CHAPTER 6
6.1 Battle of the Dragon
Stevie Nicks spent most of 1984 working and worrying about her third solo album, a crucial project for her long-term career whose working title was the ultrawitchy Mirror Mirror. She started the record with Jimmy Iovine, but when Iovine realized that his sometime girlfriend had fallen for totally uncool Joe Walsh (most everyone in New York hated the Eagles), their personal relationship was finished. Nevertheless, they worked on some of the new music she had, mostly “Battle of the Dragon,” “Reconsider Me,” “Violet and Blue,” and “Love Is Like a River.” They reworked “Sorcerer,” originally “Lady from the Mountains,” and her record label placed it on the Streets of Fire movie soundtrack in mid-1984. Then Stevie decided she hated all the new music they’d recorded. “It didn’t sound right,” she said. “I can’t tell you why; it just didn’t sound right.” She decided to warehouse these songs and start over.
Jimmy Iovine called Tom Petty at home in Encino and asked about a new song for Stevie. Petty suggested that Iovine call the guy from the Eurythmics. This was the now broken-up English synth-pop band, all the rage on MTV, consisting of Scots singer Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart, originally from Sunderland in the far north of Britain. Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox had been a power couple like Stevie and Lindsey, but their massive success had split them up. Dave Stewart moved to Los Angeles, bought a big old Cadillac, and started throwing great parties at a rented house in the Hollywood Hills. Dave was a bluff, extremely smart, and funny guy. He charmed everyone and was a really talented musician, arranger, and producer. Jimmy listened to the Eurythmics’ big hit, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” and knew that Dave Stewart could write with Stevie.
Stewart came to see Stevie one evening at her house. She asked him about the breakup with Annie Lennox, and he ended up staying the night. Stevie seemed surprised to see him in her bed the next afternoon. To him, she looked dazed, otherworldly, out of it. She told him not to come back to the house, that she’d see him at the studio later. (Decades later, when they were working together again, Stewart reminded Stevie that they’d once made love. No, she answered, they’d done it twice.)
Dave Stewart started working with Stevie and Jimmy. He had a drum program they were working on, without much success. Stewart called Tom Petty at home and invited him to the studio, just to hang out and lend his ears. Petty, glad to get out of the house, agreed. He arrived at the studio around two o’clock in the morning.
Stevie: “Tom liked what we were working on. I was writing, madly. I had my little book. I was writing, writing. But it was five in the morning and I was really tired.” Stevie went home, and Dave and Jimmy worked all morning, producing a track that Dave called “Don’t Come Around Here No More”—based on Stevie’s order not to come back to her house after their night together. Tom sang on the track as a guide vocal: this was meant, after all, to be a Stevie Nicks song.
Stevie: “When I got back the next day at three in the afternoon, the whole song was written. And not only it was written—it was spectacular. Dave was standing there saying to me, ‘Well, there it is … it’s really, really good, and now you can go out and you can sing it.’ [But] Tom had done a great vocal—a great vocal. I just looked at them and said, I’m going to top that? Really? I got up, thanked Dave, thanked Tom, fired Jimmy, and left. That all went down in about five minutes.”
“Don’t Come Around Here No More” would be a big hit single for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. (In the psychedelic video produced for MTV, Petty famously played the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland.) It was a good payback for Stevie’s theft of “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.”
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After Jimmy Iovine left, Stevie got a case of writer’s block and was advised to take some time off. Mick Fleetwood called to ask if she would play some shows with a moribund Fleetwood Mac to help him stave off imminent bankruptcy. Stevie had heard Mick was in trouble, with rumors of bounced checks and canceled credit cards, and his house in Malibu was facing foreclosure. The rumor was that he’d lost eight million dollars, and that most of it had gone up his nose. Stevie wanted to help Mick, but her representatives had to tell him, because she wasn’t taking his calls, that she was in no shape to play shows with Fleetwood Mac that year, or the next.
Stevie needed inspiration. Her assistant Rebecca Alvarez reached out to Sandy Stewart in Texas, but for unknown reasons (reportedly related to songwriting credits on The Wild Heart) Sandy declined to make herself available. Stevie did find some magic in Don Henley’s new album Building the Perfect Beast, chock full of great songs, contemporary LA ennui, and an intelligent, world-weary sensibility. The hit single “Boys of Summer” was based on a track that Henley had got from Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, and Stevie took notice of this for some future project.
Around this time, Stevie went to see a mystic and had a “life reading,” which purported to reveal a person’s previous life incarnations. She took this sort of thing very seriously and was moved by what was revealed to her. Some of it was interesting. She’d been a high priestess in ancient Egypt, living in a stone temple. She’d been a famous concert pianist. On the other hand, she’d been a German “who went through some of the atrocities. I know I experienced it. Every time I go to Germany, I feel it.” She was also told that the life she was living now would be her last.
Beginning in November 1984, suffering from various ailments and thinking of herself as a captive spirit chained to a recording contract, Stevie resumed work on her music, using other collaborators to help her assemble enough songs to fill out an album that only had two strong songs. The first of these was “I Can’t Wait,” which began as a backing track sent to her by a friend from her teen years called Rick Nowels. He’d been a friend of Robin Snyder’s younger brother, and now worked on commercial jingles in Los Angeles. Jimmy Iovine heard the tape of the backing track he’d sent to Stevie, and thought it might work on radio and the dance floor. It was a typically “eighties” track informed by machines rather than instruments. Computer rhythms underlay skittering Oberheim 8, Prophet, and Emulator II synthesizers. Stevie sings the impatient lyrics—Joe Walsh always kept her waiting—in a cracked and wasted voice, the best she could offer at the time. All this was overlaid by lashings of glistening glockenspiel, for that Springsteen High School marching–band feel so popular in those times.
The other strong track they had was “Talk to Me,” written by Chas Sanford, an English producer who had cowritten John Waite’s massive hit “Missing You.” “Talk to Me” was basically the same song, but kind of sung like video star Cyndi Lauper. The song had come through Jimmy, who rightly thought it could be a hit for Stevie. The backing track was recorded in France and featured Parisian jazz master Barney Wilens playing the saxophone solo. Again the lyrics were a message to Joe Walsh: “You can set your secrets free, baby.” While recording the vocal track, Stevie was having trouble with the lyrics, trying multiple times and failing to get them to scan with the backing track. (This often happened when she was singing words written by someone else.) Also working in the studio that night was the great LA session drummer Jim Keltner. Stevie spoke with him, told him of her troubles, and he said to her, “Come on, try it again. I’ll be your audience.” Reassured by Keltner’s presence and encouragement, Stevie nailed it on the second try. This worked out so well that “Talk to Me” would become one of Stevie’s most popular, and requested, songs: an expression of her sympathetic attitude toward her fans.
Another fan favorite is “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You?” By the time in 1985 that they were working on this track, Jimmy Iovine was gone, so Stevie turned in desperation to her old producer, Keith Olsen—who happened to be working with Joe Walsh on a solo album at the time. Stevie begged both Joe and Olsen, and Joe agreed to step aside for her—for a week. They worked at Olsen’s new studio, designed to produce digital music for the new compact disc format that was replacing the old analog record. Unfortunately, Olsen had bu
ilt his studio right next to Sound City, taking business from his old friends and generally drawing hatred from them. Olsen was also upset because Stevie was so high on cocaine that she couldn’t sing in tune. One night he got so angry that he ordered her out of the studio and told her to come back sober, or don’t come back. When the song was finished, Olsen left the project, and their old friendship never recovered.
Keith Olsen had adapted her piano demo for “Has Anyone” (written in Phoenix in early Joe Walsh days) and helped with the verses. The synthetic orchestral background was produced by Rick Nowels. Olsen also cowrote “No Spoken Word,” the only track on Rock a Little that sounds like a real Stevie Nicks song.
The title track, a reggae-flavored tune sung in Stevie’s most frail register, was strung together from fragments, somehow congealing like ingredients in a murky soup. “Time to rock a little,” her tag-along father had urged her when she needed to be onstage during the Wild Heart Tour. Using her then-current hotel pseudonym, Jess Nicks would say, “Go ahead, Lily—time to rock a little.”
The album’s remaining tracks were mostly filler and lesser songs, unusual for a Stevie Nicks record, recorded by studio pros and informed by production styles similar to that of Michael Jackson, the Police, Duran Duran, and other MTV stars. These included forgettable numbers like “Sister Honey,” written with guitarist Les Dudek; “I Sing for the Things,” another torn-up ballad; “Imperial Hotel,” a generic rock song with Stevie’s lyrics applied to a Mike Campbell backing track (for the first time) by Jimmy Iovine; “Some Become Strangers”; “The Nightmare,” written with her brother Chris; and “If I Were You,” another collaboration with Rick Nowels.
Three good songs were recorded at this time but remained unreleased. One session produced “Are You Mine,” a duet with the young rockabilly star Billy Burnette, on a song first taught to her by her grandfather when Stevie was about five years old. “Reconsider Me” was a rocker by Warren Zevon that Jimmy Iovine brought to her late in the 1985 sessions, which they recorded with Don Henley’s vocals and a full band; and which she then left off Rock a Little mostly because she and Jimmy were fighting again. (He stayed mad at her for a long time about this.) Finally there was “One More Big Time Rock and Roll Star,” a sarcastic and angry song about Joe, who played a symphonic guitar solo for her bitter song that evoked candles and crystals, an abandoned woman, and the wistful observation, “I was anyone’s fantasy.” The track was good enough that it was on the B-side of “Talk to Me” when the first single from Rock a Little hit the market in late October 1985.
MTV was quick to play the new videos for “Talk to Me” and the album’s second single, “I Can’t Wait.” These were choreographed, troop-style dances, directed by Marty Callner, starring Stevie and her girls along with dancer Brad Jeffries and her brother Chris. (Originally Stevie’s management wanted her to work with a different director, Bob Giraldi, who had made the earliest Michael Jackson clips. Giraldi came to Stevie’s house, as he later recalled: “I had a meeting with Stevie Nicks where we sat on her bed. I’ve never seen a woman that stoned in my life. She was so wasted, we couldn’t even communicate.”
Marty Callner set “Talk to Me” in a stark, claustrophobic setting, like a rehab in an office park. Cut to Stevie and her crew, walking to the beat with a simple little back step. “I Can’t Wait” had them climbing and descending a precariously steep staircase, which she almost fell down. Then she was on a treadmill, then in a claustrophobic trap, pounding on enclosing walls to get out. Both (highly successful) videos radiated an unusual (for MTV) anxiety and lack of contact with the viewer.
Later Stevie had her own point of view: “‘I Can’t Wait’ is one of my favorite songs, and it became a famous video. But now I look at that video, I look at my eyes, and I say to myself, Could you have laid off the pot, the coke, and the tequila for three days so you could have looked a little better? Because your eyes look like they’re swimming. It just makes me want to go back into that video and stab myself.”
6.2 The Survivor
Late 1985. Rock a Little, which had cost Stevie Nicks almost a million dollars to make, was released for the holiday market. The album sold well in both vinyl and CD formats, if not as well as Stevie’s first two solo albums. Rock a Little got to #12 on the Billboard album chart, while the first single, “Talk to Me,” got major national airplay and rose to #4. The reviews were mixed but mostly favorable, except for her image on the album jacket, a heavily retouched photo of Stevie in whiteface makeup and wearing a layered black dress and a cloche hat. (This had been shot in London by fashion photographer Tony McGee. The reverse of the sleeve had a downcast, spectral portrait of Stevie by Herbie Worthington.) The album jacket also featured a crystal ball supported by a pair of bronze dragons, and an off-the-wall dedication to all those who had survived the Vietnam War. One reviewer observed that Stevie—in her music and her presentation—had now come through a portal into mainstream, corporate rock, a move away from quirky, semi-gnarly Fleetwood Mac and the thematic unity of her first two records. Now thirty-seven, Stevie Nicks was seen by some as another cog in a megacorporation that viewed music as “product” and churned out soulless pablum for mass consumption on schedule. Sometimes Stevie Nicks must have wondered if she felt that way herself.
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Now scheduling became a problem. Stevie’s management team at Front Line didn’t quite know what to do with her. Stevie preferred to tour in the American summer, which was months away. Then she announced that she was going on Bob Dylan’s Australian tour, which began in late February 1986. Dylan was using the Heartbreakers as his band after Tom Petty opened. But Petty had started having problems with his wife, Jane, and was saying he wasn’t going on tour without her. One evening Stevie was at their house in Encino and told Petty he was crazy to even think about canceling. “I told him, Oh yes, you are going. You can’t cancel on Bob Fucking Dylan.” He told her he was going through a rough time and needed to be with Jane, who didn’t want to go because she was having mental problems, and also she had more freedom to be herself when Tom was away on tour. Acting as a go-between, Stevie negotiated a settlement where she would go to Australia and look after Tom. They wouldn’t be a couple, she assured Jane (who didn’t seem to care). Stevie would be more like Tom’s big sister, his sidekick. That’s the way it worked out in the end. Stevie, her assistant Rebecca Alvarez, and a big wheeled wardrobe case full of stage clothes flew to Wellington, New Zealand, for the first show of Bob Dylan’s True Confessions Tour on February 5, 1986.
For the next three weeks, Stevie and Rebecca looked after Tom, kept him on track, got him to the gigs on time, and then helped him feel like going onstage. Stevie was always in full wardrobe, hair, and makeup as she stood in the wings and watched the concerts. She sometimes sang with Dylan’s backup singers—three black women—as they were warming up before the shows. (This tour had happened so fast for Stevie that they didn’t have time to get her work permits for New Zealand and Australia. She didn’t even have a valid passport when she decided to go, and they had to really scramble to get her on the plane.) One night Stevie saw Dylan waving her onstage to sing with him, and all she could do was wave back because she didn’t have papers. But she was a hoot at the hotel bar afterward, when Ben Tench took over the piano and led a late-hours oldies sing-along with her and Dylan and Tom and their backup singers.
As the tour progressed and the shows got better, everyone was glad to have Stevie Nicks on the tour. Even the enigmatic Dylan was smiling when he saw her at the gigs, all dolled up. “I tend to get dressed up every single night,” she said, “so that everyone knows that when I walk in the room, this is serious—even if I’m ten pounds overweight. If I’m dressed up and I look pretty, everybody in that room says, ‘Wow! She must have really thought she was going somewhere.’”
“Having Stevie along was very good for me,” Petty later told his biographer. “It changed the channel. Stevie was lighthearted, and she so loved music. She figured out before I d
id that we had a blend as singers. She’d come over and we’d sing old songs, and it could sound so good. She also knew more than most that I was in a delicate mental spot.”
It was also a creative time for her. Stevie wrote “Whole Lotta Trouble,” one of her best songs in years, with Mike Campbell on a day off.
The tour’s best moments were the four nights in Sydney, Australia’s biggest city. On the second night, Stevie could no longer stand by, waiting in the wings, all dressed up and no place to sing. They were singing the show’s first encore, “Blowin’ in the Wind” (which she used to sing with her folk group, the Changin’ Times, in junior high school). Stevie walked on to sing but realized the only standing microphone on the stage was Dylan’s. So she climbed on the drum riser and sang backup vocals using drummer Stan Lynch’s microphone for two songs. Finally she was invited to center stage to join Dylan and Tom for the finale, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
After the concert, Stevie was threatened by a low-key but firm representative from the Australian authorities for working without a permit. Stevie countered that she wasn’t working, because she wasn’t being paid, but it didn’t matter. Stevie was told if she got onstage again while a guest of the tour, she would never sing professionally in Australia again.
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Like many couples, platonic or romantic, Stevie and Tom had their disagreements, often over music, during late, postconcert conversations. “She got really mad at me one night in Australia,” he remembered. They were talking about Fleetwood Mac, and Petty said something dismissive, like: “Yeah, but the Heartbreakers are a rock & roll band.”
Stevie took real offense at this. What was Fleetwood Mac? “I’m in a rock & roll band,” she insisted. “Not really,” Petty advised, twisting the knife. To Petty, Fleetwood Mac was a corporate English group pedaling soft rock music to the ladies, much different from a rock & roll band that could play a high school prom. Stevie was mad now, and she spat, “How dare you say that to me?”
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