Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  “For What It’s Worth” (cowritten with Mike Campbell) dated from 2004, when Stevie had an affair with a band member who offered to leave his girlfriend for her—if she really wanted him. “This man said that to me,” she explained later, “but we both knew it would never work off the road.” It was an acoustic ballad, full of good intentions and promise, with the risks of forbidden love. And in the end the singer tells the lover, “You saved my life.”

  The title track, “In Your Dreams,” was meant to be comforting despite lashings of tears, pain, and darkness. The track was up-tempo, courtesy of Heartbreakers drummer Steve Ferrone. The hard-rocking “Wide Sargasso Sea” was the album’s first Big Statement, with surging power chords and dueling guitars. Stevie sings of burning down the house of an English lover, smoke and fire, before running home to California. (The song’s title was appropriated from the novel by Jean Rhys.)

  “New Orleans” and “Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)” were both wistful ballads, both inhabited by blood lust. “New Orleans” was a post-hurricane tribute to “a city of tears,” one of Stevie’s favorite places. “Moonlight” was more a portrait of a beautiful, insecure, idealized lover and a thwarted romance that could never be. Stevie later allowed that she had lived in the world of the Twilight Saga for at least five years, and “Moonlight” was the song that came out of that obsession.

  “Annabel Lee” is Stevie’s setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s morbid romance that she first tried in high school. Now it totally fit in with au courant teen vampire exotica, as the poet keeps vigil by the cold body of his beloved. Dave Stewart put it in a sparkling framework for the rock audience, and it would become a huge fan favorite, since “Annabel Lee” sounded like it could have been on Mirage but for Waddy’s “gothic” interlude that captured some of the poem’s dead breath.

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  The song that gave Stevie and Dave the most problems was “Soldier’s Angel,” an attempt to capture the feelings of sympathy with injured troops that had been so transformative for Stevie, five years earlier. It had to be a somber song, haunting but respectful, but they could not find a way into it. In near desperation Stevie called Lindsey Buckingham, who came over to her house, shook hands with Dave Stewart, was nice to everyone, and played a trolling guitar that turned “Soldier’s Angel” into a war threnody, one that reminded some listeners that The Iliad was chanted for a thousand years before someone wrote it down. Stevie was grateful to Lindsey for his uncomplaining cooperation. She noted that family life, now with three daughters, seemed to have finally softened the highly strung master musician.

  The easiest songs to make were the ones Stevie and Dave wrote together over the course of the year. “Everybody Loves You” seemed like a self-portrait; it ended with the observation that “you’re so alone.” “Ghosts Are Gone” was hard rock, more Stewart than Nicks. “You May Be the One” was a pastiche of girl-group doo-wop with clever and ironic lyrics, some of Stevie’s best from this period. “Italian Summer” was an operatic recounting of Stevie’s time in Ravello with her girlfriends, soulful with violins and touristic memories of Chianti and Capri. For some the highlight of the Nicks-Stewart collaboration was a riddling song, “Cheaper Than Free,” a country music bar-room weeper complete with pedal steel guitar.

  Work on the new album was mostly complete by early 2011. For the album pictures Stevie and the girls dressed up in gowns, posing with a white horse, a snowy owl, and giant mirrors. Then In Your Dreams was held back for postproduction work on the In Your Dreams documentary so it could be entered at film festivals in Europe and considered for a theatrical release at home.

  In the meantime, a restless Stevie Nicks went back on the road, opening for Rod Stewart on what was billed as The Heart and Soul Tour. As the opening act, Stevie and her band were limited to just over an hour, but for Stevie this was mitigated by Rod’s gentlemanly insistence on bringing her onstage by the hand, introducing her personally, and proclaiming it an honor to be supported by the queen of rock.

  Stevie was determined to make In Your Dreams—her seventh solo album and her first in a decade—into a success. In the run-up to its May release she threw herself into promotion mode, appearing on major TV outlets like Oprah and The Ellen Degeneres Show, singing “Secret Love,” then released as a digital single. Then Stevie got the flu and had to cancel appearances around the release date, but she rallied and flew to England, where she was received like returning royalty, doing the important TV chat shows, speaking with the leading papers, and performing before fifty thousand fans in London’s Hyde Park.

  In Your Dreams was a big hit when it was released in May, just when Stevie Nicks turned sixty-three, debuting at #6 on the Billboard chart and selling well for months. Critical reception was positive, with some saying it was her best solo album of them all. That summer Stevie continued to promote her record, appearing on the wildly popular TV talent contests American Idol, The Voice, and America’s Got Talent as a coach and mentor to the young singers competing for her favor. Other dramatic TV roles would follow, on the music drama Glee, and American Horror Story. (On the latter, Stevie was portrayed as a white witch worshipped by all the other witches.) Stevie had never thought of herself as an actress, but now she found that playing herself, projecting a magical, womanly persona she’d honed for decades, wasn’t so hard after all.

  9.6 The Fairy Godmother

  With In Your Dreams still selling and in the charts, Stevie Nicks told Fleetwood Mac that she wouldn’t work with them in 2012 because she was extending her own tour to try to keep her album in play since, at that point, she didn’t know if she would ever make another one. The documentary, for which Stevie was credited as codirector, was shown at some festivals but failed to find a distributor for a run in theaters, a disappointment after all the work they’d put into the project. It was released on DVD along with the four music videos produced for “Secret Love,” “For What It’s Worth,” “Moonlight,” and “Cheaper Than Free.”

  Stevie and her band went out that autumn of 2011 on the In Your Dreams Tour, a long run that would extend into 2012. “Secret Love” and other new songs were in the show, and the band was playing with a renewed energy and drive. There was a five-month intermission when Stevie’s mother died in December, of emphysema. Stevie was of course disconsolate about “my little mother,” who had given Stevie life itself and had never lost faith in her, even when Stevie had lost it in herself. Stevie moved back into her house in the hills where she could be with her tribe and be looked after; the “rock-and-roll penthouse” near the ocean was basically one enormous glass room with statues and images of Buddha everywhere, but Stevie found no place for the sense of loss she was experiencing.

  There was another death around then. A son of a friend of Stevie’s, one of her godsons named Cory, eighteen years old, had overdosed on drugs at a fraternity party. In her leathern journal Stevie wrote some lines about how she and her people had always tried to be careful not to dance with the devil and his narcotics. It was one of her most bitter poems about the needle, and the damage done. A bit later, Stevie was contacted by Dave Grohl, the former Nirvana drummer, now leader of the serial rock festival headliners Foo Fighters. He explained that Nirvana had recorded its grunge-classic album Nevermind at Sound City in 1990, using the same Neve VR-72 console that Buckingham Nicks had used to record “Crying” in 1973. Sound City had closed in 2011, as the analog studio was unable to compete in the world of digital music. Grohl had bought the historic Neve board from Sound City and had installed it in his home studio. Now he was making a documentary film about Sound City and its famous console. Paul McCartney was involved. Stevie said yes, right then.

  Stevie arrived at Grohl’s studio with an entourage that included hair and makeup. If she was going to be filmed for this, she was going to look good. She had sent them the lyrics she’d written when her friend’s son had died, now titled “You Can’t Fix This.” Grohl and Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins set her words to a “Rhiannon” chord progr
ession, and Stevie sang them with a passion and intensity that surprised even herself. When Grohl’s (excellent) documentary Sound City was released in 2013, some fans commented that “You Can’t Fix This” had to be the best, most stirring, most emotionally acute song Stevie Nicks had written in thirty years.

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  The In Your Dreams concert tour finished in the fall of 2012. Mick was after her to play with Fleetwood Mac in 2013, and this time she said yes, under certain conditions. After a band meeting Stevie and Lindsey had what she later called “The Talk.”

  Stevie did most of the talking as they sat, drinking coffee. She told him she was an old woman now and needed his sympathy if they were going to work together again. She explained that in her world, on her solo tours, she was surrounded by the love of her friends. But in Fleetwood Mac’s last tours, she felt surrounded by spite and resentment, and she wasn’t going to have that happen anymore. “What can I say?” was Lindsey’s comment. Stevie basically told him he could promise to behave decently toward her, and everything would be okay. The Talk was a big moment for Stevie. She could stand up to Lindsey now. She was a much bigger star than he was, by far. Stevie was an American legend, but Lindsey’s star would eventually fade away. She could even threaten him a little. “So,” she said as they parted, “2013 better be great—okay?”

  *

  It turned out to be an interesting and profitable year for both Stevie and the Mac. Stevie celebrated her sixty-fifth birthday that May in Las Vegas, where the band was playing that night. The original plan was to stay on the road for a year, but when Christine McVie asked to rejoin Fleetwood Mac, after appearing with the band for one song at London’s O2 Arena in September (and after John McVie was diagnosed with cancer in October), Fleetwood Mac—all now in late middle age—would stay on tour for the next two and a half years, playing about 122 concerts for three generations of fans ranging from sixteen to eighty years in age.

  Most shows began with “Second Hand News,” blending into “The Chain.” Stevie delivered a truncated version of “Rhiannon,” now a slower rite performed by a venerable celebrant. (“I don’t twirl as much as I used to,” Stevie told The New York Times.) “Sisters of the Moon” and “Sara” anchored the concert, which included a couple of songs from Extended Play, Fleetwood Mac’s four-song, digital-only EP, released in April 2013. One of these was “Without You,” a confessional song of dependence written by Stevie and Lindsey in the earliest days of Buckingham Nicks, circa 1971. It had existed as a ghost demo on the Internet for years and was revived as Stevie’s contribution to Extended Play. Describing the song (which often took longer than the song itself), Stevie told the audiences, “We were like, crazy in love.” They also played “Sad Angel” as the hottest song in the set. It was the first song in decades that Lindsey admitted he had written specifically about Stevie.

  The strangest part of the show occurred during “Gold Dust Woman,” when Stevie performed what she called her “crackhead dance,” lurching around the stage like a demonically possessed dope fiend, hair akimbo, arms flailing awkwardly, acting out her memories of staggering around under antipsychotic medication. Stevie: “The crackhead dance is me being some of the drug addicts I knew, and probably being myself, too—just being that girl lost on the streets, freaked out.” When Christine saw this interpretive dance for the first time, she said, “Wow—we’ve always known that ‘Gold Dust Woman’ was about the serious drug days, but this depicts how frightening it was for all of us.”

  Stevie revived herself for “Stand Back,” which often got the best ovation of the evening. As ever, the Mac finished with “Go Your Own Way,” and Stevie calmed the fans down with a low-key encore.

  But then the Australian leg was postponed in October while John McVie underwent treatment for cancer. Stevie rented a beach house in Malibu to rest, away from any distractions, because she was working on songs. She still wrote in longhand, proudly telling interviewers that she didn’t even own a computer or a cell phone. But this changed in December when the Santa Ana winds whipped up wildfires in Southern California. A blaze swept through Malibu Canyon, singeing the Cross Creek shopping village and bearing down on the little beachside neighborhood where Stevie was staying. Alone and concerned, she picked up the telephone to call for help, but the line was dead. The fire spared Stevie’s house that day, but she always had a cell phone after that.

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  Christine’s request to return to Fleetwood Mac wasn’t a cause of joy for Lindsey Buckingham, and he let it be known. Lindsey said he liked the Mac as a four-piece band with hired keyboards. His money would go down when they added another full partner. They hadn’t played Chris’s songs in sixteen years, except for “Don’t Stop.” Christine was seventy: could she keep up?

  Christine explained that she was bored out of her mind in her quaint suburban English village. The ancient period house had been restored. Every day she walked her dogs in the same country lanes and said hello to the same folks, most of whom were related to each other. She had just been given the prestigious Ivor Novello Award, Britain’s highest honor for a songwriter. Some nights she ate supper by herself in the village’s pub. She missed her band, she missed singing, and she missed the audiences and their electrical energy.

  Lindsey was outvoted, and Chris would be welcomed back into her old band. Mick made the announcement in January 2014. Stevie was content. “I just told Chris that she better start working out,” she said, “because some nights we play at least two and a half hours.” When John McVie recovered from his cancer treatments, Fleetwood Mac went back on the road. They called it the On With the Show Tour.

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  There were some losses in this period. Bob Welch succumbed to depression and shot himself. His departure from Fleetwood Mac had prompted the hiring of Lindsey and Stevie. Photographer Herbie Worthington died; his archive comprised thousands of images of Stevie Nicks, most of them unseen. And a curious geneological researcher, working on the Nicks family tree, found the grave of Stevie’s grandfather, A. J. Nicks, in a cemetery near Phoenix. It was unkempt and overgrown. She did her best to clear weeds and bracken from the grave and its stone, and wondered why no one looked after it.

  9.7 Still a Dreamer’s Fancy

  April 2014. Fleetwood Mac took a four-month break from the road. On April 6 Stevie sang “Rhiannon” with the group Lady Antebellum at the televised Country Music Awards in Nashville. Stevie appeared with Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt, and Emmylou Harris in a tribute to Linda Ronstadt, who had a lingering illness and wasn’t present. (Carrie Underwood, considered the only country singer who could match Linda’s epic talent, sang lead on “When Will I Be Loved,” “Blue Bayou,” and other Ronstadt hits.) On May 5, Stevie attended the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony to see Nirvana inducted. Stevie had played several shows with Dave Grohl while they were promoting Sound City, and she was now considered an honorary Foo Fighter.

  Then Stevie set herself up in Nashville for nine weeks with Dave Stewart and made a new album of songs she had written over the years but never recorded. Some of them dated to 1969. Some had been lost. One song, “Lady,” was found on a cassette in a trunk full of her mother’s treasured keepsakes. There was a severe deadline that she had to meet, before rehearsals began in late summer for Fleetwood Mac’s fall reunion tour with Christine. Stevie: “I called Dave Stewart and said, ‘I’ve got the songs, but how do we make a record in two months?’ He said, ‘Nashville. That’s what they do.’ It’s like checking yourself into musical rehab.” Lori and Sharon came out from LA to help Stevie, and Waddy as well. Standout tracks included “The Dealer,” country rock about being the mistress of her fate; “Mabel Normand,” about an old movie star with a taste for cocaine; “Belle Fleur,” thumping guitar rock with chanted, underdeveloped verses; “Carousel,” a Vanessa Carlton song that Stevie had sung with her niece Jessica at her mother’s hospice bedside. Stevie wrote “She Loves Him Still” with Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler, specifically about Lindsey. The best song for mo
st fans was “Cathouse Blues,” a faux-Louisiana jazz scat with a whorehouse flavor. Stevie-as-courtesan sang, “I need some new red velvet shoes.” And then, “I’m still a dreamer’s fancy.”

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  “Lindsey will love this album,” Stevie told Rolling Stone when her fourteen Nashville songs were released (by Reprise) as 24 Karat Gold—Songs from the Vault in September 2014. “Half the songs are about him.” The album was another Top 10 hit, climbing to #7 on the Billboard chart. (In a sign of the times, Fleetwood Mac’s old label, and the Warner Music Group itself, were now owned by an international media syndicate controlled by Russian investors.)

  Fleetwood Mac began rehearsing with Christine McVie in August. Stevie liked singing the harmonies to “Over My Head” and “Say You Love Me” with her again. Vocal warm-ups now would take a little longer, but their voices still sounded great together, and demand for tickets to this band reunion was very strong.

  Stevie did dozens of interviews between promoting 24 Karat Gold and the Mac tour in September. Some of these were in the Palisades house, with the aging terrier Sulamith resting by Stevie’s leg. Reporters pointed out that most of the younger female stars—Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Florence Welch—acknowledged Stevie as a major influence on their careers, and Stevie allowed that this was flattering. A writer who got into Stevie’s kitchen noted the refrigerator contained only sealed meals from Weight Watchers. There seemed to be intense curiosity about this sixty-six-year-old rock star’s romantic life. “I’ve narrowed it down to nobody,” Stevie joked, but if pressed she would elaborate. She said she loved being a free woman, and that she’d tried every kind of man. Her last real love had been in 2004. She told one interviewer just about all that was needed to know about the subject:

  “I’m single. I don’t have children, and I’ve never been married except for three months a long time ago. I live a single woman’s life, and yes, I spend a lot of time with myself. I have a few very close friends, most of them I’ve known forever, and I kind of like it. Would I be willing to have a boyfriend? It would be fun if I could find a boyfriend who understood my life and didn’t get his feelings hurt because I’m always a phone call away from having to leave in two hours for New York, or a phone call away from having to do interviews all day long. It’s not very much fun to be Mister Stevie Nicks.