Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  At the end, of course, Mick couldn’t account for a lot of money after a year on the road. No one actually accused him of stealing, but it was a scandal that would remain secret for a long time. John Courage was fired at the end of the meeting. No one thought JC was anything but honest, and no allegations were ever made against him; JC was a star-quality tour manager who had taken good care of his band on the road. And yet, he had to go.

  Mick was next. Some saw this as Stevie Nicks’s revenge. (Sara Recor, meanwhile, had had enough of Mick’s lunacy and had run off to Hawaii with one of the tour technicians, leaving Mick despondent.) At a subsequent band meeting at Mick’s Bel Air mansion, with all of them sitting in a circle like an Indian powwow, Irving Azoff read the riot act as Mick realized with dull horror that Stevie had given Azoff the power to leverage a position within Fleetwood Mac. He said something like, “Hey Mick—it’s over. I represent Stevie and she ain’t doing nothing unless things change. From now on, we ain’t paying no management commission, no office overhead, no legal fees, no accounting fees—nothing. She’s gonna make a record and we’re out for now, good-bye.”

  Mick remembered thinking that this was also the manager of their great rivals, the Eagles. Maybe it wasn’t only Stevie who was avenging something. In the end, Mick later wrote, “Now I was off the throne. It was the democratization of Fleetwood Mac. Ever since, we’ve had review by committee—managers, lawyers, accountants. The Gang of Four.”

  When this meeting wound down, Mick went into the back garden of his house and had a cry. The rest of them came out and sat with him. Stevie held his hand and said they weren’t mad at him. It was just that there was no money, no cash flow from the long tour. Stevie told him she knew he’d provided what they’d needed, like a sugar daddy. No hard feelings … OK, maybe just a few.

  With that, a humiliated Mick Fleetwood put his too-big house on the market and flew to Hawaii to try to get wandering Sara Recor to come back home. As for Stevie, her solo career and lots of hard work loomed in the future. But some of her most ardent longtime fans feel that Stevie Nicks’s best work was already behind her.

  CHAPTER 5

  5.1 Stevie Faces Death

  Now it’s late 1980. Ronald Reagan, the arch-conservative former California governor, has been elected president of the United States. The American eighties are under way and would be nothing like the sixties and seventies. For an ambitious, hard-charging rock star like Stevie Nicks the eighties would be big hair, big tits, new styles, swagger, and pomp. The music would be more pop than rock—synthesizers, synth drums, sequencers, Duran Duran, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper. MTV would start broadcasting music videos around the clock in 1981, which meant the wardrobes got brighter, with more pastels, big shoulders, hard edges. Stevie’s new eighties styles would explore the implications of the feminine as applied to power and strength, and her stage clothes would become an even more iconic part of the self she would project to her fans through song and presentation.

  On December 8, 1980, Stevie and Jimmy Iovine were at his house in the San Fernando Valley when someone called to tell him that John Lennon had been shot in front of his apartment building in New York. Jimmy went into shock. They turned on the TV to hear that the former Beatle was dead, murdered by a fan. Jimmy had been one of Lennon’s favorite studio engineers on his mid-seventies solo projects, and the two had grown close. Now Jimmy was inconsolable.

  She’d been living with Jimmy for about six months when this happened. “He was finishing Tom Petty’s album,” she recalled, “and since nobody really knew where I was, I was starting to get itchy to begin work on Bella Donna and it seemed like it would just never happen. Jimmy had told me many times about his incredible friendship with John. It was a real-life fairy tale that ended one gray day. A terrible sadness came over the house; there was simply nothing I could say.” Stevie packed up and went home. Jimmy would have to do this by himself.

  But Stevie would face death herself in the next few weeks. Her mother called to say that her Uncle Bill was in the hospital with cancer and wasn’t expected to live. Stevie was on the next plane to Phoenix where she joined her parents, Aunt Carmel, and cousin John at her uncle’s bedside. Late one night Stevie and John were keeping vigil when Uncle Bill went into cardiac arrest. They called for a nurse but there was no response. Stevie dashed into the hall and ran down the long, shadowy corridor, but it seemed no one was on duty. She plunged down some dark stairs, but the door to the floor below was locked. In a panic, she came back up again. She ran back down the hall to her uncle’s room, but when she walked in he was already gone. Bill Nicks was her favorite uncle, and Stevie now went into mourning herself, appearing mostly in black for a while.

  The deaths of these two men were intense for Stevie. That empty hospital hall would soon be featured on one of her best songs.

  *

  Jimmy Iovine took control of Stevie’s recording sessions with a steely will. He expected her to show up on time so they could stay on budget. Most of the girls in the entourage were banished from the studio. He’d instructed the Heartbreakers and the studio players to ignore Stevie’s attempts to make friends and get them under her spell. He told her, “Look, if we’re gonna do this, it’s not a part-time job. We have to approach it like you’ve never made an album before. This band—you can’t trick them. You can’t trick seasoned musicians. They have to believe. If they feel this is a hobby of yours, they’re gonna treat it like a hobby, and everyone around it will treat it like a hobby.”

  It addition to the half-dozen songs from Fleetwood Mac sessions, Stevie brought in several new ideas. “Outside the Rain” with the Heartbreakers, originally produced by Tom Petty, got a makeover by Jimmy Iovine that softened Petty’s guitar band sound. “Bella Donna” would introduce the album as a somewhat murky meditation on mystical love and a plea to “come in, out of the darkness.” The late Tusk outtake, “How Still My Love,” was almost an homage to Lindsey Buckingham’s celestial chord structures.

  “Edge of Seventeen,” originally a slower piano ballad, gathered elements from Stevie’s journals: the white winged dove was both John Lennon’s spirit and the archetypal dove of peace; there was also a type of white dove that roosted in the Saguero cactuses of the Arizona desert. The call of the night bird was Death in the hall where no one was left standing in. Then drummer Russ Kunkel came up with a harder rocking drum track. Waddy added a saw-toothed guitar stutter, and Jimmy Iovine changed “Edge of Seventeen” to a powerful, poetically rambling song about (what seemed to fans like) a romantic coming of age.

  But the title came out of a misunderstanding. It was an accident. It happened that Stevie felt she wasn’t getting much warmth from the musicians working on her songs. She wasn’t used to it. Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell sort of ignored her. Shelly Yakus, whom Jimmy brought from New York to engineer the sessions, hardly looked at her. Even Tom Petty seemed cooler to her. (She didn’t know about Jimmy’s harsh instructions to leave her alone.) Stevie, accustomed to the drama kings of Fleetwood Mac, wasn’t used to this kind of blank professionalism. But she still wanted to be in the Heartbreakers, and she wasn’t backing down, or going away. So, as Tom Petty later recalled, “Stevie went to work on Jane.”

  Jane Benyo Petty had been Tom’s high school girlfriend back in Gainesville. At her family’s insistence, he married her before they left for fame and fortune in California in 1975. She was slender and pretty, tall and blond like Tom, and spoke with an even thicker Southern drawl than her husband. Stevie invited Jane into her private, enchanted world of Tiffany lamps and Persian carpets, candles and incense, girlfriends in long dresses, and midnight metaphysical speculations on various occult matters, all documented with Stevie’s ever-present Polaroid instant camera. Jane Petty liked the high-speed cocaine as well.

  One night, Stevie asked Jane when she met Tom. She replied, “Ah met him at the edge of seventeen.”

  Stevie, puzzled, said, “Did you say the ‘edge’ of seventeen?”

  Ja
ne laughed. “No, Ah said Ah met him at the ‘age’ of seventeen. He wasn’t no more than a baby then.”

  Stevie told Jane that “Edge of Seventeen” would make a killer song title. Jane told her to go ahead. Such is fate. Stevie invited Jane to come down to the sessions and gradually the atmosphere loosened up. Stevie even got dour Ben Tench and Mike Campbell to smile at her at the end of a good take.

  *

  Late winter 1981. Warners Bros. released a single from Fleetwood Mac Live, “Over My Head” and Stevie’s “Fireflies.” A twelve-inch 45-rpm single was also issued to radio stations, the first appearance of Stevie’s music in this format. The single only got to #60, and was considered to have bombed.

  Around this time Stevie got tired of the so-called “marine layer,” the almost daily fogbank that rolled in from the Pacific most mornings and covered the beach towns—Santa Monica, Venice, and Marina Del Rey. She went house-hunting—maybe her favorite activity outside of music—and was shown a colonnaded mansion in the hills above Pacific Palisades with a great view of Santa Monica and the ocean. It was in the middle of its own land, reached by a long drive, and the big white columns holding up the entrance porch reminded her of Tara, Scarlett O’Hara’s house in Gone with the Wind. She bought the house for the asking price and moved her piano in a month later.

  *

  Her recording sessions continued, with an inspiring new presence.

  When listening to vocal playbacks in the studio, Stevie and Jimmy thought the singing could be stronger, meatier, deeper in timbre. Stevie and Sharon Celani sounded great together, but a third element was needed to complete the triad of womanly harmonic convergence they had in mind.

  Two years previous, during a tour break, Stevie had recorded the piano demo for “Sara” in Gordon Perry’s studio in Dallas. At the same session she made a rough demo for a new song, “Beauty and the Beast,” which touched on her relationship with Mick. The title was appropriated from one of her favorite old movies, Jean Cocteau’s surrealist 1946 masterpiece, La Belle et la Bête. While in Dallas, Stevie got to know Perry’s wife, Lori, a beautiful redhead who sang on the radio spots and commercial jingles produced at the studio. Stevie was really taken with Lori Perry—everyone was. Lori was from LA, had grown up in the San Fernando Valley, and had worked in the trenches of the music business as a production assistant and secretary. She had her own (understated but sexy) style, was a natural singer, and moved with the easy grace of a trained dancer. At age thirty Lori was a bit younger than Stevie, but she was quickly deemed to be vibey, and very Rhiannon.

  When Fleetwood Mac moved on from Dallas, Stevie left the “Beauty and the Beast” piano demo with Gordon Perry and suggested that Lori work on the song, adding backing vocals and instrumentation. Lori recalled, “I was so flattered, but a bit reticent … I really didn’t feel I had the talent to sing on a Stevie Nicks song.” But Gordon insisted that Lori should at least try it, so she enlisted her singing best friend, Caroline Brooks, to sing with her. They overdubbed harmonies and ran a simple keyboard vamp over Stevie’s piano demo. They sent the tape to Stevie and didn’t hear back until she called to say that she’d started her solo record, and she wanted to hire Lori to sing with her and Sharon Celani on the album and the tour. Soon Lori Perry arrived and was absorbed into Stevie’s hermetic, insular clique of strong, creative women—the ones who sang at night, and who with Stevie Nicks lived a California rock & roll fantasy of fun and success, and the endless promise of more the next night, too.

  5.2 Vengeance

  Spring 1981. Jimmy Iovine was worried.

  They were sequencing Stevie’s album. The difficult, almost tuneless new song “Bella Donna” would open the first side, at Stevie’s insistence, then “Kind of Woman,” “Think About It,” and “After the Glitter Fades.” Side two would be “Edge of Seventeen,” “How Still My Love,” “Leather and Lace,” “Outside the Rain,” and “The Highwayman,” the old-fashioned ballad on which Don Henley had been persuaded to play drums and sing. There were also three strong new songs in reserve: “Blue Lamp” was about guardian angels and “a lamp I carried from my mother’s home”; “Gold and Braid” was a keyboard-driven, Allman Brothers–style pastiche about a strong man who would “like to make her better, and hold her like a child”; and “Sleeping Angels,” a passionate ballad dispensing hard-won pearls of wisdom—“Real love affairs are heavy spells / For a woman and a man.”

  But Jimmy Iovine didn’t hear a hit single in any of these songs. What about “Edge of Seventeen?” Stevie asked. Wouldn’t work, he said. “Edge of Seventeen” was too much of a gamble for the first single. She wanted to gamble. Danny explained that solo albums by members of big groups usually only did so-so in the market, unless propelled by huge nationwide radio airplay. Tusk, he pointed out, was a “multiplatinum disappointment” compared to Rumours, so Fleetwood Mac’s stock was perceived by radio program directors to have fallen. Stevie needed an instant radio smash, or their hard work was all in vain.

  Jimmy wanted Stevie to cut two new songs Tom Petty and Mike Campbell had written for the Heartbreakers. She was resistant and told them bluntly, asserting herself, leaning in, “I don’t need to do other people’s songs.” But Jimmy leaned back—his career was potentially at stake—and soon Stevie and Petty were in the studio with his band. They cut a track called “The Insider,” a noirish look at the music world, and the first time anyone had heard the thrilling mix of their two voices. Still, Jimmy said, they didn’t have the single.

  Somehow, Jimmy Iovine got Tom Petty to record “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” with Stevie: an organ-driven, duet-format breakup song with a “one-listen hook,” destined for Petty’s next album. Memphis bass guitar master Donald “Duck” Dunn played on the track, under one of Stevie’s most powerful vocals. Petty’s lyrics described someone he must have known well, someone beautiful, sexy, seductive, and unobtainable; then sleazy and unwanted, but ultimately haunting. When Petty finally gave into intense pressure and gave Stevie the track, she had achieved everything she’d set out to do when she broke free from domination by Lindsey and Mick. Feminine wiles: she was almost a Heartbreaker now. Some of them were even in her band. She’d co-opted their producer and stolen their best new song. Bella Donna, her new album, would be released that summer. Lindsey’s first solo album would be out a few months later. Ambitious, super-competitive Stevie Nicks would give them all a run for their money.

  *

  Then someone at Atlantic Records had a problem with Bella Donna as the album title. Danny Goldberg did, too. Los Angeles’ demimonde was rife with rumors of drug-taking at Stevie Nicks’s house, and there were also stories going around about experimentation with herbs and plants said to have magical or psychotropic effects. The poisonous black fruit and pear-shaped leaves of the belladonna plant (Atropa belladonna) were traditionally associated with witchcraft, used for inducing visions and hallucinations, even when just rubbed on one’s skin. President Reagan and his publicity-seeking wife were rabid antidrug campaigners (“Just Say No”), and Danny warned that the title could bring unwanted negative attention to a great album. He finally persuaded an unconvinced Stevie to change the title (and the album track) to a more neutral Bella Donna, “beautiful lady” in Latin and Italian.

  Prior to release, they shot a video of Stevie and Tom performing the song with the Heartbreakers. This was a few months before the new cable channel MTV began narrowcasting music clips twenty-four hours a day, so the video was aimed at the late-night syndicated rock shows. The director told Stevie just to mime the words and flirt with Tom. Stevie wore an off-white lacy outfit with silvered leggings and stacked heels, a new look she and Margi Kent had come up with for her solo work. This style partly derived from a young Fleetwood Mac fan Stevie had seen in the audience from the stage at the Hollywood Bowl. This girl was dancing in layers of cream chiffon and snowy lace, her long hair piled up on her head like a Gibson Girl, her legs encased in big silver boots. Very Rhiannon, she was. Stevie pointed
this girl out to Margi Kent. That was how she wanted to look in front of her own band, and that’s how she appeared in the “Stop Draggin’” video. (When MTV did go on air in August 1981, “Stop Draggin’” was one of the few videos available by famous musicians, and the new channel played it almost every hour for the first year of MTV’s febrile, exciting, must-watch existence.)

  The album photos were shot at Herbie Worthington’s studio. Stevie portrayed herself as a bejeweled white witch against a dark, blue-black screen, holding aloft her brother Chris’s white toucan, Max. Other props included a crystal ball, Stevie’s tambourine, and a clutch of white roses. The inner sleeve depicted Stevie in black lace along with Sharon Celani, looking like Mona Lisa with her olive complexion and black dress, and also Lori Perry, long auburn curls falling over a blue silk dress. The album bore this dedication: “And once again this music is dedicated to my Grandfather / and all his children.”

  Unlike most musicians in rock bands, Stevie was something of a national celebrity, and Danny was able to use this with mainstream media as opposed to the music press. Stevie flew to New York and appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America, then the highest-rated show on breakfast television. This and heavy airplay helped propel “Stop Draggin’” to the top of the charts in both rock and Top 40 radio when the single was released by Modern Records in June 1981.

  Bella Donna the album came out at the end of July and was met with strong (but cautious) reviews. Doug Morris made sure Atco’s publicity and sales teams worked the record hard. It began selling strongly as legions of Fleetwood Mac fans began buying copies, but it was lagging at #3 behind big albums by Foreigner (#1) and Journey (#2), mainstays of big-time corporate rock. In those days before bar-code scans made accurate counting of record sales possible, the Billboard and other sales charts relied on phone calls to record stores and other semireliable sources. But Danny Goldberg and Paul Fishkin were determined to get Bella Donna to the top. They had almost promised this to Stevie, two long years before.