After splitting from Buckingham, Nicks began dating Eagles’ Don Henley, although the touring schedules meant they didn’t get much time to see each other. (excerpt from Faroutmag.)
Feeling lonely, Nicks started sleeping with her fellow bandmate Mick Fleetwood, later telling Ophrah Winfrey that “it was a doomed thing [that] caused pain for everybody”. The result of this complicated set-up was one of Nicks’ greatest and most personal songs, ‘Sara’, taken from Fleetwood Mac’s 1979 album Tusk.
At the time, Fleetwood was married to Pattie Boyd’s sister, Jenny Boyd, who had recently cheated on him with his bandmate Bob Weston. Thus, during a rocky period in his relationship, it wasn’t hard for Fleetwood to find himself falling for Nicks.
Reflecting on this period, he wrote in his book, Play On: “Eventually I fell in love with [Nicks] and it was chaotic, it was on the road, and it was a crazy love affair that went on longer than any of us really remember — probably several years by the end of it.”
Although Fleetwood and Nicks’ relationship was an affair, she was still devastated to discover that he had been seeing someone else, a woman named Sara Recor. Fleetwood and Recor eventually married in 1988, and remained a good friend of Nicks, despite the hurt she initially felt.
“I remember -Stevie Nicks Says- the night I wrote it. I sat up with a very good friend of mine whose name is Sara, who was married to Mick Fleetwood. She likes to think it’s completely about her, but it’s really not completely about her. It’s about me, about her, about Mick, about Fleetwood Mac. It’s about all of us at that point.”
Nicks continued: “There’s little bits about each one of us in that song and when it had all the other verses, it really covered a vast bunch of people. ‘Sara’ was the kind of song you could fall in love with because I fell in love with it.”
However, for a long time, the song was rumoured to be about Henley, who even spoke to GQ about ‘Sara’ in 1991.Nicks was angry when she found out that Henley had so openly discussed such private topics with the media, although she revealed in a 2014 interview with Billboard that his claims were partly true. She said: “Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara.
“That relationship destroyed Mick’s marriage to Jenny (Boyd, Patti's sister), who was the sweetest person in the world,” Nicks wrote. “So did we really think that we were going to come out of it unscathed? So then what happened to me, my best friend falling in love with him and moving into his house and neither of them telling me? It could not have been worse. Payback is a b****. Bad karma all around. Here’s that song in a nutshell: Don’t break up other people’s marriages. It will never work and will haunt you for the rest of your miserable days.”
Nicks based “Beauty and the Beast” on the 1946 Jean Cocteau film.
It was definitely about Mick,” Nicks confirmed. “But it’s also based on the 1946 Jean Cocteau movie. I first saw it on TV one night when Mick and I were first together, and I always thought of Mick as being sort of Beauty and the Beast-esque, because he’s so tall and he had beautiful coats down to here, and clothes made by little fairies up in the attic, I always thought, so he was that character in a lot of ways And also, it matched our story because Mick and I could never be. A, because Mick was married and then divorced and that was not good, and B, because of Fleetwood Mac.”
