Onstage, she’s still an aesthetic pioneer—her near-butt-length hair, fingerless gloves, knee-high black suede platform boots, and finely tailored dress in tatters all adding up to what she herself calls “the Stevie Nicks thing.” It’s a persona she’s said is drawn from the slinkiness of Grace Slick, the “humbleness” of Jimi Hendrix, and the attitude of Janis Joplin. Nicks had observed all three and opened for Hendrix and Joplin just out of high school in the late sixties as part of Fritz, her first musical partnership with Fleetwood Mac’s intense virtuoso guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. Buckingham is, with toweringly tall oddball drummer Mick Fleetwood, one of two ex-boyfriends Nicks performs with every night, a five-foot-one pixie singing with raspy conviction about her own heartbreak and resilience on the same stage as two men who’ve caused her pain. Or is it vice-versa?

Fleetwood Mac is, to fans, not just a band but a riveting 40-plus-year soap opera involving the loss of members to schizophrenia and a religious cult; the arrival in 1974 of gorgeous, drama-filled young couple Stevie and Lindsey; and the cocaine-and-alcohol-fueled divorces and affairs behind 1977’s Rumours, which became the then-fastest-selling album of all time. You don’t come to one of their shows just for the music; you come to watch them masochistically stare down their past before a live audience. You come to watch Stevie and Lindsey—who’ve known each other since high school—look into each other’s eyes and harmonize on the songs they wrote about each other, in anger, long ago: “Dreams” (by Stevie, “Now here you go again / You say you want your freedom / Well, who am I to keep you down?”), and “Go Your Own Way” and “Never Going Back Again” (by Lindsey, and meaner). You come to see Stevie dance in front of Mick’s drum kit, knowing full well she had an affair with him after her breakup with Lindsey, while Mick was married—as Lindsey wails away on guitar and looks on. You come because you feel for the quiet, steady man on bass, John McVie (the only guy in the band Stevie hasn’t slept with), who had to lay down the rhythm track on songs like “You Make Loving Fun,” written by his ex-wife, now-­retired keyboardist and singer Christine McVie, about her affair with the band’s lighting director and how she’d never been so satisfied by a man before. You come because this is a band that has not tried to hide their genuinely fucked-up dynamic, which plays out deliciously onstage in banter about the state of “the war” and in the way Stevie always leaves to put on her shawls right in the middle of one of Lindsey’s blazing guitar solos. Has she just had enough of his ego? Or is she magnanimously ceding the floor, only to return moments later to show him how it’s really done? To see Fleetwood Mac play live, knowing what you and everyone knows about their turmoil, substance abuse, and brushes with death, is to see layers of meaning in every gesture and to marvel that they’ve survived long enough to make it to this very show.

“They are ­absolutely on a journey, and they have absolutely not given up. And it’s nothing to do with being in love. It’s to do with love itself and the premise of a huge underlying respect from whence they have come and from whence they started their journey together. And I think they truly advocate that: ‘We can end our days saying, We didn’t run away from this.’ ”

“My generation fought very hard for feminism, and we fought very hard to not be labeled as you had to have a husband or you had to be in a relationship, or you were somehow not a cool chick,” she says. “And now I’m seeing that start to come around again, where people say to you, ‘Well, what do you mean you don’t have a boyfriend? You don’t want to have one? You don’t want to be married?’ And you’re like, ‘Well, no, I don’t, actually. I’m fine.’ And they find a lot of reasons why you’re not fine. But it just seems to be coming back. Being able to take care of myself is something that my mom really instilled in me,” she says. “I can remember her always saying, ‘If nothing else, I will teach you to be independent.’ ”

“I would like to dedicate this song to a girl, a lady. Her name is Jada and she wrote the most beautiful article about me,” the Fleetwood Mac singer said.
“She got something that nobody that has ever written about me before has ever gotten,” continued Ms. Nicks. “And I just wanted to tell her how much I appreciate that.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMVBP_0OOZY]