Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  Street Angel, Stevie Nicks’s worst-selling album, peaked at #45 on Billboard’s chart. The “Blue Denim” single—one of Stevie’s best rock & roll songs ever—didn’t even chart at all when released during the summer tour.

  Stevie gave a lot of interviews that year while selling her album and promoting the Street Angel Tour, explaining her medical problems and why her new music wasn’t up to her usual standards. “I’d been taking Klonopin for almost eight years,” she told Time Out later. “Street Angel was done in the last two years of that, when it had kicked in to the point that it took away my soul and my creativity.” When she came out of rehab, “I listened to the record—I’m off all the drugs—and I knew it was terrible. It had cost a fortune.

  “So I went back in and tried to fix it. If you’re taking a lot of tranquilizers every day, it only makes sense that the music will be [slurs] ver-r-y tranquil. Trying to fix it was like redoing a house. You end up spending way more money than if you had just burned it to the ground and started over. It wasn’t fixable. Then I had to go do interviews for it, and it was everything I could do not to say to the interviewers, ‘I hate this record.’”

  Nevertheless, and despite an onset of periods of extreme fatigue, Stevie and her band spent the three summer months of 1994 on tour. At 175 pounds, Stevie knew she would look fat to her audiences. Margi Kent sewed and stitched a new wardrobe that emphasized bodily freedom for a plus-sized rock star. Her hair was dyed blond and frizzed in a “root perm,” which took two hours a day to braid for the stage.

  Since Street Angel hadn’t taken wing, the tour was downsized from arenas to theaters, amphitheaters, sheds, music and arts centers, or auditoriums. (The fans loved being closer to the band and sometimes got rowdy down front.) Shows started with “Outside the Rain” and proceeded through “Dreams” and “Rooms on Fire.” “Rhiannon” was back in the set, the old Welsh witch now appearing in a shorter, nonhysterical rendition, timed to the second by Rick Vito. They tried out various songs from Street Angel but mostly stuck to the hits: “Gold Dust Woman,” “Stand Back,” and “Edge of Seventeen.” The encores were usually “I Need to Know” and “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You.”

  To save money, they traveled by bus from city to city. The two tour buses—one for her, one for the band—cost seven hundred dollars a day instead of the five-thousand-dollar airplane. They started in the Northeast in July, moving South and then to the Midwest in August. Stevie sang “Blue Denim” on David Letterman’s Late Night TV program in New York on August 2. She said later she liked the new routine of keeping all her tons of gear on her bus and only taking a few things into the hotel: shawls for the lamps, extension hair plugs, snacks, candles, and incense. She also said that she had a torrid romance with a band member and spent a lot of driving time making out in the back lounge. She said he asked her if he should leave his girlfriend, but she said no. “It wouldn’t have worked, off the road,” she recalled later.

  Then it was on to the West, with dates in California, Texas, and Arizona, where Stevie performed at her family’s Compton Terrace shed in the desert. They finished with two nights at the House of Blues on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. The last show was broadcast on FM radio and got huge ratings. Stevie was exhausted and her muscles ached, but she kicked it, and Rick Vito in his bright red jacket carried the swing, a real blues-rock hero. The audience—two generations now, old Mac fans and their daughters—was cheering, and a few people were crying with relief that Stevie had saved herself from dying like all the other wasted rock stars. Stevie and her people were buoyed by the passion they saw in the fans; it was an indication that Stevie could regain her standing once she got the rest of her life in order and started writing hit songs again.

  The Street Angel Tour was profitable, but Stevie was super upset when the reviews emphasized her weight gain and personal problems as much as they did her shows. Stevie was already aware that she had died, and that a new, sober, and much wiser persona had to be established for her career to resume properly. She recalled with bitterness, “When I walked off the stage after the last show, I told my assistant that I would never sing in front of people looking like that again.” So in early 1995 Stevie quit smoking cigarettes (again), and installed treadmills in her houses in Phoenix and Los Angeles. She started Dr. Atkins’s then-faddish low-carb diet and managed to lose thirty pounds by the middle of the year. She told People magazine, “I’ve accepted the fact that I’m not going to be picture-perfect. I just want to be strong.”

  Then she finished this transformational era—menopause, detoxification, rehabilitation, major attitude adjustment—by restoring her breasts. Her mother had suspected that Stevie’s chronic fatigue might not be the Epstein-Barr virus. Barbara had read that leaking silicone from the breast implants Stevie had received in 1976 might be to blame. Stevie: “It was like cocaine—everyone was getting [implants] back then, and everyone was told they were safe.” The doctor told her the procedure was painful and wasn’t worth it to get them out. Stevie insisted and had the surgery, and for good reason. “They were totally broken,” she said of the silicone implants, which were preserved and deposited in her doctor’s freezer in case she ever wanted to sue.

  CHAPTER 8

  8.1 Trouble in Paradise

  “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place,” the Red Queen told Alice. “If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

  For the next two years, Stevie Nicks would have to run twice as fast to get her career going again. Beginning in 1995 she returned to her double-winged home in the gated community at the foot of Camelback Mountain in Phoenix, and lived in the care of her brother Chris and sister-in-law Lori and their five-year-old daughter, Jessie Nicks (plus two dogs). She tried various diets and physical therapies such as movement and massage. She told friends she wasn’t even tempted to think about cocaine. She wanted to think about writing songs, but her recovery was slow, and her doctors told her not to be concerned with work. She was forty-seven years old, had plenty of money, and her whole family behind her. Yet she desperately wanted to write but felt blocked and less than inspired. She told everyone she needed a collaborator.

  Back in late 1994, Stevie had sung on “Somebody Stand by Me,” a new song by the Missouri-born singer Sheryl Crow, whose “All I Want to Do” was one of Stevie’s favorite recent songs. With Don Was producing and Ben Tench playing organ, Stevie delivered an unusual (for her) soul-style vocal, more Mavis Staples than Welsh Witch. The song was on the soundtrack for the movie Boys on the Side, released in February 1995. (This was a quasi-lesbian road movie with an HIV subtheme.) Stevie Nicks realized that glamorous and talented Sheryl Crow would be a good writing partner for her and vowed to make it happen.

  Stevie recorded music at Vintage Recorders in Phoenix in April 1995, with Lori and guitarist Jesse Valenzuela. She found the ex–Gin Blossoms front man a tonic for her postrehab depression. She recalled, “I was sad and I was trying to figure out how to get my voice back, and if that was even possible.” They cut a six-song demo that later yielded up a snazzy version of Dorsey Burnette’s rockabilly classic “It’s Late” (a hit for Ricky Nelson in the fifties), but when she listened to the playback at home, Stevie wasn’t impressed with what they’d done. “That’s where Jesse came in. He was so cool, a really strong force in taking me out of that negative thing. Jesse just said, ‘Don’t be stupid. This is good. Let’s get your singing chops going and get the excitement back.’”

  Then, on April 24 the Heartbreakers were playing in Phoenix, and Stevie had dinner with Tom Petty at the Ritz-Carlton hotel. Petty had gotten divorced from his wife under battlefield conditions, his house had burned down, and there were rumors someone had done it. Petty told Stevie he was in no shape to try to write with her. Instead, he delivered what Stevie later described as an “inspirational lecture,” reminding her of her deeply felt obligation to her fans and urging her to go and write her own stuff. Petty knew what it was
like to have a band and a road crew and about a hundred people depending on you for food on the table that night. Tom was sympathetic but steely; Stevie had to keep working or get out of the game.

  “I returned home,” she later wrote in the notes to her next solo album, five years in the future, “and began writing these songs.” Her brother and assistant Karen began helping her find themes. One of the first to coalesce was the idea of “trouble in paradise,” meaning Paradise Valley where she lived. Over the next five years, Karen Johnston and Chris Nicks recorded dozens of demos in Stevie’s home studio. Some of these new songs would be featured on Trouble in Shangri-La in 2001.

  *

  Through all of this, Stevie kept tabs on Fleetwood Mac. She knew they’d recorded an album of new songs, some by Christine and her husband. They’d toured (opening for Crosby, Stills & Nash) with Mick’s old mate Dave Mason (ex-Traffic) on guitar and the terrific twenty-seven-year-old singer Bekka Bramlett fronting the band alongside Billy Burnette. Bekka was the good-lookin’ daughter of sixties rock stars Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett. She’d been singing with the Zoo and worked steadily as an in-demand backup singer in the LA studios. Bekka Bramlett had a great voice, but in the hot summer of ’94, half the audience left the sheds when they realized the slender beauty in the skin-tight red leather cat suit wasn’t Stevie Nicks, and Christine McVie wasn’t onstage, either. Mick begged Bekka to sing “Dreams” and “Rhiannon,” but she wisely refused to step into Stevie’s stacked-heel stage boots. (Bekka did allow herself to perform “Gold Dust Woman.”) In the 1995 touring season, the floundering Mac embarked on a semi-humiliating package tour with REO Speedwagon and Styx.

  In October, Warner Bros. released a twelve-song Fleetwood Mac album called Time, which became the first Mac album not to make the charts at all. No one had the heart to tour after that. Billy, Bekka, and Dave Mason all left the band by the end of the year. This was described in the press as a stunning reversal for the twenty-year-old megaband.

  Stevie Nicks loved Christmas and, with a little girl in the house, she lavished a lot of attention on Yule decorations and traditions. Then she made her first public appearance since rehab at the Herberger Theater in Phoenix, where she played the Ghost of Christmas Past at KTAR radio’s annual broadcast of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” Afterward, she told a reporter from the weekly Phoenix New Times that she was sure 1996 was going to be a good year, because she was already starting to feel better.

  *

  Then, slowly at first, a momentum began in early 1996 to reunite the Rumours band. It started with a simple phone call from Lindsey, asking Mick to play on the solo record he was making. Mick said yes, put down the phone, and had one of his premonitions. He had to make this work, this time. Mick had to get Stevie and Christine back in the band. “It’s victory or death for Fleetwood Mac,” he told his friend Richard Dashut.

  Stevie met Sheryl Crow at a post-Grammys party in Los Angeles, where Crow (who’d started out singing backup for Michael Jackson) was a hot pop commodity. As Sheryl recalled the meeting, “Stevie had just recorded ‘Somebody Stand by Me,’ a song of mine. I liked her immediately, and she said, ‘We should get together and work some time.’ I thought, Great! But then I didn’t hear from her—for two years.”

  Meanwhile, Stevie and Lindsey were circling around each other, treading lightly. (Stevie’s spies reported that Lindsey had a new girlfriend, Kristin Messner, a pretty blond photographer, and that they were living together.) In April, while she was staying in a rented beach house overlooking Sunset Boulevard and the ocean, Stevie sent him a demo of a song called “Twisted” that she’d written for the storm-chaser movie Twister. He agreed to produce the track and play on the song, which described “chasing down the demons / crying out for love.” (The song wasn’t used in the film but appeared in the soundtrack release.) Then in May, she and Mick performed together in Louisville, Kentucky, at a private party just before the Kentucky Derby.

  Stevie owed Atlantic Records one more album and then was free to sign with another label. It was agreed that her final album under her Atlantic contract would be a multidisc compilation. But for her next solo albums, she was induced to sign with Warner Bros. after the two guys that ran the label came to her house and told her that they believed in her. They also offered her what they called “synergy.” This meant they could attach her songs to Warner Bros. movies, increasing her revenue stream. Stevie told Danny Goldberg that she would miss the people she’d worked with at Atlantic for fifteen years, but that she needed a lot of new inspiration, so it was an auspicious time to make a change.

  Stevie was still vexed by a creative blockage. If she was going to switch labels at the age of almost fifty, then the next solo album had to be terrific. However, she still wanted someone to work with her, someone supercreative like Lindsey, or Jimmy, or Rupert—someone who could bring out the best in her. She was still convinced the best person for this role was Tom Petty.

  But Petty had just left his family and moved out of his house; he was staying by himself in a miasma of guilty pain and hard drugs in a secluded, rustic cabin on some overgrown land in Pacific Palisades, near where Stevie was living. He had a fourteen-year-old daughter and couldn’t cope. He didn’t even know how to buy groceries. Stevie went to visit him one day and saw her old friend as a really broken man. She decided it might help them both if they could try to write together, despite the fact that he’d told her to forget it a year earlier.

  Stevie told Petty’s biographer, Warren Zanes, what happened next: “I said, ‘Let’s just write some songs. I don’t write songs with anybody, and really, neither do you. Let’s write some.’

  “He said, ‘Well, okay. Maybe.’

  “So I went home, thinking I’m going to go there every day until six o’clock at night and we’re going to write. The next day I arrive with my grocery bags, with Hershey’s chocolate syrup, instant coffee, and the kind of milk I like. He’s looking at me like I’m crazy.”

  Petty was horrified. It looked like Stevie was moving in with him.

  “I say, ‘I’m going to be here, so I need my supplies.’ He’s like, ‘Your supplies?’ I say, ‘Supplies! Like when you go camping.’ I’ll never forget the look on his face. So I said, ‘Okay, so we’re not going to write songs together. But I’ll come visit you, and I’ll keep in touch.’”

  Stevie was disappointed and alarmed at her friend’s mental state and near complete isolation. But she was still determined to find someone to help her find her voice again. And soon she was relieved to hear Petty had a new woman in his life, and she was someone with whom Stevie could be friends.

  8.2 The Dance

  Lindsey Buckingham hadn’t seen Mick Fleetwood in almost eight years, except for a few hours at the Clinton inaugural in 1993. “He didn’t want me turning up at his house, coked out of my head,” Mick explained. When they bumped into each other in March 1996, Lindsey could see that Mick had cleaned up his act. Lindsey explained, “I was just about to go into the studio with [producer] Rob Cavallo, and I said, ‘Why don’t you come down, Mick? Let’s cut some tracks.’ So we started, and it was going great. And then we got John [McVie] down to play some bass [on Lindsey’s ‘Bleed to Love Her’]. Then somebody at Warner Bros. said—and this was probably their agenda all along—‘Do you want to do a live Fleetwood Mac album?’ I was like, ‘No—but okay.’”

  Of course The Dance, as the project was termed from the beginning, would be more than just a live-hits album, recorded on a Warner Bros. soundstage. It would also be a huge payday, a lucrative tour, a long-form video, and a celebration of a resurgent Fleetwood Mac’s achievements two decades after Rumours. Stevie Nicks was over the moon with relief about the reunion, since it meant putting her next solo album on hold. It meant she didn’t have to come up with lots of new songs right away. It meant she could enfold herself in the first-class luxuries of a big Mac tour without having to make any decisions or take on the daunting responsibilities of a band leader. (Less e
nthusiastic about The Dance was Christine McVie, who confided to Stevie that she had developed a phobia about flying in airplanes and really wanted to retire.)

  As soon as everyone had agreed, Mick got the band into a rehearsal studio to see what Fleetwood Mac sounded like. They hadn’t played together since Lindsey had quit ten years earlier. They hadn’t toured since Mirage in 1982. Christine began to play “Say You Love Me,” and Stevie stepped up to the microphone and started to sing. When they were finished, Lindsey smiled and said, “Pretty great!” Lindsey was excited because this would be the first time he would play the Tango in the Night songs—some of his best work—with Fleetwood Mac.

  To prepare for The Dance, Stevie started working with a new vocal coach, Steve Real, who emphasized tone control, breathing, and conservation. He gently taught her various techniques to expand her range and refine the various timbres in which she sang. She also resumed a strict diet and lost thirty pounds. She also wrote a new song called “Sweet Girl,” and cut a demo in Phoenix with Big Al Ortiz on guitar, in March 1997. The song was autobiographical: “I chose to dance / Across the stages of the world.” This was the song that Stevie brought to the first rehearsal (April 1, 1997) for the two studio concerts that would be recorded and filmed for The Dance. She also brought her singers Sharon Celani and Mindy Stein; Mindy was in Lori’s place while Lori stayed home to care for her daughter.

  Also missing were veteran Mac producers Richard Dashut and Ken Caillat, since Lindsey wanted to produce the record by himself. Even Herbie Worthington was passed over for the more au courant fashion photographer David LaChapelle, who posed the band in a studio painted pink.