevie Nicks’s account was direct. I thought, Stevie said, “Whoa.
” The voice that was telling the previous band to leave was the voice of someone who had no interest in managing the distance between what she felt and what she showed. Who did not soften things when unsoftened was more accurate. Who was small and ordinarylooking backstage and completely extraordinary when she decided to be. Stevie Nicks was 19 years old and standing backstage in San Francisco watching a woman she had not recognized 10 minutes earlier tell an entire band to get off a stage with full authority and zero apology. Whoa. 30 minutes later, Janice Joplain walked onto that stage. Stevie Nicks described this transformation in her Q interview and in interviews across the decades with the specific wonder of someone who has been thinking about it for 50 years and still finds it remarkable, she said. Anyway, they wrapped it up and 30 minutes later
on comes Janice. Very different. feathers in her hair, fantastic bell bottoms, really high heeled shoes, a top with little bell sleeves in silky beautiful material, beads, wild, crazy curly hair. I was blown away by her. The woman who had been backstage telling people to get off her stage had become in 30 minutes something else entirely.
Stevie Nicks watched Janice Joplain walk onto that stage and command it. She watched the crowd respond. She watched the connection form between the performer and the audience. The specific electrical thing that happens when a great performer and a receptive crowd find each other.
She had not seen this before. Not like this. What Stevie Nicks took from that hour and a half is documented across many interviews across many decades. She said, “I learned more from her during that hour and a half, watching how she dealt with the crowd, how she paced herself, how she sang, than any hour and a half in my life.
Not a class, not a teacher, not a mentor who sat with her and explained what performance was. One hour and a half watching a woman work,” she said. Janice Joplain had a connection with the audience that I had not seen before. And when she left the stage, I knew that a little bit of my destiny had changed.
I would search to find that connection that I had seen between Janice and her audience. In a blink of an eye, she changed my life. Read those sentences. In a blink of an eye, she changed my life. That is the sentence Stevie Nicks has been returning to for 55 years. The blink 30 minutes between the ordinary backstage person telling bands to get off her stage and the performer in feathers and bells who walked out and held 400 people in her hand.
The change, everything that Stevie Nicks would become as a performer was shaped by what she saw in that hour and a half. the way she moves on stage, the way she commands the space, the draping chiffon and the ribbons on the microphone stand, and the shawls that she described once as having come from watching Janice and finding her own version of it.
She said, “She changed my life.” There is the other half of this story, the specific half that involves Fritz going over their allotted time. Fritz was in the habit apparently of running long. Or at least on this occasion they ran long and Janice Joplain was the headline act. And the headline act had a set time and Fritz was still on stage when the set time arrived.
So Janice did what Janice did. She came to the wings. She called out. Her voice, by every account of people who heard it in an ordinary room rather than through a microphone, was already extraordinary, even when she was just talking. And she told Fritz to get off her stage. Stevie Nicks heard this from the stage.
She has said across many interviews, “Being yelled off the stage by Janice Joplain was one of the greatest honors of my life.” She means this. She is not being ironic. She is not being philosophical. She means it literally. The specific quality of being yelled at by someone this real, this present, this completely themselves, even when backstage in ordinary clothes.
That is an honor because it means you were close enough to be yelled at because it means she was real enough to yell. The woman who yelled her off the stage was the same woman who 30 minutes later changed her life. Janice Joplain died on October 4th, 1970. Stevie Nicks was 22 years old.
Fritz would dissolve two years later. Stevie and Lindseay Buckingham would record a demo album together. They would spend years being almost famous before joining Fleetwood Mack in 1975. In 1975, when Stevie Nicks stepped onto a stage as a member of Fleetwood Mack, she was 27 years old. the age Janice was when she died.
Everything Stevie had learned in that hour and a half. The connection, the presence, the way to hold a crowd, the specific transformation from ordinary to extraordinary in the 30 minutes between backstage and the microphone was in her performance. She went on, she became one of the most famous female rock performers of the century.
She filled arenas. She had hit records. She influenced a generation of singers who came after her the way she had been influenced. And she always said where it started. She owns a strand of Janice Joplain’s stage beads. Somewhere in her home in whatever the equivalent of a shrine is, when you don’t call it a shrine, she has the physical object, a strand of beads that Janice Joplain wore on stage.
The specific weight of that, the connection between the person who was changed and the person who did the changing, held in a strand of beads she got clean from cocaine in the mid 1980s partly because she thought about Janice. She said, “I saw how they went down, Jimmy Hendris, Janice Joplain.” And there was a part of me that said, “I want to go down with them.
” And another part of me that said, “Isn’t it really very sad that Janice Joplain is not still here? The death that happened in 1970 was still operating in her in the 1980s. Still the example, still the lesson, still the reason to choose differently?” Here is what this story asks you. When were you yelled at by someone you admired, told to move, to get out of the way, to make room, and instead of shame, what you felt was, “I was close enough to be yelled at by someone this real.
” Stevie Nicks was 19 years old, and her band went over their time, and Janice Joplain told them to get off her stage. She has been calling it one of the greatest honors of her life ever since because the woman who yelled at her was completely entirely wholly herself. Backstage and on stage and in the wings and in the 30 minutes between always exactly herself.
In a blink of an eye, she changed Stevie Nick’s life. Stevie Nicks is 76 years old. She still says so. The beads are still there. The lesson never went away. Subscribe.
