Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  The one interviewer who asked her about him was from the BBC, who were filming a documentary on the band called “the epitome of adult rock music.”

  “I gave Lindsey up,” she told the interviewer. “He’s a thing of my past. I hope he finds what he’s searching for, and I hope he’s happy, and I wish him well. And there’s nothing left to say.”

  The tour broke for the Christmas holidays. On New Year’s Eve Stevie sang with Mick Fleetwood’s Zoo at a little club in Aspen, where she had written “Landslide” in what seemed to her another lifetime. (Eddie Van Halen sat in on supersonic electric guitar. The stage was the size of a mattress in a good hotel.)

  *

  The Shake the Cage Tour was supposed to go to Australia and New Zealand in March 1988, but Stevie’s health intervened. She was forty years old now and told friends she was feeling her age. She was fatigued, tired all the time. One doctor diagnosed glandular fever, something like mononucleosis. Another told her she suffered from the debilitating Epstein-Barr syndrome. The Pacific tour was canceled.

  But Fleetwood Mac did go to England in May, playing in Manchester and Birmingham before a record-breaking ten sold-out nights in London’s Wembley Arena. Tango had been a #1 album in the U.K., and anticipation ran high for the return of the venerable London blues band that had gone west and conquered the world. Even younger members of the royal family were requesting tickets. Hope sprang high that Diana, Princess of Wales, might come, but she was more of a Duran Duran fan. Instead, her brother-in-law, Prince Edward, the Queen’s youngest son, came to the opening night and was graciously received backstage by Stevie, the Queen of Rock, with a modest curtsey after the show.

  Stevie later said that this London residency was one of the highlights of her career with the band. Backstage the vibes were high-energy, aided by the vitamin B12 shots dispensed by the comical English tour doc. The band was augmented by an unseen keyboard player who added atmospheric drones to their sound. Stevie’s girls were along to add vocal depth to Christine’s crystalline “Isn’t It Midnight,” “Little Lies,” plus Stevie’s “Seven Wonders” and “Gold Dust Woman.” During “World Turning” Mick was joined by West African percussionist Isaac Asante, adorned in cowrie shells and a horned helmet, in a hoodoo drum duet that drew cheers. Fans were spellbound by Stevie’s plangent solo on “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You.” Then they got up and danced when Fleetwood Mac threw its full, prodigious weight into “Stand Back” and “Edge of Seventeen.”

  Rhiannon, the old Welsh witch, never appeared in London, despite constant fan clamor for her. Ziggy Marley was on the PA leading to the concerts. Afterward, as the fans filed out into the chilly spring evening, the PA played “Albatross,” Fleetwood Mac’s perennial Top 10 hit.

  After the ten nights at Wembley, everyone was relieved and more relaxed. Stevie Nicks didn’t know it then, but time’s currents would ebb and flow, and after the tense, successful, and highly creative Tango era she wouldn’t sing onstage with Fleetwood Mac for several years.

  CHAPTER 7

  7.1 The Writer

  While Fleetwood Mac was in London, Stevie Nicks was disconcerted by the presence of a writer who was helping Mick Fleetwood with his autobiography. They didn’t usually let writers mingle with the band. “I don’t think anyone in the band welcomed it,” Mick said later.

  He’d recently gone through his second bankruptcy and needed cash. His lawyer, Mickey Shapiro, knew a literary agent who knew a writer, a former Rolling Stone editor, who was now a bestselling rock biographer working with Michael Jackson on a memoir. Mick met with the writer, who produced a proposal for the New York publishers that netted a six-figure book deal for Mick’s history of Fleetwood Mac. The writer began taping interview sessions with Mick early in 1988 in Mick’s rented house near Zuma Beach in Malibu. A few months later, Mick finally married Sara Recor, who’d been living separately in a tract house in Burbank. Stevie attended the wedding at Mick’s house, along with the rest of Fleetwood Mac (minus Lindsey).

  Gradually, the writer asked to speak with other band members. Christine agreed and gave a funny interview to him backstage at Boston Garden. Wine glass and cigarette in hand, she repeated her oft-told joke that she’d been Perfect before she married John McVie. John in turn made a choking gesture with his hands when asked why Lindsey had left the band. Bob Welch described the band’s difficult midperiod of disasters and defections. Richard Dashut—who had lived for years with Stevie and Lindsey when they were a couple—kept saying what a great woman she was. John Courage told about the relentless teasing he took from his fellow road managers in the early days, because JC had two girls in the band. (These rock pirates thought it was bad luck, like women on a frigate.) Dennis Dunston let it drop that Mick had gone through a torrid affair with Stevie Nicks. Then there was the Sara material …

  “We can’t put that in the book,” a goggle-eyed Mick told the writer.

  “We have to,” the writer said. “It’s box office boffo.” Mick put his head in his hands. The writer said, “You’ll have a huge best seller. You’ll make a lot of money.”

  “She’ll kill me, or leave the band,” Mick said.

  “No, she won’t,” the writer said. “We’ll make her look good. No one wants to read trash about Stevie Nicks, believe me.”

  Weeks went by. Mick invited the writer to come along to London for the band’s residency in Wembley Arena. Christine spoke again at length, as did Billy Burnette and Rick Vito, charming guys, ten years younger than the band, who were thrilled to suddenly find themselves in one of the biggest groups in the world. No one wanted to talk about Lindsey. The writer enjoyed eavesdropping on the vocal rehearsals backstage as Stevie, Chris, and Billy worked out different harmonies for new songs like “Little Lies” and “Isn’t It Midnight.”

  One night Stevie Nicks asked Mick about the writer. Everyone was talking to him. People were spilling their guts. Why didn’t he ask to interview her? Because, Mick answered, he knows you’d say no. That’s right, she said, adding that she was going to write her own book someday. Does he, she asked, know about us? Mick nodded yes. About you and Sara? Yes again. The next day Stevie changed hotels.

  “Stevie was huffing and puffing for a while,” Mick said later. “And I said, ‘Stevie, you’ve got to trust me. I’m working with you. I’d have to be out of my mind to scuttle anyone that was close to me, in a very distasteful way.’”

  The writer and Stevie passed each other a few times in the narrow backstage corridors of Wembley Arena. She would give him a little smile, and then lower her eyes as they passed. He noted that she was tiny, overweight, and seemed a little bleary, as if she was medicated. Her eyes were red behind thick eyeglasses and she smelled of weapons-grade hairspray. She was stuffed into corseted stage clothes that displayed a bounteous silicone décolletage, and she wobbled uncomfortably in stacked-heeled boots, trailing scarves, and wore metallic hair jewels in her big coiffure. Even a bit overripe in her current state, there was still something deeply alluring in her presence.

  After the last concert in London, the writer had himself introduced to Stevie at the band’s glamorous party at the Kensington Roof Gardens. She was wearing a costumey gypsy-rocker black dress, nursing a goblet of white wine, and smoking a filtered cigarette. “Everything they say about me is true,” she advised him. Behind her, Sharon Celani and Lori Perry-Nicks, as she was now called, stared at the writer, icy and dead-eyed after a long night’s work. The writer wondered what these veteran singers made of him.

  *

  When Fleetwood Mac went on to their European concerts, the writer went home and typed up his notes. Then, in the summer of 1988, he received a phone call from John Courage, who wanted to know if he would write the booklet notes for Fleetwood Mac/Greatest Hits, a compilation of the current band’s best songs, augmented by new tracks from Stevie and Christine, to be released for the holidays in all three formats: compact disc, vinyl, and cassette. Warner Bros. had ordered a huge advance pressing, JC said
, and the band wanted the writer for the job. They agreed on a price, and the writer asked for a tape of the album’s running order and the new songs.

  He wasn’t surprised to see that five of the album’s sixteen songs were Stevie’s: “Rhiannon,” Dreams,” “Gypsy,” “Sara,” and “No Questions Asked.” This last was a complex narrative paired with an instrumental track by Kelly Johnston, almost five minutes long, about a fascinating man—elusive, a loner, and she wants him. He’s resistant—it sounds like Joe—and she gives in to her needs, then regresses into childhood: “I need you … now … no questions asked … like a little girl.” Her singing seems buried in a generic Lindsey-esque arrangement directed by Greg Ladanyi, a sought-after producer favored by Jackson Browne and Don Henley. Stevie’s sad song was offset by Christine’s more hopeful (and tuneful) “As Long as You Follow,” designated to be the package’s first single.

  The writer duly sent JC a 1,500-word essay about being with Fleetwood Mac in London during their triumphant, sold-out return to the mother country. This was accepted with only one change. The writer had characterized Stevie’s most tribal fans—young women tricked out in black toppers, scarves in shimmery, transparent fabrics, and gauzy nomad frocks—as “Nixies,” referring to the mythological Celtic fairies of the Western Isles. This was nixed by Stevie Nicks, who didn’t want this moniker attached to her people.

  Fleetwood Mac/Greatest Hits was released in November 1988. The album reached Billboard’s #14 and then proceeded to sell eight million copies over the next few years. The writer felt proud to have been a tiny part of its massive success. A few months later, John Courage sent him a framed platinum record award signed by all the members of the band (except Lindsey Buckingham).

  7.2 Alice

  Beginning after her return from England in the summer of 1988, Stevie Nicks stepped away from Fleetwood Mac and spent most of the next year making her fourth solo album. Later she would assert this album of songs was extra special to her: “The Other Side of the Mirror is probably my favorite album. It was a really intense record. I had gotten away from the cocaine. I spent a year writing those songs. I was drug-free, and I was happy.”

  She was also in love, or at least infatuated, with her new producer.

  It had taken awhile before Modern Records could find one, since no one was exactly lining up to work with Stevie Nicks, generally considered an aging, over-forty diva by the record industry in the late eighties. Jimmy Iovine had moved on. She wanted to ask Tom Petty, but he already had a lot of problems. Keith Olsen had kind of fired her the last time they worked together. Gordon Perry was out because his wife had married Stevie’s brother. Rick Nowels was out. She liked Greg Ladanyi, the soft-spoken and handsome Hungarian engineer who had worked on Fleetwood Mac/Greatest Hits, but he was booked. Longtime fans winced when Stevie’s publicist announced that cheesy pop-jazz saxophone star Kenny G. would be in the studio with Stevie. There was some relief when they were informed that rugged piano man Bruce Hornsby would be there, too. (Stevie had liked his hit “The Way It Is” in 1986.)

  Eventually Doug Morris suggested they hire Rupert Hine, an English producer who had produced some of the decade’s biggest British pop acts—the Fixx, the Thompson Twins, and Howard Jones. He was best known for writing the hits on Tina Turner’s hugely popular comeback album, Private Dancer. Rupert Hine was forty-one, handsome, tall, a musical intellectual with an air of command, like a veteran RAF pilot who had survived the war. He preferred to work in his own studio in the countryside near London but agreed to cut the basic tracks in Los Angeles if they could make a deal. Stevie agreed to meet him for dinner at Le Dome, and that was that—a coup de foudre. She remembered: “The night I met Rupert Hine was a dangerous one. He was different from everyone else I’ve ever known. He was older, and he was smarter, and we both knew it. I hired him to do the album before we even started talking about music. It just seemed that we had made a spiritual agreement to do a magic album.” Stevie told friends that she could feel that this was going to be more than a working relationship.

  Rupert Hine preferred not to record in studios, and Stevie wanted an intimate atmosphere because Rock a Little had been recorded all over the map, so she took a half-year lease on a fake castle high in the Hollywood Hills for twenty-five thousand dollars a month. Built in 1974, the crenellated house was mostly used for film and video shoots, especially blue movies. Stevie moved her own bed into the master bedroom; also in residence were her brother Chris and sister-in-law Lori, plus her longtime production associate, Glenn Parish, and her new personal assistant, Karen Johnston. Herbie Worthington was installed in the coach house.

  Paul Fishkin persuaded Jimmy Iovine and engineer Shelly Yakus to help set up a recording studio in the castle’s long dining room, lined with solemn old portrait paintings of somebody’s ancestors. The recording console was in the middle of the room, under the chandelier. This became “Castle Studios,” where the basic tracks for the new album were cut with an assortment of local musicians, joined by Waddy Wachtel, on leave from his axe-hero gig with Keith Richards’s XPensive Winos.

  Stevie wanted a theme that would tie her new songs together, but she was having trouble focusing. The success of Rock a Little was three years in the past, and this time she didn’t have a big backlog of songs. She was anxious about writing, she told the psychiatrist she saw twice a month, so he increased her Klonopin dosage. This made her listless in the studio and ultratranquil upstairs. The take-out orders from Jerry’s Deli increased, and Stevie put on more weight. Mick Fleetwood later observed that the drug that was supposed to keep Stevie productive was making her useless instead.

  But then, in October 1988, under pressure to create, she found her theme.

  *

  In 1862, an eccentric Oxford University mathematician named Charles Dodgson took a little girl named Alice Liddell and her sisters on a rowing journey up the Thames River from Oxford to Gostow. Charles was close to the Liddell family, and indeed had photographed Alice naked when she was seven. While rowing, he told the children a story about Alice’s tumble down a rabbit hole and her descent into an underground world peopled by fantastic creatures: the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, Humpty Dumpty, the Red Queen, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. At a Wonderland tea party, Alice was given potions that altered her body, first growing tall, then growing small. Alice always maintained her dignity while undergoing various ordeals, like a spooky journey through a mirror, or looking glass, but all came out well at the end. Dodgson later said that the real Alice begged him to write down the story so she could hear it again. He published The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland in 1865 under the pen name Lewis Carroll, with illustrations by John Tenniel, followed by a sequel, Through the Looking Glass, in 1871. The books were enormously popular and have remained so for 150 years. John Tenniel’s imagery of Wonderland, with its chessboard landscape and ludicrous characters, became iconic for multiple generations, especially after Walt Disney’s animated version was broadcast on television while Stevie was growing up. Then the sixties counterculture focused on the proto-psychedelic visions of mind-altering substances, giving Lewis Carroll’s fantasies new life a hundred years after they were written. (No one in that generation can forget watching a bloated caterpillar smoking a hookah while seated on a giant mushroom.)

  Stevie knew the stories of Alice in Wonderland from being read to by her grandmother Alice Harwood, during hot summer childhood visits to Ajo, Arizona. Alice and Stevie liked to disappear down the rabbit hole together, into a world where the looking glass both makes everything double and also reverses things. It was a world that now made perfect sense to an increasingly medicated Stevie Nicks, who understood Alice’s discovery while in Wonderland: that “I say what I mean is not the same as I mean what I say.”

  Also, Stevie’s grandmother—Crazy Alice—had recently died. Stevie told friends that she had never heard her own mother (whose middle name also was Alice) so upset on the phone before, because Alice Harwood had had such a hard and d
ifficult life. So Alice’s adventures in Wonderland supplied the context for some of the new songs that would reflect Stevie’s own woozy adventures across the other side of the mirror as she made her new album of songs.

  *

  She liked working with Rupert Hine from the start. He was quiet, deferential, and sympathetic about getting ideas out of her journals and notebooks and into an arrangement. They sat together at the piano; he played and she chanted from her written notes. They worked under the old-fashioned portraits that lined the gloomy room. “We never felt alone,” she mused later. Soon she was wanting to get closer to his intelligent energy. There seemed to be a glow of empathy about him, especially given the castle’s dark, cloistered atmosphere. She later wrote, “It always seemed to me that whenever Rupert walked into one of those dark castle rooms, that the rooms were on fire. There was a connection between us that everyone around us instantly picked up on, and everyone was very careful to respect our space.”

  Stevie wasn’t reticent or circumspect about expressing her feelings for Rupert Hine, who recalled the period to an interviewer. “Stevie’s so open it’s impossible not to fall for her. She’s just completely herself, and you fall for that honesty. That ‘magical quality,’ the phrase that everybody uses, is simply because she is true to who she is. If she cared about how she came across, she wouldn’t have it. It’s all real.”

  One evening after supper, Stevie was working with Rupert on a passionate new love anthem, “Rooms on Fire.” Sitting next to him at the piano while he was playing a possible arrangement, she told him, “You know this is about you, right?” He was so moved he had to stop working on the song. Stevie and Rupert remained close for the next four months as they lived and worked at the castle in the fall of 1988.