“Gypsy” is one of Fleetwood Mac’s most famous songs, but not everyone knows the meaning behind the “velvet underground” in the Stevie Nicks-penned track. Here’s how Nicks explained the lyrics and what the velvet underground really means.
Stevie Nicks sang about the ‘velvet underground’ in the Fleetwood Mac song ‘Gypsy’
“Gypsy” is one of Fleetwood Mac’s most popular songs, but it wasn’t intended for the band. Stevie Nicks wrote the track for her 1981 debut solo album, Bella Donna. She didn’t have room for it on the record, so the singer decided to include it on Fleetwood Mac’s 1982 Mirage album (per SongFacts).
Drummer and founding member Mick Fleetwood has said “Gypsy” is one of his favorite Fleetwood Mac songs. “It really crystallizes that whole period of the early 1980s, when we were in our mid-30s and beginning to look back at our lost youth,” he said.
On the track, Nicks sings about something called “the velvet underground.” The lyrics go, “So I’m back, to the velvet underground / Back to the floor, that I love / To a room with some lace and paper flowers / Back to the gypsy that I was.”
But what exactly is the velvet underground Nicks wrote about in the Fleetwood Mac song “Gypsy”?
Stevie Nicks explained the meaning behind the ‘velvet underground’ lyric in Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Gypsy’
During a Fleetwood Mac concert at The Manchester Arena in 2015, Stevie Nicks explained what the “velvet underground” lyric in “Gypsy” means. Her speech was recorded and posted on YouTube.
The song references the time before Nicks was famous, when she lived with her then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham. They slept on a mattress on the floor of their shared apartment and shopped at thrift stores.
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“In 1968, Lindsey and I lived in San Francisco, and we were in a really good band that was opening for pretty much all of the San Francisco bands that were very, very famous at that time,” Nicks said, naming musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Santana, and Creedence Clearwater among the artists she had opened for. “We were really, like, living the dream,” she said. “We were young, and it was just fantastic.”
Nicks explained that the velvet underground referenced in “Gypsy” was a clothing store. “There was a rumor that there was a store in downtown San Francisco where all the rock and roll girls got their clothes, the ones that could afford it. And I thought well, I’m saving my money, so I will go up there and I will buy myself something at this fantastic store. And this store was called The Velvet Underground,” she told the audience.
Standing in the same shop where her idol, Janis Joplin, had stood before made an impression on the young Stevie Nicks. “So I went up there and I found the store, and I walked into this really beautiful store with really beautiful things that I was pretty much sure there was nothing I could really afford there,” the singer described. “But I was standing where I absolutely knew that Janis Joplin stood. And I was feeling the love.”
The singer said she had a ‘premonition’ at the store
Stevie Nicks claimed she had a “premonition” while standing in The Velvet Underground store that inspired the Fleetwood Mac song “Gypsy.” She said she could see the future, and what she saw was Fleetwood Mac.
“And when I left that store without anything, I was a different person,” Nicks said. “Because I knew at that point that my dream was going to come true even though the whole rest of the world – my world – was saying it’s never gonna happen.”
She told the crowd of fans that she wanted to share the velvet underground story because she didn’t want them to give up on their dreams. Nicks told them to ignore the “jaded people” who told them they couldn’t do it or weren’t good enough.
“Because that’s not true,” she concluded. “You can and you will. You just have to reach up into those stars and grab one and bring it down to you and take it to The Velvet Underground and stay there.”
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