Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  Stevie: “At first he said, ‘Just come home, honey.’ But then he said, ‘Are people coming to the shows?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ Then he said, ‘Well, Stevie, if you can gut this out and make people happy for a minute, then try and stay out there.’”

  She called her mother. “When my mom answered the phone, I burst into tears and said, ‘I don’t know if I can stay out here. I’m having a really hard time.’ She said, ‘Teedie, I’ve had at least ten phone calls from Atlantic City saying they loved it, and that you totally cheered them up. Honey, if you can finish this tour, think how many hearts you can lift up. This is your gift. I know you can do this. You are that strong.’”

  So Stevie stayed on tour, moving from one Ritz-Carlton to the next Four Seasons hotel and back. Some days she had to force herself to get on the plane to do the next concert. For the first time she copied personal diary entries onto her Web site, nicksfix.com, so fans could follow her travels. The Washington, D.C.–area show sold out and was emotionally wrenching since the Pentagon was still smoldering in nearby Virginia. Stevie was visited backstage by children in wheelchairs, and there were long hugs for all of them.

  They were going to return to New York, but Today canceled and Radio City declined to reschedule. This was disappointing as Stevie wanted to sing “Landslide” and “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You”—which she thought her most compassionate song—for a New York audience. To her fans she wrote that she was having panic attacks, especially on show days, and these feelings didn’t let up until she was on her way to her plane after the concert. “That is the only time I can feel calm or safe. That is the time when I reaffirm my conviction to stay out here and finish the tour.”

  Meanwhile, her band was really hot onstage, rechanneling the crackling electro-spiritual energy coming from an excited rock audience. (Fans who compare bootleg concert recordings think these were some of the best performances of Stevie’s career.) Stevie picked up on this: “Anyway, the shows have been good, and I do think I take the people away for a moment, I see them smile, I see them dance, I touch their hands, I look into their eyes, they are suffering, but just for a moment, we are free.”

  The Nashville show was difficult, but Lori Nicks had joined the tour for moral support, so Stevie didn’t cry onstage, even if she wanted to. (She was glad she didn’t, she told her journal.) In San Francisco a few days later she was distracted by the TV sound of bagpipes keening at the funerals of firemen killed on 9/11. At 1:20 in the morning of September 28, while watching CNN in her suite in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, she wrote, “I feel like I have aged five years since Sept. 11th. My skin feels different; my eyes look different to me—my frown is more pronounced.” Two hours later she added: “I play tomorrow at Shoreline, San Jose, land of Bill Graham, big rock shows, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, all those great San Francisco bands we opened for—the place where Buckingham Nicks was born. So this is as close to home as it gets—my dearest friends will be there—San Francisco, here I come.”

  *

  In early October, the Trouble in Shangri-La Tour moved into the new Aladdin Theater in Las Vegas. Stevie was hoarse and sometimes struggling, but her parents and her brother’s family were there with her, so she felt safe. Other times she gave herself pep talks: she was a warrior-queen on a crusade to bring succor and healing to her damaged people. She also was obsessing about those canceled shows and her reputation in the industry. She wanted to make up for all the missed concerts, but the autumn touring season was really over for her.

  The last concerts were in Los Angeles. Watching the news in her hotel suite in the San Fernando Valley, where she would play two shows at the Universal Amphitheater, she was informed that although all the 9/11 plane hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, her government was now bombing Afghanistan, whose Taliban government supported Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Los Angeles was in fear of retaliation. Streets were unusually quiet. The Emmy Awards broadcast was canceled. But both of Stevie’s LA shows were sellouts, and they had to be special. That night she wrote out her prayer:

  Dear God, let me be great tomorrow—let me forget about terrorism and sing your songs from my heart … let me feel good and be happy—let me give that to these people—that is my prayer—And remember Stevie,—Walk like a queen.

  As usual, Stevie was glad and relieved to be home, which was then an apartment with high ceilings in an oceanside building near the Pacific Coast Highway, where Santa Monica meets Pacific Palisades. It was on a high floor, with big picture windows and beautiful, majestic views toward Palos Verdes in the south, and then all the way to Point Dume, the massive promontory northwest of Malibu. Sitting by her window with a glass of wine, watching the serpentine red taillights of the cars moving up the coast, she felt herself in a post-tour twilight zone.

  “I am home now,” she wrote. “I am starting to calm down a little bit, knowing there is no show tomorrow. Lucky for me and the band that we are doing a few shows between now and December, or we’d all be freaked out. It is always hard to come back into the atmosphere after a tour ends. It’s an age-old rock road problem—the road becomes normal, so going home is strange.”

  The sun was down now, and Stevie got up and lit some candles. She liked watching the mesmeric highway lights, the whites coming toward her, the reds going away, the apartment filled with the candle’s pungent scent of nag champa, a rare spice from India. The name of the candle was Illumé. She fixed on Illumé’s double image, the candle and its reflection in the darkening window. Then she got out her journal and wrote out four long verses of a new song about the last few weeks, a haunted ballad of trauma and remorse, and a thanksgiving for all the love that got her through the ordeal. When she was done, she dated the entry: October 11, 2001.

  CHAPTER 9

  9.1 The New Deal

  In late November 2001, Stevie Nicks returned to Los Angeles from a Hawaiian retreat, determined to make another solo album. She recalled, “What happened was, when I went home to Phoenix for Christmas, I realized I needed to say how I was feeling after that horrendous tour of mine. The way things stood, only one of the songs on the new album was actually brand new, and as a writer that is not acceptable to me. So I went back to my journals and wrote ‘Destiny Rules,’ then ‘Silver Girl,’ then ‘Illumé,’ then ‘Say You Will.’” This happened over a six-week period in Phoenix with help from bassist “Big Al” Ortiz. Then Stevie Nicks and Friends were top-billed at a Christmas benefit for the Arizona Heart Institute, on whose board sat Stevie’s father, Jess Nicks. Stevie’s friends included Sheryl Crow, and Stevie reciprocated by appearing on Sheryl’s 2002 album C’mon C’mon.

  Fleetwood Mac, meanwhile, had come to the end of its contract with Warner Bros. and was currently without a record label. But there was turmoil in the Warner Bros. executive suite: record sales were plummeting with the advent of file-sharing platforms like Napster. Obituaries were being written for the expected demise of the retail record business, with all recorded music becoming free to anyone with a tap of a computer key. No one had seen this coming, and now an entire generation of record guys—Fleetwood Mac’s crucial allies in the industry—were being sidelined and laid off, not the least at Warner/Reprise, leading to anxious uncertainty for the label’s artists.

  One of these was Lindsey Buckingham, who had been working on a solo album for Warner Bros.—the one delayed by The Dance—in his home studio while he was building another house nearby for his growing family. When he played his new tracks for Warner executives, they were less than thrilled. “They just couldn’t hear it,” Lindsey recounted later. “But I knew AOL [America Online] was about to buy Time Warner, so rather than put the album out with a lame-duck regime I decided to wait for a new one.”

  Mick Fleetwood was confident that Warner Bros. would re-sign the band, but he also talked with Jimmy Iovine, currently the president of major label Interscope Records. (The kid from Brooklyn—“Little One”—was now one of the top execs in the music industry.) Jimmy told
Mick straight out that Interscope’s interest in Fleetwood Mac depended solely on the participation of Stevie Nicks.

  But Stevie Nicks was traumatized from her unwanted exposure to the realities of current events. “You don’t live in the real world,” Tom Petty had taunted her years before. But now she felt more a part of things, especially after the dark days of September. She resolved to start thinking differently. She remembered her fervor for Jack Kennedy when she was twelve years old. She asked herself, was there anything she could do for her country? Now, a different and more mature Stevie Nicks began to emerge, at the age of fifty-four: a woman who wanted and needed to see things more clearly.

  *

  But it was hard to see clearly from her high-floor apartment by the beach on an early afternoon in December. The “marine layer” of sea smog had failed to burn off Santa Monica on a windless day, and the ocean was shrouded in a thick and fleecy fog. After a strong cup of tea, Stevie was driven to the offices of her manager, “big bad Howard Kaufman,” as Lindsey referred to him. After greeting the office staff with hugs and presents, Stevie was shown into an office bare of the usual award albums and citations and photos with the clients. The atmosphere was cool, professional.

  Stevie wanted to speak with Kaufman about her next solo album. He listened to her pitch and then told her to forget it. He explained that computers and the Internet and the World Wide Web—only hazy concepts for Stevie at this point—were destroying the record business. Kids were getting their music free from file-sharing, and soon their parents would, too. Something called YouTube was coming along, and then they’d get the videos for free, too.

  As Stevie listened, she was angry. It wasn’t fair, she said. What about the artists? Don’t we have our rights anymore? Kaufman explained that professional paradigms were shifting for musicians. Artists who were used to living on recording and publishing royalties were now going to have to depend on touring for income. The days of the troubadours were coming back, where musicians would have to go out and play for the public to maintain their reputations and their value to the community. There’s not much point, Kaufman reiterated, for Stevie to spend a year of blood and treasure on making a solo album that might be great, but that few would pay to hear when they could get it for free.

  Then Kaufman got to the point. He had inquiries from Mick Fleetwood about putting the Mac back together as a four-piece, without Christine McVie. Fleetwood Mac was that rarity in show business—a sure thing. People would always come out to hear their old songs of love and hate. Revenue would be split four ways instead of five. She would make more money. He would, too. In fact, the boys were already jamming at Lindsey’s house. Kaufman wanted Stevie to say yes to a proposed two albums and two tours. It was a four-to five-year commitment as it then stood. Stevie’s heart sank. Another potentially horrible psychic siege with Lindsey Buckingham had appeared on the horizon instead of the solo album she’d come to talk about. She protested that Fleetwood Mac didn’t even have a record deal, but he said they would get a deal—if they made a good album—with her. But before they went for the record deal, they were going to realign Fleetwood Mac’s power structure. Stevie now had major leverage to dictate her own terms with Fleetwood Mac. The deal Howard would eventually propose to Mick would basically make Fleetwood Mac Stevie Nicks’s band.

  There was a certain satisfaction in that, a naked vindication of the angry and taunting lyrics of “Fall from Grace,” about how Stevie had worked to make sure that all of them—the Fleetwood Mac family—survived this long. She told Howard that she would think about it, but she knew she would take the deal, whatever it was.

  But this came at a price. Stevie Nicks’s solo recording career would be put on hold—for years. It would be a decade between Trouble in Shangri-La and In Your Dreams in 2011.

  And there would be major resentment over the financial restructuring of Fleetwood Mac, which reportedly involved Stevie making more than Lindsey, Mick, and John. It was a tacit acknowledgment that there was no Fleetwood Mac without Stevie Nicks. (Some observers noted that they never could have pulled this off if Christine McVie was still in the band. She wouldn’t have stood for it.) Another factor was songwriting. Lindsey wanted the recordings to be released as a double album, like Tusk, because he wanted to use his (rejected) solo album as his contribution to the new project. Without Christine, all the songs had to be written by Stevie and Lindsey, but Lindsey had many more than Stevie did at that point. Howard Kaufman insisted that the two writers had parity on the next Fleetwood Mac album. This meant that Stevie had to write some more songs, and that Lindsey had to sacrifice some of his.

  When this dust had settled, a chastened and put-in-his-place Lindsey Buckingham told The Guardian newspaper: “Howard [Kaufman] has his formulas and he’s very much in control of certain aspects of the business side.… He’s concerned with getting this project up and running and making Stevie the money that he feels he wants her to make. There’s a strength to that, but there’s also a weakness.… Let’s just say I sense there’s something large looming up ahead.”

  *

  Stevie arrived at Lindsey’s home studio on January 28, 2002, with a giant Navajo “dream catcher” from her Phoenix home, as her contribution to the décor. She also had a bagful of new songs and a positive attitude toward developing music with her difficult former boyfriend. A documentary film about the making of the new album was in production, so the house had been fitted with lights and microphones and even a few discreet cameras meant to capture any drama, let alone train wrecks. This also meant that Stevie had unwanted hair, makeup, and wardrobe sessions before leaving for the studio every day.

  At band meetings, Lindsey was reasserting himself in his role as producer after a fifteen-year absence from Fleetwood Mac’s recordings. He said he wanted the new album to be a double, and the others tried to not groan. He kept saying that Fleetwood Mac had to redefine itself and present new styles to their audience. Mick said that was great, but he was forced into praying to the commercial gods. Mick admitted that he had a fear of failure and that the idea of a double album didn’t seem right. Lindsey understood but held his ground. “It’s my selfish idea,” he said of the double album proposal. There was a silence in the room as eyes rolled into the back of heads. Then, “No—it’s my ambitious idea.”

  Stevie Nicks didn’t bother to argue with Lindsey. She knew that it would never happen, because she didn’t want it to.

  9.2 Hidden Cameras

  In February 2002 they began working on Stevie’s songs, beginning with “Say You Will,” “Silver Girl,” “Illumé,” “Thrown Down,” and “Destiny Rules.” Jimmy Iovine had heard some of these as demos, and mighty Interscope was now interested in signing Fleetwood Mac. But Warner Bros. came in with more money up front after Rob Cavallo, an ally of Lindsey’s and now the chief of the label, came to the studio and heard working mixes of “Say You Will” and “Destiny Rules.” Cavallo expressed mild interest in a double album if they had enough songs, but the issue was left open while negotiations began.

  Lindsey was being nice to Stevie, perhaps for the benefit of the “hidden” cameras. Sitting with her one night, he got emotional about their coming together, “making up for some of the mistakes we made before.” He told her he was “so thrilled, you and me, doing this.” She told him it meant a lot to her, to hear him say these things.

  But there was still this worry that Warners would pass if Lindsey kept insisting on putting out a double CD. One night, whispering so as not to upset Lindsey, Stevie told the film crew how she felt. “We have to sell our music to [younger] people, not people our age, in their fifties. They’re not lying around on the floor smoking dope and worrying about paying the rent.… And they don’t want twenty-two songs from us.”

  And at a band meeting she scolded the others: “You guys all have young families. [Mick and McVie, like Lindsey, both had kids with second and third wives.] We have to be commercial on this record.”

  One night the cameras ca
ptured a run-through of “Illumé,” in which a smoldering Stevie sang in full hair and makeup, in a billowing black dress, with white nails, red toenails, and red sandals, with a gold thumb ring and a bracelet made of delicate white seashells. She was emotional as she sang of the terrors of the Twin Towers, chanting the verses about the serpentine movement of traffic up the coastline as she recalled the fears of those days in September.

  *

  March 11, 2002, was the six-month anniversary of 9/11. Stevie flew to New York, her first flight on a commercial airline since then, to perform at the Revlon Breast Cancer benefit with Sheryl Crow. Stevie then stayed in Manhattan for a week to see “my best friend Tom Petty” inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the Waldorf Astoria’s ballroom. Two months later, in May, she was back in Manhattan again for a benefit for the Robin Hood Foundation, which helps poor kids with scholarships in New York. In her hotel, she watched TV images of the last steel I-beam from the fallen World Trade Center being lowered onto a truck, covered with a giant flag, and driven away. At the same time an empty gurney was lifted into an ambulance, a gesture toward the many victims never found. She flashed back to the despair they must have felt—“Of how we could make it / Of how we could get out” of the burning buildings on that day: lines from her poem “Illumé.” Later she wrote that she was lucky “to come off the road into the dreamlike setting of recording a studio album with Fleetwood Mac. It was a good place to be, after what I had been through—a great tragedy followed by a gift.”

  Another gift was the Dixie Chicks’s massive hit single “Landslide,” which reached #2 on both the rock and country music charts and kept one of Stevie’s signature songs on the radio during the summer of 2002. (It also fulfilled the prophesy of “Silver Springs” that Lindsey would never get away from the sound of the woman who loves him.)

  It was just around this time that the fragile production truce between Stevie and Lindsey began to fray. It started while they were working on Stevie’s “Thrown Down,” which was explicitly about Lindsey, written about indignities while touring The Dance. Lindsey complained that he was finding it “odd” to sing about himself, and he wanted Stevie to change some of the pronouns and some tenses of her lyrics. Her umbrage at this was caught on videotape. “Would you say that to Bob Dylan?” she rebukes him, visibly offended. (She had worked with Dylan; Lindsey had not.) And Lindsey was like, “Uh, no.” “Well,” she interrupts, “that’s how I write.” This might have reminded Lindsey who was now the real boss in Fleetwood Mac. He may have found this discouraging. Things went downhill from there, with renewed bad vibes and serious enmity between Nicks and Buckingham. (Those close to both of them say they never really recovered from Say You Will—a tense period of enforced competition and strife.)