Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  Danny: “Hundreds of stores were called for information, but the final creation of the chart was done by one guy named Bill Wardlow. Doug [Morris] took Stevie to dinner with Wardlow, and as a quid pro quo for personal attention, the next week Bella Donna was officially the number-one album in the country according to Billboard, despite the fact that reports indicated it was really number three.” Foreigner and Journey angrily protested, to no avail. “Bella Donna was number one for only a single week,” Danny sagely observed, “but that still made it a number-one album.”

  Jubilation and relief reigned in Stevie’s camps in LA and Phoenix, and at the LA and New York offices of Modern Records. They had done it. Speaking of himself and Paul, Danny later said that they had risked their careers on Stevie, and their faith had paid off. Bella Donna would sell up to three million copies by the end of the year. After MTV kept playing the video, the album sold three million more. Stevie Nicks now was an established star in her own right. She was thirty-three years old.

  *

  On the day Bella Donna went to #1, as Stevie remembered, “my very best friend [Robin Anderson] called me and told me she had terminal leukemia, and might last three months. So without a doubt it was the absolute high and low of success. I never got to enjoy Bella Donna at all because my friend was dying. Something … went out that day. Something just left.

  “They said Robin had the worst leukemia UCLA Medical Center had ever seen,” Stevie recalled. “She was sicker than you could believe.” The doctors told Robin there wasn’t much they could do for her. Then Robin got pregnant. Her doctors advised her to terminate the pregnancy if she wanted to prolong her life. Robin ignored this advice, which set off a mad scramble for alternative therapies and healers as well as months of worry and anguish for Stevie. Robin Snyder Anderson was determined to live long enough to bear this child.

  Danny Goldberg loved Robin, who’d even worked for his PR firm, and felt terrible for Stevie. “She had this huge success with Bella Donna while trying to manage her unhappiness over her best friend’s predicament. It was a very trying time for everyone involved with Stevie and her project.”

  *

  When Stevie received the first finished copies of her album, she wrote and drew elaborate dedications to each member of Fleetwood Mac, and took them over to the studio where they were remixing possible further singles from the Live album. She handed a copy to Lindsey, with a fulsome inscription thanking him for all the inspiration over the years. Lindsey seemed preoccupied with the knobs on the mixing desk; he barely glanced at Bella Donna. He put the record on the floor, leaning it against the console. She waited around for him to pick it up and read what she had gratefully written. He never looked at the album for two hours and then went home without it. Someone told Stevie that Lindsey was calling her Top 10 single “Stop Dragging My Career Around.” She was mad as hell. “I never forgave him for that one,” she seethed.

  “My old journals tell the story of the way things changed when Bella Donna came out,” Stevie said later. “No one in the band ever said a word to me about my solo career. They were keeping quiet, out of their own interests. No one even said they’d listened to my record. They knew that if they ripped Bella Donna apart, I wouldn’t give them any more songs. No more ‘Dreams’—the only #1 single that Fleetwood Mac ever had. That was me.”

  Stevie’s feelings were hurt. She felt really wounded by her friends’ reaction to her album.

  She might have taken some small notice (and satisfaction) when Lindsey’s solo album was released that October of 1981. The first single, “Trouble,” got to #9, but the Law and Order album stalled at #32, while Bella Donna’s second single, “Leather and Lace,” the loving duet with Don Henley, was hot on the radio and peaking at #6.

  Vengeance—a dish best served cold.

  5.3 “The Reigning Queen of Rock & Roll”

  Stevie Nicks’s newly appointed music director, Waddy Wachtel, began rehearsing the first Stevie Nicks Band in early November 1981. Everyone had played on Bella Donna. Waddy was on lead guitar, with Bob Glaub on bass. Swinging Russ Kunkel was the drummer, perfect for a dancing singer like Stevie, with Roy Bittan from the E Street Band on keyboards. Heartbreaker Benmont Tench played atmospheric organ and synthesizers, which made the Stevie Nicks Band sound a lot like Tom Petty’s. Bobbye Hall, a striking black woman, played congas, with Sharon and Lori singing at the right side of the stage. Waddy was concerned about Lori actually upstaging Stevie with her unusual beauty and sensual movements while singing backing vocals. He told the girls in no uncertain terms to stay in front of their microphones and not distract the audience’s attention away from Stevie. “Take it down a step,” he ordered. He didn’t want the girls to gesture or wave their arms, either. “Keep those fuckin’ arms down,” he insisted, “or I’ll fuckin’ cut ’em off.”

  While the band was rehearsing, something happened that gave Stevie a jolt. “I came out of the stage door and a girl was crying hysterically. I can never walk away from someone in tears, so I asked what was wrong. She said, ‘Will you sign my arm?’ So I did. The next night she was back with her arm tattooed with my name!” Stevie scolded the girl, which prompted more floods of tears. Another night, a different girl asked Stevie to sign her arm. Stevie said, ‘I did that the other day and the girl went out and had her arm tattooed.’”

  That was my best friend, the girl replied. Stevie: “So I told her, ‘I’m not touching your arm. Don’t put that on me. I’ll sue! That’s pain. I’m not here to bring pain. I’m here to bring you out of pain. It’s not funny—it’s stupid.’ It bummed me out. I felt like I’d come out the wrong door.”

  Stevie and the band performed a concert for an HBO special that was shown several times on America’s most important cable channel, increasing sales for Bella Donna. (This was directed by Marty Callner, one of a new breed of video auteurs whose small-screen visions—often grounded in TV commercials—would come to dominate Western visual media in the next decade.) Stevie was dressed in white, like a bride, with leggings covering stiletto-heeled boots. Her big hair was blown out backstage between numbers. She wrapped herself in a white shawl for the show’s finale, “Edge of Seventeen,” which featured a stirring, repeated, priestess-like warning of impending death—“I hear … the call … of the nightbird”—by the three singers. At the end of the song, as the band vamped behind her, Stevie began a tradition—“The Walk”—moving across the front of the stage, accepting bouquets, toys, notes, and framed pictures while discretely shadowed by Dennis Dunston, a beefy (and married) Australian security expert who’d been working with Fleetwood Mac. He was popular with the band, didn’t drink and drug, and now was minding Stevie on her tour.

  The White Winged Dove Tour consisted of only eleven shows in Texas, Arizona, and California in late November and early December; the tour went by fast and everyone had fun. Shows began with “Gold Dust Woman” and introduced “Think About It” and “Outside the Rain” to Stevie’s audience. Rapturous cries from the seats greeted “Dreams,” and then “Angel” from Tusk. Three new songs followed: “After the Glitter Fades,” “Gold and Braid,” and “I Need to Know.” More rapture for long, swooning versions of “Sara,” taken fast by Russ Kunkel, followed by “Blue Lamp” (just out on the Heavy Metal movie soundtrack album) and “Bella Donna”—unfamiliar songs that sent her audiences to the bathrooms. Back at their seats, they heard “Leather and Lace” (the Don Henley part sung by Benmont Tench), “How Still My Love,” and “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” They ended with “Edge of Seventeen” (after a heroic, hand-wrenching, three-minute guitar stutter from Waddy while Stevie refreshed and switched shawls backstage). “Rhiannon” was the encore most nights. The final concert was at the Fox Wilshire Theater in Hollywood on December 13 before a hometown crowd rabid for Stevie Nicks and her band.

  Right after that, Stevie went to Phoenix for Christmas, and then she and her assistant flew to Paris via Air France. They were met by a black Citroen limousine and driven for
an hour to a remote country castle, the Chateau d’Herouville, in the dead of winter, to help make the next Fleetwood Mac album.

  *

  Mick Fleetwood arrived the next day. He remembered the long, tree-lined drive to the chateau and then getting out of the car and looking up to see Stevie peering at him from the leaded-glass windows of her turreted bedroom, looking like Queen Guinevere in the foggy country morning light. He had asked the band to record outside the United States because of his ruinous tax liabilities and increasingly desperate financial concerns. He’d chosen the studio at Le Chateau, a late medieval French castle near the town of Herouville, about sixty miles from Paris. Elton John had famously recorded there and renamed it “Honky Chateau.” Other rock stars (with tax issues) who had worked there included David Bowie, Pink Floyd, the BeeGees, and the Dead. The modern recording studio offered the privacy of a fifty-acre deer park, good food, and a romantic atmosphere appropriate to Fleetwood Mac’s quest, which was basically to try to remake Rumours. They were booked in for a month. Stevie’s and Chris’s bedrooms had been redecorated at the usual expense. Stevie found the chateau to be chilly and damp, haunted, a little creepy, and she had a cold and a runny nose most of the time she was there.

  No one was happy. Stevie, Christine, and Lindsey had all interrupted solo work to be in France, for Mick’s sake. Christine was sad, having recently dumped Dennis Wilson, a true cad, who’d used her credit cards to buy stuff for young girls and also put out the malicious story that he’d had a relationship with Stevie Nicks. (Apparently not true. Later Dennis would drown in a pathetic boating accident in Marina Del Rey.) There weren’t much drugs to be had. With the excellent JC’s contacts and international dope expertise having been forfeited, Mick would have to be driven into Paris on sleazy, dangerous cocaine forays, often returning to the chateau with dubious powders that seemed on nasal ingestion to be infant laxative cut with speed. Delicious communal meals with superb wines in the castle’s ancient kitchen were eaten mostly in silence. Mick later remembered one of the only light moments being when Stevie “borrowed” his rented gray mare and galloped down the long drive in the morning mist, a flowing auburn cape streaming behind her.

  And yet, here she was—the woman whom Rolling Stone had just put on its cover and proclaimed her “The Reigning Queen of Rock & Roll”—back under Lindsey Buckingham’s … law and order. She was sick, and having trouble breathing, and didn’t know whether she had asthsma or bronchitis. She joked that she was a career invalid.

  She’d brought three songs to France for Mac’s consideration. (They’d asked for four.) “That’s Alright” was a laconic, country-style rocker, a breakup song with an organ and banjo groove, originally called “Designs of Love” and dating from the 1974 Buckingham Nicks sessions. “Straight Back” was a new song that seemed to conflate the dwindling of the romance with Jimmy Iovine amid the anguish of having to rejoin the Mac in France in the midst of her epic new solo career. It was sung in a low and fierce voice, set off with Lindsey’s clever countermelody, an angry soul singer searching for lost dreams.

  Then there was “Gypsy,” considered by some to be the greatest of the heroic musical collaborations between Stevie and Lindsey. The gypsy was a visionary metaphor: youthful innocence floating away, inchoate, calling out, but then just an echo or maybe a wish. Only visible by lightning, the gypsy was elusive, fugitive, just a feeling and a desire expressed in a sparkling arrangement for guitar and keyboard, bass, and drums. For many, Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy” bottled a moment, the early eighties crystallized in a haunted song.

  Lindsey was with his girlfriend, Carol, who later reported that he was in a bad mood in France. Fleetwood Mac’s mandate to recapture the “soft rock/adult contemporary” Rumours groove, he felt, was a slap at him for the less-than-magic experiments of Tusk. Lindsey took out some of his frustrations on stressed and ailing Stevie, who bore his insensitive sarcasm and toxic indifference until she could stand it no more. She called Front Line Management in Los Angeles and sent for Jimmy Iovine, who soon appeared at her side at Le Chateau. That shut Lindsey up. Stevie had been visited in the studio by love interests before, but this was another matter: a boyfriend who was a respected producer, even a rival, and one who had just made Stevie’s solo album a number-one hit record, proving—forever—that Stevie wasn’t commercially dependent on Lindsey’s production of her music.

  Stevie and Jimmy sat close together on the Chateau’s commodious studio sofa, sipping champagne, whispering to each other as if in a conspiracy … ssss, ssss … which drove already deeply stressed Lindsey crazy while he was trying to mix tracks at the console. When the month at the chateau had expired, Stevie was relieved to go home and begin work on her next solo album for her label, Modern Records.

  *

  Los Angeles, 1982. While Lindsey, Christine, and Mick spend the next seven months at the Record Plant working on the Fleetwood Mac album, Stevie was trying to write her new record, which was difficult because she was preoccupied with trying to help look after Robin Anderson, now visibly pregnant. Robin’s cancer doctors were telling her that carrying the baby to term would likely shorten her life, but she wanted the child and had found some strength and solace in her born-again husband’s ardent Christian faith. All the songs and verses Stevie was coming up with seemed to be for or about poor Robin. Stevie took her friend to Hawaii for a few restful weeks late in the winter, and it seemed to do them both some good.

  Modern Records released two more singles from Bella Donna that year, which kept the album in the stores and selling well. “Edge of Seventeen” reached #11, and later “After the Glitter Fades” got to #32. “Sleeping Angel,” which didn’t make it on the album, would be released on the Fast Times at Ridgemont High soundtrack album in June.

  In March Fleetwood Mac made their first videos for MTV. Stevie was already a mainstay of the network because of the ubiquity of “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” (The “Edge of Seventeen” video had been lifted from the HBO special’s footage.) Stevie was well aware that the cable music channel was the immediate future of getting her music out to the world. “I was living in the Pacific Palisades [when MTV began in August 1981] and I would just sit there, on the end of my bed, watching video after video, just stupefied,” she recalled. The first clip MTV played was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. “When that came out, we took it with a grain of salt. We thought, Well, video’s not gonna kill the radio star. But it did! The song was prophetic.”

  Russell Mulcahy directed both of the Mirage videos. Stevie appeared only tangentially on the first one, Christine’s “Hold Me.” It was shot in 100-degree heat in the desert. Stevie refused to walk in the sand in her stacked heels, and indeed seemed so stoned she could barely walk at all. John McVie got drunk and tried to punch the director.

  Right after this, Jimmy Iovine got Stevie into rehab for cocaine addiction. She remembered, “I was in Corona del Mar [California] in self-imposed rehab for two weeks. I wanted to stop doing coke. But then the ‘Gypsy’ video was scheduled and there was no getting out of it.” The shoot was for three days. At the end of the first day, Stevie was tired and asked for some cocaine, which was procured. She wrapped the little phial in a tissue and hid it behind the makeup mirror. When she was called back to the set, someone cleaned the dressing room and threw away the tissue with the cocaine. “I said to the person that got it for me, ‘You have to get in the garbage dumpster and find that little bottle.’ But this person refused.” Stevie refused to return to rehab.

  The “Gypsy” video was all Nicks: a ballet studio with dolls and crystals; cut to a soup kitchen in the black-and-white rain of a forties movie; then a swank nightclub, with the other Macs as bit players; cut to Stevie in a manic Nirvana, dancing on the edge of a cliff with little white fairy children twirling about her. Stevie: “There’s a scene in ‘Gypsy’ where Lindsey and I are dancing. And we weren’t getting along very well then. I didn’t want to be anywhere near Lindsey, and I certainly didn�
��t want to be in his arms. If you watch, you’ll see I wasn’t happy. And he wasn’t a very good dancer.”

  The long (five and a half minutes) “Gypsy” video, said to have been the most expensive clip to date, was MTV’s first “World Premier Video.” It helped propel Mirage to a legitimate #1 Billboard chart position when the album came out that summer. “Gypsy” generated the most replay requests in MTV’s young history when it went into heavy rotation in September 1982. Mirage would spend eighteen weeks in the U.S. Top 10, five weeks at #1—the first time in five years. Mick Fleetwood remembered, “It felt great to be back on top—at least for a while.”

  He was less than thrilled when Stevie told him that she would only do a short tour with Fleetwood Mac, just shows in North America: no Europe, no Pacific. She said that her friend was sick, she wasn’t feeling well herself, and she had her own album to do now. It was another way of Stevie telling him that Fleetwood Mac was lucky to get her at all.

  5.4 Kim and Sara Anderson’s Honeymoon

  The Mirage tour, originally about thirty shows in the summer of 1982, was booked around two big outdoor festivals, one in Florida, and the US Festival in California, a mammoth concert in the California desert produced by Steve Wozniak, who had invented the Apple II computer. (The band received $800,000—more than $4 million in current money—for their single show closing the three-day festival.)

  For Stevie Nicks the tour was an ordeal. She’d been diagnosed with what she called bronchial spasmodic asthma. She told a Playboy magazine interviewer, “I have to take these miserable pills that make you feel like someone put something weird in your Perrier.” Her singing voice was torn and frayed, and her trusty vocal coach Robin was dying at home. So Stevie used the lower range of her voice to sing and got lousy reviews in the press. But Mirage was still #1 after three weeks and many of the shows sold out. Two nights were filmed by Marty Callner, and his cameras captured some memorable moments. There was Stevie glaring with hatred at Lindsey during “The Chain,” in whiteface makeup, dark eyeliner, heavy rouge and lipstick, wearing a silver-spangled black dress under a black shawl as if she were in mourning. There was Stevie, barely able to sing “Gypsy,” in woolen leggings and a pink mesh top over a cleavage-revealing beige camisole. She was leaning forward for emphasis as she sings, legs wide apart, drugged eyes dead to the camera. They caught Stevie singing “Rhiannon” in a white shawl, barely moving, with only a slinky and subdued dance at the end. During “dreams unwind,” she looked over at Lindsey and sang, “You don’t change I don’t change All the same, Rhiannon,” finishing the song in a woozy collapse at the microphone stand. She put on her signature top hat and a black cropped jacket for “Go Your Own Way,” walking the edge of the stage at the end, accepting presents and flowers as in her solo concerts. The first encore was “Sisters of the Moon,” Stevie in a black silken shawl, looking blasted, stricken, tears in her eyes, offering trans-lexical singing, like talking in tongues with a voice that didn’t quite work. Christine ended the shows with “Songbird.” Some of these shows earned Stevie Nicks some of the worst concert reviews of her career.