Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

It wasn’t all work. Energized by her new relationship, Stevie began to emerge from her medicated world and just get out more. Rupert Hine was someone she could be seen with around town, at restaurants, openings, and industry events. In late October she threw a Halloween party for the Fleetwood Mac family. Everyone had to wear an outfit of some kind. Stevie found hers at Western Costume in Hollywood: a billowy scarlet ball gown with short puffed sleeves and a vampire collar. Stevie loved this dress for her party costume as Scarlett O’Hara; she also wore the red dress for the jacket photo of her new album, and in the first single’s video. (Rupert Hine came as a World War I biplane pilot. Mick Fleetwood arrived as Jesus Christ entering Jerusalem. “Mick was riding an actual donkey,” Hine recalled. “These people didn’t do things by halves.”)

  Then, in early November, Stevie gave an A-list Hollywood party at the castle for the Irish band U2, then the biggest rock band in the world. They’d come to LA to preview their new album Rattle and Hum. Stevie—all dolled up and looking great—attended U2’s show at the Wiltern Theater on the arm of Rupert Hine, who found himself in People magazine a week later. Stevie’s party for U2 started at seven the following evening at the castle. Rupert was at the front door when Jack Nicholson, Hollywood’s biggest star, walked in promptly on time. Hine later remarked that, after making records in the fastness of Buckinghamshire for ten years, he knew he had finally hit the big time when he found himself directing Jack toward the bar.

  Rupert Hine was really charmed by Stevie’s natural ways. He told an interviewer, “We’d go out to dinner and she’d suddenly just start singing to me straight into my ear, things that she was either thinking or just little ideas … [she was] only able to tell me what she was thinking by singing.”

  Rupert went back to England in December. Stevie joined him after spending Christmas in Phoenix with her family. Her new album would be finished and mixed at Rupert’s rural studio, away from the temptations of London. Stevie arrived the following January with a small entourage and twenty pieces of luggage, planning for a few months’ stay in England in early 1989. They were driven to Farmyard Studio, Rupert’s house near the village of Little Chalfont, in Buckinghamshire, about an hour’s drive north of London. Rupert wanted to re-create the familial atmosphere of the castle sessions, but in the context of a romantic old English farmstead. He had one of the farm cottages upgraded and redecorated for Stevie, and hired some jolly local ladies from the parish church to keep the studio’s kitchen open at all hours.

  At first Stevie was disoriented, dazed, ensorcelled by the ancient landscapes of the quiet, rural shire. The English winter is mostly mild; she took long walks along sere fields and fallow pastures, then over turnstiles with the farm dogs, and she wrote in her journal about the swirling mists and the morning fogs of the gently rolling countryside, with the blue hills of the Chilterns rising in the distance. The musicians quickly fell into a working routine, spending the most time on the strongest of the new songs: “Whole Lotta Trouble,” “Alice,” “Rooms on Fire,” and “Ooh My Love.” Rupert brought in British musicians, like guitarist Jamie West-Oram from the Fixx, to add colors and accents where needed to fill out the castle tracks.

  After a month, to stay on the production schedule, they needed to dub in Bruce Hornsby, who was supposed to be on two tracks, “Juliet” and “Two Kinds of Love.” But Hornsby was having second thoughts about being featured on the same record as the dreaded Kenny G., who was regarded as a hack by most serious musicians of the era. (They may have been jealous, too, since his sugary “smooth jazz” recordings were shipping gold.) Hornsby’s management said his schedule was tight, so he couldn’t work in England just then. So Stevie (really annoyed) and Rupert boarded the supersonic Concorde at London’s Heathrow Airport, and flew to New York for two days’ work at the Hit Factory with Mr. Hornsby. (Rupert noticed that Stevie traveled with only six suitcases for the two-night visit.) Hornsby was truculent, and the sessions were tense. But they got his piano stylings and vocals down and then flew the Concorde back to London in just over three hours.

  Then something happened that remains a mystery. Stevie and her people suddenly left Rupert’s studio in a flurry of hired cars. They checked into a London hotel, then flew back to Los Angeles. The reason for Stevie’s quick exit has never been explained—there were rumors of a medical diagnosis of some kind—but two years later Stevie had this to say about the scene with Rupert Hine in England: “[It was] somewhere outside London. It was like being in a cottage in Wales, it was a little spooky … the atmosphere was like nothing I had ever experienced. Then something happened to him [Rupert] that simply made it impossible for us to ever be together again. I left him there … the rooms were still burning, but the fire had been stolen from us. It wasn’t over love, in fact, it had nothing to do with love. It was just a bad situation. I came back to Los Angeles a very changed woman.”

  7.3 What Price Glory?

  When the tapes of Stevie’s new music came back to Los Angeles, they didn’t sound quite right, and so they were remixed by Chris Lord-Alge, an up-and-coming young LA engineer much in demand for his “ears.” Rupert Hine was said to be offended, but Stevie didn’t return his calls. Some of her new songs were strong, and potential hit records. “Rooms on Fire,” written with Rick Nowels, was a blank verse narrative with a chorus that echoed the Searchers’ version of “When You Walk in the Room.” It had an orchestral palette and a Spanish guitar, and would be the album’s first single.

  The lyrics for “Whole Lotta Trouble” were written in Mike Campbell’s hotel room in Australia during the Dylan/Petty tour five years before. The line, “You’re not living in the real world,” had been spoken to her by Tom Petty during one of their heated disagreements on nights off. Stevie and Campbell had recorded a hotel-grade demo of the song on Mike’s four-track recorder, with Stevie playing her guitar. Then he wrote a bridge and expanded the demo into a backing track, developed further by Rupert Hine. To Stevie it came out sounding like an old John Lee Hooker song. “Whole Lotta Trouble” was a breakup message, a threat display, a power play. “When I want something,” Stevie declares, “I get it.” The LA Horns, a trio of session players, were overdubbed as a tribute to Atlantic Records’ classic R&B band sound.

  Equally strong was “Ooh My Love,” with its rhythm following “If Anyone Falls in Love,” and words about romantic memories of creating art with a new lover in dark castle chambers. Other tracks included the cowgirl rock of “Long Way to Go,” “Ghosts,” “Fire Burning” (both, again, with Mike Campbell), and “Alice,” a dreamy séance using the “Sara” template, with a journey to the other side of the mirror. “Run for your life, said the Mad Hatter,” Stevie sang as Kenny Gorelic warbled his insipid soprano saxophone cadenzas.

  “Two Kinds of Love” and “Juliet” were the two duets with Bruce Hornsby. In the first, Stevie is a widow contemplating a fatal love. “Juliet” (one of Stevie’s names for Robin Anderson) is a rocker about a crying blue sky and getting one’s life back on track. Three more songs complete the album. “Cry Wolf” is a cover of a song recorded by Laura Branigan, an Atlantic singer who was said to be close to the label’s chairman, Ahmet Ertegun. “Doing the Best I Can (Escape from Berlin)” is a somber portrait of distress and addiction. “I paid a price for it,” Stevie comments ruefully. The record ends with a reggae version of “I Still Miss Someone (Blue Eyes),” tacitly dedicated to Lindsey Buckingham, according to Stevie in a later interview.

  Herbie Worthington shot the cover of The Other Side of the Mirror in his studio, using a black backdrop and a checkerboard floor to simulate Wonderland. Stevie wore her outrageously red Halloween dress, with a crimson fascinator sprouting from her big, late-eighties shag perm. Diamonds sparkled on her fingers. The (beautiful) inside-sleeve portrait showed a melancholy rock star in a dark beret, revealing an alluring, deep décolletage. Stevie dedicated the album to her grandmother Alice, “the Queen of Hearts.”

  Stevie made an expensive video for “Rooms on Fire”
(shot mostly at the faux castle), and featuring boudoir scenes, Stevie dancing on the water of a swimming pool, an adorable baby girl, and Stevie—as an old lady—being led into the white light of a mystical landscape by a caped stranger. She called it “the What If video,” meaning what if she had married Rupert Hine, something she seems to have considered. But when they screened “Rooms on Fire” at MTV’s weekly editorial meeting in New York, someone suggested Stevie looked way too fat in the clip, and that it would hurt her career. Some in the room remembered that when MTV began ten years earlier, the only good clip they had was “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” Stevie Nicks had friends at MTV, which, for whatever reason, did not play the “Rooms on Fire” clip in heavy rotation.

  The Other Side of the Mirror, Stevie’s fourth solo album of songs, was released in May 1989 when she was forty-one years old, and it proved a great success for her. The first single reached #16, while the record was a Top 10 album by July. It was a smash in Europe, Stevie’s first record ever to sell really well on the continent. It got to #3 in England after Stevie flew to London and sang “Rooms on Fire” on the BBC’s Top of the Pops. Her first solo European tour followed during that summer and fall, playing in England, France, Sweden, and Holland. Opening for her were singer Richard Marx and the Hooters, and these two bands got better press reviews than Stevie, who was described as clumsy and distracted. The American leg of the Mirror Tour extended into the autumn months, with Russ Kunkel on drums and Carlos Rios on guitar. Sara Fleetwood, now separated from Mick, joined Sharon and Lori singing backup onstage.

  Her fans were still eager to see Stevie, and she sold out arenas and amphitheaters that big acts like Tom Petty and Bon Jovi had failed to even half-fill (in a recessionary national economy that year), especially in the South and Midwest. The two-hour concerts included several costume changes and mostly fan favorites (but not “Rhiannon”). Stevie and the band worked out stage arrangements for several new songs. Russ Kunkel propelled anthemic “Rooms on Fire” with a hard-rocking, four-on-the-floor beat, and played “Whole Lotta Trouble” with a rumbling menace, like war drums. He gave “Ooh My Love” almost a striptease rhythm, which Stevie, Lori, Sharon, and Sara all agreed they liked to move to. Stevie’s fans seemed attentive and appreciative of the first new songs they had heard from her in four years.

  But there was also a spate of awful reviews of some of these shows, cringe-inducing notices of Stevie’s increasing weight, her tightly girdled or corseted costumes, her overdone makeup, her rigid hair. Some critics accused Stevie of letting down her fans with less-than-magic performances. There was even a contentious press conference in Europe where disrespectful reporters kept shouting rude questions about what drugs she was on when she went to rehab at Betty Ford. Stevie refused to answer, got annoyed, snapped, “I didn’t go there to have a good time. I went because I wanted to.” Then she walked out.

  “Two Kinds of Love” (with Kenny G.) was released as the album’s second single, and it bombed: it was the first Stevie Nicks single not to make the charts of either Billboard or Cashbox magazines. The industry maintained a disciplined radio silence. (Some said it was the curse of Kenny G.) They made another video, shooting “Whole Lotta Trouble” while playing in Houston that fall. Veteran fans noticed that Stevie’s band was much more animated without Waddy Wachtel in charge. Sharon and Lori waved their arms around and danced with more abandon. The musicians threw themselves all over the stage, vogueing, rockin’ out. “It was much more of an R&B band than I usually had,” Stevie said.

  At the end of 1989 Stevie went home to Phoenix, where her mother was recovering from open-heart surgery. It had been a long, hard year. Even Western civilization itself had shifted seismically when the Berlin Wall came down that year, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rest of the communist nations. Stevie Nicks was herself a troubadour in the Western romantic tradition, and that she was affected by major political changes would soon be reflected in her songwriting.

  When family members asked how the Mirror tours had gone, Stevie replied that she had no memories of even being on tour. She said she couldn’t remember a thing.

  But later, she wrote that she had fond memories of making The Other Side of the Mirror: the spooky faux castle, the old pictures on the walls, dinner dates at actual restaurants with dashing Rupert Hine, the U2 party where movie stars had come; and then the haunted winter landscape of rural Buckinghamshire. Years later she told Rolling Stone that Mirror was her favorite album of her solo career. And she wrote, “Now I remember the rooms, the music, and how magic the whole thing was … ‘All right, said Alice, I’m going back … to the other side of the mirror.’” Followed by, “‘What price love … what price glory…’”

  7.4 Desert Angel

  Now it was 1990, and Fleetwood Mac came calling. The new Mac album would follow Tango in the Night, the band’s bestselling album after Rumours and Greatest Hits, which also had sold in the millions. Mick Fleetwood was nervous about the new record, the band’s first album without obsessive-compulsive producer Lindsey Buckingham in control. Mick asked Stevie to give them three or four new songs. But she was mostly living in Phoenix, concerned for her mother’s health, and existing in a haze of psychotropic medication. Stevie was now wracked by bodily spasms, and her hands sometimes shook, which frightened her. She was finding it very hard to write something new.

  Stevie did fly to Los Angeles and meet with Greg Ladanyi, who was producing with Fleetwood Mac. She wanted to write with Rick Vito and Billy Burnette, and invited them to her rented estate in the Valley for long sessions with their guitars and her journals. She enjoyed it, she told Rick and Billy, because she could never work this way with Lindsey anymore. First, he would never come to her house, and even if he did, all she and Lindsey would do was get into heated arguments about why they broke up, years before, and whose fault it was.

  Stevie did come up with new music during that winter in 1990. She wrote “Love Is Dangerous” with Rick Vito and sang the somewhat generic lyrics with him. She wrote “Freedom” to a killer track sent by Mike Campbell. The lyrics dated to the stunned and heartbroken era when Mick had dumped her for Sara: “My intentions were clear I was with him Everyone knew / Poor little fool.”

  “Affairs of the Heart” was credited solely to Stevie, a passionate appropriation of an old saw that probably came from deep in the heart of Shakespeare: “’Tis better to have loved and lost / than never to have loved at all.” But with a passionate attack and a Rick Vito guitar break, Stevie somehow transformed the Bard’s timeless sentiment into something fresh and moving. She also wrote (with Vito) the sad, sweet ballad “The Second Time,” about a woman who had regrets but still never looked back.

  Stevie stayed in Paradise Valley, keeping out of the warm winter sun during the album’s production. When it was time to add her vocals, Greg Ladanyi came to Phoenix and recorded her at Vintage Recorders’ studio there. Behind the Mask, Fleetwood Mac’s fifteenth album, was released by Warner Bros. in April 1990. Reviews were mixed, most noting that Lindsey’s not being there made the band sound more like a team of individuals. Rolling Stone (which had never really embraced the abrasive Lindsey) said that Rick and Billy were the best things to ever happen to Fleetwood Mac. Somewhat tellingly, the actual group wasn’t depicted on the album jacket.

  But sales proved disappointing. Behind the Mask barely grazed the Top 20. Christine’s single “Save Me” got on Top 40 radio, and her “Skies the Limit” made it to the adult/contemporary FM radio format, but none of Stevie’s songs were much played. Meanwhile, Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac for a long and successful international tour that, on and off, lasted for the rest of 1990. Once again, some fans missed Lindsey Buckingham’s steely presentation and clever guitar playing, but the band agreed the touring atmosphere was less tense and more fun. As for Stevie, she still donned her iconic top hat for the encores, but she mostly preferred to sing wearing slouchy black berets adorned with jewels or feathers or beads. “Rhian
non” was never on the set lists, so the old Welsh witch’s gossamer capes stayed in the wardrobe cases.

  Fleetwood Mac was on a private plane between European concerts when Mick Fleetwood came out of the lavatory and beheld the entire band and entourage reading the hot-off-the-press British edition of his just-published autobiography, Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac. Mick gulped. He looked at Stevie, who was avidly absorbed in his gentle recounting of their affair. No one looked at him. This was mostly a prank staged by John Courage, who’d gotten hold of a case of books, but actually they were all engrossed in Mick’s recounting of the often dramatic story of the band. Mick was immediately concerned about Stevie’s reaction. Would she freak?

  Mick: “When she actually read the book, we were on this private jet and she said, ‘I’ve just finished the book.’ And I was dreading it. I thought she was going to bat me around the face, or something. But she said, ‘Well, you could’ve put more in about you and me. What about that kiss we had behind the curtain in Australia, with Jenny inches away?’”

  Mick laughed and looked at her. Stevie winked at him.

  But their friendship was about to fray into enmity and revenge over—once again—her mother’s song, “Silver Springs.” By the time the dust settled in 1991, Stevie Nicks had quit Fleetwood Mac, and she would not come back for seven years.

  *

  It all began in late 1990, while Fleetwood Mac was still on the road. Stevie’s health became more of an issue, and her manager convinced her to stop touring with the band. Stevie was persuaded that she only needed one career—her solo work. Christine McVie decided that she wanted out from touring as well. (Touring was better left to the competition, which in those days meant Wilson Phillips, the daughters of Brian Wilson and John Phillips.) On December 7, before the tour’s last show in Los Angeles, it was announced that Stevie and Christine would record with the band but would stop touring with Fleetwood Mac. That night, Lindsey Buckingham joined his old band for an emotional “Landslide” with Stevie, and then “The Chain” with the whole band. In her dressing room afterward, Stevie wept with relief and sadness that this might have been her last show with her old band.