Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

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  In early 1990 Modern Records was intending to release Stevie’s first compilation of hits from her solo career, augmented by a few new songs with famous cowriters and some remixes of familiar tunes. Then Stevie had the notion of including “Silver Springs,” her 1977 song left off of Rumours. “Silver Springs” had never had an album release: it had been the B-side of the “Go Your Own Way” single. Stevie had given the publishing income of the song to her mother. If “Silver Springs” appeared on her possibly megaselling solo compilation, her mother could be in for considerable income, and everyone would be happy. Stevie asked her new manager, Howard Kaufman, to propose this idea to Mick Fleetwood.

  Mick said no. He refused to let Stevie use “Silver Springs.” His exact words were that she could have “Silver Springs”—over his dead body. It was a Fleetwood Mac song, he tried to remind her, and he wanted to release it on a Fleetwood Mac compilation in 1992, commemorating the band’s twenty-fifth anniversary. This made Stevie very angry. She just could not catch a break with “Silver Springs.” There was a lot of pleading, cajoling, and begging over this, but Mick was determined to maintain control over Fleetwood Mac’s legacy.

  Stevie threatened to quit Fleetwood Mac. Mick failed to respond. Howard Kaufman told her it was her decision if she now wanted to let go of Fleetwood Mac entirely. It could mean a cut in income for her, he advised, but Stevie was adamant. So she announced her departure in early 1991. Rick Vito left as well. Then Christine McVie told the London press she was leaving, too. “Fleetwood Mac just kind of fell apart for various reasons,” Rick said at the time. Years later, Stevie told a reporter, “I didn’t leave Fleetwood Mac. My brain left me.”

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  Winter 1991. Stevie was working on her hits compilation. She spent two weeks in the studio, working on a song she didn’t much like, “Sometimes It’s a Bitch,” with its writer, Jon Bon Jovi, the telegenic New Jersey rock star. She didn’t even want to sing the word “bitch,” but her people convinced her that this was a Garden State product worthy of mighty Bruce Springsteen, and a sure-fire radio rocket. “I had to be talked into it,” Stevie later explained. At first she didn’t really understand what his song was about. What did “Well, I’ve run through rainbows and castles of candy” actually mean? Later she said she thought it was about an earlier version of herself—“the notorious Stevie Nicks,” as she put it. (Stevie and her girl singers enjoyed inspecting Jon’s shapely bottom as he leaned over the mixing console. “He was nice to all the ladies,” Stevie later said of him, “and he had the best butt of all time.”)

  Then there was a collaboration (and some semi-motherly infatuation) with twenty-seven-year-old Bret Michaels, pretty-boy lead singer of Poison, the LA glam rock band that everyone who liked Guns N’ Roses loved to hate. Michaels and Stevie worked on his song “Love’s a Hard Game to Play,” which would be a late addition to the hits package when they needed an extra track. Stevie really dug this kid. Just after cutting his song, she wrote (or dictated): “This song was brought to me barely two weeks ago by a most extraordinary young man. One of those men who have everything … beauty, sensitivity, warmth, and a love for life that I had not seen in a long time. I recorded his song, singing it for him to the best of my ability … hoping that people would love the song as much as we loved doing it.”

  Stevie wrote “Desert Angel” in a hyperpatriotic mood during Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 Gulf War between the United States and Iraq, after Iraq had invaded U.S. ally Kuwait. It was her first overtly political song, referencing recent events like the fall of the Berlin Wall. She wrote the words at her house in Paradise Valley after reading about a local support group for the troops called Operation Desert Angel, and recorded the vocals with Sharon Celani at Vintage Recorders in Phoenix in February. She was even inspired to write a passionate letter in support of the military that was published in the Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes. Describing herself as among those who felt “helpless and scared” by the onset of war, she was motivated to patriotic fervor in part by the hypnotic track Mike Campbell had sent her, and by a growing sense of dedication to her American homeland, especially politically conservative Arizona. Her blank-verse lyrics refer to National Guard units being called up and the anxiety of those whose family members go to fight in a foreign war. “You should know how much we love you,” Stevie sings to the departing soldiers, and then simply, “Come home.”

  “Desert Angel” was the closing track of TimeSpace/The Best of Stevie Nicks when the compact disc was released, worldwide, in September 1991. This was ten years after Bella Donna had launched Stevie’s solo stardom in 1981. TimeSpace’s first single “Sometimes It’s a Bitch” was disappointing, and wasn’t helped by an uninspired performance video that mixed childhood photos with quick cuts of film clips from Stevie’s career. Radio didn’t seem to want to play a song with “bitch” in the title. The album got to #30 in Billboard, and was a Top 20 record in England, where interest in her music continued to build. (The London press, the BBC, and TV networks were happy and eager to help Stevie promote her music; some of this was due to her immense popularity in Australia and New Zealand. She also tended to give English reporters chatty and candid interviews.)

  The rest of 1991 was devoted to Stevie’s Whole Lotta Trouble/TimeSpace Tour in the autumn months. Stevie’s old friend Les Dudek, who’d worked on Rock a Little, played lead guitar with a broken hand after an accident. The tour manager broke his leg. Other weird stuff happened, like power failures and dead microphones. There were whispers the tour was cursed, but the shows went well, with Russ Kunkel pounding out those hip-swinging rhythms for the girls onstage and in the audience. When it was over, Stevie came home and collapsed. Much later, no one understood how she had been able to perform at her level after five years taking ever-increasing doses of the powerful antipsychotic drug Klonopin. Those who knew her well realized it was sheer will that kept Stevie Nicks in the arena. For her, any other life was not worth living. What price, glory?

  7.5 Death in Venice

  After a period of rest and some time in Hawaii, Stevie was restless and intended to make another record. This was 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president against George Bush. All that year, Clinton used Fleetwood Mac’s catchy, hope-filled “Don’t Stop” as his campaign theme, and when Clinton won the presidency in November he wanted Fleetwood Mac to perform the song at his January inauguration in Washington.

  The problem was that Fleetwood Mac didn’t really exist. The band was down to Mick and John, but the White House wanted the classic Rumours lineup with Stevie and Lindsey. When Mick polled the band members, Lindsey reminded him that he’d left the group five years earlier. Stevie was still angry with Mick over “Silver Springs,” which had finally appeared on the compilation Fleetwood Mac: 25 Years—The Chain in November 1992. Christine was also gone. But Mick emphasized what a huge honor this was for their band and won over Stevie and Christine. But Lindsey didn’t want to do it. He said he didn’t care about Clinton and that he was making a solo album.

  Stevie got Lindsey on the phone and told him that if he deprived her of this honorable moment, she swore she would never speak to him again. Lindsey caved in. People close to the band speculated that he was helped to this conclusion in that he might need to be part of Fleetwood Mac’s guaranteed touring cash flow some sunny day in the future.

  Fleetwood Mac played for the Clintons in January 1993. Bill Clinton told Stevie that he’d first heard “Don’t Stop” while riding in a taxi in 1977 and realized what a great campaign song it could be. He pointed out that he and his wife Hillary were big music fans; they’d even named their only daughter after a Joni Mitchell song. Fleetwood Mac’s presidential reunion was nationally televised, and it helped keep the band in the public eye while it didn’t really exist. It would be another four years before they would play together again.

  *

  Work on Stevie’s fifth solo album began in mid-1992, Stevie’s sixth year on Klonopin. She ask
ed her psychiatrist about decreasing her daily dose, since the drug was producing side effects that made her look older than her forty-four years. The doctor told her that she would be “nervous” without the pills, and he didn’t think that was a good idea if she wanted to keep working. He ran down a gossipy list of rock stars who were supposedly on Klonopin, mentioning Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Michael Jackson, and that crazy guy from Aerosmith. He suggested increasing Stevie’s dose instead. She didn’t know what to do.

  Stevie had liked working with an English producer, so they hired Glyn Johns, who had started out engineering the Rolling Stones’ records in 1965 and had gone on to work with the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Rod Stewart, Linda Ronstadt, and almost every important musician in rock music. Johns (fifty, attractive, longish graying hair) arrived in Los Angeles and found Stevie eager to work but muddled, unfocused, and sometimes confused. Stevie didn’t have much in the way of new material. She and her in-house production guy, Glenn Parrish, had been poring over old tapes, looking for outtakes and demos of songs, some dating back almost thirty years. They had some songs left over from Rock a Little: “Mirror Mirror,” “Greta,” “Listen to the Rain,” and “Love Is Like a River.” They found “Destiny” on an old cassette, dated 1973. “Rose Garden” originally was a fragment of another song that Stevie wrote in 1965. “Unconditional Love” came from Sandy Stewart’s demos for The Wild Heart. Newer material included “Street Angel,” hard-rocking “Blue Denim” (written to a Mike Campbell instrumental track), “Kick It” (also with Campbell), and “Jane.” Glyn Johns brought “Docklands” (by Trevor Horn and Betsy Cook) from England, and suggested they ask Bob Dylan to play on a cover of his classic song, “Just Like a Woman.”

  They worked on these songs until November 1992. The album, now titled Street Angel, was set for release in March 1993. But then, on December 12, 1993, a seemingly dying and desperate Stevie Nicks disappeared into a locked rehabilitation clinic for almost two months. Glyn Johns went back to London, and Street Angel—an album Johns thought was complete—was put on hold. No one knew what would happen next.

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  These events began one evening when Stevie was entertaining at home. She now weighed 175 pounds and was smoking three packs of mentholated Kool cigarettes per day. She felt cold all the time, so there was always a gas-fed blaze in the fireplace. One moment she was standing by the mantel, wine glass in one hand and lit cigarette in the other, and the next moment she’d almost fallen into the fire.

  She remembered this with bitterness. “I was hosting a baby shower in my old house. We had a bottle of Lafite Rothschild, some incredible vintage, and there were probably fifteen of us there. Everybody had a little sip. And that’s all I remember. I must’ve collapsed. The girls said they found me on the carpet, curled up by the fireplace. I’d hit my head, but felt no pain. They got me up to bed. Later I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and saw I had some blood on the side of my head. I never injure myself, so I was horrified to see that blood. I hadn’t had enough wine to pass out like that. I knew it was the Klonopin.

  “I’d gone from two blue pills in the morning to four blue pills. Then it was two white pills in the morning and two more at bedtime. He [her psychiatrist] kept upping my dose. If I went without it for two days, I’d start to shake. I was shaking so hard that people would look at me like I had Parkinson’s disease. And then I’m starting to think, do I have some kind of neurological disease, and I’m dying?”

  Then Stevie had an idea. Her assistant Glenn Parrish, who’d been with her since 1980, was a trusted friend. She now asked Glenn to take her daily dose of Klonopin so she could see what kind of effect it had on him.

  “I said, ‘It won’t kill you because it hasn’t killed me, but I just want to see what you think.’ Because Glenn was terribly worried about me. Everyone was. At that point, if I could find a Percocet, because I was so miserable, I would take that, too.

  “So Glenn proceeds to take all my medicine. He was a very good friend to me. I told him I’d sit with him in case he died. He began setting up a stereo in the living room. And after half an hour, he was just sitting there. And he said, ‘I can’t fix the stereo, and I don’t think I can drive home.’ And I said, ‘Well, good. Just stay there, because I’m studying you.” And he was almost hallucinating. It was bad. Then he just passed out.

  “I called up my psychiatrist, and I said, ‘I gave Glenn everything you prescribed for me.’ And the first words out of his mouth were, ‘Are you trying to kill him?’ And the next words out of my mouth were, ‘Are you trying to kill me?’ So I decided to get off Klonopin.”

  She went to this doctor for the last time the next day. “I told him I was going into rehab and he said, ‘No, I can cut your dose way down.’ But I had made my mind up. I felt like this jerk had taken away eight years of my life.” Shortly afterward, Stevie was admitted to Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Venice Beach, where she remained for the next forty-seven days.

  *

  In some primitive societies, shamans are intermediaries with the invisible realm of spirits and ghosts, healers who often take on themselves the sufferings and illnesses of their patients. Sometimes, aided by potions and herbals, the shaman must “die” to the material world and enter the dangerous, supernatural, often hellish underworld in order to restore and bring back healing energies to the regular world. Some fans speculate that this is basically what happened to Stevie Nicks in those forty-seven days, purging her body of an addictive benzodiazopine before returning to resume her songs of hope and consolation.

  She recalled, “They said I’d nearly died. My hair had turned gray and was falling out. My skin molted and had started to peel off. I was in terrible pain. I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t stand up in the shower. I thought I was going to die. I felt like someone had opened a door and shoved me into hell. But after forty-seven days, I came out shining, on the other side. I had a new lease on life.

  “I learned so much in that hospital. I wrote the whole time I was in there, some of my best writing ever. I learned that I could have fun and laugh and cry with amazing people, and not be on drugs. I learned that I could live my life and still be beautiful and have fun and go to parties and not even have a glass of wine. And I never went to therapy again.”

  And later: “It’s been easy for me to stay sober. I could still drink alcohol, recreationally, because I’m not an alcoholic. But I take a drug called Neurontin for my menopause. It handles the menopause [symptoms] brilliantly, but if you take so much as a sip of tequila, it makes you very sick.” (After this, Stevie’s publicist suggested that she stop talking to the media about menopausal issues, advice Stevie ignored.)

  After this, and for the rest of her working life, Stevie constantly expressed a deep bitterness over what she described as a wasted time of her life. She told London’s Telegraph newspaper: “I think it’s very good to talk about this, to get the message out to the world about addiction to this particular drug. That was the worst period of my life. They stole my forties. I might have met someone, had a child, become a mother, made some great music. It was eight completely wasted years of my life. It’s very Shakespearean, very much a tragedy.”

  “It was eight years of my life—gone,” she told The New York Times. “Your forties are the last vestige of your youth, and mine was ripped away from me.” Asked if she was still angry with the psychiatrist, she answered, “If I was driving a car and he was crossing the street, I might run over him.” The interviewer asked for the psychiatrist’s name. “Doctor Fuckhead,” was her reply.

  *

  Stevie Nicks came home from the hospital on January 27, 1994. After a listening session for the supposedly complete Street Angel album, she said she wanted to go back to the hospital because she hated her new record so much. She said it was the saddest, lowest-energy music she’d ever made.

  Atlantic was told the album was delayed while Stevie tried to fix it. Glyn Johns stayed in England and took his name off the recor
d. Tom Panunzio, a Heartbreakers associate, was brought in to supervise. Stevie recruited Waddy Wachtel and former Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon to overdub some of the tracks. Benmont Tench supplied painterly lashings of his majestic organ sound. Over the next few months they boosted the firepower of the better tracks (“Blue Denim,” “Listen to the Rain,” and “Street Angel,” a pastel portrait of a homeless girl, harmonized by David Crosby.) They completely overhauled songs like “Greta” and gave it a sense of the epic, with a reggae rhythm. Song lyrics were changed to reflect bitter recent experience, referencing addiction, despair, rehab. She substituted “pills” for “pearls” on “Just Like a Woman,” sang it in the first person, and indeed got Bob Dylan to play some guitar and (inaudible) harmonica on the track. She recut her vocal on her pretty 1965 ballad “Rose Garden” because her voice was hoarse on the original. (Indeed, there are four or five of her different voices running through Street Angel.) She wrote a new song, “Thousand Days,” given a terrific, horn-driven production by Chris Lord-Alge—“Why does the greatest love / Become the greatest pain?”—but the song was left off the album.

  In the end, Stevie gave up, in part because of the sheer cost of the project. Street Angel was released in May 1994, when she was forty-six years old. Stevie and Tom Panunzio were credited as coproducers. No one had high hopes for the record. It had some good songs but was overwhelmed by the sadness of the ballads: “Destiny,” “Maybe Love Will Change Your Mind,” and “Jane.” Stevie was depicted on the Modern Records CD jewel box looking downcast and swaddled in pink, as if she’d break just like a little girl. The first single was supposed to be “Blue Denim,” but it was replaced by “Maybe Love Will Change Your Mind,” which stalled at #57. That summer, while she was touring (with Rick Vito on guitar), Marty Callner directed a performance video for the second single, “Blue Denim,” showing Stevie wearing a black Bedouin tent to disguise her full figure, upstaged by stunning Sara Fleetwood, who was singing onstage with Sharon Celani and Mindy Stein.