Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  CHAPTER 3

  3.1 Starting Rumours

  1976 was an intense war year for Stevie Nicks and the rest of Fleetwood Mac. All five members of the band had split with their partners by the end of the year. The previous months, while they were trying to make a follow-up album while barely speaking to each other, were cruel and unusual punishment for having sold a couple million Fleetwood Mac albums. But the end product of these labors, the legendary megaselling Rumours, would be one of the most popular and acclaimed song albums in history. It’s still one of the greatest achievements of the rock music movement.

  It started, of course, badly, when Mick Fleetwood had a massive falling-out with Keith Olsen, and that was the end of working at Sound City for Stevie and Lindsey. The issues were mostly financial, involving disputes over fees and royalties, but there was also bad blood in getting the former Buckingham Nicks out of their contract with Olsen’s production company. Stevie felt bad about this—Sound City had nurtured her and Lindsey for years, and the owners and studio staff had been like family—but in the end there was nothing she could do about it except go along with what was best for the band she had joined.

  And then Mick insisted that Fleetwood Mac find another studio, preferably out of town, as his wife Jenny had taken their children and gone home to England after Mick had filed for divorce. Likewise, Christine McVie had moved out of the house she and John had bought in rural Topanga Canyon, leaving John to drown his sorrows by himself. This was when Mick decided to work at the Record Plant, a famous studio in Sausalito, the bohemian waterside village near San Francisco. The Record Plant had a reputation as a favorite of the great Bay Area bands and was a notorious haunt of Sly and the Family Stone, which made many of its epic soul records in the facility. The Record Plant came with a house in the hills that the band and engineers could live in while they worked there, although Stevie and Chris (and their little terriers) preferred to eschew the guys’ bunkhouse atmosphere and instead shared an apartment in the village’s marina, closer to the studio.

  But first Fleetwood Mac went back on tour, promoting the still-soaring Fleetwood Mac. Now they were playing in front of their new stage backdrop, a spooky nighttime scene of the full moon illuminating silvery clouds and bare trees, conjuring a feeling of watchful owls and witches on broomsticks. During an early break from the road in Buffalo, New York, Stevie and Chris were shopping for vintage clothes in a thrift store when Stevie came across an antique black silk top hat, the kind a gentleman once wore to the opera. She tried it on and decided it gave her a dramatic, even operatic look. Within months it would become her trademark.

  The band sounded better all the time as the musicians bonded and grew into a fluid organic concert unit, moving from Christine’s softly rocking ballads to Rhiannon’s spiritual tornado. Offstage the vibrations between the musicians were deadly. Stevie and Lindsey were barely speaking; he suspected she was seeing someone outside their “marriage,” which she later said wasn’t true. What was true was that Christine was seeing Curry Grant on the side while on tour. John suspected something. “He’s doing her, you know,” he kept saying to Mick, who’d reply, “No John, it’s all in your head.” Eventually the road crew heard about it and told Curry he was a bastard for fooling with Chris. It got to the point where Grant couldn’t ride in the van with the roadies. Mick and JC confronted Chris; she said it was true. JC sent Curry home for being a distraction, and Chris accepted that it was for the best.

  The band took a break from the road in a rented house in Florida, a spooky old mansion with overgrown vines hanging from the trees and humid tropical vibes. There were frogs in the green swimming pool and the band’s big touring trucks were crammed in the driveway. Barbed wire surrounded the property. Here Stevie and Lindsey had a blowout fight when she heard the lyrics of his new song “Go Your Own Way,” which accused her of “packing up, shacking up”—secretly being unfaithful to him. She bitterly denied his accusation, and there were floods of tears. Several other songs that would later appear on Rumours were begun in Florida, under psychic battlefield conditions.

  *

  Late winter in the Bay Area is cool and damp, with thick fog rolling in from the Pacific, especially in the morning. Stevie and Christine were driven to the Record Plant draped in sweaters, leg warmers, coats, and headscarves. It took a few days for the band to get used to the Record Plant, whose various studios were connected by a dimly lit, cave-like hallway. Fleetwood Mac had been recorded in three months. Now the band would take a year to craft a new album during which, according to Mick, “we spoke to each other in clipped, civil voices while sitting in small airless studios listening to each other’s songs about our own shattered relationships.” Among the Record Plant’s curiosities was Sly Stone’s “pit,” a thickly shag-carpeted sunken lounge into which Sly would disappear when recording. The pit, which had its own nitrous oxide tank, was generally avoided by the band since it was often occupied by people they didn’t know chopping cocaine on mirrors.

  They had to fire the house engineer after four days, his crimes being too much attention paid to Stevie and being much too concerned with the band’s astrological signs. Mick ordered Richard Dashut, who had been running the soundboard on tour, to produce the new album. Richard, understanding that the new songs would need arrangements, and that no one in the band read or wrote music notation, brought in a more experienced LA engineer, Ken Caillat, to coproduce with him.

  In the early days it was actually hard to get the musicians in the same space, as feelings were so raw. Stevie especially was upset because of her almost total dependence on Lindsey to shape her written poems, melodies, and chord changes into actual songs. He was so cross with her that he couldn’t let himself help her without making her painfully aware of what this hostile dependency was costing him. But after a couple of weeks he started dating a waitress at a local hangout and began to be less unhappy. Stevie didn’t like this and would get upset, leading to more arguments, more tears. In fact, she missed the parts of Lindsey that she had loved and so respected, and the two deeply estranged lovers did have a few stoned sleepovers. Stevie recalled, “In Sausalito, up at the little condominium, Lindsey and I were still enough together that he would come up there and sleep once in a while. And we had a terrible fight—I don’t remember what about—but I remember him walking out and me saying, ‘You take the car with all the stuff [to LA]. I’m flying back.’ That was at the end of the first two months of recording Rumours.”

  It was the same with John and Christine, who still had feelings for her husband of seven years and was quite rattled when he took up with an old girlfriend of Peter Green’s. Then there was Mick, who described himself as “piggy-in-the-middle” of all this, even as his ex-wife Jenny and their daughters returned to Los Angeles and moved in with Mick’s old band mate Andy Sylvester, one of his best friends.

  All this was “material” for the songs Stevie brought to the Sausalito sessions. Her favorite of these was “Silver Springs,” a ballad of love and revenge directed at Lindsey. The lyrics implied that he was a wellspring of inspiration for her, but that love for him had faded and that he would—forever—be haunted by the sound of the woman who loved him. Lindsey kind of hated “Silver Springs,” but he was professionally obligated to work on it anyway.

  As the band was settling in, Fleetwood Mac was edging closer to Billboard’s Top 10 album chart after the remixed “Rhiannon” single was released in February 1976 and got huge national airplay. Album sales were now above the 2.5 million mark, which put enormous additional pressure on the band’s three writers, especially Stevie Nicks. This new album had to be even better than their last, which was produced under much friendlier conditions at a studio they were comfortable in. Stevie was really feeling this pressure. To help her, Robin Snyder came to Sausalito and stayed with her, a soothing presence in the studio and at the end of the day. Robin was a good cook and Stevie, who wasn’t eating much, usually ate what Robin put on her plate.

  The R
ecord Plant sessions included some promising instrumental tracks that would months later evolve into massive singles and album tracks. As yet without lyrics, they were denoted by the titles written on the two-inch tape boxes: “Spinners”; “Strummer”; “Brushes”; “Keep Me There”; and “Butter Cookie.” Some of Stevie’s new songs were very strong, like “Silver Springs” and the early demo of “Gold Dust Woman.” Others were carefully considered, demo-ed, recorded, and didn’t make it on the album. Among these were an early version of “Planets of the Universe” and a piano demo called “Sleeping Angel”; an electric piano demo of “Castaway”; and a heartbroken ballad called “Mistaken Love” that riffed on forsaken love, pagan love, heartbreakin’ love. “Think About It” was an almost fully realized band track about a love affair in its final moments. So was “If You Ever Did Believe.” “Forest of the Black Roses” was a piano demo of a spooky fairy tale. “Blue Water” was an atmospheric country song. They were all experimental, but Stevie thought of her songs as her children, and it never stopped bothering her that her children were at Lindsey’s mercy if they were going to turn into works of art.

  3.2 Is It Over Now?

  While all this was happening in early spring of 1976, “Rhiannon” was on the radio everywhere, and her song was climbing the sales charts. The 45-rpm single actually bore the song’s original title, “Rhiannon (Will You Ever Win),” an echo of the primal and starkly competitive ambition that drove Stevie and her younger lover south to seek their fortune half a decade before. The song had been remixed for single release, losing half a minute from the album track. At 3:46 the tempo was faster and the vocals mixed higher to soar out of car radios. The guitar mix was different from the album, “hotter,” the electric piano “sweeter.” The “taken by sky” chorales were celestial mythograms. “Dreams unwind, love’s a state of mind” sounded more country, somehow. The engineers who worked on the single assumed that Stevie’s original vocals had been doubled, but when they separated the tracks they found that Keith Olsen had used a Lexicon delay unit to achieve the silvery voice that people identified with Stevie’s inspiring song. When Fleetwood Mac’s pretaped “Rhiannon” concert video was shown on The Midnight Special syndicated rock show later in the year, “Rhiannon” reached #11 and sealed Stevie Nicks’s destiny for the rest of her career.

  The working title for the new album was Yesterday’s Gone, from the chorus of Christine’s new song written for unhappy John, “Don’t Stop.” They were telling each other that their long travail was over, and now tomorrow beckoned and they shouldn’t blow it. Work continued amid relative chaos and heroic intake of stimulants, potions, powders, alcohol, preparations, and medications. Stevie was smoking too much, and to soothe her throat she experimented with various tonics made of tea, honey, Courvoisier cognac, herbal elixirs, and lemon.

  The Thousand-Dollar Cookie Session took place one evening when Robin Snyder baked a fresh batch of brownies laced with chunks of hashish someone had given the band. She and Stevie brought them to the studio the next day, warning that the brownies produced a stupefying buzz. Sure enough, Fleetwood Mac got so stoned that the songs were forgotten and the engineers left for the night. Stevie and John spent the session on the studio couch, laughing at the jokes and cartoons in a copy of Playboy.

  Things were getting a bit out of hand at the Record Plant. They spent four eye-wateringly expensive days trying to get the house piano in tune. The studio’s tape machine started shredding the tape—they called it Jaws—ruining fresh takes and requiring boring do-overs. Local scene-makers, players, and strangers the band didn’t know were in and out. There was a lot of tapping on mirrors. According to Mick, “We were certainly doing our fair share of the old powder [cocaine]. There was one dealer who came around and kept us supplied at generous discounts … and we were so grateful to him that we considered giving him some kind of credit on the album jacket, but sadly he got snuffed—executed—before the thing came out. Perils of the trade, we heard.”

  And Lindsey was losing it, acting like a jerk. Frustrated and anxious about the lax atmosphere he perceived, he vented his annoying opinions in insulting ways and lashed out at people. He grabbed Ken Caillat by the throat in a studio rage. He reportedly hit the pretty waitress he’d been seeing and she walked out. He struggled for control of the production until McVie walked out, and Mick had to sit Lindsey down and ask him if he was really sure he wanted to be in a band.

  Mick and John had talked this over, like it was a crisis. If Lindsey was fired or left the band, they decided they would gamble that Stevie wouldn’t leave with him. Fleetwood Mac couldn’t afford to lose Stevie Nicks, but they’d never had a problem finding good guitar players. The friction between Stevie and Lindsey was getting worse. One night she and Lindsey were singing the backing vocals to “You Make Loving Fun.” They were sitting on two high chairs in the studio with headphones on. When Ken Caillat stopped the tape to rewind it, Stevie glared at Lindsey and shouted, “Fuck you, asshole. You can go to hell!”

  Lindsey let out a bunch of curses and said, “When we get back to LA, I’m moving out!”

  “I don’t want to live with you anymore either,” she shouted. The engineers behind the glass looked at each other. When the tape was rolling again, they took up where they’d left off about making loving fun.

  Late one night, sitting on the studio floor, Mick gave Lindsey an ultimatum. “I said, ‘Lindsey, it comes down to this: either you’re in a band or you’re not. It’s neither good nor bad. If you accept the fact that you’re working with other people, then that’s great. But if you don’t, then you shouldn’t be in the band.’ We looked at each other hard for a long moment. I’m sure we looked haggard, burnt-out. But the matter was resolved, and we continued.”

  *

  It was storming the night Stevie wrote the lyrics to “Dreams.” Thunder echoed through the Record Plant as Stevie made her way through the stygian hallway to Sly Stone’s pit with a little electric keyboard and her velvet-covered notebook. Stevie: “There was a big black circular bed with Gothic curtains hung around it. I hopped up on this bed with my little piano and wrote ‘Dreams.’ I recorded it on a little cassette machine, and then I walked across the hall to the studio and said, ‘I think you’re going to want to hear this.’ They said, ‘We’re busy.’ I repeated myself and said, ‘I really think you’re going to want to hear this.’ They listened to ‘Dreams’ and we recorded it the next day.” Amid the drawings of angels, flowers, and fairies in her journal were lines of loneliness and heartache. Her spirits were low and rubbed raw by the coruscating loss of love. Yet there was hope in the rain, that it could wash away the burden of loss and cleanse the soul for a new life. She implies the power of crystal visions, esoteric and secret knowledge that she possesses and keeps to herself. Her dreams are prophetic. The loss will eventually be worse for her lover than it would be for her. “You’ll know,” she says. “Ahh, you’ll know.”

  Stevie has also pointed out that “Dreams” is the other side of “Go Your Own Way,” a song she saw as angry but honest. “So then I wrote ‘Dreams,’ and because I’m the chiffon-y chick who believes in fairies and angels, and Lindsey is a hardcore guy, it comes out differently. Lindsey is saying go ahead and date other men and live your crappy life, and Stevie is singing about the rain washing you clean. We’re coming at it from different angles, but we were really saying exactly the same thing.”

  (“Dreams” would become Fleetwood Mac’s only ever #1 single release. Stevie later said that “Dreams” was “totally related” to a song by the Spinners, but couldn’t remember which one. Observers have suggested “I’ll Be Around” as a possible model.)

  *

  Stevie had been putting off recording her first vocal track for a difficult song, “Gold Dust Woman,” a lyric she’d been working on for years. She recalled: “There’s a street in Phoenix called Gold Dust Avenue. I think that’s where I got the idea.… That song was about a very heavy, very bad time in my life. The drug addict
in ‘Gold Dust Woman’ is out there, breaking her back, looking for drugs. I felt I wanted to re-create that dark situation, to warn people. I never saw it as a premonition about myself.” The lyrics related to girls she’d known, girls she’d seen, the girl she was, the girl she was afraid she might become. The question in the song—is it over now?—was a question she’d been, up till now, afraid to ask. Gold dust was pretty and it felt good, but the doom-laden click track Lindsey had come up with foretold nothing good. The track also had a somber, wardance coda with a subterranean blue streak of electric piano. The singer must evoke dark forces—black widows, dragons—to overcome her destiny as a shadow of a woman. Either that, or it was pick up the pieces and go home. Recording the vocal track for “Gold Dust Woman” was going to be a bitch. Lindsey thought the song was evil.

  It was cold and raining heavily the night Stevie tried it first. Mick Fleetwood watched in awe:

  “I recall that she started in a fully lit studio. The song needed a lot of power, a lot of emotion. She got halfway through, stopped, and said she wanted to start again. Take followed take, and I could sense that Stevie was transforming, sort of withdrawing inside of herself. She was reaching inside for something—some magic that she kept hidden from us.”

  At three in the morning she took a break and walked outside, breathing the chilly air. Somebody made her a cup of black tea with lemon and a little cognac. She mentioned that the studio was too brightly lit for her. Mick: “The lights were dimmed; a chair was brought in so she could sit. She wore a woolen cardigan and wrapped herself in a shawl to ward off the predawn chill. An hour later she was almost invisible in the shadows, a tiny figure under the big cans [headphones]. She was hunched over in her chair, alternately choosing from her supply of paraphernalia: tissues, reading glasses, a Vicks inhaler, lozenges for her sore throat, a bottle of mineral water. Gradually she took command of the material. On the eighth full take, exalted, she sang the lyric straight through for the first time.”