Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  Around this time Stevie’s father bought a bar nearby in the San Gabriel Valley, with the idea of turning it into a music venue where A.J. could come and play. Stevie’s mother cooked some of the bar food, and she and Stevie would often bring the catering to the bar. On weekends they’d sometimes find Jess and his brothers singing with A.J. and some of the players and pickers from the local country music scene. A.J. wanted Stevie to sing with them, but her mother always demurred and said she had homework to do.

  Arcadia High had an annual father-daughter dinner, and in tenth grade Stevie invited Jess to come and sing with her. Jess was a good singer, and he suggested country music star Roger Miller’s current hit song “King of the Road.” They practiced a few times, but when they got up in front of the audience Stevie was so embarrassed that she lost it. She began laughing, couldn’t stop, then Jess started up, and it was a fiasco. Her father later told a magazine interviewer that Stevie wet her pants while on the stage with him.

  Stevie kept up her guitar practice and soon was singing with a school group, the Changin’ Times, inspired by Bob Dylan’s stirring protest song “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” This quartet harmonized on Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon” as sung by Dylan’s folk revival colleagues Peter, Paul & Mary. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” is a rather dark song that speaks to the political and cultural convulsions of the era. The Cold War was raging, the Bomb hung over everything, Martin Luther King was agitating for civil rights, Kennedy was dead, and the Beatles were here. The song was confrontational. “Your old road is rapidly agin’ / Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand.” Stevie would later remember how much Dylan’s song meant to her, and she resolved to somehow be part of the big changes to come, and especially to somehow do work that she, too, would be remembered for.

  1.3 California Dreamin’

  At the end of 1963, Stevie Nicks fell in love. He was a little older, a “really handsome boy,” she said later. He broke up with the girl he’d been going steady with, a girl who was a good friend of Stevie’s, and he and Stevie went out for about six months. But then—on May 28, 1964, Stevie’s sixteenth birthday—he went back to his previous girlfriend. When she found out about this, that she’d been dumped for her friend, Stevie went home, shut herself in her room, and began to cry. “I had fallen for this incredible guy, and he ended up going out with my best friend. And they both knew that I was going to be crushed.”

  A ballad is a simple narrative poem composed in short stanzas, often with a romantic theme, often set to music. It’s one of the oldest forms of musical communication still extant. Stevie Nicks wrote her first ballad—called “I’ve Loved and I’ve Lost”—on this unhappy occasion, which also happened to be her birthday, which made it even worse.

  “I was totally in tears, sitting on my bed with lots of paper, my guitar, and a pen, and I wrote this song about your basic sixteen-year-old love affair thing that I was now going through.” It was a country-style song that went, “I’ve loved and I’ve lost, and I’m sad but not blue / I once loved a boy who was wonderful and true But he loved another before he loved me I knew he still wanted her—’twas easy to see.” (Stevie clearly had an ear for verse; like Bob Dylan, she wrote in “common measure,” the simple meter of many ballads and hymns, as well as most of Emily Dickinson’s poems.)

  Stevie: “When I said, ‘I’m sad but not blue,’ I was accepting the fact that they were going to be together. I was horrified but I really loved both of them, and I knew they didn’t do it purposefully to hurt me.

  “I finished that song, hysterically crying. And I was hooked. When I played my own song later that night, I knew—from that second on—that I was not going to sing a lot of other people’s songs. I was going to write my own. From that day forward, when I was in my room playing my guitar, nobody would come in without knocking, nobody disturbed me. They even let me miss dinner if necessary, it was that important to me. They could hear that I was working, at sixteen years old, and they would leave me alone. I started singing a lot more at school, and I sang whenever I could, for whatever I could possibly find to do. If it had anything to do with music or singing, I did it.”

  At the same time that she knew she could sing a love song, and really put it over, Stevie also knew that she could use some romantic experience. “At sixteen I could sing a love song pretty well,” she said later. “My dad would go, ‘That’s a good song, honey.’ And my mom would go, ‘That’s just beautiful, Stevie.’ And they would be thinking, ‘We know for a fact that she’s only been on one date, and she was back in two hours.’”

  *

  In June, Stevie and Robin Snyder got their hair streaked by a friend who was going to a beauty school. “I had my hair streaked at the end of my tenth-grade year and got in a lot of trouble for it,” Stevie recalled thirty years later, laughing. “They didn’t just streak it blond, they streaked it silver. My hair was totally ivory. I was grounded for six weeks. But when my hair changed, everything changed. I got to wear grayish plum eye shadow. There was no way I was going back.”

  In the summer of 1964 Stevie bid a sad farewell to Arcadia High and her friend Robin Snyder—they vowed eternal friendship—because the Nicks family was on the move again. This time they were headed north, to the wealthy suburban towns halfway up the great peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose. They fetched up in San Mateo, and Stevie began her junior year at Menlo-Atherton High School in nearby Atherton.

  M-A, as the school is known, was and is one of the great American public high schools, and it has a reputation for academic rigor. Many graduates went on to prestigious Stanford University in nearby Palo Alto. Today these towns are better know as Silicon Valley, legendary birthplace of personal computing, but in 1964 the San Francisco peninsula was mostly still farmland, with vast strawberry fields stretching along California Highway 101, backing up to the San Francisco Bay.

  Stevie Nicks was at first intimidated by M-A, a wealthy, politically conservative school whose parking lot was full of Detroit’s finest: Corvettes, Sting Rays, GTOs, the early Ford Mustangs. The car-crazy greasers drove ’57 Chevies, and there were even a few ’32 Ford coupes, the little deuce coupe of Beach Boys fame. But her mother gave her the pep talk about opening herself up and making new friends, and as always Stevie was encouraged. She was also the living embodiment of “The New Girl in School,” Jan & Dean’s hit single from that summer—a beautiful California girl that the guys wanted to date and the girls wanted to be like (or hate). Stevie’s classmates took to this guitar-toting new girl immediately—these kids knew star quality when they saw it—and soon Stevie found herself a close runner-up for 1964 homecoming queen and then was nominated for vice president of M-A’s Class of 1966. She established her musical aptitude quickly and soon was a regular at school assemblies and talent shows, appearing at M-A’s Sports Night Dinner in a demure skirt, low heels, and a low-key beehive hairstyle, de rigueur for girls in those days. She did well in class and began keeping journals, expressing herself in private jottings, poetry, and drawings. She dressed herself in the preppy “Ivy League” style common to all the kids from well-to-do homes. She was a “good girl,” a self-described “prude,” unlike some of the faster girls in class with serious reputations for backseat love during The Carpetbaggers at the drive-in.

  “If you were going out with somebody,” she remembered later, “you went to a movie, and then you came home and parked in your driveway, and you made out—in a not-a-big-deal way—and then you came in the house.”

  *

  Stevie’s senior year at M-A began in September 1965, the pivotal year of the American sixties. The civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were the big issues of the day, with student protests at the University of California in nearby Berkeley gaining national attention. California bands like the Byrds were adapting Bob Dylan songs and inventing a new style, folk rock. And the local music scene was in full boil as well. Two garage bands from nearby San
Jose, the Count Five and the Syndicate of Sound, would have coast-to-coast hit singles (“Psychotic Reaction” and “Little Girl”) in 1966. Up in San Francisco new bands were forming; within a year the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company would coalesce with a dozen other groups into an organic movement that would spread the so-called San Francisco Sound around the planet.

  Locally, Stevie bought her guitar strings at Dana Morgan’s Music Store in Palo Alto, where all the aspiring young players hung out. She acquired an “official” boyfriend, Charlie Young, a handsome star of the M-A Bears football team. She scored an ace in English class when she set Edgar Allan Poe’s morbid poem “Annabel Lee” to music in order to make it easier to memorize as a song, and then sang it in class. (Poe has long appealed to teen readers who instantly recognize a fellow sufferer.) She would record her version of “Annabel Lee” forty-five years in the future. (Another original ballad Stevie sketched in 1965, “Rose Garden,” would appear on her album Street Angel thirty years later.)

  Late in 1965 a new folk rock group from Los Angeles calling themselves the Mamas and the Papas (Hells Angels slang for gang members and their girlfriends) released a new song, “California Dreamin’,” written by the group’s leader, John Phillips. The celestial four-part harmonies the quartet specialized in appealed to singers like Stevie, and the song became a national hit record. When the group’s album came out a few months later, it introduced passionate, brokenhearted classics like “Monday Monday,” “Got a Feelin’,” and “Go Where You Wanna Go,” and Stevie was hooked on this harmonically sophisticated new way of getting folk rock songs across.

  Around the end of the year, Stevie took her guitar over to a local church that offered Wednesday evening sessions for young musicians. “It was called Young Life,” she said. “Everybody went just to get out of the house on a school night. It was fun. Even I went, and I didn’t go anywhere.”

  She was talking with some kids from school when a tall boy with longish dark hair walked in. She recognized him from M-A; he was a junior, a year younger than she. After a bit, Lindsey Buckingham, age sixteen, sat down at the piano and began playing the opening chords of “California Dreamin’.”

  “Well, I just happened to know every word and could sing the harmony, and I thought he was absolutely stunning. So I kind of casually maneuvered my way over to the piano.” Stevie chimed in, singing Michelle Phillips’s high harmony part while Lindsey sang the melody. They glanced at each other; she noticed his eyes, cold blue like lake ice. They sang the whole song while the room went quiet, everyone mesmerized. Then it was over. People clapped a bit. Lindsey was, she guessed, “ever-so-slightly impressed. Not to let me know it, but he did sing another song with me, which let me know he did like it a little.” Nothing more was sung that evening. “It wasn’t any kind of big deal,” Stevie remembered. “He was singing ‘California Dreamin’,’ and I joined in. It was just a one-off, three-minute moment.”

  Stevie Nicks wouldn’t see Lindsey Buckingham again for three years. But she later said that she never stopped thinking about him from time to time.

  *

  Then, in the middle of her senior year, Stevie Nicks got herself a recording contract. She described this to England’s Guardian newspaper much later. “I had a record deal early on. When I was a senior in high school, a friend of a friend of my dad was a big deal at 20th Century Fox [the movie studio, with its own record label]. So I flew to LA with my guitar, sang for them, and signed a contract with a producer called Jackie Mills. But he quit soon after, and luckily there was a ‘main man’ clause in my contract that meant that now I was released from it. I wasn’t upset. Even at that age I was smart enough to realize that I didn’t want to be stuck on a label with people that I didn’t know.”

  *

  After the 1966 new year, Stevie’s senior year flashed by. She needed stronger glasses. She applied to colleges at her parents’ insistence. “I wanted to go to hairdressing school,” she later maintained, “but they didn’t go for that idea at all.” She kept up her music; her favorite song was Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” from Blonde on Blonde, especially the line “But she breaks just like a little girl.” (“Just Like a Woman” would appear much later on Street Angel as well.) She was photographed in a modest off-shoulder sack dress at the M-A senior prom in June, and shimmied and shook while doing the frug, the most popular high school dance of the day.

  In September 1966 she began classes at La Canada Junior College. Stevie continued to live with her family, close to her loving mother, Barbara, commuting to school in a little car that she could hardly drive because she was so nearsighted. The following year she transferred to San Jose State College, where she was often seen on campus carrying her guitar. “I should have gone to hairdressing school,” she insists, “because that would have really benefited me more.” Soon, “I was singing with Lindsey the whole time, and found it real difficult to study.”

  1.4 Fritz

  Lindsey Adams Buckingham was born on October 3, 1949, in Palo Alto, and grew up in Atherton. His father, Morris “Buck” Buckingham, owned a coffee importing company, Alta Coffee, in Daly City, which had been founded by his own father in the 1920s. Lindsey was the youngest of his mother Rutheda’s three sons, the older brothers being Greg and Jeff. Lindsey has described his childhood being like Ozzie and Harriet, a popular fifties TV comedy about a “normal,” typically contemporary suburban family in California. (The program launched the successful music career of the couple’s youngest son, Ricky Nelson, who often performed at the end of the show.) A big part of the Buckingham family’s life centered on the swimming pools of the Menlo Country Club and the famous Santa Clara Swim Club, where all three boys swam competitively. (Lindsey’s older brother Greg, who swam for Stanford University’s world-class program, would win a silver medal at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.)

  When Lindsey was about six years old, he saw cowboy star Gene Autry strumming a guitar on television and asked his parents to buy one for him. So from the Atherton five-and-dime store came a little plastic Mickey Mouse guitar. To Buck and Rutheda’s surprise, Lindsey showed some rhythmic aptitude, strumming along to his brother Jeff’s collection of 45s. A bit later he appeared at a grade school assembly in black slacks and a starched white shirt, playing a thirty-five-dollar Harmony guitar, singing (or miming) Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”

  Lindsey was deeply influenced at an early age by local heroes the Kingston Trio, calypso collegians who emerged from Palo Alto with the hit single “Tom Dooley” in 1958 and went on to a successful and enormously influential career playing college concerts around the country. The Trio was really the vanguard of the folk revival to come a few years later, and young Lindsey was captivated by the series of Trio albums his brothers brought home: The Kingston Trio;… From the “Hungry i”; At Large. He was especially enthralled by the banjo playing of Trio founder Dave Guard, whose fluid style would affect Lindsey’s own unusual finger-picking way of playing guitar. By the age of thirteen, even though he never took lessons and couldn’t read musical notation, Lindsey was developing into a good guitarist himself through constant, obsessive practice.

  Another major influence came in 1963, when the Beach Boys’ records started getting airplay in California. Brian Wilson’s dreamy reveries about surfing, girls, and cars were delivered with moody blue chord changes and soaring vocals unlike anything heard in rock & roll and pop music. Their 1966 album Pet Sounds made an indelible impression on Lindsey, to the point where Brian Wilson’s melodic sensibility would have a major impact on Lindsey’s musical direction. These two archetypal California groups—the Beach Boys and the Kingston Trio—were the two foundations on which Lindsey’s career as a musician, songwriter, and arranger were based.

  Lindsey played guitar and banjo while in high school, copying records by the Beatles, Elvis, the Everly Brothers, and country music stars Hank Williams and Marty Robbins. He was much more interested in music than swimm
ing, and when he finally quit the M-A swim team, the coach told him he was a loser. But by then he didn’t care, because Lindsey had joined his first real band, Fritz, composed of friends from high school.

  *

  Fritz was formed in the fall of 1966 by Lindsey (on guitar and bass) and classmates Bob Aguirre on drums and Javier Pacheco on keyboards. Jody Moreing was the singer and her cousin Cal Roper played bass. The original name of the band was the Fritz Rabyne Memorial Band, named for a rather awkward German exchange student at M-A who reportedly didn’t appreciate this honor, so they shortened it to just Fritz. They started playing Top 40 songs like “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” the Byrds’ great satire on the Monkees, the artificial band cynically created in Los Angeles for a TV show. Satire or not, the song’s ending—“Don’t forget who you are / You’re a rock ‘n’ roll star”—made a deep impression on a lot of aspiring young musicians.

  At the time he joined Fritz, Lindsey didn’t own an electric guitar, so Bob Aguirre borrowed a Rickenbacker twelve-string from a friend he was playing with in another band. Javier Pacheco was an aspiring songwriter, and they began working on his songs in the garage of the big Buckingham ranch house in Atherton. They gradually worked out band arrangements for a set list that included numbers called “Dream Away,” “Lordy,” “Sad Times,” and “John the Barber” (Pacheco’s father was the Buckingham family’s longtime barber). Fritz’s first real gig was at a senior class assembly at M-A in the spring of 1967. Lindsey’s brother Greg came by with some of his Stanford buddies, one of whom, David Forest, liked the band and said he could maybe book them into fraternity house parties for decent money.