Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  But she carried on, and the Gold Dust Tour stayed on the road into 2006. Stevie was immersed in Twilight, the first of a series of novels about teenage vampires, an obsession that would last for the rest of the decade as Stevie identified with the romantic tribulations of the character Bella. And it was around then that they heard that Judy Wong, Fleetwood Mac’s friend and secretary since 1968, had taken her own life. There were those who maintained that Judy had asked the band for financial help, and had been turned down.

  9.4 The Honorary Heartbreaker

  The Gold Dust Tour stayed out through early 2006. On February 4, Stevie and the band played for an hour at the Super Bowl pregame show in New Orleans. On the plane home the flight attendant—a big guy—told her how he tarted up—in a chiffon dress—for his annual visit to The Night of 1,000 Stevies in downtown Manhattan. He begged her to come, just once. She told him she was flattered, but it might be too much for a lady her age.

  Few of Stevie’s American fans were aware of her enormous stature and stardom in Australia, where the tour continued, beginning at the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on February 17. Stevie’s shows had sold out immediately. Her record sales were strong, and a high-stakes horse race had been named for her. In Melbourne she was backed up on “Landslide” and “Edge of Seventeen” by members of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, with string charts by Waddy Wachtel. The audiences Down Under loved her version of “Rock and Roll,” and the Led Zeppelin thunderbolt stayed in the set.

  Back home in March, with no new music forthcoming from her, Warner Bros. announced yet another Stevie Nicks hits compilation, to be called Crystal Visions, also featuring all of her music videos to date. (“These records are never your idea,” Stevie groused.) For the next few months she would review all the videos, often aghast at how stoned and wasted she appeared in some of them. A few years later she described this in a fan forum online: “Some of those videos are really good, except that I’m high. I’m sorry I let that happen. I ask myself, ‘Stevie, could you have just, while you were filming that video, not done any cocaine, and not drank, and not smoked pot?’ But I didn’t, and now I’m very sorry.” Stevie made it clear that years of addiction were a matter of deep regret to her. “If I could have gotten it together a little more, I would have had a better career. I would have made a couple of more great albums. I would have painted more pictures. You are sorry for this, later on.”

  Later in March 2006 Stevie and the band again appeared at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which was becoming one of their favorite places to play, since their most ardent fans came to see them there, some for multiple nights. Stevie was still doing The Walk as the band vamped at show’s end, still collecting the bouquets, the stuffed bunnies, and the fervent love notes from the most besotted fans, those clamoring down front to get near to her in person.

  Later that spring, she attended the fortieth reunion of Menlo-Atherton High School’s class of 1966. She was sitting with a group of her old girlfriends—most of them in their late fifties like Stevie—and one of them said to her, “You know what? You haven’t changed one bit. You’re still our little Stevie girl!”

  This made Stevie cry. “It was the nicest thing anybody had said to me,” she told an interviewer, “that I’m still the same. Because I always tried very hard to stay who I was before I joined Fleetwood Mac, and not become a very arrogant and obnoxious, conceited, bitchy chick—which many do, and I think I’ve been really successful.”

  *

  Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had migrated from the Florida panhandle to Southern California in 1975, and by the next year had a record deal and a national tour. Three decades later, Stevie joined the band’s Thirtieth Anniversary/Highway Companion Tour as a special guest, pleasing Petty’s audiences no end when she glided onstage—a vision in black tulle and chiffon—to sing “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” with him. She was his “special guest” at the massive Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee in June (introduced by Petty as “an honorary Heartbreaker”), and then was in and out of his tour over the next five months. (She was also exploring trying to write with guitarist Mike Campbell, who had started sending her backing tracks again.)

  Later in the summer of 2006, the legendary Swiss concert promoter Claude Nobs dedicated an evening of his annual Montreux Music Festival to Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records (and partner of Stevie Nicks in Modern Records). Ertegun had helped launch her solo career, so Stevie was happy to participate, performing “Rock and Roll” with Nile Rogers and his band, Chic. Stevie later observed, “Robert Plant was there on the side of the stage, and he congratulated me after our performance. He told me I did a great job. That meant the world to me—one of the great rock-and-roll moments of my life. I think Robert Plant and I are kindred spirits. I think we are both connected to the mystical side of things—but on different sides of the world.”

  Stevie spent the rest of that year doing good works, headlining an October benefit for New York City charities, then in Las Vegas for the Epicurean Charitable Foundation in December. But the highlight of that era was the opening of the Arizona Heart Foundation’s Cardiovascular Research and Education Building, a project that her father had worked on before his death in 2005.

  *

  Stevie and her team spent most of 2007 compiling, promoting, and touring her third compilation album, Crystal Visions, released in March of that year. This was a CD/DVD package with extensive booklet notes written or dictated by Stevie, and a collection of her videos with her own (often hilarious) subversive commentary. (“Why is Mick in this one?”) Included in the DVD videos was the rejected “Scarlett Version” of “Stand Back,” a fiasco that had cost Stevie a fortune in 1982. The sixteen audio tracks collected the usual hits plus two live tracks with the Melbourne orchestra, the “Deep Dish” remix of “Dreams” that had been a dance floor hit in 2005, and her stirring version of “Rock and Roll.” The Crystal Visions booklet was cluttered with old snapshots and extensive song notes. Stevie dedicated the album to her father and to his twin sister Carmel, Stevie’s closest aunt, who had died the year before. Crystal Visions entered the charts at a respectable #21, but the singles “Rock and Roll” and the symphonic “Landslide” failed to receive airplay or even make the charts.

  Stevie did a round of interviews for the album, receiving interviewers in the lamp-lit living room of her house in the hills, offering them steaming cups of Earl Grey tea as her two terriers listened on the chintz-covered sofas. She was usually dressed in a flowing silk or chiffon blouse and close-fitting black trousers, wearing stiletto-heeled boots, her long hair worn loose and down to her waist. Reporters mentioned how small she seemed as she spoke with them in front of a gas-fueled fireplace. She told them that she was working on children’s stories and the illustrations to go with them. “They’re my Zen thing,” she said, “what I do on airplanes, what I do when I really think about what I’m going to do.” Asked about her tireless touring schedule, she answered: “Due to the fact that I never got married and never had children, I do have this crazy world where I pretty much continually work. But I love my work, and it’s so different all the time that I really can’t complain. And when I do get tired and irritable, I get really mad at myself and stop in my tracks and say, ‘You have no right to complain. You are a lucky, lucky girl.’”

  Asked if she still had any vices, Stevie was candid. “Since I got out of rehab in 1994 I’ve stopped doing serious drugs. And then as menopause touched my life, I stopped even having a glass of wine. I don’t drink at all. I find that I’m spacey enough on my own that I don’t need to be drinking and smoking. It just doesn’t fit into my life anymore.”

  *

  The Crystal Visions Tour began on May 17, 2007, in Concord, California, with hunky crooner Chris Isaak opening for Stevie. Her set list now included the furious “Fall from Grace” and Tom Petty’s “I Need to Know.” “Rock and Roll” was the killer first encore, and Stevie usually closed the show with “Beauty and the Beast” as scenes from the
Cocteau movie screened behind her. The brief tour ended in New England in mid-June, after Don Henley bailed on some promised shows with her that summer. But then Stevie stayed on the road, playing dates with Vanessa Carlton until August. Stevie now added covers of Bonnie Raitt’s “Circle Dance,” and Dave Matthews’s big hit “Crash Into Me,” which, Stevie told Rolling Stone, was about the sexiest song she’d ever heard.

  But at the age of fifty-nine, in a profession requiring twirls and spins plus two-and-a-half hours in platform boots, Stevie started having problems with her knees and hips. She fell hard onstage in Toronto when her knee went out from under her, hurting herself, which led her to Power Plate therapy, which required fifteen minutes standing on a vibrating platform that was developed by Russia for its cosmonauts in space. “It’s this big-ass machine,” she told the Toronto Sun, “and we built a big case for it, and we roll it around, and we use it. It fixed my knees, and now I’m in pretty damn good shape.” She also told a Canadian audience that she loved Canada because everyone was so nice. “As much as I love my country,” she added, “they aren’t that nice.”

  *

  Some of Stevie’s fans, as reported on various blogs and Web sites, were upset by the 2007 publication of Storms, Carol Ann Harris’s book-length account of her troubled years as Lindsey Buckingham’s girlfriend. Harris provided meticulously detailed accounts of Lindsey’s dire behavior toward her, including beatings, repeated chokings, and mental cruelty, testimony that jibed with some of the stories that Stevie had told friends over the years. Harris generally depicted Stevie Nicks as what one reviewer described as “a bubble-headed nymphomaniac.” Asked by an interviewer about her reaction to Harris’s book, Stevie told the truth—that she hadn’t read it and wasn’t intending to. (But a friend later told a reporter that someone had read Carol’s book to Stevie.)

  In October Stevie and her band were in Chicago to film an episode of Soundstage, a concert program with a live audience on PBS in America. Seventeen songs were filmed, including most of her contemporary set. Stevie performed in a cutaway black frock coat over a frilled white dress of crinoline and lace. Her black top hat was adorned with ostrich plumes and peacock feathers. Long blond hair spilled over her shoulders and caught the hot TV lights, shining. The evening’s most dramatic shawl was purple with golden trim. Lori Nicks came back to sing with Sharon Celani and Jana Anderson. Highlights included “Sara” (at the producer’s request), “Fall from Grace,” “How Still My Love,” and “Sorcerer.” Stevie sang “Crash Into Me” with Vanessa Carlton as an earthy sex chant. “Landslide” was dedicated to her father, as a montage of Nicks family photos was projected behind her. The show ended with “Edge of Seventeen” and “Rock and Roll” in a satisfying TV blast of cathode-ray energy.

  Stevie then went to Nashville to embellish a CD version of the concert with producer Joe Thomas, who assembled a small string section to give depth to “Beauty and the Beast,” “Crash Into Me,” and “Circle Dance.” Stevie’s Soundstage concert was broadcast on PBS in 2008. A DVD was released by Warners in March 2009 as Stevie Nicks Live in Chicago, containing eighteen songs. A ten-song CD, The Soundstage Sessions, came out at the same time, reaching #47 on the Billboard album chart. “Crash Into Me” was released as a digital download single at the same time.

  In late 2007 Mick Fleetwood called Stevie to ask if she would be interested in touring with Fleetwood Mac. Stevie replied that she would consider this, but only if Christine McVie rejoined the band. Mick called Christine in her quiet Kentish village and asked her if it was time to come back to the band. “Not yet,” Christine said.

  9.5 In Your Dreams

  Stevie Nicks was sixty years old in 2008, spending her birthday on her Soundstage Sessions Tour, again supported by Chris Isaak. She put her house on North Yucca Road in Paradise Valley on the market, and would sell the sprawling property later in the year for about three million dollars. She gave a bunch of interviews that revealed some interesting details. She now considered what she described as her “rock-and-roll penthouse” by the ocean to be her true and probably final home. She said she no longer drove a car or went anywhere alone because she was “very, very famous.” She never carried money, she told London’s Telegraph newspaper, because she had sold her soul to the Devil “to follow this dream.” She liked to stay up all night drawing and painting, retiring around dawn and rising around noon. She promoted her Soldier’s Angel Foundation as much as she could. She launched into tirades against Klonopin, plastic surgery, and Botox. She said she had no interest in Fleetwood Mac unless Christine returned to the band. She admitted she was still at odds with Lindsey Buckingham, adding: “Maybe when we’re seventy-five and Fleetwood Mac is a distant memory, maybe then we might be friends.” She denied being a witch or ever practicing witchcraft in any serious way.

  *

  Then she changed her mind, having been persuaded that going on the road with Fleetwood Mac might enhance the prospect of writing new songs for the new solo album she was beginning to think about. So Stevie spent a good portion of 2009 on the band’s intercontinental Unleashed Tour, which billed itself as a “global hits” concert for longtime Mac fans. It began in June in New Orleans, where Stevie spoke passionately from the stage about her feelings for the city in the dreadful wake of Hurricane Katrina four years earlier.

  But once again, this tour was marred by Lindsey’s behavior toward her, with bad blood and bitterness even noticed by fans and critics, who saw that they ignored each other onstage and that he seemed mocking and contemptuous of her when introducing her songs. They still performed “Landslide” as a barely contained duet, continuing the clenched smiles and corny hand-kissing routine that they both hated. Stevie said she felt bad about faking love; it felt so false and soul-destroying. Yet she acknowledged that the fans were still interested in the Stevie-Lindsey legend, and it was important they be seen as still able to put aside their unhappy past and perform with each other. Some reviewers noted that Stevie’s heart didn’t seem to be in these shows.

  *

  When Fleetwood Mac’s Unleashed Tour reached Europe in October, Stevie reconnected with Dave Stewart in London. Stevie had last seen Dave a few years earlier, when they were both involved in making a pilot episode for a television show that was never produced. Stevie: “We talked about everything for two hours. At the end he suggested I play something at the piano, so I did a fifteen-minute version of ‘Rhiannon.’ Then Dave joined in as if we’d been singing it together for years. I realized then that if I were ever to make a solo album again—and believe me, I had my doubts—but if that day came, I knew I wanted to have Dave on board.”

  Now in London Stevie asked Dave Stewart if he wanted to be involved in her solo record. He replied that not only would he help her produce the record, but that together they should make a documentary film of the whole production, using mostly hand-held cameras in natural light. Stevie was enthusiastic, and told him she would reach out to him when she recovered from the current tour. The Unleashed Tour ended in New Zealand in December with two sold-out stadium shows near the capitol at Wellington. It had been a financial success despite some unsold seats in Europe, but the stresses of working with each other proved emotionally exhausting to the band’s aging front line, Stevie and Lindsey.

  Stevie Nicks went to Arizona to spend Christmas with her mother and brother’s family and began to clear out her Paradise Valley house, which held so many memories—good and bad—for her. She told friends that she was going back into the solo album business and that she intended to hit the ground running. She already had a complete song, “Moonlight,” written while in Australia after seeing the movie New Moon, based on the Twilight teenage vampire novels.

  *

  Some time now passed. Deal memoranda passed between Stevie’s people and Dave Stewart’s so they could work together. Stevie took four girlfriends on a vacation to Italy’s Amalfi coast, where they stayed in a splendid villa hotel perched on a mountain with a stupendous view of the isle
of Capri.

  When work on her solo album started, Stevie recalled, music started to flow from the first day. “Dave Stewart came over to my house in the Palisades, and I gave him a binder of my poetry and said, ‘See if there’s anything that appeals to you.’ Dave always has a guitar around his neck, and he started playing, and I just sort of started reciting my poetry, and all of a sudden, in about an hour, we had this amazing song.” (This was “Secret Love.”)

  She continued, “I have never been interested in writing with anybody—not Lindsey, not anybody. And all of a sudden I could actually understand why Lennon and McCartney wrote together, or Rodgers and Hammerstein, or any of the great songwriting teams. I don’t know a thousand chords, and Dave doesn’t have a book of forty poems. When you put those two things together, you have this amazing amount of wisdom and knowledge. Those five minutes when it all started was a brilliant moment. Stars went off. When it was done I said, ‘Well, I’m a changed woman.’ And then we just continued.”

  The name of the project was In Your Dreams. For the next eleven months Stevie turned her house into a home studio, with recordings made in the acoustically bright front hall, various hallways, and in the master bathroom. A chef was hired to provide meals and snacks for the musicians, singers, engineers, and visitors to the production. Stevie said that it was the first time she felt really comfortable in that house, working with Dave Stewart on her first album in almost ten years.

  One of the first songs they worked on was “Secret Love,” which had origins as a demo from the Rumours era and then as an unused lyric in 1980. Now it became a rhythmic plea for romance, “in a timeless search / for a love that might work.”