Fleetwood Mac usually went out on the road for a year to promote a new record. But Stevie’s management took notice of her fragile condition and basically canceled the tour after only eighteen, mostly apathetic, shows. When the brief Mirage tour ended, Mirage had been #1 for five weeks. It almost immediately dropped off the charts, and that was that. Mick Fleetwood told Stevie he was heartbroken that they couldn’t stay on tour to promote their best record in years, but she told him she had other matters to attend to.
When Stevie arrived at her mansion with the great view in Pacific Palisades, the place was dark. The Mac tour had ended quickly, and no one had time to prepare the home for her. The big house was cold, and there was no heat, no firewood either. The refrigerator was empty, and Stevie couldn’t even call for a pizza because the phone didn’t work. She decided she hated the house. “I was all alone up there with nothing, like a mountain woman. So I freaked out and wrote ‘Sable and Blond’ and the verses to ‘Wild Heart,’ just me and my piano.”
*
On Sunday, September 5, 1982, Stevie boarded a helicopter with her friend Robin and flew to a remote desert site near San Bernardino, where Fleetwood Mac would headline the last day of the US Festival before more than 600,000 fans. Robin had been part of the Mac family since the rainy nights back in Sausalito, and the musicians and crew were told that this was probably the last time they’d be seeing her. Now, with child, she looked frail but beautiful as her fate began to close in on her. Fleetwood Mac’s show was a bit shorter than usual, and Stevie and Robin were on the first chopper heading back to LA afterward. Mick Fleetwood had a jeweler make a crucifix of gold and rubies for Robin; he was able to hand it to her just before takeoff from the festival site. Robin Anderson died holding the little cross a month later, in October 1982, just after giving birth to a son, Matthew.
Stevie was disconsolate, and could not be comforted. She spent hours talking to her mother on the telephone, sobbing long distance. No one had ever seen her like this. Stevie had met Robin at Arcadia High School when they were in the tenth grade. Later, she tried to describe the loss she felt to the school’s alumni magazine.
“[Robin] had just been in my life since I was fourteen. She was the one person who knew me for the person I really was and not the famous Stevie, and it was good to have someone who knew the real you besides just your Mom and Dad. She kind of walked me through life. Robin is also my speech therapist, and the lady who traveled with Fleetwood Mac during the time when my voice just seemed to give up. My friend saved my voice, with a lot of patience and love. She listened to me sing the first song I ever wrote. She taught me how to sing. She taught me how to use my voice. She made sure before she left this planet that I was all right. I don’t have any problems with my voice now, but I did and it took us years to fix it.… Robin was one of those people, when she walked in the room everybody looked. She was breathtaking, and that’s why it’s so wild that she possibly could have died. It just doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Not knowing what else to do, Stevie moved in with widower Kim, ostensibly to help look after the baby, a child with whom she was emotionally hyperinvolved. Then, confused and addled by drugs, she proposed marriage to Kim Anderson, and to everyone’s horror, especially their families’, he accepted. No one could believe this. Mick burst into tears when Stevie called to tell him this news. (She’d started by asking if he was sitting down.)
Everyone thought it was a crazy thing to do. “We were all in such insane grief,” she said later, “just completely deranged. In a lot of people’s eyes, it was very blasphemous. But I didn’t care.” Their families were outraged. Some friends avoided Stevie’s wedding in January 1983. The bride seemed dazed and disconnected from the event. The heavily bearded groom looked forlorn. Stevie’s mother came, and her brother. From the band, only Mick and Christine McVie attended the simple ceremony in what Mick described as “some born-again type of church. Stevie’s bridal veil was one of sorrow. I could see on her face that she knew it was a mistake.”
That night Stevie and Kim left for their honeymoon at San Ysidro Ranch near Santa Barbara, a resort popular with newlyweds. On the way north, driving along the coast, Prince’s new hit song “Little Red Corvette” came on the radio, and Stevie spontaneously started humming “Stand Back” to the track of Prince’s naughty but clever double entendre. “The entire song,” she later said, “just wrote itself right then and there.” Stevie told Kim that they had to get off the highway and buy a cassette recorder—right away. They also bought a tape of the album 1999, which contained “Little Red Corvette.”
They checked into one of the ranch’s honeymoon suites as Kim and Sara Anderson. Stevie spent the first night of their stay writing and recording the four verses of “Stand Back,” which describe the approach-avoidance stage of a man-woman relationship, or, as she later wrote, “some kind of crazy argument.” At the end she asks for sympathy then acquiesces to the inevitable (or is just weary), and says to her man, “Take me home,” which—Stevie later explained—meant “Let’s make this work.”
Back in Los Angeles, Stevie knew she’d found the key song of her next album. The Bella Donna songs had been written over the course of a decade and more. The new album would rely on songs written during the previous tortured and tumultuous year. (And she certainly wasn’t getting any hit songs from Tom Petty, whose album she’d just eclipsed with her own.) She went into Sunset Sound Studios with Jimmy Iovine, who got Prince’s phone number through Warner Bros. Records. Stevie called the number, and was amazed that Prince actually answered himself. She told him about hearing “Little Red Corvette,” and tried to explain that on her honeymoon she “became” the lady in “Stand Back” during the long night she was writing, as if a whole new character had taken hold of her through the inspiration of his song. Stevie was even more amazed when Prince agreed to come to the studio and listen to what she was doing.
Danny Goldberg went to the session that night. “I arrived at the studio to find a giant, white-haired bodyguard hulking over the lithe, petite, doe-eyed superstar [Prince] as he added a driving synthesizer beat to ‘Stand Back.’
“Prince is exactly like Jimmy,” Stevie announced. Danny looked at Iovine, who just shrugged his shoulders and rolled his eyes.
Stevie: “He played incredible synthesizer on ‘Stand Back’ … and then he just walked out of my life, and I didn’t see him for a long time.” Prince refused to be credited when “Stand Back” was released as the first single from The Wild Heart in 1983. Prince’s ardent, orchestral synth licks would be credited instead to Stevie’s newest collaborator, Sandy Stewart, a talented singer and songwriter from deep in the heart of Texas.
*
Stevie later told her trusted Australian minder, Dennis Dunstan, that she knew her marriage wouldn’t work when she arrived home from the studio one night and found that her husband had moved a giant Sony television set to the foot of the marital bed. Kim explained he liked to watch TV before he went to sleep. Stevie moved to another bedroom. As the weeks moved along in early 1983, Kim began complaining that Stevie was spending too much time in the studio working on her album. “He was like, ‘There’s no time in your life for anybody. There’s no time in your life for Matthew and me.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Well, boy—are you right. There’s not.’”
Then she got the feeling, from beyond the grave, that Robin was less than thrilled by the situation. “One day I walked into Matthew’s room and the cradle was not rocking,” she said later. “I know this sounds crazy, but the cradle always started to rock a little when I came in the room, and I knew that Robin was there. And one day it wasn’t rocking, and the room got very dark, and the baby was very quiet. And I said, ‘Robin wants this to end—now.’ I felt it as strongly as if she’d put her hand on my shoulder. It was absolutely a sign.”
After about six weeks, Stevie moved back into her own house and instructed her lawyers to file for divorce. She told Kim to take the baby and go home to Minnesota, where
he was from and had family. She tried to explain that she’d sold her soul to the devil long ago, as she put it, “so I could follow this dream fully and completely and not be wrapped up in children and husbands and all of that.” She told him, “Kim, I’m a rock and roll star. It’s what I do, and who I am.” The marriage with Kim Anderson had lasted about three months. Later in the year Stevie was granted an annulment by a California family judge. Legally, the marriage had never happened.
Some years later, in 1990, Stevie told a version of this story to a reporter from Us magazine: “Robin was one of the few women who ever got leukemia and then got pregnant. And they had to take the baby at six and a half months, because Robin died two days later. And when she died, I went crazy. I just went insane. And so did her husband. And so we got married three months after she died. And it was a terrible, terrible mistake. We didn’t get married because we were in love, we got married because we were grieving and it was the only way we could feel like we were doing anything. And we got divorced three months later. I haven’t seen Kim or Matthew since that day. I suppose that Matthew will find me … when he’s ready.” (Years went by, and Matthew Anderson did contact Stevie; she later helped put him through college.)
5.5 Blame My Wild Heart
During this sad and difficult period, Stevie kept working on her next album, recording in Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York. Recognizing that recent traumatic events were affecting her writing, she accepted help from a collaborator for the first time, and the creative partnership with Texas singer-songwriter Sandy Stewart was crucial in getting Stevie’s second solo album made in the first half of 1983. Anticipation for this record was very high, so much so that some radio stations were playing the Mirage album track “Straight Back” just to keep Stevie’s voice on their air in the first part of the year.
Sandy Stewart was twenty-five and living in Houston when she was introduced to Stevie by Gordon and Lori Perry. Sandy was a big-boned, pretty brunette with dark eyes, an unusual alto singing timbre, and a direct Texan style. She came to LA in the immediate aftermath of the death of Stevie’s outré marriage. She was quickly assimilated as a Sister of the Moon by Stevie and her initiates, and she proved to be a bulwark of calm and much needed artistic inspiration. With Stevie, Sandy Stewart cowrote and sang on three of the best songs on The Wild Heart.
The album was made half on the run between making videos. The operatic “Wild Heart” and “Gate and Garden” were both produced in Gordon Perry’s Dallas studio and then further worked on by Jimmy Iovine at Studio 55 in LA, where Bella Donna had been recorded. Same with the final version of “Stand Back,” with its offhanded tribute to the gentle, pulsing Juju music then being introduced from Nigeria; and “Nightbird,” cowritten with Sandy, who had a solo role and even a countermelody of her own, on what Stevie has many times said is her favorite song on the album. She has also said that “the ones who sing at night” do so because they’re too busy to sing during the day.
The stately, droning, faintly Celtic “If Anyone Falls in Love,” an evergreen fan favorite, was also written with Sandy Stewart. It was cut at the Record Plant in Hollywood with soaring backup vocals by Carolyn Brooks, a classically trained singer. (The song was dedicated to Waddy Wachtel and the lyrics are a paean to Stevie’s friendship with him.) The same studio produced the third collaboration with Sandy Stewart, “Nothing Ever Changes,” with its pleading bridge that sounds like a Carly Simon song. “Sable on Blond” was also recorded in Los Angeles, a Fleetwood Mac knock-off with Mick on drums, even, and Sandy’s washes of synthesized orchestration, “in the sacred name of love.”
The remaining songs were all cut in New York studios familiar to Jimmy Iovine, who sometimes had to fit Stevie’s sessions in between other projects. “Enchanted,” Stevie’s funny piece of cheerleader rock, was done by her touring band at the Record Plant in Manhattan. She recorded Tom Petty’s song “I Will Run to You” with the Heartbreakers at the Hit Factory on the West Side. And for the orchestra featured on “Beauty and the Beast”—violins, violas, cellos, a harp—Jimmy booked the big room at venerable A&R Recording.
The “beast bridegroom” fable is one of the older European fairy tales. The most famous one, La Belle et la Bête—“Beauty and the Beast”—was written in France in 1758 by a woman, Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont. (Some scholars think the story was designed to reassure girls facing arranged or dynastic marriages, that in time they could come to love their husband, even if he seemed bestial. Stevie’s reference was more to the surrealist film version; in later years she would project scenes from Cocteau’s film behind her as she performed the song.)
“Beauty and the Beast” ended The Wild Heart and was the album’s big statement. Originally written about her relationship with the giant, heavily bearded Mick Fleetwood in 1978, the song first saw light as a piano demo in Dallas. Stevie later said it was more a generalized feeling about the way the Fleetwood Mac family related to each other. To realize the emotions she wanted to express, Jimmy Iovine brought in the protean young English arranger-conductor Paul Buckmaster, famous for his work with the Rolling Stones, Elton John, and Miles Davis. He gave Stevie’s disjointed lyrics a romantic platform of vamps and rising scales, playing to the gauzy sensibility of the piece—something barely there and hard to grasp. Stevie later wrote: “We recorded this live in New York, with Roy Bittan playing a grand piano and Paul Buckmaster conducting the [seventeen-piece] orchestra, and me and the background singers. It was like we had gone back in time. We all wore long black dresses and served champagne, and recorded it all in one room. When it was all over I walked out with this elderly gentleman who played violin and the generation gap ceased to exist.”
There were a few songs left off the album that Modern Records would place on Hollywood movie soundtracks over the next year and a half. “Battle of the Dragon,” about a struggling soul with too many friends, with programmed rhythm and Mike Campbell on guitar, would be used in the film American Anthem. “Violet and Blue,” produced by Jimmy Iovine, would be in Against All Odds the following year. And “Garbo” was a sad little waltz about Hollywood—“a town full of fools”—that referenced icons Marlene and Marilyn in a teary and wistful way. “Garbo” would be the B-side of “Stand Back” when the smash single was released ahead of the album in June 1983.
*
“Stand Back” was another huge radio ear worm, getting to #5 and staying in the Top 10 for weeks. Likewise, The Wild Heart was #5 for two months in the summer and would spin off two more Top 40 singles, “If Anyone Falls” and “Nightbird.” Reviews were respectful and often glowing, which made thirty-five-year-old Stevie Nicks feel a little better as her crucial second record hit big and her solo career was so firmly now established.
Now airplay on MTV meant almost as much as on the radio, if a record was going to sell. The first attempt at a video for “Stand Back” was titled “Scarlett” and was an expensive costume drama involving the American Civil War, the burning of Atlanta, ghosts in the rented Beverly Hills mansion they were using (and which the film crew set on fire by mistake), and a wild ride on a white horse that literally ran away with Stevie during the shoot. “I almost got killed riding that horse,” she laughed. “He bolted into a grove of trees and the crew in the car driving alongside were screaming at me to jump off.” The storyline was confused, the lighting was amateurish, and the video was spiked at enormous cost. “This can never come out,” Stevie told her manager. “I don’t care if it cost a million!” Irving Azoff told her she was an idiot. A new video had to be made quickly, so Jimmy found Jeffrey Hornaday, who had choreographed Flashdance, a sexy recent blockbuster, and now had ambitions to direct. He and Stevie came up with a simple performance video, intercut with a troupe of dancers. Stevie sang straight into the camera with big hair and clear eyes, her most intense gaze, wearing the “Stand Back shawl,” translucent black tulle with appliquéd silver polka dots. The dancers performed flash, troop-style coordinated movements behind principal dancer Brian
Jeffries.
There was a meeting in the editing room a few days after the shoot for Jimmy, Paul Fishkin, and Danny Goldberg. Hornaday—twenty-six, long blond hair, self-absorbed—screened the edit, and to his annoyance Jimmy criticized it, took it apart, telling him what changes Stevie would want him to make. Hornaday was furious because he had a vision, a concept, of what the “Stand Back” video should look like. When Stevie arrived soon after and viewed the edit, she echoed exactly the same changes that Jimmy had suggested. Hornaday began contradicting her, trying to explain his higher ideals of cinema.
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