Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  Stevie never mentioned to Mick that while they would be on the road, her new partners Paul and Danny were working for her, underground. It would change things around for good. They were keeping her in the loop. Modern Records was going forward.

  4.6 Not That Funny

  Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac took to the air in a chartered jet at the end of October 1979 and played thirty-two shows through mid-December. The first concerts in Utah and Colorado were warm-ups, not sellouts (which worried Mick), more like paid rehearsals. Then in November the band found its strength in the routines of touring, and the set fell into place. “Monday Morning” would start, with Stevie up front banging her tambourine, then “Say You Love Me” would get the fans into a groove. They had to wait for “Dreams,” third in, for Stevie to appear upstage in long hanging curls, voluminous berets, cerulean scarves, and diaphanous outfits in beige and teal. The intro to “Dreams” drew a big cheer and an ovation at the end. When Lindsey next fired up “Oh Well,” the girls made for the ladies’ room. A few songs later, after a costume change, it was time for “Sara,” performed in a dark crimson shawl under a red spotlight. The concert arrangement for “Sara” was now oceanic, pulling the audience into a moody slipstream that could last for ten minutes, revealing her (and to be fair, Lindsey’s) new masterpiece as both an occult enchantment and a prayerful song of love.

  Christine then greeted the audience, still the voice of the Fleetwood Mac onstage. Lindsey took over for a few songs. Then “Landslide,” with Stevie in a blue silken shawl and her coiffure piled into a frizzy helmet, like an Edward Burne-Jones painting of a naiad. “Rhiannon” usually got the biggest response. To preserve her voice, Stevie’s presentation was now less anarchic. Lindsey took up some of the slack with his blazing guitar solo before the dramatized 4/4 march of “Rhiannon” crashed to a halt with Stevie’s deep bow, almost to the tip of her platform boots, amid audience-supplied tumult.

  The rest of the concert reprised Rumours’ greatest hits. A golden shawl covered Stevie under amber light for “Gold Dust Woman.” It took a few shows for the band to find its way into spooky, droning “Sisters of the Moon,” but the fans responded loudly to this new song of Stevie’s, and it quickly found its place in the set as the first encore. Stevie sang the verses while tapping on a cowbell, very cool and poised, telling the story of the song, communicating with the rapt girls and women down front looking at her in pure female rapture. Her subtle, ballet-informed movements, shamanic cadences, and majestic raised palms were mesmeric. The girls up front strained to hear the unheard lines Stevie would chant away from the microphone, as if they feared missing some knowledge too special to be shared with so many. Stevie shouted and wailed the climax to “Sisters of the Moon.” The fans roared back at her as she thanked them profusely (and often tearfully) from the lip of the stage. (One astute critic theorized that the dragon in “Sisters” was the anger Lindsey felt for Stevie because she’d left him.) As always, Fleetwood Mac finished with “Go Your Own Way.”

  By the time they got to St. Louis, where two concerts would be filmed at the Checker Dome, it was clear to everyone who was the star of the show. Audiences responded to Stevie longer and much louder than to the others. Lindsey’s new songs in particular were ignored. Water tables in American cities lowered when Lindsey started his angry “Not That Funny” or spiteful “What Makes You Think You’re the One?” and thousands headed for arena bathrooms to offload the night’s first beer. This caused resentment and silences on the flights between shows. Stevie had Robin along as vocal therapist, and Sharon Celani was her wardrobe mistress, so she could retreat with her girlfriends into her freshly redecorated hotel suites and try to ignore the weirdness of being in Fleetwood Mac. (On this tour Stevie used the pseudonym Katherine DeLongpre when she checked into hotels. Delongpre Avenue is a street in West Hollywood.)

  By the time the Tusk tour arrived in the Northeast, the concerts were selling out again. “Sara” was released as a single in early December, remixed faster and shorter (but still running four-and-a-half minutes) for radio play. “Sara” reached #7. Tusk itself got to #4, but was a #1 album in England. Lindsey told the British music paper Melody Maker that he was under a lot of strain and was questioning the decisions he had made about the album. “I was out to do something that had depth to it, but then I realized that people aren’t getting the message. You wonder if you’ve been deluding yourself, especially when the rest of the band starts telling you that it’s time to get back to the standard format.”

  After selling out New York’s Madison Square Garden for two nights, the tour moved through the Midwest before returning to California, playing five packed shows at the Forum in Los Angeles. Then it was up to San Francisco for three shows produced by Mac fan Bill Graham at the Cow Palace. Not all the seats had been sold; needing a publicity surge, Graham had arranged a press conference where the same questions were basically repeated for a long, awkward hour: “Stevie, who is Sara?” “Stevie, when are you leaving the band?” “Stevie, when are you making a solo album?” “Stevie, what about the Rhiannon movie?” “Stevie, are you free for dinner tonight?”

  The San Francisco critics noted that Lindsey seemed a little weird. He had this mad gleam in his eye as he stared into the crowd, as if he were looking for a friend. He kept pointing at Stevie Nicks during “What Makes You Think You’re the One?” She seemed less than comfortable with this. The last show at the Cow Palace was on December 16, 1979. Fleetwood Mac went home and took six weeks off. Stevie Nicks signed a deal with Atlantic Records, rang up Tom Petty, whom she’d never met, and began her solo career.

  *

  January 1980. When Paul Fishkin and Danny Goldberg went to mighty Mo Ostin at Warner Bros. to give him first look at Stevie’s solo career, they were dismissed as unworthy interlopers. “Maybe I would make a Stevie Nicks solo album,” he told them, “but I am certainly not interested in another joint venture.” Now the secret was out. Later that night, Danny checked with Stevie to see if she had told Mick about their plans. She looked at him plaintively and said, “No … no—I haven’t told him. Can you?” She gave Danny Mick’s number.

  Mick called back the next day. His voice was calm, but Danny could tell he was annoyed. “Well, we actually have a plan, you see, for a new deal, that of course includes Stevie, and that we were just about to bring to her.” Danny reiterated that they had already made a deal for her solo albums. Mick thanked Danny for keeping him informed, and then Danny let Stevie know that Mick was no longer in the dark about what they were trying to do. She seemed much relieved.

  Then Fleetwood Mac’s lawyer called Danny to say that their work for Stevie was preventing the band from getting a better royalty deal. The lawyer ridiculed the idea of Stevie making an “artsy-crafty” solo album on her own. Other terms deployed by the horrified Warners and Mac factions to belittle the notion of Stevie recording were “airy-fairy” and “artsy-fartsy.” The conventional wisdom was that Stevie’s commercial worth was exclusively as part of the platinum-selling formula of Fleetwood Mac.

  Then Mick called Stevie and started in on her, made her cry. But any talk of betrayal and backstabbing was pretty lame, coming from a man who had left her and stolen her best friend. She told Mick to call Danny and hung up. When Danny picked up the phone all the English reserve was gone from Mick’s voice and he started screaming. “YOU DIDN’T TELL ME THAT SHE HAD SIGNED A PIECE OF PAPER!” Danny reminded Mick that he’d told him that they had a deal with her. “BUT YOU DIDN’T TELL ME THAT SHE HAD SIGNED!” he shouted. Danny realized that Mick probably figured that anyone who spent a lot of time at Stevie’s house (like Danny) was too spaced out to produce a contract with a valid signature.

  Stevie was offended by the dismissive and condescending reaction to her artistic aspirations. If Warners didn’t like it, that was too bad. If Mick didn’t like it, she was so sorry. “She was impervious to any pressure from the group,” he recalls. And Fleetwood Mac was pretty freaked out by the specter of an i
ndependent Stevie Nicks. At a testy band meeting in mid-January 1980, she told the others that she was not about to leave the band. She calmly told them she needed another outlet for a big backlog of songs that the band didn’t want. She tried to reassure them, saying, “I’m not doing a solo record to turn myself into a solo artist.” It also didn’t hurt Stevie’s cause that Lindsey was also refusing to give up his potential solo career to get a renegotiated deal for Fleetwood Mac. It also didn’t hurt that Stevie was now represented by Irving Azoff, the powerful talent manager whose clients included Don Henley and the Eagles. Now that things were in the open, Danny recalls, “Stevie was enjoying the empowerment that came with doing her own thing. She would show all of them who was ‘artsy-crafty.’”

  4.7 Rhiannon Is Afoot

  At the end of January 1980, Stevie wrote a (quite rare) note to Mick. Fleetwood Mac was going back on the road in February, with ten concerts in Japan and sixteen in Australia and New Zealand, and Stevie wanted to settle things before she got back on the plane. In the letter she noted that Senator Ted Kennedy had beaten President Jimmy Carter in the Iowa presidential primary; that the Russians were taking over Afghanistan; and that the American diplomatic hostages in Iran had been held for seventy-eight days. “It is a fearful time,” she wrote. “Things are becoming less exciting and more real.” She also told Mick that she’d started on her solo album: “Recording has begun, and Rhiannon is afoot.” She mentioned that she was selling the house on El Contento Drive and had moved to a duplex condominium on the beach, near Marina Del Rey. She told Mick that he was a cheap bastard and that she’d sent the girls in their office an extra $250. The note was signed “K. DeLongpre.”

  On February 3, Fleetwood Mac began a three-night stand at the Budokan, the famed martial arts arena in Tokyo. At a news conference they were bombarded with questions from the Japanese press about drugs. Former Beatle Paul McCartney, touring with his band Wings, had recently been held for two weeks in a Japanese prison and then deported after marijuana had been found in his bags at the airport. Fleetwood Mac swore to the Japanese reporters that they never touched the stuff. Then they boarded the famous bullet trains for concerts in Kyoto, Sapporo, Yokohama, and Osaka. Stevie was delighted when the Sony Corporation gave them all then-new Walkman portable cassette players. (She bought a lot more to take home to her friends.) The huge problem was that there were no drugs in Japan, or they were impossible to find, and no one wanted to help in the wake of Paul McCartney. They were playing shows without cocaine telemetry for the first time in years. Everyone was in a foul mood. Mick confided to Stevie that he and Sara—who had been forced to stay home or Stevie wouldn’t tour—were fighting like tigers, screaming at each other for hours over expensive satellite telephone connections. When they were checking out of one hotel, Mick’s bill for a single, miserable all-night call to Sara was over two thousand dollars.

  Then it was on to Australia, beginning at Perth on February 21. This was a big market for Fleetwood Mac because the millions of Aussies with Welsh ancestors totally got the whole “Welsh witch” concept and bought the records and concert tickets. The audiences were enormous: Mick claimed there were 48,000 in Sydney, 60,000 at a Melbourne racetrack, with Santana opening. Meanwhile the police were convinced that the band was smuggling drugs into the country. Stevie’s rolling wardrobe cases were ransacked by customs officials more than once.

  The Australian contract riders became legendary. They stipulated a medieval marquee tent, branded liquors, six dozen cases of Heineken beer, American and English cigarettes, a groaning buffet of roasted meats, cheeses, fruits, salads, and puddings. The band was supposed to be met at Sydney Airport with at least two ounces of high-degree cocaine. After the drug-free Japan shows, the concerts were notably livelier, and longer.

  Then it came apart in New Zealand toward the end of the long Pacific tour leg. The first show took place on March 20 in Wellington, before 60,000 at the Athletic Park, a rugby stadium. The opening act was New Zealand bluesman Hammond Gamble and his band, Street Talk. They played well, and were even asked to extend their set by fifteen minutes as there was some problem with Fleetwood Mac. In the rugby dressing room Mick noticed that Lindsey was draining a bottle of Scotch whiskey but didn’t think much of it. Their concert set was proceeding normally until they noticed that Lindsey was playing out of tune. Then he began to fool around, trying to trip Stevie as she whirled and twirled about the stage. Then he began imitating her moves and dances. The people up front started laughing, like it was part of the show. When Stevie was hunched down during the quiet interlude of “Rhiannon,” Lindsey stopped playing and pulled his suit jacket over his head in a stupid parody of her pose. Then he began trying to kick her when she attempted to salvage the number. He’d aim a boot at her and she’d have to dodge. The rest of the band was embarrassed and furious, glaring at Lindsey, who was now laughing hysterically.

  “It was meltdown night for the Mac,” Gamble said later. “They deteriorated before our eyes. We heard the crowd chanting ‘Bring back Street Talk!’ It was my worst live rock experience—ever.”

  There was no encore that night. The band was in shock. Tens of thousands were outside, screaming for more music, but Lindsey hardly even seemed to know where he was. Suddenly Christine McVie stormed into the men’s dressing area, an unheard-of breech of postshow custom. Refreshed cocktail in hand, she strode over to Lindsey, who was dead-eyed and sadly slumped on a bench; she smacked him with a hard right across his cheek. Then Chris splashed her drink in his face. She told him, in a low voice: “Don’t you ever do that to this band again,” and stormed out. Christine didn’t even speak to Lindsey for the rest of the tour leg. Lindsey later blamed the incident on “my temper,” but he never apologized to Stevie or anyone else.

  Two nights later, Fleetwood Mac played another massive show at Western Springs stadium in Aukland. The guys in Street Talk were ordered to play a short set and then leave the backstage area. They could hear raised voices coming from the dressing rooms. “They were arguing among themselves,” Hammond Gamble recalled. “We were told to leave them alone; don’t even go near them. We went out and watched from the stands, I think. Stevie Nicks came onstage and used all her considerable charm and won the crowd over, and proved she was the rock goddess that we had come to see. But somehow, it seemed forced to us.”

  They flew to Hawaii, a long haul, for three nights of shows in Honolulu. Everyone was sick of being in Fleetwood Mac. Mick called a band meeting in Hawaii. Stevie reiterated that she was not leaving the band but was going to make her own record next. She told them if her solo career bombed (which many in the Fleetwood Mac camp were praying for), she’d still have a great band to be in. They were all reminded that the Tusk tour was booked until the end of 1980. Mick managed to get all five to agree that they would renegotiate with Warners and then plan for the future. There would be solo albums now, a healthy thing, but there were forces that would try to pull them apart, Mick said, but they must stick together. No one could break the chain. They made an oath on it.

  When Stevie got back to Los Angeles at the end of March 1980, instead of going home she moved in with her future new producer and current lover, Jimmy Iovine. They’d been together, more or less in secret, since the beginning of the year.

  *

  Back in 1979, after Warner Bros. passed on a joint venture with Modern Records, Paul Fishkin and Danny Goldberg pressed on. There were a half dozen major labels who might be interested in the multimillion-dollar package they were proposing, but they wanted the next record company they approached to make the deal, since multiple rejections could hurt their cause. Paul knew an exec named Doug Morris, then the head of Atco, a division of Atlantic Records, the pioneering R&B company that had branched out into rock and counted Led Zeppelin as one of its biggest successes. Stevie approved of Atlantic, and a meeting was arranged. Their cause was helped by corporate jealousies; Warners and Atlantic were part of the same giant record company, and Doug Morris was seen by the
board members as only a second-tier guy who’d had a couple of one-off hit records. He resented this, and a big success with Stevie Nicks would be a sharp spike in the eye for Mo Ostin at Warners. Morris got his boss Ahmet Ertegun, the suave Turkish diplomat’s son who founded Atlantic in 1950, to approve the deal with Modern if Stevie would agree to five solo albums, not two albums as originally proposed. After some hesitation, she agreed. Modern Records would be distributed by Atlantic. (Two decades later, Doug Morris would be the most important executive in the recording industry.)

  By then Stevie was already in the studio with Tom Moncrieff, her demo producer who’d worked on the tracks she cut with Walter Egan. One night Danny brought Doug Morris to the studio when they were working on one of Stevie’s new songs, “Outside the Rain.” Morris was a smart businessman, but he’d also been a songwriter in his younger days. (His biggest hit was “Sweet Talkin’ Guy” sung by—ha ha—the Chiffons.) Danny remembered, “After a couple of hours lying on the floor listening to what was going on, Doug leaned over and whispered to me, ‘We’re fucked. He [Moncrieff] doesn’t even know she’s singing out of tune. We need a real producer.’ I knew immediately that he was right.”

  Stevie took this hard. Tom Moncrieff was a trusted old friend from Fritz days who wore one of her little crescent moon pendants. But it didn’t take much persuasion in the end to get Stevie to agree. She was in a state of anxiety now about her music. She’d never done anything without Lindsey Buckingham, who’d shaped her sound like a surfboard and knew her in and out. Could she succeed without his brilliant ear and subtle sonic sensibility? (And there were plenty of doubters about this.) But then she came up with the idea of getting Tom Petty to produce the record. She loved Tom Petty, and went to work making this happen.