Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  *

  In 1971 Keith Olsen was the chief engineer at a grungy, second-rate recording studio in Los Angeles called Sound City. Olsen was a little older and had played bass guitar with the Music Machine, an ahead-of-its-time Los Angeles garage band that dressed in all black and played with black leather gloves. They had a national hit single with “Talk Talk” in 1966. Like many ambitious recording engineers, he aspired to the greater satisfaction and rewards of producing records, taking a band’s songs and reshaping them into a commercial format that would sell to the huge postwar baby boom, an audience that bought so many millions of records that by the mid-1970s the music industry was the most lucrative entertainment component of the American economy, even bigger than Hollywood.

  Olsen was at the end of a long list of producers that another agent named Todd Shipman was trying to persuade to go to San Francisco and see Fritz. Every LA studio pro with any record company connections said no—except Olsen, who was always up for a free trip north to hear a promising new band. At the least he could record demos of some of their songs if they were any good. He flew in and was met at the airport by Bob Aguirre driving the seatless Fritz van; Olsen sat on the drum cases on the way to the band’s gig, a Friday night dance at a Catholic high school.

  “They were OK,” he recalled, “but not the super band of the future.” But Keith Olsen was struck by the harmony singing and the sexy rapport between Stevie and Lindsey. There was definitely energy there. He allowed that he could get Fritz some free studio time, on a Sunday, if they came down to make some song demos with him in LA.

  Stevie didn’t much want to do this, and neither did Javier, but soon the band piled in the van and made the long drive to Los Angeles on a Saturday. They checked into the famously band-friendly Tropicana Motel on Sunset Boulevard. When they got to Sound City Studio in industrial Van Nuys on Sunday morning, they found the door locked. They had to take it off its hinges to get inside. The studio was a dump, with rotting Chinese take-out food containers and overflowing ashtrays from the previous night’s sessions. Soon Javier noticed that Lindsey’s demeanor was changing as he watched Keith Olsen, a seasoned studio engineer, manipulate the knobs and faders of the sixteen-track recording console for the first time. Lindsey was fascinated, entranced. Worse, he looked bored when the band listened to the tapes they’d made. The mostly hook-free tunes kind of sucked; they may have sounded OK at a beer-sodden fraternity party, but they just didn’t have the dynamics of a great record. Javier could almost feel his band slipping from his iron fist while they were still in the studio.

  They cut demo tapes with Keith Olsen of four of Javier’s songs. “Something wasn’t right,” Olsen recalled. “There were too many weaknesses.” Before Fritz went home, Olsen recalls, “I took Lindsey and Stevie aside and said to them, ‘You two really have a unique sound together … but the rest of your band will hold you back. I’d like to continue to work with you, but I think you’d do much better as a duo.’”

  They looked at each other, then told Olsen that they would talk it over and get back to him. The race was now on for real.

  1.7 Trading Old Dreams for New

  When Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham returned home, they took a few days to think about what Keith Olsen had offered. Stevie called her mother. Lindsey spoke with his father and brothers. At one point she asked Lindsey what would happen if she decided to stay, and he said he didn’t know what he’d do in that case. Everyone felt bad for the other guys in Fritz, but that’s show business. Unspoken were the social and racial implications of the two cuter and more talented Anglos leaving behind the two journeymen Hispanics, Pacheco and Aguirre. But that’s California. Stevie saw it as a betrayal. Lindsey didn’t think so. They had something major going between them, he told her, and they were just taking it to the next level. There was a lot of talk between them about races to be run and about winning as opposed to losing.

  But she still wasn’t sure she wanted to be in Los Angeles. The city had just had that big earthquake: bridges flattened, cracks in the earth, the sky turned yellow for days. “I didn’t want to go that much,” she said later. “I never thought that I’d make it in Hollywood. And I never thought that I’d want to stay.”

  But in those fraught days Stevie and Lindsey were growing closer. Sometimes she had stayed overnight in the Buckinghams’ guest room when the band came home late. Now she started sleeping there more. Lindsey broke up with his girlfriend Sally. “We started spending a lot of time together,” she recalls, “working out songs” with lots of shared intimacy and eye contact. When they finally made the decision to break up the band, they kept it to themselves for a few days, and it wasn’t the only secret they shared.

  There may have been an erotic aspect to killing this attachment of five years and taking off to greener pastures. Stevie later said that she never felt entirely comfortable with what happened. “All through Fritz Lindsey and I were dating other people. I’m not sure we would have even become a couple if it wasn’t for us leaving that band. It kind of pushed us together.”

  Stevie and Lindsey dreaded the last band meeting. Later Stevie told Behind the Music: “We had to tell these other three guys—that we loved—that we were going to break up the band, and that Lindsey and I were going to Los Angeles. And it was very difficult.” They said they couldn’t resist Keith Olsen’s offer to produce them, that it was a main chance for them. They held hands, the first time anyone had seen this. (Bob Aguirre: “They weren’t real out in the open about it. All of a sudden they were together.”) They said they were both dropping out of college—Stevie was only a few credits shy of graduation—and running for the rainbow in LA. And that was basically the end of Fritz. Bob Aguirre stayed friends with them, but Javier was bitter and later complained about the “lying and manipulative” way that David Forest had treated them, just as Bill Graham had (supposedly) taken an interest. Forest himself went on to a checkered career as an agent, a pimp, a gay-porn producer, and eventually went bankrupt.

  *

  But it was the beginning of the epic love of Stevie and Lindsey. She was twenty-three; he was a year younger. “I loved him before he was famous,” she said on TV later. “I loved him before he was a millionaire. We were two kids out of Menlo-Atherton High School. I loved him for all the right reasons.” And, to an interviewer: “We did have a great relationship at first. I loved taking care of him and the house. I washed his jeans and embroidered stupid moons and stars on the bottom of them, and made it so he was perfect.”

  This love would become greater with time. The Stevie & Lindsey Saga would inspire some of the greatest love songs of their generation, and indeed of the entire rock movement. The songs are in heavy rotation even now, decades on. This love would then suffer neglect and jealousy and finally would expire, but only on the surface. Their love would burrow underground, forgotten by everyone but the lovers, where it would smolder for decades like a dormant volcano, occasionally erupting into passionate explosions of romantic fire and magma. (Some say this love still exists.)

  *

  September 1971. The deed was done, and Stevie and Lindsey prepared to move south. Keith Olsen invited them to stay at his house in the Hollywood Hills until they could get on their feet. But then fate intervened and Lindsey got sick. The symptoms were low fever, lassitude, and weakness. The diagnosis was glandular fever or mononucleosis. The doctor told Lindsey to rest, nothing else until he started to feel better.

  So while they waited (and waited, for seven months) for Lindsey to recover, and while Stevie looked after him, they started making songs. The Hand of Fate may have dealt Lindsey a bad card, but now Dame Fortune favored him with a timely family inheritance of $12,500, enough to live on for a year. He and Stevie went shopping and bought a used BMW, a pre-owned electric guitar, and an old Ampex half-inch, reel-to-reel tape recorder. The inheritance came at just the right time, Stevie remembered. “It was a goodly amount of money, especially then, and especially for two people who had no money. Lind
sey bought an Ampex four-track—he’s very brilliant and I can’t even plug in the stereo—and his dad let us have this tiny little room in his coffee plant. All the workers would leave around seven [P.M.] and we’d get there around seven-thirty and leave at six in the morning. It was this big, huge building; it was scary, and we’d lock ourselves in and work. It was just me, Lindsey, and the Ampex, everything we owned on the floor of this tiny room, and we’d just sing, and play, and record. We did seven songs and it took us a year. We thought they were really good.”

  As the months at the coffee plant in Daly City dragged on, Stevie’s new song lyrics started to take on issues about their relationship. Lindsey was not an easy boyfriend to have. She found him to be bossy, hyperopinionated, and overcontrolling. He made her study records by the Beatles and the Kingston Trio so she could learn songwriting form—verses, chorus, a bridge. It was annoying. Forbidden to smoke marijuana by his doctor, major pothead Lindsey was often irritable and short with her. New songs like “Races to Run” and “Lady from the Mountains” explored relational issues like mastery and jealousy. “Without You” was about adjusting to a tense new relationship. “After the Glitter Fades” and “Nomad” mirrored her unease about moving to LA. This didn’t seem to faze Lindsey, who was focusing more on turning her words into music than on what they actually might mean. “I loved her lyrics,” he said later. “I loved providing the styles in which we would interpret these songs.”

  And Lindsey was writing, too, in an amazing burst of artistic creativity. He was, after all, a bass player who was also teaching himself how to play electric lead guitar. Early in his recovery he was too weak to sit up, so he taught himself to play while lying flat, using downward strokes. This developed into an almost unique personal style: playing a “bass” part on the lower strings with his thumb while using the first three fingers—and mostly his fingernails—for melody and rhythm. One of the first songs he completed this way was a lovely instrumental for his new girlfriend, called “Stephanie.”

  Lindsey was also teaching himself the craft of sound engineering with his four-track machine. Stevie would watch him intently, for hours, concentrating under his headphones, recording with one little microphone, obsessing over details, dubbing in her vocals over the lead and bass guitar parts, with Bob Aguirre’s drums on the bottom of the rock songs. She noticed that he would vigorously rub his hands together in pleased enthusiasm when he achieved an effect he was seeking. This is where Lindsey’s earliest songs—“So Afraid” and “Frozen Love”—came from.

  In late 1972 they had seven songs they thought were good enough to bring to Keith Olsen. They packed their clothes, a few possessions, the tape recorder, and Lindsey’s guitars, and made the six-hour drive to Los Angeles. They found Olsen at busy Sound City, supervising the electricians and crew that was installing the studio’s brand-new recording console, and generally being elated at the prospect of making records at this gleaming desk. At the end of the day they followed Olsen home to his house off Coldwater Canyon Boulevard and moved into his back room until they could land a place of their own.

  So Stevie Nicks was dragged reluctantly, if not kicking and screaming, to Los Angeles by her new boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham. He was so sure this was the right road to follow, and she was so devoted to him that she went along, and indeed, she never lived to regret it.

  1.8 Sound City

  Stevie Nicks remembered that she and Lindsey Buckingham were apprehensive the first night they were taken to Doug Weston’s Troubadour nightclub on Santa Monica Boulevard in late 1972. The Troub, as it was known, had been the social clubhouse of the LA music scene for more than ten years. Everyone played there, and many went on to become legends. The bar scene was intimidating.

  By then the previous generation of sixties California rock stars had moved on (or died). The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas and Papas, the Burrito Brothers, Joni Mitchell, and all the laid-back sixties musicians were now living up in Topanga Canyon and Malibu and couldn’t be bothered to drive into West Hollywood and be seen in the Troub’s noisy, smoky bar area, packed with musicians, dealers, and hustlers, all on the make.

  Their places were taken by a glamorous and talented new breed, many of them singer-songwriters: Linda Ronstadt, the braless beauty from Tucson; handsome young Jackson Browne; lanky Texan John David Souther; Hollywood brat Randy Newman; nasty drunk Warren Zevon; and especially charismatic Don Henley and Glenn Frey, the two principals of “Eagles” (as they insisted on calling themselves), the hottest group in America right then. They were surfing the crest of a new wave of psychic energy as California recovered from the serial traumas of the American sixties, which in Los Angeles had ended with the gruesome multiple murders by the so-called Manson Family and the subsequent trials and recriminations about an era of revolt and license that had gone horribly wrong.

  But now there was a change in the air. The American seventies had an air of promise. In Los Angeles the music scene was alive with possibility and confidence, typified by the amazing success of the ultracommercial Eagles. The band had actually come together at the Troubadour bar when Linda Ronstadt, the greatest voice of her generation, hired singer-guitarist Frey (from Michigan and in Longbranch Pennywhistle with John David Souther) and the band Shiloh’s singing drummer Henley (from Cass County, Texas) to play in her band. This mutated into Eagles, and all year Stevie and Lindsey had been listening to their irresistible Top 10 smash hits on the car radio: “Take It Easy,” “Witchy Woman,” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” The Eagles were hated by establishment rock critics for their glossy superficiality and slick production values, but their records sold in the millions (mostly to women) and the songs were everywhere. (Many fans didn’t think the Eagles were even the best band in Los Angeles. That honor went by popular acclaim to guitarist Lowell George’s jazzy rock band, Little Feat.)

  “We were scared to death when we first moved to LA,” Stevie later recalled, but they needn’t have been. They were immediately perceived as a sexy, star-bound couple. People who encountered them recall an aura about them, a radiance. They were Mr. and Mrs. Intense, he in his curly locks and icy blue eyes and she in her long straight hair and her piercing gaze when you talked to her. (This was because she could barely see you without her reading glasses.) They seemed to share an internal strength as magnified individuals. When they walked into the room—whether at the Troubadour or the Ash Grove or the Palomino Club or McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica—heads turned to check out this power couple newly arrived in LA, trying to make it big. Few who met them doubted that they would. Even brilliant but crazy Warren Zevon was nice to them.

  *

  But their demo tape of seven songs couldn’t get arrested.

  Lindsey had brought the Ampex and the tapes, which Olsen plugged into Sound City’s new recording desk, and made a bunch of copies, which he tried to pedal to recording executives eager, even desperate, to sign the next Eagles. In early 1973 their demos were rejected by all the big labels: Columbia, Warner Bros., Reprise, Elektra, Atlantic, RCA, Polygram, Mercury, ABC-Dunhill, and talent manager David Geffen’s new Asylum Records. Nobody heard a hit record in “Rhiannon,” “I Don’t Want To Know,” and “So Afraid.”

  “Every record company in the world passed on us,” Stevie said later. “We were devastated, but we still knew we were good.” And Keith Olsen still believed in them, knew they had something special together, and he encouraged them to keep going. Olsen worked it out with Sound City’s owners so the duo could work on new song demos, for free, in unused studios and after hours. This was at least something for the disappointed pair. Stevie and Lindsey had no record deal, and no management; they were lonely in these early days, were running out of money, and they missed their families. But now at least they had the Sound City Studio family behind them, and it was something like a family, and that was a good reason for them to keep going. It was a help to know that people they liked had faith in them.

  *

  Sound City wa
s a former warehouse behind the railroad tracks in Van Nuys, then the industrial heart of the San Fernando Valley, northwest of downtown Los Angeles. There was a Budweiser brewery nearby, so the neighborhood always smelled of burned hops and fumes from the diesel beer trucks that rumbled through the streets day and night. 1540 Cabrito Road had been the Vox guitar factory in the sixties. The Rolling Stones had famously visited during their first American tour in 1964; it’s where Stones founder Brian Jones got his iconic white teardrop-shaped guitar that was frequently seen on TV from 1964 to 1967. The building itself was shabby and in ill repair. The parking lot flooded when it rained.

  The recording studio was started by local businessman Joe Gottlieb a few years later to cash in on the record boom in the wake of the big LA bands. There were two studios, control rooms, and a reception and lounge area. The whole complex was carpeted in brown shag, even some of the walls, and it was widely regarded as unsanitary. There was no janitor. The girls at the front desk were supposed to help keep the place tidy, but sessions often ended long after the receptionist had left for the day, and the facility was awash with coffee cups, empty bottles, and full ashtrays. One of Sound City’s claims to fame was that Neil Young had sung the wonderful vocals for his multiplatinum album After the Goldrush there in 1970. On the album sleeve Young is depicted lying amid the empty soda cups and grungy shag of the studio lounge.

  That year Gottlieb sold an interest in Sound City to a West Virginia entrepreneur called Tom Skeeter, who was moving to California to get into show business. When Keith Olsen joined the company a year later, he persuaded Skeeter to order a new mixing console from British sound engineer Rupert Neve. Then Neve’s company took more than a year to custom-build the console to Sound City’s specifications. Neve boards were then (and still are) considered the holy grail of analog recording. They were extremely rare (especially in America), custom made, and highly coveted. Sound City’s board, when it arrived in Van Nuys at about the same time as Stevie and Lindsey, was the only one of its kind in North America. Tom Skeeter paid a whopping $76,000 for the console; by contrast he also bought a three-bedroom house in Teluca Lake for $36,000, so this was a sizeable investment.