Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  Stevie and Lindsey had a bunch of new ideas they wanted to try out, so as it happened the first song that Keith Olsen worked on with the brand-new Neve board was one of Stevie’s new songs, “Crying in the Night.” It was an auspicious beginning for the musicians, the producer, and Sound City, a studio taking a chance on two scared and lonely kids from out of town. For the next two and a half years, Stevie and Lindsey basically lived at Sound City. “It was like our home,” she later agreed. “[Owners] Joe and Tom were like our parents.”

  1.9 “Not for Long”

  Summer 1972. While Stevie and Lindsey were crashing in the back bedroom of Keith Olsen’s house, he was called to New York to mix a James Gang show in Central Park. Their old car’s transmission had died, so he loaned them his car—a new Corvette Sting Ray, gold colored, with 350 miles on it—on the condition that they drive him to the place where the limousine would be picking up the band—at five in the morning—and then pick him up three days later. At dawn on the appointed day, Stevie appeared in a nightdress, her hair in a towel, and blearily drove Keith down steep Coldwater Canyon Boulevard to the rendezvous in the Valley. Olsen: “Stevie in a long, heavy cotton robe, trying to drive a stick-shift car, which she’d never done before, where the end of the robe got caught up in the pedals. As she rode away after dropping me off, the lead singer of the James Gang said, ‘Keith, you’ll never see that car again.’”

  When Olsen got to his hotel in New York, there was a message waiting for him to call home. “Lindsey got on the phone and told me everyone was OK but the car was in my neighbor’s bedroom. Stevie had parked the car [on the steep hill], pulled on the brake—one click—and went back to bed. Forty minutes later, the car rolled down the hill, went over a cliff, was hurled into the air and into the bedroom of the house below me. (Come to think of it, I think Stevie still owes me for that car…)”

  *

  Stevie and Lindsey may have felt lonely when they first arrived in Los Angeles, but that wouldn’t last long. One of the first friends they made was Richard Dashut, the twenty-two-year-old assistant engineer at Sound City. He was local, from West Hollywood, with dark long hair, friendly eyes, and a great laugh. He’d started out as the janitor at Crystal Sound in Hollywood, keeping an eye on the big stars of the day as they worked in the studio: James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Crosby, Stills & Nash. He wasn’t allowed to even touch the sixteen-track mixing board outfitted with the big Dolby units that every studio used to have. Richard met Keith Olsen and talked himself into a job doing maintenance at Sound City. But after a couple of weeks he was promoted to Olsen’s number-two engineer, which is when he met Buckingham Nicks, as the duo was called in the production deal they had just signed with the studio.

  Richard recalls: “They were staying at Keith’s house and working with him on songs. Lindsey and I were friends five minutes after we met, smoking a joint in the parking lot. This was my first day in my new job. I met Stevie next, and twenty minutes later the three of us decided to get a place together, since I was looking around and they had to move out of Keith’s. Eventually we rented an apartment in North Hollywood, near Universal Studios. It quickly became a madhouse. I’d come home after twenty hours working with Keith at the studio and literally trip over Lindsey’s microphone cables because he’d be up late working with his Ampex four-track machine. Various other musicians would be passed out on the floor sleeping off the effects of all the pot and hash that we smoked, all the time. Sometimes I’d go into my room and find Stevie sleeping in my bed because she’d had another big argument with Lindsey, who liked to boss her around. It wasn’t an easy life for us. You had to be resilient, but we were young.”

  One of those other musicians on the floor was Robert “Waddy” Wachtel, who had migrated to LA from Brooklyn. He was a spectral, gangly guitarist with long wild blond hair and wire spectacles perched on a big Brooklyn nose. He was a Stones-inspired hard rock musician who’d already been featured on Linda Ronstadt’s albums, and like Buckingham Nicks he had a quasi-production deal going with Sound City. Wachtel recalls, “I was working at Sound City, doing my stuff, trying to get up the next rung on the ladder, and so were they. And we became very tight friends, you know? Stevie was still very innocent at that point. She was like this little folksinger girl. Lindsey and I were both totally addicted to the music. He had a four-track Ampex tape machine, and they were making these great demos of their songs. I started working on their album, and from then on the three of us were always together, basically. I was always at their house. We were just sitting around, on the floor, talking and playing our guitars and smoking lots of hash.”

  It was around this time that Stevie and Lindsey (pka—“professionally known as”—Buckingham Nicks) signed their deal with Pogologo Productions, a new company owned by Keith Olsen and Tom Skeeter, who recalled, “We signed them to a production deal. They wrote the songs. We provided the studio, the engineers, and the tape.” There would be no retainer or salary for them until they got a recording contract with a major label, so they would have to get jobs. Also signing Pogologo contracts at this time were their pals Waddy Wachtel and the hot young percussionist Jorge Calderon.

  There had been some contention about “Buckingham Nicks.” Band names were important. Was it quite right? There were a lot of duos working in those days: Delaney & Bonny; Loggins & Messina; Brewer & Shipley; Seals & Crofts; Batdorf & Rodney. They all had the ampersand. Some thought the registered name should be “Nicks & Buckingham” since she was obviously going to be the draw, not him. Then someone said the name Buckingham Nicks might be too English. Like, Buckingham Palace. Like, Buckinghamshire. The Duke of Buckingham, et cetera. Then Warren Zevon came to—he was often out cold—and pointed out that Buckingham Nicks had four syllables but all the big English bands of the day had three: Led Zepp’lin, Jethro Tull, Judas Priest, Humble Pie, Spooky Tooth, Wishbone Ash, Blodwyn Pig, Steeleye Span, Savoy Brown, Fleetwood Mac. Even Rolling Stones. But they signed their deal, in the end, as Buckingham Nicks.

  *

  Keith Olsen now really put them to work. For this producer “preproduction” really meant rehearsal: shaping songs, working out arrangements, putting the ideas on paper because the reefer-addled musicians would forget what they’d done the day before. The next step after agreeing on an outline was to build the foundation of the song on cassette. The cassette tape was the template; the rest was built from there. It meant long and often tedious, detailed work in the studio as ideas and sounds were added and subtracted using the miraculous Neve board, which produced a hyperreal playback that everyone loved. While this was going on, when Stevie wasn’t singing she curled up on the control room sofa, her legs tucked under her, watching everything, with her journals, tissues, and remedies because she was usually not feeling well.

  When she wasn’t needed in the studio, she went to work. They weren’t making any money, and Lindsey’s inheritance was spent. He and Richard Dashut would take turns bouncing checks at the International House of Pancakes and the Copper Penny, two chain restaurants where a lot of music-friendly people had jobs. Lindsey worked briefly at painting houses and telephone sales, but he gradually moved into Sound City to work on their songs full time. Someone had to make the rent.

  Stevie started out cleaning Keith Olsen’s house. She was the daily. She’d show up with her mops and brooms, a rag on her head. If no one was at home she’d play Spinners records on Olsen’s massive home stereo rig. (She was really into “Mighty Love.”) Once she padded through a meeting that Olsen was having at home. Someone said, “Who’s that?” and Olsen said, “That’s the maid.” (Not for long, Stevie thought to herself.)

  Stevie got a temp job as a dental assistant, but only lasted one day. She waited tables at the Copper Penny, did well in tips, always had a little silver in her pocket. She did hostess shifts at Bob’s Big Boy, a burger chain. “I made the money that supported Lindsey and me,” she remembered for the London Telegraph years later. “I paid for the apartment, for the
car, for everything. And I loved that!”

  But there was resentment as well. She gave Rolling Stone a different spin on that period: “We were broke and starving. I was cleaning the house of our producer for fifty dollars a week. I come home with my big Hoover vacuum cleaner, my Ajax, my toilet brush, my cleaning shoes on. And Lindsey has managed to have some idiot send him eleven ounces of opiated hash. He and all his friends are in a circle on the floor. They’d been smoking hash for a month, and I don’t smoke because of my voice. I’d come home every day and have to step over these bodies. I’m tired, and I’m lifting their legs up so I can clean up and empty the ashtrays. And all these guys are going, ‘I don’t know why I don’t feel very good.’ I said, ‘You want to know why you don’t feel so good? I’ll tell you why—because you’ve done nothing else for weeks but lie on my floor and smoke hash and take my money!’”

  *

  After recording a few demos, Stevie and Lindsey auditioned for the head of 20th Century Records, who said he liked them but couldn’t sign them without proper management, which they didn’t have. They went to see Lou Adler, a talent manager who owned Ode Records and who had signed the Mamas and the Papas. Adler listened to half of one song and told them thank you very much.

  Through these difficult times Stevie kept writing lyrics in her omnipresent journal. “Without You” was from then; also “Planets of the Universe.” (Both would show up on albums years—decades—later.) “Gold Dust Woman” in its earliest form was from then. “Designs of Love” became “That’s Alright” on Mirage, ten years in the future. They got their first piano when Keith Olsen gave them an old carved upright, painted white. Learning to write on piano for the first time, Stevie came up with “Lady from the Mountains,” which became “Sorcerer” later on. She was the lady from the mountains, Northern California. Lindsey was the sorcerer. “Who is the master?” the singer asks, in their continual struggle for control. “‘Lady’ is me figuring the piano out,” Stevie later averred.

  Also around this time, Stevie read Triad, a romance novel by Mary Leader set in Wales, a tale of witchcraft and possession, sorcery and magical powers. She was also hearing Led Zeppelin’s majestic “Stairway to Heaven” on the car radio every day as that epic anthem invaded the mass consciousness of her generation in those times. If Zeppelin could sing about mysterious ladies and bustles in hedgerows, she figured she could, too. All of these were part of the backstory of “Rhiannon,” which was beginning to come together as Stevie sat, for hours, at her white piano, hunting for the music that would take her where she wanted to go.

  1.10 Frozen Love

  While Buckingham Nicks were pursuing a recording contract, other currents were swirling around in the musical torrents of Los Angeles. They had been there for a year now, and people were starting to take notice. But when they tried to get paying gigs around town, promoters instead offered them deals to form a Top 40 cover band and play the steak-and-lobster circuit from San Diego to Santa Barbara, playing “Take It Easy,” “Witchy Woman,” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling” at Chuck’s Steakhouse three nights a week for good money, five hundred dollars a week. The gigs were there for them, they were told, all the work they could handle, and they should take the offer because nobody was going to pay money to see Buckingham Nicks in the foreseeable future. They agreed that if they did this, it would be like prostituting themselves, and they would lose whatever they had going for them, even at that low point.

  So no gigs, but Keith Olsen arranged a showcase for Buckingham Nicks at Art LaBoe’s on the Sunset Strip so label executives could take a look at them, up close. They rehearsed for this together, and it wasn’t sounding right. Stevie was nervous. Stage fright was rare for her. She told people that she was born to get up on a stage and sing, that she’d been trained to do this by her grandfather when she was five years old. That evening the only ones to show up were Waddy Wachtel and a friend of his.

  Then Waddy had this notion that Stevie should sing country songs. “When I met Stevie and I heard her sing, I was very much into Dolly Parton at that point, which was wild because I never heard a note of country music when I lived in New York. And so I gave Stevie a Dolly Parton album and I said, ‘You’ve got to learn this girl’s work. You gotta get a load of this chick!’ And she couldn’t believe it. So we started to play around town, doing Dolly Parton tunes, some other country songs, a couple of [their] originals, and Lindsey and I would play guitar great together. We had another friend, Jorge Calderon, who played bass with us. It was the four of us, just knocking around town like that.”

  They were still working on their stuff at Sound City (for free, unheard of) with Richard Dashut, when Buckingham Nicks suddenly got a recording contract. Keith Olsen had played their tapes to a guy who was partners in an independent label, Anthem Records. He said he wanted to sign Buckingham Nicks and send them to London to record at Trident Studios, where the Rolling Stones often worked. But then the partnership broke up, and that deal fell through. But then the Anthem guy got a distribution arrangement with Polydor, a major label. For once, someone said yes to Buckingham Nicks. The Anthem/Pogologo deal was said to be worth about $400,000, huge money back then, but Pogologo recording artistes Buckingham Nicks were told only that their album had a green light with a most generous recording budget of $25,000.

  They were ecstatic, so relieved. There’d be an album and a tour. Fame and riches were in the future. The album would be released late in 1973, and then another. What they had foreseen and what people had predicted for them would come true.

  Stevie quit working at Bob’s Big Boy.

  For the next six months they cut ten new tracks under Keith Olsen’s supervision. Waddy Wachtel and other friends played on the sessions, but now Olsen brought in some of the top studio musicians in Los Angeles. Drummer Jim Keltner (widely considered the best in town) played with Delaney & Bonnie and Eric Clapton. When Keltner wasn’t available, Elvis Presley’s drummer Ronnie Tutt was flown in from Las Vegas and paid double scale, $220 an hour. Bassist Jerry Scheff also played with Elvis and had worked with the Doors. Stevie attended all the sessions, often wearing long charcoal-colored skirts over her ballet leggings, watching everything from the control booth sofa. She wrote letters to her parents (now living in Phoenix again) on Sound City letterhead that famous people were playing on their record, and that Lindsey himself was going to be famous someday.

  They finished sequencing the record in late spring, 1973. Stevie’s “Crying in the Night” began the LP’s first side and was an acoustic plea for a man to beware of a woman who was back in town, a dangerous woman. It had a sense of Joni Mitchell fronting the Eagles, and Stevie’s rattling tambourine was way up in the mix. Lindsey’s “Stephanie” was a guitar portrait of Stevie, touching and tinkling, also an homage to Brian Wilson’s musical direction. Lindsey’s “Without a Leg to Stand On” came next, sounding like a song by Cat Stevens, the very precious (and popular) English minstrel. Lindsey sang lead on Stevie’s new ballad “Crystal,” which described romantic love as a quest, a journey through mountains and fountains, sustained by a string section. (“Crystal” was New Look Fleetwood Mac avant la lettre, and would be reprised on that band’s first album.) The album’s first side ended with an actual anthem, Stevie’s “Long Distance Winner,” about a romance with a difficult, untamable man. “Winner” emerged as somewhat epic in scope, with a blowout jam at the end.

  The album’s flip side began with Lindsey’s “Don’t Let Me Down Again,” a fast California rocker with the brilliant Jim Keltner driving the train. “Django” was Lindsey’s tribute to gypsy guitar genius Django Reinhardt, and also to the song’s composer, John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Stevie’s “Races Are Run” followed, an oddly modulated song about winning and losing at life’s competitions, and about a relationship that had to end. (When Javier Pacheco heard “Races,” he thought it was about them leaving Fritz in the lurch.) Two of Lindsey’s songs wound up the sequence. “Lola (My Love)” sounded like another homag
e, this time to Ry Cooder. And “Frozen Love” (cowritten with Stevie) was astute, about a love that had gone stale, with layers of strings and synthesizers and a major Lindsey Buckingham rock guitar symphony with three separate movements, a Big Statement from a new guitarist. Close reading of Stevie’s lyrics could suggest that, from her point of view at least, the Buckingham Nicks romance was nearly over.

  *

  With the recording completed, it was time to make the album jacket photographs. They wanted Waddy’s brother Jimmy Wachtel to shoot them, but that was vetoed by Polydor’s art director. Stevie and Lindsey duly reported to the Burbank studio of photographer Lorrie Sullivan, whose brief from the company was to make it sexy. This was an album from and about a hot couple; sex was what the label thought they were selling. So Stevie went shopping and with her last hundred dollars bought a loose, filmy white blouse that exposed a little skin, figuring that would do it. They went through hair and makeup while the set was lit for a close-up of the charismatic pair. Lindsey came out blow-dried and darkly handsome, with a carefully groomed moustache. Stevie was more brunette than blond, with long colored feathers dangling from her ears. The photographer snapped off a few rolls of film, and then she asked the couple to take off their shirts.

  Stevie balked. She told Sullivan that she was a prude, and that her family would not approve of a bare breast on her first album, let alone a nipple. She was wearing a flesh-colored bra; maybe they could work with that instead. The photographer explained that it would be too hard to retouch the bra under the dangling feather; it would look fake. That’s when already bare-chested Lindsey lost patience with her. “Don’t be paranoid,” he snapped at her. Then he lowered his voice and growled, “Don’t be a fucking child. This is art!”