Now the young musicians began having delusions of grandeur. Maybe, after a lot of hard work and gigging, Fritz could join the growing roster of the San Francisco bands, playing original songs in front of psychedelic light shows in the city’s repurposed old ballrooms and auditoriums: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Charlatans, Moby Grape, the Sons of Champlin, Ace of Cups, Spirit, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. In Oakland across the bay, Sly & the Family Stone were fomenting a revolution in dance music, combining the funk of soul music with the hard rock of the other Bay Area bands. These groups played almost every weekend, often on bills with top English bands—Cream, the Who, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers—at a handful of venues around San Francisco. Top rock promoter Bill Graham had been putting on rock concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium at the corner of Fillmore and Geary since 1966. The Family Dog hippie commune staged shows at the Avalon Ballroom at 1268 Sutter Street, a favorite venue of the communitarian Grateful Dead. In 1968 Bill Graham would lease the Carousel Ballroom at Market and South Van Ness Avenue and rename it the Fillmore West. These shows were promoted with avant-garde psychedelic posters and on the new FM rock stations pioneered by San Francisco’s KSAN. They inspired a new kind of audience, “girls dancing like they were catching butterflies on acid,” according to guitarist Carlos Santana, a Bill Graham protégée.
Graham also showcased San Francisco bands in San Jose, and these sometimes wild shows in 1967 were the first time Stevie Nicks saw the two women who would become her role models: Grace Slick, the elegant lead singer of Jefferson Airplane; and Janis Joplin, whose raw, bluesy vocals powered Big Brother and the Holding Company. Little did Fritz know it then, but a year later they would be opening for a lot of these legendary bands.
Lindsey graduated from M-A in June 1967 and would start at San Jose State in September. He wanted to keep Fritz going, because the more they rehearsed, the better they sounded. But then Jody Moreing left to join the New Invaders, a bigger band working out of San Jose. Cal Roper left for college, and Lindsey moved over to play bass. Javier hired Brian Kane to play lead guitar. Fritz auditioned two girl singers, but neither had the onstage presence that Jody had. Finally, at a band meeting at Lindsey’s house, he mentioned that there’d been a girl a year ahead of him at M-A who was kind of cute and could really sing. He’d seen her at college toting a guitar case. Maybe she would do. Her name, he said, was Stevie Nicks. Javier said he knew her from M-A. Lindsey said, yeah, give her a call.
Stevie was in her first year at San Jose State (where she had decided to study speech therapy, since it was the major closest to her aspiring singing career). A few months earlier, in the fall of 1967, she’d had an epiphany when she first heard Linda Ronstadt (from Tucson, Arizona) of the Stone Poneys sing “Different Drum” on Top 40 radio in a powerful voice that delivered a passionate message about a young woman wanting her independence from a man who just wants to settle down. Much later, looking back, Stevie remembered, “I heard Linda Ronstadt, and I just said, ‘That’s it! That’s what I want to do’ … although I didn’t look as good as her in cut-offs.”
More than ever, an ambitious Stevie now knew what she needed to do: write songs and sing them with a band behind her, like Linda, Grace, and Janis. She wrote in her journal that nothing was going to get in her way. But where could she find a band? It was at this fortuitous moment that the phone rang, and on the other end of the line was Bob Aguirre from high school, saying that “Linds,” the bass player in his band, recommended her as a good singer, and would she be interested in coming by his house for an audition?
And so Stevie Nicks, in her twentieth year, packed up her guitar, and a friend drove Stevie, in her own car, over to Lindsey Buckingham’s house in Atherton, and into a future that she might have faintly foreseen at that moment in her life, a glimmer of what was to come.
1.5 Hands Off Stevie Nicks
They hired her. Sometime in the summer of 1968 Stevie Nicks joined Lindsey Buckingham and friends in Fritz. And this was only one of many big changes to come that year. Her father was reassigned to Chicago, so the family home was sold and Stevie moved into a little apartment with friends so she could continue at San Jose State. (The college made headlines that summer when two of its star sprinters won Olympic medals in Mexico City and raised black-gloved fists at the awards podium to protest against racism in America.)
Joining Fritz was a big deal for her. Bob was a good drummer and Lindsey was versatile, could play almost anything. “They were good,” she recalled. “They were really playing, so it was almost as bad as joining a big rock-and-roll band, because they were serious. I was the only girl and I was always late for everything, but now it was ‘You be there!’ But I was one on-time person, mostly. I had no social life at all, but I would get paid, at least.”
Stevie learned Javier’s songs, and he thought she did them as well as or better than Jody. She brought along two songs of her own, “Funny Kind of Love” and “Where Was I?” and played them on her guitar. She seemed to fit right in as a band singer, working with the microphone and moving to the rhythms in an attractive way, kind of slinky like Grace Slick. The band’s first paying gig with Stevie Nicks onstage was arranged by Greg Buckingham in the fall of 1968, playing to a huge crowd in the main quad at Stanford.
Bob Aguirre: “I knew right away what she would bring to the party, and it worked! I remember that her first gig with us was at the Quad at Stanford—a big deal with lots of people there—and Stevie did a version of Linda Ronstadt’s “Different Drum” that brought the house down, that we had to do again, by popular demand. The writing was on the wall.”
After the concert the band was approached by a Stanford freshman who was so impressed by Fritz’s performance that he wanted to be their booking agent. His name was David Forest and he was the social chairman of his Stanford dormitory. He realized that he could make money by booking the top local bands he was hiring for other gigs at high schools and college fraternities. Forest asked if they wanted to work more, and explained that he could get Fritz regular gigs at $125 for four 45-minute sets per night. He took a $25 fee on top of that. Fritz came back and said they’d do three sets for $150, take it or leave it. Forest took the deal, even though Fritz absolutely refused to play the most requested songs by the frat boys: “Gloria,” “Louie Louie,” and “Satisfaction.”
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And so Fritz started playing around Santa Clara County, up and down the peninsula, hairy young Bob Aguirre driving the decrepit Ford equipment van, working the Stanford frat parties and local high school dances, plus the Bay Area community colleges like La Canada Junior College in Redwood City and De Anza in Cupertino, performing mostly Javier’s songs but also quirky numbers like “Bonnie and Clyde,” which was actually Lindsey playing “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (from the 1967 hit movie about the bank-robbing lovers) on the banjo. They worked up a version of “Codine,” folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s song about codeine addiction, with Stevie dramatically acting out the ravages of addiction withdrawal that often got the most applause of the evening. (The band would be eye-rollingly annoyed every time Stevie stole the show this way.)
Gradually, the guys in the band began to get frustrated that Stevie Nicks seemed to be getting all the attention. People clapped politely when the band members were introduced at the end of their sets, but Stevie usually provoked a roar and general cheering. David Forest reported that when clients—especially the fraternities—called to book a band, they first asked for the group that had the cute little chick singer with the dirty blond hair.
Things were looking good for the former high school band. They even got a permanent place to rehearse, in the unused banquet room of the Italian Gardens restaurant in San Jose. At Fritz’s peak they rehearsed there four days a week and did shows on Friday and Saturday nights.
Meanwhile, Fritz had a policy: Hands off Stevie Nicks. This was from day one. It was barely discussed, but there wasn’t
going to be any intraband dating going on with Fritz. And this was fine with her. The guys all had girlfriends, anyway. (Lindsey was going with a girl called Sally.)
Recalling her days on the road with Fritz, Stevie said, “Nobody in that band wanted me as their girlfriend because I was too ambitious for them. But they didn’t want anyone else to have me either. If anyone else in the band started spending any time with me, the other three would literally pick that person apart—to the death. They all thought I was in it for the attention. These guys didn’t take me seriously at all. I was just a girl singer, and they hated the fact that I got a lot of the credit.”
Years later, an interviewer asked Stevie when was the first time she ever felt like a rock star. She replied that shortly after joining Fritz, she was walking across her college campus in 1968, carrying her guitar, and that’s when she knew in her bones that she was going to be a rock star someday.
All this time, she kept writing poems and lyrics in the journals she always carried. In early 1969, thinking about the boy who broke up with her in high school, she wrote a sexy lyric called “Cathouse Blues.”
*
By late 1969, Fritz had graduated to San Francisco’s legendary electric ballrooms. It was a thrill to open for Moby Grape at the Fillmore West or for Creedence Clearwater Revival at Bill Graham’s Winterland, an old skating rink at the corner of Post and Steiner that the impresario had opened as a rock venue in 1968. For the next eighteen months Fritz opened shows for Leon Russell, Chicago, and the Santana Blues Band. They appeared twice on Ross McGowan’s local TV dance show. They opened a huge concert called Earth Day Jubilee at Cal Expo, the big state fair in Sacramento, the other acts being B.B. King and the Guess Who. They supported Santana again at the Monterey/Carmel Pop Festival, right before Woodstock in the summer of 1969. They tried and failed to get a gig opening for Led Zeppelin in San Francisco, but Bill Graham wanted a bigger act for Jimmy Page’s new English band—which was the hugest thing at San Jose State that year. “Their music was everywhere,” Stevie remembered. (Somewhat oddly, Fritz never opened shows for Fleetwood Mac, the surging British blues band starring London guitar god Peter Green. Fleetwood Mac—reliable, crowd-pleasing, virtuosic—was a favorite of Bill Graham’s, who actively promoted them and gave the band all the work they wanted in the San Francisco area.)
Janis Joplin had left Big Brother to go solo, an industry trend as talent managers separated the biggest rock stars from their original bands and started over with hired musicians. Fritz opened for Janis’s new Kozmic Blues Band at the Fillmore West in early 1970. Stevie: “When I first saw Janis she was very angry. The first band had run overtime and she came on the stage screaming, scared me to death. I was hiding behind the amps. She told them to get the fuck off her fucking stage—and they wrapped it up! Twenty minutes later, on walks this girl in silky bell bottoms, a beautiful top, lots of gorgeous jewelry, wearing sling-back low heels, feathers in her crazy big natural hair. Lots of attitude, arrogance, sang like a bird, the crowd in the palm of her hand.… She was not a beautiful woman, but very attractive. I was very taken with her.”
Less taken with the hard-living singer were the guys in Fritz, who hung out with her and her band in the dressing room. Janis was swigging from a bottle of Southern Comfort, chain-smoking and cussing out everyone in her Texas drawl. They thought she was coarse, vulgar, and not someone you’d want to be in a band with.
*
In the spring of 1970 there was a student strike at San Jose State to protest the American invasion of Cambodia. Strike organizers put together a concert with Fritz as the main act, and they played for hours, and in the end Stevie lost her voice for the first time.
That summer Fritz opened some of Bill Graham’s rock concerts at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds. These drew big crowds, and big acts. They opened for Janis Joplin’s new Full Tilt Boogie Band at the Fairgrounds on July 12, 1970, and also for Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies that summer in front of a reported 75,000 fans. Jimi noticed Stevie backstage, and he seemed to her to be a very humble, sweet, unpretentious person. During his act, as he was tuning his guitar, Hendrix looked over and saw Stevie watching him from behind the amplifiers. He stepped up to the microphone, pointed at Stevie, and told the crowd, “I want to dedicate a song to that girl over there.” Legend has it that the song he played for her was “Angel.”
“I saw him play once,” she later said of Hendrix, “and I remember thinking, I want to wear white fringe. I want to tie a beautiful scarf in my hair.”
Through all this Stevie Nicks watched and learned, taking her lessons as she found them. “So from Janis I learned that to make it as a female musician in a man’s world is going to be tough, and you need to keep your head held high. From Jimi, I learned flamboyance, grace, and humility.”
But neither star would see the end of 1970. A few months later, both Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died of drug overdoses, a national tragedy, both at the age of twenty-seven.
1.6 The Music Machine
Much later, Stevie recalled this period with her first band as one of the happier times in her life, “when I first lived on my own, with my friend Robin.” Certainly the sense of style, costume, and fashion that would underpin her future career were formed in the intense cultural matrix of the San Francisco Sound. Stevie moved in both music circles and student circles. She was impressed by the early groupies’ original style that scrambled genres and broke fashion rules in the same way these girls also aggressively broke sexual norms. The groupies mixed contemporary styles (which they often sewed or knocked off themselves) with vintage clothes and outdated mod stuff from thrift stores. They used feathers, boas, and fishnet to attract attention. Heavy on the makeup, lots of flashy dyed hair. They liked costumes—flapper dresses, bordello-chic lingerie, Barbarella sci-fi outfits, velour suits with kinky masculine brogues, Native American buckskins—all topped with floppy broad-brimmed hats or classic veils.
(But Stevie also was well aware that the real lives of the so-called groupies weren’t all dressed-up glamour. Their world was competitive and often tawdry, even dangerous because of the drugs, and many a dirty-look dagger did Stevie receive backstage from these feral girls hunting rock stars. Some of this sordid atmosphere would surface ten years later in the song “Gold Dust Woman.”)
Then there was the prevailing style of the college coeds, and the hippie girls milking goats in the new farm communes sprouting north of San Francisco, listening intently to Joni Mitchell’s confessional albums and reading Sulamith Wulfing, the visionary German artist who painted vivid depictions of angels and fairies (and a major inspiration for Stevie Nicks): these were young women in shawls, woolens and long tweed skirts, hair long and straight, wearing sturdy boots, peasant blouses, tie-dyed dresses, turquoise, jet, and silver, with the occasional brocaded sheepskin vest that someone had brought back from Afghanistan.
Stevie liked to shop at an ultrahip San Francisco boutique called Velvet Underground, where Janis Joplin and Grace Slick bought much of what they wore onstage. If anyone, it was Grace Slick—electrifying siren of acid rock—whom she most admired as the archetypal female rock star. Grace was tall and aristocratic, a former debutante from suburban Chicago. She was older than most, born in 1939, and performed the Airplane’s anthemic, hard-rocking songs with the élan of someone who’d had sophisticated dance training, moving across a stage with slinky feline assurance. Stevie liked that it wasn’t “Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane,” that Grace was part of a band and not on a solo trip like Janis had been in the end. Grace looked great in silk bell-bottoms and stiletto-heeled boots. She wore Victorian blouses and antique clothing to photo shoots. Her soaring vocal bravado on the band’s 1967 Top 10 singles “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit” had turned the Airplane into a national brand, a group of hippie artists with commercial clout. Some of Grace’s distinctive style definitely rubbed off on Stevie, in those years when Fritz was one of the better local bands in the Bay Area.
I
n fact, people remember Fritz as an exciting psychedelic rock band. Back in the early days of the group, Fritz had competed in a battle of the bands in San Jose with the Count Five and the Syndicate of Sound, both groups with national hit singles behind them. Count Five won the battle, but afterward Stevie got in their faces. “You’re good,” she told the astonished Counts, “but you’re not as good as me.”
*
But then, in 1971, it all fell apart. Fritz would disband that year. It would be a months-long process, and it ended in a lot of recrimination and remorse for everyone involved. When it was over, Stevie and Lindsey Buckingham would embark on the most important relationship of their lives.
It started to change when David Forest, the band’s de facto manager, decided to move to Los Angeles, and he wanted Fritz to go with him. He would get them studio time, they’d demo their songs, he’d get them a record deal. LA was where it was happening in the music business. San Francisco was so 1967. What Forest didn’t tell Fritz was that Bill Graham had taken an interest in the band, and thought he might be able to do something with the group. But Forest had a point. The big LA bands—the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Love, the Flying Burrito Brothers—sold more records nationally than the Bay Area bands. They had much more exposure to the media. And he may have noticed that when Stevie and Lindsey sang together, it sounded a lot more like Southern California country rock than anything else.
This LA move was controversial, and the band meetings were heated. Stevie didn’t much want to go to LA, which was generally thought of as plastic, crass, and uncool by the hippie musicians in San Francisco. Javier Pacheco, who wrote the songs and ran Fritz (according to Stevie) “with an iron hand,” was against the idea as well. He protested that there were sharply different regional values at work here. Did Fritz want to be overproduced, like Crosby, Stills & Nash? He said that Fritz was already beyond the commercial limitations of the polished Tinseltown record business. Later he wrote, “How do you [re]fashion a group whose music is inspired by the Dead and the Airplane to suddenly turn into the Monkees?” But in the end, Javier would be outvoted by his band mates. Fritz would try to head south. The next step was to find a producer interested in recording the band in Los Angeles.
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