Jimmy the scrapper from Brooklyn jumped up and stuck his finger in Hornaday’s face and told him, “There is no argument from you. This isn’t a fuckin’ movie. This is Stevie’s record. This is Stevie’s video. You do what Stevie wants.”
Hornaday was shocked by this and said, “Fuck you, man.” Jimmy punched him in the face and knocked him over. The others restrained the combatants as a tearful Stevie jumped in between them, and the fight was over. Danny later said that “when the changes Stevie wanted were made, Hornaday’s choreography had given Stevie the modern effect the song needed” to get played on MTV.
The Wild Heart album jacket, with its three images of Stevie, was shot by Herbie Worthington after he and Stevie worked out that she wanted a triad of personae. (One wasn’t enough.) The sad and crouching figure on the left with the shag perm is grieving Stevie. On the right, in a long gown, flowing curls, décolletage, and pouting lips is Stevie the Reigning Queen of Rock. The middle figure, wearing a hooded robe and making an esoteric gesture with her hands, is the transmigrated soul of her late friend Robin, always borne within Stevie’s deepest being. The reverse bore an image of Stevie in Lori’s arms, with Sharon just behind, and the dedication: And … “Just like the white winged dove” This music is dedicated to Robin—for her brave, wild heart And to the gypsies—that remain. And at the top of the Wild Heart jacket verso, Stevie wrote: Don’t blame it on me … (The inner sleeve listed credits for hair design, hands, makeup, wardrobe, boots, and inspiration—Sulamith Wulfing.)
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Stevie Nicks and her band spent the rest of 1983 on tour. The lineup was pretty much the same but for New York drummer Liberty DiVito replacing Russ Kunkel. (Jimmy Iovine wanted a more animated drummer for the visual effect, to get the audience’s attention away from Stevie now and then.) Caroline Brooks joined the chorale. The two-hour shows (introduced by the Police’s “Every Breath You Take”) began with “Gold Dust Woman” and ranged through Fleetwood Mac songs (especially “Gypsy”), the hit singles from Bella Donna (and “Outside the Rain”), and introduced new standards like “If Anyone Falls” and the midset thriller “Stand Back.” The tour’s contract rider with local promoters specified a hundred hibiscus candles for backstage, white drapes for Stevie’s dressing room, five bottles of French cognac, six bottles of wine, five bottles of Russian vodka, and seven cases of beer.
The first show headlined the second US Festival on May 30, 1983, again in the California desert near San Bernardino, and went on through the mid-South and Northeast through early summer. In June and July they played almost every night in the Midwest. On July 15, after a sold-out show at the Met Center in Minneapolis, Stevie was “kidnapped” from the tour by Prince and taken to his studio for an all-night recording and jam session. Stevie was between relationships at that point and told friends she was a little disappointed when Prince showed her to her car just before dawn.
The tour had a month off in August, but Stevie had been creative while on the road, filling journals with paintings of sad angelic beings with downcast eyes surrounded by colorful robes and floral gestures. She also worked on poems and lyrics, some of which she put into demo form during that month. Some of these titles were realized later, others filed away. They include “Mirror Mirror,” “Running Through the Garden,” “Greta,” “Listen to the Rain,” “Thousand Days,” and others. It was a highly productive period for Stevie, and the work had the additional benefit of keeping her mind off her considerable agonies. She spent a lot of time at home cosseted in her tribe of women, watching favorite movies like The Hunger, a vampire film with David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve; and Risky Business, with Tom Cruise dancing in his briefs. Stevie liked that movie so much she bought a 1979 Porsche 928 sports car like the one Cruise drove in the film.
Meanwhile “If Anyone Falls” was at #14 and the video was in heavy rotation on MTV. It was a shambolic affair that featured Sandy Stewart playing a gothic organ, Mick Fleetwood as a giant monk, lots of twirling and ballet (with dancing master Brad Jeffries lifting Lori aloft because Stevie was much heavier), shadows against the wall, and no story line or direction of any kind. Set décor included Stevie’s blue lamp and the urn containing her grandmother’s ashes. “I have to keep her with me at all times,” Stevie explained. And later: “Videos in those days didn’t have to make a lot of sense. This one didn’t make any sense at all.”
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September 1983, back on tour. They performed a killer “Stand Back” on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, with Brad Jeffries leaping into action during the guitar break and dancing a torrid solo around Stevie on the show’s small stage. They mimed the new single “Nightbird” for the syndicated rock program Solid Gold. Tom Petty showed up for two shows at New York’s Radio City Music Hall and sang “I Will Run to You” with Stevie. She sold out the Fabulous Forum in LA on October 2, but the press reviews in LA Weekly and The Los Angeles Times were less than kind. Stevie’s weight was noted for the first time (and this would get worse). Her bathetic “dying swan” posturing and between-song patter were dismissed or ridiculed. “There’s always a market for earnest silliness masquerading as poetic insight,” opined the Times’s critic.
Around this time, a bitter Lindsey Buckingham was doing press interviews for a new solo album, Go Insane. “I’ve seen Stevie’s show,” he said. “To me, it borders on being a lounge act.” He went on to claim that she was cruising on Fleetwood Mac’s laurels and that she owed it to the fans to try harder.
Lindsey, to another interviewer: “Stevie has never been very happy, and I don’t think the success of her albums has made her any happier. In fact, it may have made her less happy. She’s flexing some kind of emotional muscles that she feels she can flex—now that she’s in a more powerful position. Her success is making her feel that she can pull things that she wouldn’t have felt comfortable pulling before. She’s venting something—loneliness, unhappiness, something.” (Go Insane only got to #45 on the Billboard album chart when it was released in 1984.)
The Wild Heart Tour spent the rest of the month and most of November 1983 playing coliseums, civic centers, and university arenas all over the South. They finished with two shows in Iowa just before Thanksgiving. By then Stevie Nicks was exhausted, and crazy in love with her opening act, Joe Walsh.
5.6 The Joe Walsh Affair
It had begun early in September 1983, the start of the Wild Heart Tour’s second leg. Irving Azoff wanted one of Front Line Management’s clients to be the opening act, and he and Stevie picked Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, who was promoting his solo album, You Bought It—You Name It. Walsh was thirty-six, a year older than Stevie. He was originally from Ohio, where he’d starred with local heroes the James Gang. He came to LA and was invited to join the Eagles when original guitarist Bernie Leadon left the band in 1975.
Joe Walsh was famously goofy, with a toothy, houndlike smile and long brown hair. When he walked into the room one expected him to start chewing the furniture, then the wallpaper. He was an all-star lead guitar player, well respected for musicianship, and so was able to hold the stage between the monumental egos of Eagles band mates Don Henley and Glenn Frey. Even Led Zeppelin’s enigmatic Jimmy Page was Joe’s friend, the two often dining together when Page was in Los Angeles, and gifting rare and vintage electric guitars to each other.
Stevie usually preferred to rest in her hotel suite after concerts, but in Dallas on September 5 she decided to change clothes and go down to the bar of the Mansions Hotel and greet her old acquaintance and new support act, Joe Walsh. She left her eyeglasses in the suite, figuring she’d be downstairs for just a moment anyway. But then Stevie was delayed.
Joe Walsh was sitting alone at the bar. “I walked across the room toward him,” she recalled. “He held out his hands to me, and I walked straight into them.” She sat on the bar stool next to him. “Two seconds later I crawled into his lap, and that was it.” Cradled in Joe’s strong arms as he smiled down at her, she could see a lot of hurt in his eyes. “I remembe
r thinking, I can never be far from this person again.” It would be a few amorous hours before Stevie could see properly again, once she’d regained her spectacles.
As the tour moved on that month through Rhode Island, New York, and the Midwest, Stevie’s affair with Joe Walsh was a closely held secret, played out in post-midnight backstairs journeys between hotel suites. Dennis Dunstan would escort Stevie between floors, then wait for the call to bring her back. He’d asked some of Joe’s road crew about Joe and was told Walsh was on his third marriage. He mentioned this to Stevie, to make sure she knew, and she—echoing Dennis’s Australian lingo—told him, “No worries, mate.” The tour’s cocaine specialists were also aware that demand had made a dramatic jump; Stevie and Joe seemed almost in competition to see who could snort the most Andean alkaloid without dying.
Stevie was surprised at the passion she felt for Joe. “Why do you love somebody?” she asked, years later. “Why do you love them so much that when they walk in the room your heart jumps out of your chest? I don’t know, but I fell in love with Joe at first sight from across the room. It went from 1983 to 1986. It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
The affair’s most ardent passion—Stevie’s compassion for Joe—stemmed from a journey after a concert in Denver, Colorado, on September 19. Stevie had been grousing about some tour conditions, and Joe asked her to go for a ride with him. His tour manager got him a rented Jeep and Joe whisked Stevie off to Boulder, a couple hours away. (This made Stevie’s people, especially Dennis Dunstan, very nervous. Joe Walsh was a loopy space cadet. Could he be trusted to get her back safely? Dennis had his doubts, but his boss was determined to be alone with Joe.)
As a light autumn snow began to fall in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Joe told Stevie about the little girl he’d had with his second wife. Her name was Emma; in 1974, when she was three years old, she had been killed in a road accident as his wife was taking her to preschool. Stevie: “And he drove me to this park [North Boulder Park], and I knew he was going to show me something that was going to freak me out, because I was already totally upset by the time we got to Boulder. We walked across the park, and there was this little silvery drinking fountain. A plaque nearby read: TO EMMA KRISTIN FOR ALL THOSE WHO AREN’T BIG ENOUGH TO GET A DRINK.
Joe explained that he used to bring Emma to this park, her favorite place to play, but she was too small to reach the park’s drinking fountain, and this was his tribute to his poor child. As they stood by the fountain, Stevie was weeping, her head on Joe’s shoulder, and he was crying, too. It was still snowing. After a while in the park, they drove back to Denver in silence. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was on the radio.
There was a short break in the tour, and Stevie wanted to see her mother and write in her house near Phoenix. She was in love with Joe Walsh and so deeply felt his loss. Hadn’t she, herself, just lost a child—baby Matthew—Robin’s son? When she walked into her big house in Paradise Valley, she lit some candles, sat at her piano, and wrote most of “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You,” one of her most trenchant songs, in about five minutes. It was the only way she could respond to the suffering to which she’d been exposed. The song was ostensibly about Joe Walsh, but it was also about herself.
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Stevie was also at home for a business meeting. She had invested in a concert promotion business with her father and his brother Gene. Jess Nicks was said to have been dumbfounded by the money his daughter was making and had wanted to get into the business for some time; he’d even gone on the Bella Donna Tour as an observer. But he was dismayed by some of the ways things were run. He began to complain, and was gently advised to butt out. “So he went home,” Stevie commented later.
Stevie put up the money and her father and uncle bought (or leased) an amphitheater (a “shed” in concert parlance) called Compton Terrace in some scrubland near Tempe, Arizona, and began putting on rock shows. Aerosmith played Compton Terrace, also Bruce Springsteen. Stevie took a night off from her tour and did a free benefit there for the American Heart Association, a charity her father favored. Joe Walsh and Kenny Loggins played for free as well. (The Compton Terrace Amphitheater was judged by the bands and crews that played there to be a dump, with bad acoustics, poor sightlines, and inadequate facilities for both artists and their audiences. It has since been demolished.)
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Over the years, Stevie has often forcefully stated that, for her, Joe Walsh was The One. “We were probably the perfect, complete, crazy pair,” she said. “He was the one I would have married, and that I would probably have changed my life around for … a little bit, anyway. Not a lot. But he wouldn’t have changed his life either.” During the rest of that tour, she tried to look after crazy Joe, buying him clothes, making sure he got what he needed because opening acts—even if you were in the Eagles—were often bullied or neglected by the promoters and the headliner’s crew. “I loved him,” she told an interviewer later. “It was a great secret, which made it even better.” To another: “I really looked after him, and that’s what probably scared Joe the most. I was too in tune with him, and he was so out-of-tune—with everything!”
But the drugs got in the way. Rock cocaine was a powerful energizer that opened up grand vistas of production and helped make everything happen. Stevie: “We were busy superstars, and we—everyone—were doing way too much drugs. We [her and Joe] were really, seriously drug addicts. We were a couple on the way to hell.”
The biggest problem Stevie had with Joe was getting him to pay attention to her. He seemed distracted when they were together, always playing with some gadget that he’d just bought. The first time she visited him at home, the first thing he showed her was his music room, which was actually a computer lab. With all the metal cases, dials, and winking lights, she thought it looked like the spaceship from The Jetsons. Joe had some new gear, “samplers” that would soon replace the programmable OBX-A and DMX drum machines and the postmodern synthesizers that had featured on Stevie’s records. Joe wanted to demonstrate the future of electro pop. He told her to play a melody on a sampler’s keyboard; he then turned a knob and she heard the tune—fully orchestrated. Stevie: “I looked at him and said, ‘So—we’ve all just been replaced by … whatever this is?’”
Wrong thing to say to a gear head. Joe Walsh ignored her for the rest of the day, lost in the novelty of his samplers. Stevie was mortified. Thirty years later, Stevie told England’s Mojo magazine that she has distrusted computers ever since.
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At least she had someone to write about besides Lindsey, and the affair with Joe Walsh certainly gave her plenty of first-rate cad-lover material over the course of three years, during which Stevie said she mostly worked on songs and waited by the phone in case Joe called her, which he rarely did. She also started eating and gaining weight. A friend told her she was “stuffing her feelings,” using food as an antidepressant, but she said she didn’t care. Toward the end of the Wild Heart Tour, Joe Walsh’s opening set was cut down to half an hour, so if there was a short break in the tour Joe and his band would play a solo show—two hours of Eagles songs and roadhouse rock. After one of these in the Midwest, some local journalists were taken backstage for a meet-and-greet. Also waiting for Joe in the hospitality room, to their amazement, was Stevie Nicks. When Joe came out, he completely ignored Stevie, who cut herself a hefty slice of a chocolate cream pie that was laid out on the buffet. The scribes then watched in disbelief as Stevie proceeded to eat the entire gooey dessert, by herself, over the course of an hour.
Much later, Stevie was talking with collaborator Sheryl Crow about this period, and speaking of Joe Walsh, she recalled, “I look back at all the men in my life, and there was only one that I can honestly say I could truly have lived with every day for the rest of my life, because there was respect and we loved to do the same things. I was very content with him all the time. That’s only happened once in my life. The point is, it can happen—this kind of love. This man, if he’d asked me to
marry him, I would have.”
To People magazine: “There was nothing more important than Joe Walsh—not my music, not my songs, not anything. He was the great, great love of my life.”
They broke up in the middle of 1986, almost in public. Joe had been out on tour, and she was working in the studio with Waddy. Joe came over, got high, and was entertaining the studio crew while Stevie patiently waited for some time with him. Finally she got tired of Joe ignoring her, told him she was leaving, and asked him to come with her. Joe said, “Oh, I meant to tell you—I can’t see you—I’m leaving tomorrow to go back on the road.”
Stevie looked at him for a moment and muttered, “I don’t think this is working.” As she headed for the exit, Joe called after her, “If you walk out that door, you cease to exist.” She kept going. (And later used his line in a song.) The next day Joe Walsh flew to Australia, having left a message for Stevie (through their management): she was not to follow him or even try to contact him. Their thing was over. Joe went to the far side of the world “to get away from me, basically,” Stevie said. “He thought—or so I’m told—that one of us was going to die, and the other person would not be able to save them. And I did think I was going to die—absolutely.”
“It nearly killed me,” she told another interviewer. “We had to break up, or we thought we’d die. We were just too excessive. But there was no closure. It took me years to get over it—if I ever did. It’s very sad, but at least we survived.”
Twenty years later, in 2007, Stevie was still in love with Joe Walsh. “There was no other man in the world for me,” she told London’s Telegraph newspaper. “And it’s the same today, even though Joe is married and has two sons. He met someone in rehab and got married. And I think he’s happy.”
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