Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  Petty pushed on. “And this long debate ensued about how you get those credentials. And I love that band, have the greatest respect for Lindsey and Mick, but I didn’t see them as a rock & roll band. I thought her journey was different than mine. I didn’t always agree with her musical taste, and she didn’t always agree with mine. My frustration with her was, ‘You need somebody to remind you what you’re capable of. You get too easily distracted by bullshitters that want to make a hit. I don’t know why you’re doing all this synthesizer rock.’” This was a stab at Rock a Little, which Stevie should have been promoting at home, especially her new hit single “I Can’t Wait,” instead of pretending to be Tom Petty’s road wife on the other side of the planet.

  There was a bit of a furor over this issue in the Los Angeles and New York offices of Modern Records. “I Can’t Wait” was a Top 20 single in America and the video was in constant rotation on MTV. A twelve-inch single, released with three dance floor remixes, was selling well and especially popular at gay discos; to her amazement, an aging Stevie was becoming an icon of female sympathy for homosexual men under threat from the AIDS epidemic of the eighties. Also wanting Stevie was comedian David Letterman, host of NBC television’s Late Night program. Letterman repeatedly showed clips of Stevie’s modest cleavage (edited from her videos) and demanded she come to New York and sing “I Can’t Wait” with the show’s house band. Stevie: “But I was gone, out of touch with the world, and it got into the papers that I’d disappeared. I’m in Australia with Tom Petty and Bob Dylan, having a great time—oblivious. This is how important Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are to me. I was completely willing to get in the way of my own single.”

  Then Irving Azoff managed to reach Stevie on the phone and literally ordered her to come home. Stevie did as she was told, flew to New York, and sang “I Can’t Wait” on Letterman’s show, which had its best ratings of the year. From then on, Stevie could count on David Letterman’s crush on her when she needed to promote a new album.

  *

  No one was happier when Stevie came home than the cocaine purveyors who counted on her, their best customer—ever. Less happy was her musical director Waddy Wachtel when Stevie came to the first band rehearsals for the Rock a Little Tour in the summer of 1986. Stevie looked wasted and haggard without her stage makeup, and her scratchy voice needed work. She was going on the road with a six-piece group anchored by the New York drummer Rick Marotta, who often worked with Carly Simon and other lady singers. Bobbye Hall on percussion was the only holdover from the old band; Elisecia Wright, a powerful black singer from the Dylan/Petty tour, augmented Lori and Sharon’s vocals. Margi Kent had fabricated some beautiful new shawls and costumes: a black dress and shawl for “Talk to Me,” set off by a red trailing scarf; a crimson shawl for “I Need to Know”; a white spangled wrap for “Beauty and the Beast”; a black and golden shawl for “Stand Back.”

  Stevie got her demon down far enough to play some good concerts that summer. Others were less than enchanted. Stevie could seem obviously intoxicated, slurring her words, dancing so close to the edge of the stage that she fell a couple of times, always caught by Dennis Dunstan, who had to carefully shadow Stevie from the security pit in front of the stage so she didn’t hurt herself. (Another of Dennis’s duties was helping to put Stevie to bed, since she had to sleep in an awkward sitting position due to both a back problem and an acid reflux condition.) Her road crew joked that you could drive the equipment truck through the hole in her nose. They’d heard the rampant rumors about Stevie’s drugs back in LA: that her face was falling off; that she was absorbing cocaine in unorthodox applications—anally, or through her vagina.

  The last concert was in early September at the Red Rocks Amphitheater at the foot of the Rocky Mountains near Denver, Colorado. Mick Fleetwood joined the band on percussion and Peter Frampton played a little guitar as well. Mick was alarmed by how much Stevie was drinking and snorting and smoking so she could perform. He’d seen a couple of her shows and was scared that her increasingly dizzying spins would propel her off the stage. Before the Red Rocks concert, he managed to take her aside.

  “I said to her, ‘Stevie, you’re gonna hurt yourself. You’ve got to work on getting away from being so high while you’re on stage.’ And she cried, and said, ‘Oh Mick—I know it. I don’t want to be like this. I don’t want to need this stuff so much. I’m going to do something about it.’”

  This concert was filmed by director Marty Callner for video release the following year. The set blended Stevie’s older songs—“Dreams,” “Sisters of the Moon”—with mostly new material, especially “Stand Back” and “Talk to Me.” During “Beauty and the Beast” Stevie looked over at Mick and sang, “I’ve changed, baby / Or at least I’m trying to change.” She delivered “Has Anyone Ever Written” with a bathos that seemed genuine, and the audience responded with whoops of appreciation and affection for her. The concert ended with an epic “Edge of Seventeen,” with fresh blooms on the microphone stand and Stevie twirling in a creamy fringed shawl and lacey half-gloves, singing in crazy tongues, bringing down the house before the nightly ritual of The Walk, just as it started to rain.

  Now it was cold and everyone went home except Stevie, who had her makeup reapplied and stayed to shoot some grueling hours of close-ups and inserts for the commercial video. She was relieved and grateful to see that Mick had stayed behind to keep her company on the now empty Red Rocks stage. He’d wanted to leave with the rest of them but stayed when he saw how alone and fragile his beloved Stevie looked, with more work to finish that night: she seemed to him ghostlike, a distant glimmer of her former self, on the fugitive threshold of the drugs that barely sustained her.

  After this, the Rock a Little Tour moved on to Australia. With no cocaine, Stevie began to drink more, and she fell off the stage twice.

  Back in Pacific Palisades later that month, the people closest to Stevie—friends, musicians, management—staged an intervention at her house, and she was reluctantly persuaded that her very life was in danger, that her entire face was at risk from her perforated nasal septum and a possibly subsequent brain hemorrhage, and that she must enter a detox and rehab unit immediately. Within a few days, she checked into the Betty Ford Center, the famous rehabilitation clinic in Rancho Mirage, California, under her married name.

  It seemed clear to everyone that Stevie wouldn’t be working for some time. Dennis Dunstan left Stevie’s employ and went to work for Mick Fleetwood, who was trying to re-form Fleetwood Mac, confident that Stevie would recover and join the Mac for another big payday. Waddy would join the XPensive Winos, Keith Richards’s solo band. Sharon and Lori sang backing vocals for Mick Jagger and others. Irving Azoff was out because Stevie hadn’t liked being forced into treatment, even though she admitted it was the right thing for her. Danny Goldberg sold his share of Modern Records and later went on to become president of Warner Bros. and other major labels. Modern released “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You” as a single and it bombed, only reaching #60 in America.

  The fifty-seven-minute video Stevie Nicks Live at Red Rocks was released early in 1987, heavily doctored with reshot close-ups, cut-ins, and overdubbed new vocals. The VHS tape sold well, and today its DVD edition provides stark visual evidence of an old Welsh witch hitting the very bottom of her career.

  6.3 Too Special for Words

  “Sara Anderson” checked into the Betty Ford Center, hardly knowing herself. She sat through an orientation session in a daze. Someone explained that Betty Ford was the wife of former President Gerald Ford. She was a longtime alcoholic and Valium addict who wound up in a naval hospital after hitting bottom because there was nowhere else for her, other than private clinics that could wean people off drugs and drink but offered little or no help afterward. In 1982 Mrs. Ford and some doctors founded the Betty Ford Center, where Stevie Nicks now was surrounded by people like herself: helpless addicts in need of a fix and redemption. The current poster children of the mid-eighties
rock star sobriety movement were Aerosmith, the famous band from Boston, who were a year into recovery from addiction to everything, and now making chart-topping singles and albums after a decade of sludge and despair. Look, the drug counselors told their resistant clients, if those toxic junkies in Aerosmith can get sober and create again, then anybody can got sober and get their lives back.

  After the intake procedures, someone dressed like a nurse helped Stevie make her way to the spartan quarters where she would spend the next twenty-eight nights. The nurse opened the door for her and said, “Welcome to the room, Sara.”

  *

  “Betty Ford was not easy,” Stevie later recalled. “I called it the Betty Ford Boot Camp.” Stevie soon found herself swabbing floors with a mop and cleaning bathrooms alongside tired businessmen, desperate housewives, sick rich kids, some athletes, and one of James Taylor’s backup singers. No one got preferential treatment. (Stevie didn’t even mind cleaning since she used to do it professionally.) Everyone had to do chores in housekeeping, or buildings and grounds. “It’s what I imagine it’s like to be in the army,” she remembered. “There’s four dorms, twenty people in each dorm. Everyone does the dishes, makes the coffee, vacuums the carpet. And it was tough. But two weeks in, you start to think, Oh my God, I’m getting better—because when you first get to Betty Ford they basically tell you that you’re dying. And that’s not an easy thing to hear.”

  In the group meetings, Stevie was frank about what she had done with cocaine. “You could put a big gold ring through my [nasal] septum,” she said later. “It affected my eyes, my sinuses. It was a lot of fun for a long time because we didn’t know it was bad. But eventually it gets hold of you, and all you can think about is where your next line is coming from.

  “All of us were drugs addicts,” she explained. “But there was a point where I was the worst drug addict. I was a girl, I was fragile, and I was doing a lot of coke and I was in danger of brain damage.”

  Later she was asked about the persistent rumors that she was being administered cocaine anally. “Well, it’s just not true,” she insisted. “I’m a lady, and I’d never do such a thing. But I have to say, when I heard that rumor, it made me decide, OK! Enough! I checked into the Betty Ford Center soon after.”

  Stevie shared a room with a fifty-five-year-old alcoholic woman whose snoring kept Stevie awake at night. One morning the alarm went off at seven o’clock. It was Stevie’s turn to swab down her dorm’s interior patio. She quietly dressed, folding her fading blond curls behind the shawl over her shoulders. She was glad she’d packed her brown suede platform boots, so her feet wouldn’t get wet in the desert’s morning chill. At seven thirty she slopped her string mop into her bucket and got to work.

  Back in her room, she applied some lipstick, rouge, and kohl to a face she barely recognized. During the day she had psychotherapy, group therapy, and attended lectures. Lunch was the major meal of the day, a bountiful buffet surpassing even the legendary uneaten backstage repasts at Fleetwood Mac concerts. Afterward was the daily walk around the duck pond. Later she had tea with her new gang: three millionaire drunks from Texas, two oilmen and a cattle tycoon, old guys in their sixties with rheumy eyes and rough, course hands from working the ranch and the oil patch. She enlisted them to help her distribute the dozens of bouquets, plants, cacti, and flowers that started arriving daily at Betty Ford from friends and fans since word got out that Stevie was at the clinic. The four of them would fan out to the dorms and give the stuff to patients who were alone and far from home.

  No one at Betty Ford had ever seen such an outpouring of gifts for a patient. Some of the staff blamed Stevie for leaking her whereabouts to the media; they preferred to keep treatment confidential. There was one mean nurse who seemed to dislike Stevie; she would say to her, when she was gathering up her horde of flowers and stuffed animals: “Oh my, aren’t you just too special for words?”

  But it didn’t matter. Four weeks after she arrived, Stevie Nicks left Betty Ford and went home to Phoenix, sober. Her coke dealers were astounded that their best client had given up their product. But everyone around Stevie (except her mother) was certain she would relapse. It was just a question, they were sure, of when. But it didn’t happen.

  *

  Three months passed, and it was now early in 1987. She was still off the devil’s dandruff, as Dennis Dunstan used to say. Dennis was now managing the career of Mick Fleetwood, who was desperate to get out of bankruptcy and seemed to be succeeding in putting Fleetwood Mac back together for another go at the punters. And it would work. Cue Tango in the Night.

  Fleetwood Mac had been inactive since the end of the truncated Mirage tour in 1982. The next time all five members were in the same room was when Stevie and her band played a benefit gig in 1985 (the cause was environmental, “Mulholland Tomorrow”), and the vibes between them in the hospitality room were uptight. Then, while Stevie was promoting Rock a Little, four-fifths of Fleetwood Mac helped Christine cut an Elvis song for a movie soundtrack, and they thought they sounded good. Christine had gotten off cocaine, and Mick almost had. John McVie was drinking less after an alcoholic seizure almost scared him to death. Even the great tour manager JC had been recalled from his Hawaiian exile and was managing Christine’s affairs. Stevie was approached to re-form the band while she was in Australia, but she wasn’t returning calls. But she did let Mick know through Dennis Dunston that she would try to do whatever he needed to help him, once the band was back together.

  Lindsey was the most reticent about Fleetwood Mac. He was enjoying his independence, writing new songs like “Big Love,” and working on his third solo album. Then Mick played him some of Christine’s new songs—the best of her career. Mick convinced Lindsey that they might have enough momentum to carry on without him. Lindsey thought about this for a couple of days, and renewed his membership. They began recording—without Stevie—at Rumbo Recorders (recently vacated by a new band called Guns N’ Roses) in the Valley, and then moved to Lindsey’s hillside garage studio for overdubs and mixing the tracks.

  Soon Stevie began getting cassettes—working tapes—of new Fleetwood Mac songs at her home in Paradise Valley. She was astonished by what she heard. Christine had “Little Lies,” “Everywhere,” and “Isn’t It Midnight,” cowritten with her new husband, Eddie Quintella. Lindsey had written his best music in ten years: “Big Love,” “Caroline,” and “Tango in the Night.” If they could get a few songs from her, Stevie realized, this album could be another number one.

  She got to work on her piano and came up with some demo-quality tapes. “Welcome to the Room Sara” was a faltering, nightmarish recounting of her experience in rehab. “When I See You Again” was another of her frail songs of parting, closely related to “Silver Springs.” Sandy Stewart sent Stevie a demo of “Seven Wonders.” Stevie wrote some new lyrics and shared the songwriters’ credit. A fast rocker called “What Has Rock & Roll Ever Done for You” wouldn’t make it on the album.

  The night before Stevie was due to work in the studio with Fleetwood Mac for the first time in five years, she called Mick and told him she was dreading having Lindsey lord it over her with sarcastic and jaded remarks in his capacity of producer. She didn’t have to remind Mick that she was a bigger star than any of them and wasn’t going to put up with any disrespect.

  “We only had a brief few days with Stevie,” Mick recalled, “and we’d been working for about six months. When she finally came to us Lindsey made an effort not to be as much of a martinet as he was with the rest of us. He was under some strain with this project and lost his patience occasionally, but with Stevie we wanted him to be more objective and professional. He tried to make her feel good in the studio, got some good vocals from her, and it seemed to us that they got on well.” Stevie and Lindsey even wrote a song together, really more of a wordless melody, called “Book of Miracles.” The real miracle was that they could be in the same room.

  The truth was that Lindsey was sick and tired of Fleetwo
od Mac. He’d actually found postrehab Stevie to be a tranquilized zombie, and drug-addled Mick Fleetwood had spent most of the recording period nodding off in his Winnebago, parked outside Lindsey’s garage. Now Lindsey was forced to remix their tapes to make it sound like Stevie was singing on songs that she’d never even heard.

  Late in March 1987, Stevie came to the studio to listen to the mix-down before the new album, Tango in the Night, was released. There was a row. After the closing strains of the album’s last track, Stevie looked like she was about to explode. She got up and stormed around the studio, fighting tears.

  Mick: “All right, Stevie, tell us what’s wrong.”

  “It’s not even like I’m on this fucking record. I can’t hear myself at all!”

  Mick: “Stevie, we only had you for a couple of days in the studio. We have a deadline.”

  “All right,” she said, really angry now, “maybe I wasn’t able to get to the studio that much. You know how fucking sick I was.”

  Silence. She went on, “But how is it going to look when the record comes out and I might have to tell Rolling Stone that I didn’t work on it?”

  Christine McVie, hardened road warrior, wasn’t used to being threatened. Plus she’d had two glasses of wine. “OK, Stevie. What specifically are you so upset about?”

  “I should be singing harmony on ‘Everywhere,’” she said, bitterly. “You should hear me singing harmony on that song.”

  “I wanted you to sing on it, too,” Christine said, “but you weren’t there. In fact we’ve been working on this record for almost a year, and you were only with us for a couple of days. Now why don’t you just tell us you’re sorry and we’ll work it out.”