The Epic Track: “Edge of Seventeen”

Editor’s Note: There are certain tracks that are, well, “epic” — memorable, larger than life, carved into music history. In this series, we look at one of them.

***

Though Christine McVie wrote more of their hits and Lindsey Buckingham played a larger role in shaping the band’s overall sound, Stevie Nicks was the breakout star of Fleetwood Mac. Her debut solo album, 1981’s Bella Donna, cemented this from a public standpoint. Selling over four million copies and featuring a quartet of Top 40 singles, it eclipsed all other Fleetwood Mac solo records, including her subsequent albums. More than forty years since its release, Bella Donna remains Stevie Nicks’ best-selling album by a wide margin and its songs dominate her concerts, especially the track that opened the record’s second side: “Edge of Seventeen.”

The album’s first two singles were bigger hits – “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” and “Leather and Lace” both reached Billboard’s Top 10 – but “Edge of Seventeen” encapsulated her musical identity more succinctly than anything else on the record.

Bella Donna’s significance to Nicks went far beyond commercial considerations, or even her need for space from Fleetwood Mac after a long, fractious tour. As a prolific songwriter, she needed an outlet for her songs.

“[With Fleetwood Mac] there’s only one album every two or three years and, as a writer, two or three songs every two or three years is not much,” she told journalist Sylvie Simmons in a 1981 interview for Kerrang! “I write all the time – sometimes three or four a month – so I have such an incredible backlog of material that there’s no reason for me to ever have to write another song.”

One upside of this wealth of unrecorded songs, accumulated over a decade, was that it made Bella Donna a portrait of the singer’s life before and after achieving fame. Not that this was her intention, as she told Blair Jackson from the magazine BAM. “I didn’t pick out the songs on Bella Donna because I wanted to document my life. I picked them because I liked them. It just sort of worked out that way.”

One of the newer songs on Bella Donna, “Edge of Seventeen” drew lyrical inspiration from multiple sources. The initial spark was the deaths of both John Lennon and her own uncle Jonathan. Nicks explained in Rolling Stone that, “The white-winged dove in the song is a spirit that is leaving a body, and I felt a great loss at how both Johns were taken.” At the same time, it drew accidental inspiration from something that was very much alive, the marriage of Tom and Jane Petty. When Jane told her about meeting Tom Petty at “the age of seventeen”, Nicks misheard it as “the edge of seventeen”, giving the song its title.

In a sense, Tom Petty also gave Bella Donna its sound. When Atlantic Records president Doug Morris, whose company was handling distribution of the label Stevie Nicks founded to distribute her solo work, asked the singer about producers for her first solo record, she told him that she wanted, “Whoever produces Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.” A dinner meeting with Jimmy Iovine, who produced the band’s 1979 breakthrough Damn the Torpedoes, led to both a personal and professional relationship with Nicks.

The risks of being romantically involved with someone you work with aside, Iovine was well aware of the professional challenge that working with Nicks posed. “The biggest challenge of Bella Donna for me was having someone coming out of the gigantic rock band that had big hits and total credibility – and to have to create a sound behind the voice of one of the singers.” To accomplish this, he recruited musicians comfortable in a band environment, such as pianist Roy Bittan, guitarist Waddy Wachtel, and members of the Heartbreakers. “I used musicians from bands,” the producer explained in the liner notes for a 2016 reissue of the record. “‘Cause studio guys, their thing can fit on anything. And they become sometimes very neutral sounding…Everybody I used had to have a real distinct sound.”

Since these musicians were also busy, the producer and artist had to work around their other commitments, requiring a mix of patience and preparation. While Iovine was finishing work on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album Hard Promises, to which Nicks contributed vocals on two tracks, Nicks spent two months working through the songs with background vocalists Sharon Celani and Lori Perry and Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench. “We played and sang all the songs on Bella Donna over and over until we had them down perfect,” Nicks told Chris Neal from Performing Songwriter. “It was so much fun. We were like Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills & Nash, living in this great house and making music in Laurel Canyon.”

That balance between work ethic and freewheeling enthusiasm ensured that recording the album was efficient but not sterile. Nicks also enjoyed the freedom to arrange songs to her taste without getting bogged down in creative negotiations with Lindsey Buckingham. “On this album, I didn’t have to fight to do my songs the way I wanted to. The other players just did them the way I wrote them, and they came out great,” she explained to Blair Jackson. “We didn’t do a ton of overdubs. We didn’t put on 50,000 guitars because we didn’t have Waddy around long enough to do 50,000 guitar overdubs. We were lucky to get him to do one guitar part.”

One guitar part from Wachtel proved more than enough for Edge of Seventeen. His simple yet distinctive guitar figure, with its accidental echoes of the recent Police track “Bring on the Night,” made Nicks rethink how to approach recording the song. ‘It would have been one of my piano songs,” the singer commented in the liner notes for the 2007 compilation Crystal Visions, “If Waddy Wachtel hadn’t come into the studio and added the amazing guitar riff at the beginning of the song.”

The combination of ear-catching riff and personal emotions Nicks conveyed in her passionate vocal struck a universal chord with listeners. While it just missed the Top 10 – peaking at #11 on Billboard’s Hot 100 – “Edge of Seventeen” established her presence as a solo artist more concretely than “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” and “Leather and Lace.” Because those songs were duets with Tom Petty and Don Henley respectively, detractors could argue that their success reflected the popularity of her collaborators more so than her own. Not so with “Edge of Seventeen,” which remains her signature song.

Her recent appearance as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live affirmed its status within her work. While she first performed a new single called “The Lighthouse,” for her second number she sang “Edge of Seventeen,” once again accompanied by Waddy Wachtel. Four decades on, the song’s impact was undiminished.

[This article was adapted from the Sonicbond Publishing book Fleetwood Mac in the 1980s.]

-Don Klees

Photo: Getty Images