Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  Then Mick walked in one day, wearing a big smile, and said: “We have a label.” Warner Bros. had made a deal—but only if the double-CD idea disappeared—and of course, Lindsey caved. Mick was thrilled. He whispered to the camera crew that Stevie’s new songs were the best she’d written for Fleetwood Mac since Rumours.

  Autumn 2002: Stevie’s nine songs were finished, some with the help of John Shanks, who was brought in when relations with Lindsey tanked. Then they began dubbing in Stevie’s vocals as background to Lindsey’s nine songs, with Stevie singing on a high stool under headphones in the tiled entrance hall of the house. Sharon Celani and Mindy Stein came in to add vocals, as they would on the forthcoming tour. Then there was a big fight about who would mix down the eighteen tracks into a cohesive sound. Stevie wanted Chris Lord-Alge, who knew her music and had a track record, but Lindsey dug in his heels and refused to sign a deal memo that would let this go forward. Someone else mixed Say You Will.

  Then, toward the end of the year, there was another row over the running order. Lindsey wanted two of his songs to come first on the album. Stevie was insulted but caved in. Why fight this anymore? But then she scaled back this whole Fleetwood Mac project, only agreeing to a limited number of concerts in 2003–2004 as opposed to the four-year commitment originally proposed.

  *

  Say You Will, Fleetwood Mac’s seventeenth album, was released in May 2003, when Stevie Nicks was fifty-five years old. The CD jewel-box photo depicted the band looking miserable. Stevie’s back was turned toward Lindsey, who was trying to look bored. John McVie and Mick Fleetwood appeared to be clutching each other for dear life.

  Stevie’s longtime fans listened to the nine new songs she had composed for the album and realized that, by themselves, the songs were of such a high caliber that they alone would have made an excellent Stevie Nicks solo album. (Some fans gave Lindsey credit for this; it seemed to them like the old Buckingham Nicks magic had resurfaced in some of Stevie’s new work, as arranged and produced by Lindsey.)

  After two Buckingham songs, the album really begins with “Illumé,” with its beatnik bongos and images of a coastline like a working river and being alone with the dark thoughts of a 9/11 obsessive. It’s one of Stevie’s most anguished vocals and most haunted songs. This is followed by the wishful thinking and bitterness of “Thrown Down,” a fantasy of a rekindled romance with a man eager to make amends to her in the form of a duet with Lindsey and his sparkling chords. “You can dedicate your pain to him,” she sings in a song of touching psychic projection.

  Lindsey’s “Miranda,” a rewrite of the Kingston Trio’s moody ballad “South Coast,” was followed by his “Red Rover,” an anxious paean to free-floating negativity. Stevie’s “Say You Will” countered this with a plea for hope and second chances, with backing vocals (and Hammond organ) by Sheryl Crow, plus a children’s chorus composed of her niece, Jessica, and John McVie’s young daughter, Molly.

  Then came Lindsey’s creepy song “Come,” followed by a run of three of Stevie’s: “Smile at You” (dating from the Mirage era) was about regrets and missed romantic opportunities; “Running Through the Garden” (written with Rick Nowels) was like a Fleetwood Mac song from 1975 but with a rocking theme of addiction and “turn-around”; “Silver Girl” (sung with Sheryl Crow) was a late-period self-portrait of a girly girl caught in a man’s world, a woman of heart and mind who saw herself as an actress—“you cannot see her soul.”

  Christine McVie had played keyboards on Lindsey’s “Steal Your Heart Away,” followed by his “Bleed to Love Her,” a live version of which had appeared on The Dance. Stevie wrote the catty, defiant lyrics for “Everybody Finds Out” to a Rick Nowles backing track. It’s a funny song about love in the dark and hiding from decline. Then came “Destiny Rules,” one of her great songs, sung in a low voice over a cowgirl-rock rhythm. She travels to foreign countries, she misses an old lover, she follows the rules, and she reprises the powerful imagery of the evening traffic moving up the coast as a glittering diamond serpent that she can see from her high window, “like living by a working river.” (“Destiny Rules” was the lone track on Say You Will mixed for release by Chris Lord-Alge, at Stevie’s insistence, signifying the song’s importance to her.)

  Say You Will winds down with two songs of farewell—appropriate since this was the last studio album Fleetwood Mac has released, as of this writing. Lindsey’s “Say Good-bye” was a quiet bolero, Stevie’s “Good-bye Baby” a tinkling lullaby. (Another of Stevie’s songs, “Not Make Believe,” was released on a deluxe version of Say You Will.)

  *

  Say You Will was a hit album in the summer of 2003. It jammed into the Billboard chart at #3, something that hadn’t happened to Fleetwood Mac since Mirage in 1982. The album stayed in the Top 40 for months and was also a Top 10 album in England. They made quickie performance videos for the two singles. “Peacekeeper” wasn’t a hit, but “Say You Will” got to #15 and was on the radio for the rest of the year.

  Lindsey Buckingham walked Stevie Nicks onstage, holding hands in a false display of amity at the first show of the Say You Will Tour in Columbus, Ohio. Actually they hated each other, but this was show business, after all. Stretching from May 2003 through September 2004, the tour would produce 136 hits-heavy Fleetwood Mac shows in five legs. Stevie’s production values were at their peak, with a new flowy wardrobe and black Nike boots replacing painful stacked heels. She sang “Rhiannon”in a black gown and a black shawl, whirling carefully in a subdued manner compared to the crazy maenad of olden times, displaying cleavage during the traditional deep bows at the end, reaching to the audience as she wailed, “And you still cry out for her Don’t leave me.” She performed “Gypsy” in a golden shawl and six-inch cream-colored suede boots with a half-moon pendant on her throat. She made “Gold Dust Woman” the tour’s show-stopper, sung in a fringed, pearl-beaded cape and danced with two twirls and a half-spin. When Mick hit the pounding backbeat in the shadowdragon section, the stage went dark and Stevie entranced the crowd with oracular hand gestures that seemed descended from ancient temple paintings. This often provoked the biggest ovations of the evening. Lindsey petulantly refused to play the “Stand Back” and “Edge” guitar figures (Stevie’s solo turns were a crucial part of Fleetwood Mac’s concert repertoire now), so Carlos Rios from Stevie’s band was along to motivate them as Stevie danced in an off-shoulder shawl.

  For many fans, the concerts’ highlight was “Landslide,” with Stevie and Lindsey on a dark stage under a bright spot. Their languid smiles at each other, as Lindsey tenderly kissed Stevie’s extended hand while applause washed over them, were totally fake. The concerts ended with “Don’t Stop” (Christine’s only song in the set, Stevie banging her tambourine, wearing a shawl of royal purple silk), and finally Stevie singing “Good-bye Baby” as a country-flavored ballad.

  Fleetwood Mac were still troupers, solid professionals, and the tour would gross twenty-eight million. Stevie’s new songs were well received, and without Christine McVie’s songs, Stevie had much more time at stage front; this was to her liking because in her solo tours she was used to rapping to the audience about the origins of the songs. There was a glitch in Stevie’s crew when backup singer Mindy Stein left in September. Jana Anderson was recruited to sing and sway next to Sharon Celani for the remaining shows. When the tour was over, Stevie Nicks—who had hated almost every moment of the last two years—left Fleetwood Mac for another five years.

  9.3 Soldier’s Angel

  After the Say You Will Tour ended in late 2004, Stevie Nicks retreated to her 3,000-square-foot penthouse condominium on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, with its slightly better view of the California coastline that she so loved. But Stevie was in a state of depression, feeling tired and bloated after months of being squeezed and tied into stomach-flattening corsets on tour. Some of it was a prolonged, “horrible” menopause, the symptoms of which her Warner Bros. publicist Liz Rosenberg begged her fifty-six-year-old client not
to discuss with interviewers, advice Stevie again ignored. One day Stevie and Liz were flipping through a fashion magazine, and Stevie said, “We’re too old to wear these clothes.” And Liz (whose other main client was Madonna) answered, “No Stevie, we’re too fat to wear these clothes.”

  “I looked at her,” Stevie remembered, “and suddenly this lightbulb went off. I said to myself, That’s it. It’s over. I’m losing this weight.” Stevie went back on the rigorous Atkins Diet, about which she said: “When you get into its mindset, you’re terrified to even have a potato.”

  The other causes of her malaise were the bitter feelings left over from the Fleetwood Mac tour, which, she told both friends and journalists, she had hated. She hated the bitter production disputes involving petty and abrasive ego trips onstage. She hated the old wounds and the livid scars that remained. She hated Lindsey bringing his vulgar solo material into the set, and she usually left the stage when he played his tasteless song “Come.” She hated missing Christine McVie and the isolation of being the only girl in the band. She told London’s Express newspaper that she even hated Say You Will. “I didn’t like it at all,” she was quoted. “I didn’t like making it; I didn’t like the songs, so that tour was very hard for me.”

  Stevie’s estrangement from Fleetwood Mac was such that she shied away from doing publicity for Fleetwood Mac Live in Boston, a CD/DVD package released by Reprise in late September 2004. Instead she flew to Hawaii with some friends for three months to try to come up with a project relating to Evangeline Walton’s Mabinogion Tetrology, to which she still held development rights. Normally after a tour, Stevie would dress up, with makeup and the candles and the piano, and begin writing new songs for the next solo album. But with no solo material in the near future, Stevie needed some other creative passion, and so decided to realize her long ambition for the Rhiannon energy to be something other than a familiar song. “It could be a movie,” she told a reporter. “It could be a record. It could be a couple of records. It could be a miniseries, because the stories are fantastic. We started in that totally scholarly, you-are-a-student-of-Welsh-mythology place. And then I got a call from my manager saying, ‘I need you to come to Vegas right now, because Celine Dion and Elton John are playing back-to-back at the Caesars theater, and they want you to do a week there. It’s really good money and you don’t have to travel very far.’

  “And I’m like, ‘Howard, I am on a spiritual quest here; I really cannot come to Vegas.’ And he’s like, ‘Stevie, you have to; please, just come tomorrow.’”

  So she and her girly Rhiannon brain trust packed their bags and flew to Las Vegas for a lucrative four-night stand at Caesars Palace, the Roman-themed casino. She has yet to bring any more Rhiannon projects to fruition. (But she says she still wants to try.)

  *

  In the spring of 2005 Stevie went house-hunting and found a white family house in the hills above Pacific Palisades. The large house, on Chautauqua Road, had five bedrooms, a nice garden, plus canyon and ocean views. Stevie could see her apartment house by the beach from the second-floor master bedroom. The house was cozy, with stained-glass windows, sofas and fireplaces, with family photos in silver frames, flower arrangements, and freshly baked aromas wafting from the country-style kitchen. Stevie bought the house on impulse for a reported nine million dollars, but when she went to live there after the family had moved out, the place seemed lifeless. She also intuited that the house was haunted.

  “There was this big family living there,” she said later, “that obviously loved this house. So there was a vibe. And something in me thought, Maybe I can have that. I was not there three days before I thought, What the hell do I do here? I was too shallow and stupid to realize that it wasn’t the house I had fallen in love with, but the mom and the dad and the four kids, and the smells of the cooking. So it was a mistake from day one.” Stevie installed one of her goddaughters in the caretaker’s apartment above the garage, and from then on she used the big house mostly for guests and parties, preferring to stay in her glass-walled penthouse by the Pacific Coast Highway.

  *

  Summer 2005. Stevie and Don Henley teamed up for the Two Voices Tour, a ten-concert showcase whose nightly show-stopper was the tour’s two principals meeting onstage during Stevie’s set to sing “Leather and Lace.” Then something happened that profoundly affected Stevie Nicks.

  The tour was in Washington, D.C. It was hot and humid, and no one wanted to leave the hotel. Someone from Walter Reed Army Hospital, which treated and provided long-term care for some of the most grievously wounded soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, contacted Warner Bros. and asked if Stevie Nicks would come to the hospital to visit the recovering soldiers. Stevie immediately agreed and had a car take her and her assistant Karen Johnston to the famous military hospital. She put on a gown and gloves, and spent the afternoon moving from bed to bed in the intensive care unit, talking with the damaged young men, many without limbs, spreading as much cheer as she could. When it was time to leave, Stevie and Karen were waiting for their car in the hospital’s forecourt when sirens sounded and the military police closed off the hospital to traffic as medical emergencies began to arrive from Iraq by ambulance from Andrews Air Force Base. These were fresh casualties, hours off the battlefield, some of them bloody, being wheeled into Walter Reed right in front of Stevie and Karen.

  With no car to pick her up, Stevie went back into the hospital and asked what she could do, now. Comfort these new guys, she was told. So she started greeting the soldiers, talking to them. Some couldn’t speak. Some didn’t have limbs or faces. She would touch them lightly and say, “My name is Stevie Nicks—what happened?” Some told her of the IEDs—roadside bombs—that had maimed them and killed their comrades. Stevie held a lot of rough hands that night, and new feelings began to build inside her. Maybe the patriotism she had felt in September 2001 could be channeled into something useful for her country—now.

  That night she wrote in her online journal: “I look at life through the eyes of a rock and roll fairy princess who lives for nothing more than to sing a song … break a few hearts … and fly on to the next city and do it all again … until today.

  “I walked into Walter Reed today as a single woman with no children. I walked out a mother, a wife, a girlfriend, a sister, a daughter, a nurse, a patient’s advocate—a changed woman. What I saw today will never leave my heart.”

  The next night the tour was in Charlotte, North Carolina. Stevie called her mother. Barbara Nicks told Stevie that Americans had to do whatever it takes to keep the country safe. She said, “These young men are in no uncertain terms fighting for our freedom. So what you can do, Stevie, is love them and visit them, and tell the world what you experienced, so that people know what these boys have given up.”

  Stevie wanted to find some token to give to the patients during these visits and came up with the idea of giving them iPods—small music players loaded with digital lists of her favorite songs: “all the crazy stuff I listen to.” Stevie knew that music had gotten her through some of her worst times, and maybe music could help some of her new constituency of wounded soldiers and their families. Later she would incorporate the Stevie Nicks Soldier’s Angel Foundation, which purchased hundreds of iPods that she personally distributed to wounded veterans around the country.

  After the Soldier’s Angel campaign generated national publicity, she returned to Washington to lay a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery—one of America’s most sacred places. She was escorted by Mick Fleetwood; he was from an old English military family and understood the gravitas of the event. Afterward, having heard “Taps” played by Arlington’s bugler, they went to Walter Reed to visit patients. Stevie: “As Mick and I went from room to room delivering their tiny iPods, they told us their stories. We floated down through the halls of two hospitals over a three-day period. We gave out all the iPods until there was none left.” Stevie had been raising funds for Soldier’s Angel
from her fellow musicians in Los Angeles. When they heard about this in Boston, Joe Perry and Steven Tyler from Aerosmith gave Stevie a pledge of ten thousand dollars to buy more iPods. “In my eyes,” Stevie wrote, “they went from the coolest rock stars to generous, great men.”

  Beginning in late summer 2005 Stevie went back on the road under the banner of the Gold Dust Tour. Opening was Vanessa Carlton, twenty-six, a pop chanteuse and Stevie’s new best friend. Waddy Wachtel and drummer Jimmy Paxson had worked out a hot version of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll,” which Stevie started doing as an encore after watching a sedate audience explode into agitation when Waddy pulled the trigger on the classic rock masterpiece.

  Most of the Nicks family attended Stevie’s concert in Reno, Nevada, in late August. The next day Barbara Nicks called her daughter with the bad news that her father had collapsed, was in a bad way, and wasn’t expected to recover. Jess Nicks died a few weeks later in September. Stevie told friends that saying good-bye to him had been the hardest thing she’d ever done. She said a bit later, “I always hear my dad saying, ‘Ninety-nine percent of the human race will never be able to do what you’ve been able to do, to see all the beautiful cities, and meet the people you’ve met. You’re a lucky girl, Stevie.’ And I just try to keep that very present in my life.”