When MTV launched in 1981, it heralded a new era of promotion that centered on music videos. They were works of art that were often distinct from the song that accompanied them, and that in turn helped develop new filming techniques and technological advances.
First, though, there had to be a silly season featuring a new era of victims who were moving in the wrong direction. Mainstream television had already learned the adage about never working with children or animals, but in the rock world, many still had to work that out for themselves. Stevie Nicks was one of them.
The Fleetwood Mac star had ambitious plans for her 1983 solo single “Stand Back,” but it became an expensive and dangerous mistake.
This was to be “my first and last foray into writing a video,” Nicks said in 2012’s I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution. “I decided it was going to be a Civil War scene. It was insane; it didn’t go with the song at all. It was so bad, it was almost good. I tried to act, which was horrific. We used a house in Beverly Hills that we accidentally set on fire. I almost got killed riding a horse: He went straight into a grove of trees and the crew in the car driving alongside screamed, ‘Jump!’
“So we watched it back and I said, ‘This can never come out. I don’t care if it cost $1 million.’ Irving Azoff, my manager, said, ‘You’re an idiot.’ We knew ‘Stand Back’ was gonna be a big hit and we had to have a video, so we hired another director and I paid for two complete videos.”
Original director Brian Grant admits that “there was a lot of experimentation, some good and some bad. As a director, it was like somebody else was paying for me to attend film school. For Stevie Nicks’ ‘Stand Back,’ I dreamed up the idea of doing Gone with the Wind in three minutes. I wanted to direct feature films, and I thought this would help prove myself. When Stevie watched the video, she hugged me and said, ‘I look fat.’ And she redid the video with somebody else – a simple, boring, dance-routine video. Such is life.”
Watch Stevie Nicks’ Second ‘Stand Back’ Video
