Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  Stevie also noted that it sounded like most of Joni’s new songs had obviously been written on the piano, not the guitar (or her mountain dulcimer).

  So, on piano, Stevie began reworking the song she thought could make this prophesy come true. Her interest in the Rhiannon material had started with the sound of the name itself. It rang a bell for her. Stevie had bought a novel called Triad: A Novel of the Supernatural, by Mary Leader, at an airport bookstore the year before. (Triad was published in 1973.) “It was about a girl named Rhiannon and her sister and mother, or something like that. I just thought the name was so pretty that I wanted to write something about a girl named Rhiannon. It was only later I found out that Rhiannon was a real mythical character!”

  The book was a story of sorcery and witchcraft inspired by the old Welsh myths. The writing style was impossibly romantic; reading the novel, Stevie felt like she was watching scenes in a film:

  And down the glorious pathway flew three singing birds. One was white, and one was green, and one was gold as morning. Their singing was sweet, the thundering of hooves was loud. The sound flowed like water over his tired aching body. The words of his old nurse came back to him: the three birds of Rhiannon …

  But Stevie’s vision of Rhiannon was different than the book’s narrative. “It was the name that interested me,” she insisted. “It was a kind of superbeing that I made up. She was the only supernatural character that I’ve ever written a song about.” Her vision of the Welsh goddess was numinous—something that could be felt and experienced but not actually seen. The various poems she wrote about Rhiannon were paired with an older melody in her head called “Will You Ever Win?”—a variation on the theme of winning and/or losing that had preoccupied her and Lindsey ever since they left home for LA.

  When she moved back into their cramped apartment around Thanksgiving, she got up late one morning to go to work at her waitress job at Clementine’s. She left a C-60 cassette containing a piano demo of “Rhiannon” propped against the coffeepot, with a note for Lindsey that read: HERE IS A NEW SONG. YOU CAN PRODUCE IT, BUT DON’T CHANGE IT.

  *

  November 1974. Stevie and Lindsey continued to work on the new songs at Sound City: “Monday Morning,” “So Afraid,” and “Rhiannon,” also versions of “Nomad” (aka “Candlebright”), “Lady from the Mountain,” “Castaway,” “Mistaken Love,” and the earliest attempts at “Gold Dust Woman.” But they weren’t really working together. Stevie complained that Lindsey was changing her songs too much from her original intentions, and that they didn’t sound the way she wanted them to sound. This was a huge problem and an issue between the two of them. According to Keith Olsen, this simply couldn’t be helped. He recalled, “Stevie writes these little repetitive loops that she crafts melodies around. This is one of the unique aspects of the way she writes, [but] sometimes this gets old—quickly. So a more commercial, chordal form needs to be implemented, and this is what she sometimes considers too much change from the original material.”

  Even Stevie had to admit that she was very dependent on Lindsey to remake her poems and melodic notions into actual songs. “He takes my little skeleton songs and turns them into finished pieces,” she said later, but she was adamant that he took too many liberties with her music, and she told him so. This “hostile dependency” was tearing the couple apart. She needed Lindsey’s creative mind, his fluid music, and resented this intrusion on the treasured independence her mother had instilled in her. Lindsey lately had been paranoid and cold to her; she told friends that Lindsey was more interested in his guitar than in her, and this left Stevie feeling drained by the conflicting emotions of their arrangement. They’d been through three hard years of stress together. Now the fights and harsh words grew worse. Sometimes Stevie was physically afraid during Lindsey’s rages. Even their Toyota was broken, its reverse gear having given up the ghost.

  Stevie couldn’t take it anymore—being anxious all the time—and moved in with Robin Snyder. Stevie remembered, “Lindsey and I couldn’t be together [as a couple] and try to work together. It wouldn’t leave us anywhere to go at the end of the day.” The once loving friendship between the two ambitious young musicians was beginning to fray and unravel.

  *

  And then something happened. Early in December, Stevie was working in Sound City’s Studio B, at the rear of the building. Richard Dashut was at the controls, listening to her play a piano rendition of the entire “Rhiannon” cycle, including the much faster storm-dance segment toward the end. She wondered aloud into the microphone whether some “really important” bird sounds could be added to the track. She asked, “Don’t you think Rhiannon is a beautiful name?” Just then, as if in answer to an occult summons, there was a commotion in another part of the building. Stevie walked into the hall and could hear the sound of Lindsey’s guitar solo on “Frozen Love” blasting at top volume from Studio A.

  Then she saw him. He was a giant, six-foot-six, with long straight hair under his weathered cowboy hat and a big, aquiline nose. He had on a flannel western shirt and sported a tweed vest with an old-fashioned pocket watch and chain across his skinny frame. With him were two little blond girls in frilly dresses and sandals, obviously his daughters. He was listening to the guitar solo with big ears, his head bobbing to the throbbing pulse of the hard rock guitar as he pounded the track’s rhythm on his knee. She thought she recognized him. She’d seen him on TV, maybe. He was a rock star, an English rock star. She whispered to Richard, “Who is that?”

  “That’s Mick Fleetwood,” he answered, “from Fleetwood Mac.”

  CHAPTER 2

  2.1 Heroes Are Hard to Find

  In December 1974 Fleetwood Mac was a band on the run, a band in exile, a band in serious trouble.

  The group had formed in London in 1967 when guitarist Peter Green, who had succeeded Eric Clapton in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, decided to go out on his own. Green was a brilliant guitarist in the same league as the more famous London virtuosos Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. (When the CLAPTON IS GOD graffiti began appearing in unfashionable Notting Hill in 1966, it was soon answered in ultrachic Chelsea by PETER GREEN IS BETTER THAN GOD.)

  Peter Green also took his Bluesbreakers band mates, drummer Mick Fleetwood (whom Mayall had just fired for bad behavior) and bassist John McVie, and proceeded to name his new band after them—Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. A comic second guitarist called Jeremy Spencer, who specialized in hellacious Elmore James blues playing, completed the first lineup, and Fleetwood Mac became a huge act in England on the strength of Peter Green’s run of hit records: “Black Magic Woman,” “Oh Well,” and especially the moody, soulful guitar instrumental “Albatross.”

  Fleetwood Mac then took the electric ballrooms of late sixties America by storm. Promoters liked them because they were serious blues scholars and musicians who actually had an act. After the fiery guitar playing of Peter Green, the band would perform a hilarious rock & roll oldies set fronted by Jeremy Spencer in a gold lamé jacket. The fans loved this, and Fleetwood Mac became headliners at the Fillmore East in New York, Philadelphia’s Electric Factory, and the Boston Tea Party. In San Francisco they were taken up by Bill Graham and performed up and down the state.

  But after a few years Peter Green left the band in bizarre circumstances (LSD), followed by Jeremy Spencer in even stranger ones (hippie religious cult). Between 1971 and 1974 musicians came and disappeared like gypsies. In a notorious incident in 1973, the band’s management sent a fake version of Fleetwood Mac to play “Black Magic Woman” in America after the real musicians were too exhausted and freaked out by the latest defections to continue. But the band had regular fans who protested this outrage, and the promoters pulled the fake band off the road, leading to wearying litigation between Fleetwood Mac and its English manager that was still ongoing in December 1974.

  By then the core lineup was at least stable. Mick Fleetwood, twenty-seven, was from a military family and considered Fleetwood Mac to be his l
ife’s mission. He had left school at sixteen, moved to London with his drum kit, and began a fast rise through the London beat scene in the sixties; his band the Cheynes had opened for the Rolling Stones early on, and then Mick married into Swinging London’s aristocracy when he wed Jenny Boyd, sister of Patty Boyd, archetypal dolly-bird fashion model who was married to Beatle George Harrison. Mick had been with the Mac from the beginning and now found himself managing the band, since their old manager kept filing lawsuits against them.

  John McVie, twenty-nine, was nominally the band’s comanager. The affable bassist in the cloth cap with the humble stage presence was more of a perennially tipsy sidekick than a deal-maker. He was also a superb bass guitar player. He had to be, or perfectionist British blues purist John Mayall never would have hired him in 1963, when he was only seventeen. He was somewhat precariously married to Fleetwood Mac’s lead singer and keyboard player, Christine McVie, thirty-one, originally Christine Perfect. She was a pretty blond former art student from the British Midlands, a great blues singer under her maiden name (and with the blues band Chicken Shack). Chris was Fleetwood Mac’s spokeswoman onstage, greeting “the punters” (as they called their fans), announcing the numbers, and introducing the band.

  Bob Welch completed the quartet lineup, a twenty-nine-year-old guitarist from California who joined Fleetwood Mac in England after working in a Paris-based band. He was the band’s lead guitarist and wrote many of their later songs. An artist ahead of his time, Bob Welch (and there’s the Wales thing again) was producing spacey, mystical, jazz-informed music for Fleetwood Mac, and songs like “Hypnotized” were chart hits in America and got played on progressive FM radio all the time.

  It was Bob Welch who convinced Fleetwood Mac to move to California in April 1974. The band was finished in England for the time being, what with human resources problems and lawsuits. But Fleetwood Mac could work in America, could get on television when their albums came out, and Los Angeles was where their label, Reprise Records, was located. So, with some misgivings about leaving parents and families behind, the band migrated to Southern California. The band’s financial assets were transferred to Bob Welch’s American bank account, which gave him a whopping tax headache later on. No one thought about visas, immigration, working papers, or anything. Mick and Jenny Fleetwood, their two daughters Amy and Lucy, the McVies, Bob Welch, and veteran road manager John Courage (and a container of the band’s road gear) landed at LAX in April 1974.

  Before she left England, Christine McVie told her mother that Fleetwood Mac was in trouble, and that it was going to take a miracle to get the band going again in America. Her mother—who some thought had a gift for prophesy—told Chris not to worry, because they would find their miracle in a sunny California orange grove.

  *

  When Mick Fleetwood had settled his family in an old cabin in rural Topanga Canyon, he assumed his managerial duties and called Fleetwood Mac’s longtime label, Reprise Records, to set up an appointment. He was put through to Mo Ostin, the president of parent company Warner Bros. Records. A few days later, at Warner headquarters in Burbank, somewhat to his surprise, Mick and the band’s loyal American attorney, Mickey Shapiro, were warmly received by label executives. They told them that they loved Fleetwood Mac. The 1969 masterpiece album Then Play On was still outselling the Grateful Dead. Mystery to Me was moving product, too. The band’s master tapes were always delivered on time, they always had good songs, some of them radio hits, and you didn’t have to put paper down for them when they came to the office. Their recent albums, Mick was told, sold a reliable 350,000 copies to the same 350,000 fans—every time. They joked that Fleetwood Mac took care of Warner Bros.’ annual light bill in Burbank. Sure, they’d heard about the fake Mac disaster and were concerned about the resulting public relations nightmare, but they were in sympathy with the band over this painful issue. They even presented Mick with a framed gold record for the band’s most recent album, Heroes Are Hard to Find, recorded in LA the previous summer, and which had reached #36 on Billboard’s Hot Hundred chart. Best of all, despite the band’s legal troubles in London, Warners would support Fleetwood Mac with a large advance on earnings and also support the group’s new album—if they could get it out the following year. They shook hands on this, and Warners said the lawyers would start on the paperwork right away.

  Much relieved, Mick Fleetwood left Burbank with the label’s firm commitment to keep Fleetwood Mac going. As he drove up Highway 101, the Ventura Freeway, bisecting the San Fernando Valley on his way north, he set his mind to its next task—finding an affordable studio in which to make the veteran band’s tenth album. Something told him that, way against all odds, this move to California might just work out for Fleetwood Mac.

  2.2 Little Magic Star

  One sunny day in late 1974, Mick Fleetwood loaded his daughters Amy and Lucy into the back of the old white Cadillac he was leasing from Rent-A-Wreck, which supplied vintage cars to people—mostly new arrivals to LA—who needed a little style at the right price. He drove up Topanga Canyon Boulevard until he reached the car turnout at the top of the mountain. He often stopped there to admire the cinematically stupendous view of the San Fernando Valley spread out for miles below, the very essence of Southern California in the seventies. Then they careened down the other side of the mountain, with its hard curves and switchbacks, until the boulevard emptied into Woodland Hills. Mick Fleetwoood was on a mission—for groceries.

  But in the supermarket parking lot, Mick ran into an acquaintance, Thomas Christian. They had met when the Mac had recorded their last album in LA the previous summer. Mick mentioned that he was looking for production on the band’s next album, and Thomas Christian said he was now associated with a studio in Van Nuys called Sound City.

  Mick: “He told me I should check the place out, so I piled the groceries and the kids into the back of my seedy old Cadillac and followed this guy over to this studio. At Sound City I was introduced to Keith Olsen, the engineer. To demonstrate the sound of the studio, he played me a track called ‘Frozen Love,’ from an album he had recorded there.”

  Mick was impressed not only by the sound of the guitar but with the obvious talent of whoever was playing. This guy rocked out. He was fast, clever, arena-ready. But there was also something else, even more interesting. “My attention had been caught by what I saw through the thick glass that separated Sound City’s two studios. It was a girl, and she was rehearsing a song in the next room. A piano track was playing, and I could hear her say something to the assistant engineer about wanting to have bird songs somewhere in the final mix of the song she was working on. I even remember what she was wearing: a long, sort of Indian-y cotton skirt and a little blouse—really pretty.”

  Mick Fleetwood was smitten. He wanted to meet the girl but managed to keep his very English reserve together as he airily inquired of Keith Olsen, “Who’s that pretty girl in there?”

  Her name, he said, is Stevie Nicks.

  *

  While Mick was digging “Frozen Love,” Keith Olsen asked if he wanted to meet the guy who wrote the song. Mick said sure, and Lindsey Buckingham came in and was introduced. They shook hands and then Mick turned to Olsen, asking about the studio’s availability and the hourly rates. Mick said he wanted to think it over and would be in touch. For the next ten days Fleetwood Mac would be on the back end of the Heroes Are Hard to Find tour, promoting their latest album. The band was playing in Las Vegas, just before Christmas, when Bob Welch told Mick he was leaving the band.

  It wasn’t exactly unexpected. Bob had long felt the band was floundering, repeating itself, and needed new blood to survive. He also wanted his own career and outlet for his style of music. If he didn’t try this now, maybe he never would.

  Mick pleaded with him to stay. Fleetwood Mac, he insisted, was like a marriage. You don’t want to just walk away. But Bob and Chris had exchanged some harsh words after a rough gig in Vegas, and Welch was fed up.

  This was a few days b
efore the new year. Veteran Mac tour manager John Courage freaked out at this latest defection and threw Welch’s guitar amp out the window. The band’s road crew liked Welch, and there was talk of mutiny. Mick told them not to worry, that he had a plan, and things would work out, with a little patience.

  Mick: “I rang up Keith Olsen over at Sound City and asked what was the name again of the chap whose music and guitar playing I had liked so much when I visited the studio.

  “‘Lindsey Buckingham,’ he said.

  “I told him that I wanted Lindsey Buckingham to be the new guitarist in Fleetwood Mac, and what did he think?”

  Olsen explained that Lindsey was part of a duo, Buckingham Nicks, and the other half was also his girlfriend. They were a working couple, Olsen said. “If you want him, you’d probably have to take her, too.” Olsen then gave Mick the outlines of their career so far: from his meeting them in Fritz and their coming to LA; working on their songs; Stevie cleaning his house and waiting tables all over town; making their record, a little touring; getting fired by Polydor but keeping at it; and working for free on their next album as Sound City’s resident mascots when Mick Fleetwood just happened to stop in, looking for production.

  Stalling for time while thinking this over, Mick explained that Fleetwood Mac always did everything on instinct. No one had ever auditioned to be in the band; musicians were hired on reputations, recommendations, plus smiles and vibes. Nothing ordinary, he explained, had ever happened to Fleetwood Mac precisely because of this. (And, by God, Mick could easily see himself in a band with that extremely hot little girl in the sexy blouse he had seen in the studio.)

  “Without hesitating,” as he later claimed, Mick told Olsen that he wanted them both. He’d take the whole package if they were agreeable. “I said, ‘Those two kids—do you think they’d want to join my band?’” Olsen—totally surprised—replied that although it was New Year’s Eve, he’d get in touch with Lindsey and Stevie, inform them of Mick’s offer, and get back to him on the following day, January 1, 1975.