Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  “This is not ‘art,’” she hissed. “This is me taking a nude photograph with you, and I don’t dig it.”

  Stevie was intimidated. She felt trapped by the people looking at her. Under pressure, she took off her blouse, then her bra, and was directed to pose behind Lindsey’s right shoulder, exposing the side of her right breast. In the resulting picture she looked directly into the camera with her dark eyes. She looked like someone else. She also looked tense.

  After this, Stevie went to her parents’ home near Phoenix and had an ovarian cyst removed. She was in bed for five weeks after that. When the proofs of the album jacket were sent to her, Stevie showed them to her mother. Barbara Nicks told Stevie, “We’re going to have to think about this before we show it to Dad.” Stevie wanted it kept from her father, but this wasn’t possible. When Jess Nicks saw his daughter’s album jacket he was annoyed, and he let Stevie know it.

  Around this time, Stevie wrote a song lyric titled “Garbo,” after the film star Greta Garbo, who refused to wear revealing costumes on screen. The lyric was a tribute to all the Hollywood actresses who were forced into doing scenes they didn’t really want to do.

  This incident really bothered her. When the album came out later in 1973 she was mortified, even though it was quite chaste by contemporary standards. Her father was still not amused. Even A.J. complained. She tried to explain that she’d been bullied into taking off her shirt. “From the very beginning,” she said later, “Lindsey was very controlling and very possessive. And after hearing all the stories from my mother and how independent she was and how independent she’d made me, I was never very good with controlling people and possessive people.” She told herself that she would never let anything like this happen again.

  1.11 Heartbreaker

  Polydor Records released the Buckingham Nicks album in September 1973, when Stevie Nicks was twenty-five years old. The record promptly bombed.

  The album jacket was dark gray and somber. The singers radiated an off-putting anxious glamour. (The same image, dyed in the solarization process, was on the jacket’s reverse.) Stevie’s name was misspelled “Stevi.” There was no track listing, just lyrics. Jimmy Wachtel’s insipid interior photo showed the pair smiling, dressed casually in bell-bottom jeans, with Lindsey’s hand insinuatingly close to Stevie’s crotch. The album bore a dedication to A.J. Nicks, identified as “the grandfather of country music.” (In Nashville, they must have wondered about this.)

  No one seemed to like the record. Polydor executives hadn’t even wanted to release it. They said the songs lacked imagination and had no commercial potential, but their deal with Anthem meant that they were contractually obligated to put the album out. There was no radio promotion budget (i.e., bribes of cash and cocaine to program directors), and barely any publicity at all. Radio DJs told the Polydor promo guys that the songs weren’t original enough, and that Stevie’s voice was too “nasal” for the FM stations. Hard-rocking “Don’t Let Me Down Again” was released as a single. (Polydor advertised it in the trade publication Record World: “A beautiful single by two beautiful people.”) There was little airplay, except for in the college town of Madison, Wisconsin, and in Cleveland, where disk jockey Kid Leo played the single and album tracks on hard-rocking WMMS-FM.

  The single didn’t make the Billboard sales charts. Neither did the album. The press ignored Buckingham Nicks, which wasn’t reviewed by Rolling Stone, Creem, or Hit Parader, the most important American music publications. In the only published interview Lindsey did, he was asked about the duo’s inspirations. He answered that their songs were influenced by Cat Stevens, and his guitar playing owed something to Jimmy Page’s acoustic work with Led Zeppelin.

  Lindsey then put together a band so Buckingham Nicks could play out. Bob Aguirre came down to LA at Lindsey’s request and played drums, and Tom Moncrieff, their old friend from Fritz days, played bass. Buckingham Nicks played another showcase at the Troubadour and only twenty people showed up. There were a couple of reviews in local papers, neither very supportive. Billboard, the weekly bible of the record business, dismissed them as “a lackluster male-female duo.” Then Waddy Wachtel joined on second guitar, which took the Buckingham Nicks Band up a major notch. This is the band that played at the Starwood in West Hollywood (which usually featured glam bands) in late 1973. In November they opened for stellar songwriter John Prine at the Troubadour, and played other shows as well. Set lists (according to drummer Aguirre, who’d quit Dr. Hook’s Medicine Show to make the gig) included “Lola,” “I Don’t Want To Know” (just written for the next BN album), “Monday Morning” (same), “Races Are Run,” “Crystal,” the guitar instrumental “Stephanie,” “Lady from the Mountain,” “You Won’t Forget Me,” and “Don’t Let Me Down Again.” A cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker” was a star turn for Waddy. The encore was heavy-duty anthem “Frozen Love,” Lindsey Buckingham’s electric guitar showpiece.

  Buckingham Nicks made their East Coast debut at a showcase for press and radio at Manhattan’s Metro club. Stevie arrived in New York with a sore throat and a streaming cold. Billboard sent a writer, who thought Lindsey seemed overwhelmed by his duties as both lead singer and lead guitar. As for Stevie: “Ms. Nicks also encounters problems, chiefly in her solo style, which points up the occasional roughness of her voice and the strident quality to her top end that makes duets bracing, but proves less than fruitful when she takes the stage alone.” Later the cold turned into the flu.

  After that, Buckingham Nicks went south and opened some shows for headliner bands. They opened for LA country rock band Poco in Atlanta and for guitarist Leslie West’s thunderous Mountain in Birmingham, Alabama. The local rock station had been playing cuts from Buckingham Nicks, and so they were pleasantly surprised when the fans seemed to know some of the songs, and they got an ovation and were called back for an encore.

  *

  Then, in the late winter of 1974, they were fired. Polydor dropped Buckingham Nicks. The label execs said that returns of Buckingham Nicks were enormous (retailers could return unused product for credit), and that Polydor’s sales staff now had to prepare for Eric Clapton’s big comeback album after years of heroin addiction.

  Stevie: “We were dropped by Polydor after about three months, and Lindsey and I were devastated, because we’d just had a taste of the finer things of life, and now we were back to square one.

  “So Lindsey went back to writing his angst-laden songs [like “So Afraid”], and I went back to being a waitress: ‘Can I get you anything? More coffee? Some cake?’ I was all right with that—I didn’t mind being a waitress—but we couldn’t believe it! We thought we had made it! Famous people played on our record! We were living the highlife! We were stunned!”

  Discouraged, somewhat humiliated, Stevie told Lindsey she wanted to quit music, at least for a while. She thought seriously about going home, but during long soul-searching phone calls, Barbara Nicks advised her to try to keep going. “My mother would say, ‘Stevie, don’t forget—you’re on a mission.’”

  *

  But somehow the contentious couple’s luck managed to hold. Keith Olsen and Joe Gottlieb had put too much energy into them to stop now. They told Stevie and Lindsey that they could keep working at Sound City for free, same as before, until they had enough new songs to try to get a new deal with another label.

  It was a hard time for them. There were bruising fights with harsh words about winners and losers that left Lindsey sleeping on the living room sofa with his guitar and Stevie in their bedroom with her toy poodle, Ginny. But later that spring, Lindsey and Richard Dashut got to work on their new songs while Stevie and her friend Robin Snyder (who’d relocated to LA) worked waitress shifts in corny flapper outfits at Clementine’s, a Roaring Twenties theme restaurant in West Hollywood.

  Stevie: “I’d get home at six [P.M.], fix dinner and straighten up, ’cos they’d been smoking dope and working on songs. Then from nine to three [A.M.] I’d join Lindsey on the music. Then I wen
t to bed, got up, and went to my waitress job.”

  And so they pressed on, determined to make new music against hard odds.

  *

  The year 1974 would be an important year for Stevie and Lindsey. It was a time of political upheaval, with the agony of the Watergate scandal hearings and that summer’s resignation of President Nixon, the first in American history. The Vietnam War was still in progress, with defeat looming over the horizon—another first for America. American cities were riddled with crime and prone to bankruptcy. It was the era of killer bees, Deep Throat, The Exorcist, and the kidnapping of the California publishing heiress Patricia Hearst by an armed radical faction that styled itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. (Most of them died in a fiery shootout in Los Angeles, shown live on TV.)

  What impacted most Americans were the long lines at gas stations during the Arab oil embargo in the wake of the 1973 Middle East War. Not since the Second World War, when gasoline was rationed, did Americans have to line up for fuel. Sometimes the lines seemed endless, and frustrations could boil over into arguments and fights. It was in one of these gas lines that spring that Lindsey’s father suffered a heart attack and died in his car while waiting his turn to fill his tank. He was only fifty-seven years old. Brother Greg Buckingham called to tell Lindsey the sad news.

  Stevie: “I answered, and had to hand him the phone.” She’d never seen Lindsey cry before. They went back to Atherton for the funeral, with Stevie doing her best to comfort Lindsey’s distraught mother. Lindsey was subdued for a long time after that. “I don’t think he ever got over his dad,” Stevie said later.

  Richard Dashut: “I had moved out to a one-bedroom apartment near Fairfax [Avenue, in West Hollywood]. After Buckingham Nicks bombed, Stevie and Lindsey ran out of money, so they moved in with me. Back went the four-track, the cables, the stoned musicians sprawled on the floor, and we worked on the demos for the next Buckingham Nicks album: ‘So Afraid,’ ‘Monday Morning,’ and ‘Rhiannon.’”

  *

  Then opportunity knocked in the form of Don Everly, of the legendary Everly Brothers. Brother Phil had angrily thrown down his guitar and walked out of the long fraternal partnership during a show at Knott’s Berry Farm in California, leaving Don to go it alone. He had recorded an album of new songs, and Warren Zevon put together a touring band with himself on keys and Waddy on guitar. When Waddy left to do session work he got Lindsey the job, with Lindsey also singing Phil’s harmony parts with Don. The money was OK and much needed, and the tour would give Lindsey good experience and national exposure. He’d be away for about six weeks.

  At least the place was clean while he was gone, and Stevie needed a break from her grueling routine of working all day and then singing on demo tapes until three in the morning. She could come home in her Clementine’s outfit and collapse. “Stevie is so friendly, and such a good woman,” Richard said later, “and we laughed all the time when we weren’t out slaving.”

  While Lindsey was on tour, Stevie was invited to stay at a ski lodge owned by Warren Zevon’s in-laws in Aspen, Colorado. Aspen then was still fairly rustic, with faint echoes of the old frontier mining town, and cool movie stars like Jack Nicholson gathering nightly for drinks in the funky saloon of the Jerome Hotel. Stevie thought she could use some time alone in Aspen to work on new songs. She packed herself, her guitar, and tiny dog Ginny into their old Toyota, and made the long drive to the Colorado mountains.

  Stevie later wrote, “I was in somebody’s living room, sitting cross-legged on the floor with my Goya guitar,… thinking about what to do with my life. Should I go back to school, or should I go on pursuing a music career with Lindsey?” She was thinking about the rejection they had suffered, how much it had shattered their pride and hurt them as a couple. “And we weren’t getting along. I sat looking out at the Rocky Mountains, pondering the avalanche of everything that had started to come crashing down on us [and] at that moment, my life truly felt like a landslide in many ways.”

  She’d only been there for a few days when Lindsey showed up—in a rage. Don Everly had cut short his tour in frustration after disrespectful fans ignored his new songs and demanded to only hear the hits, from “Bye Bye Love” to “Cathy’s Clown.” Stevie was having problems of her own—breathing in the rarefied alpine air was difficult for her, leaving her with a a chronic sore throat—and she was, in Lindsey’s opinion, less than comforting to him. This led to the inevitable shouting match (and maybe worse) before Lindsey stormed out, abandoning his girlfriend—ill and alone—in the freezing Colorado ski town.

  Stevie later wistfully recalled this incident, which led to one of her best, most popular, and enduring songs: “‘Landslide’ I wrote in Aspen. That’s where the snow-covered hills came from. And I was definitely doing a lot of reflecting when I was up there. Lindsey was on the road with the Everly Brothers [sic], and I was very unhappy and very lonely … and trying to figure out why he was out with the Everly Brothers and I was in Aspen with forty dollars and my dog, and my Toyota that went frozen the day we got there. And we thought he would make like, lots of money. He didn’t. He came back to Aspen and he was very angry with me. And he left me. [He] took Ginny the poodle and the car and left me in Aspen … [on] the day that the Greyhound buses went on strike. I had a bus pass because my dad was the president of Greyhound. I had a bus pass; I could go anywhere. I said, ‘Fine, take the car and the dog—I have a bus pass.’ I also had a strep throat. He drove away. I walked in and the radio is saying that Greyhound is on strike all over the United States. I’m going ‘Oh no—I’m stuck.’ So I had to call my parents, and they—unwillingly—sent me a plane ticket because they didn’t understand what I was doing there in the first place. So I followed him back to Los Angeles. That was like October [1974]. It was all around Halloween.”

  1.12 Landslide

  When Stevie returned to Los Angeles she couldn’t bring herself to go back to the apartment she shared with Lindsey and Richard. Instead, she briefly camped out in Keith Olsen’s back room in Coldwater Canyon and wrote most of “Landslide.” It was a song about romantic disaster, the seismic upheaval of a woman of twenty-six years losing her partner, the ground, sickeningly, giving way under her feet. The “children” are getting older, and she’s getting older, too, her biological clock ticking, she could feel it. Would she ever even have children? She had hopes, but she also had her doubts. She’d been waiting tables and cleaning houses for three years. She was tired, emotional, exhausted. Keith Olsen could hear Stevie Nicks softly crying down the hall as she worked on her heartbroken new song.

  Adding to her sadness was the death of her grandfather, A.J. Nicks. Her father told her she didn’t have to go to his funeral in Phoenix, and she was relieved. She’d written a song for him while he was dying but never played it for him.

  Barbara Nicks became alarmed at how Stevie sounded during their phone calls. It was like talking to a sickly old woman, not her little Teedie. She dispatched her husband to Los Angeles to see what was going on. Jess Nicks was shocked to see his daughter so thin and unhappy. Stevie: “There were times when my dad would say, ‘How long are you going to do this? You have no money, you’re not happy, you work constantly, you work at restaurants, you clean houses, you get sick very easily, you’re living in Los Angeles, you don’t have any friends—why are you doing this?’ And I would just say, ‘Because this is what I came here to do.’”

  Jess Nicks then strongly suggested that Stevie put a time limit on her quest. Give it six more months, he advised, and if it doesn’t happen, go back and finish college. The family was behind her, but there should be an end game. Her parents had been sending her a little money almost every month, but it couldn’t go on forever. Reluctantly, Stevie agreed to some kind of vague timetable.

  She recalled, “I think they saw in me shades of my grandfather A.J. He was a country-and-western singer who never made it and drank too much. He was so unhappy, trying to make it. He turned into a very embittered person and died that way.
” A few months later, Jess Nicks suffered a cardiac arrest, but Stevie couldn’t get to Phoenix in time before her father underwent an open-heart operation. She was afraid he might die before she could make something of herself, which would make him so proud of her.

  Now Stevie Nicks was even more determined to keep at it. When she eventually returned to their apartment she looked at Lindsey and read him the riot act. “I basically walked back into the house and said, ‘Lindsey, let’s go. Let’s do this.’ I wrote ‘Landslide’ about whether or not I was going to give it all one more chance. You know the rest of the story.”

  She played the first verse and chorus of “Landslide” for Keith Olsen, who agreed that the melancholy ballad had strong possibilities, but it needed more inspiration. Stevie: “I was over at Keith’s house, and he had these great speakers that were as tall as me. And Joni [Mitchell]’s record [Court and Spark] had just come out, and I put it on. He went away; it was just me. I took some LSD—it felt like a safe place to do it and it was the only time I ever did it—and I listened to this record for three days. She was able to stuff so many words into one sentence and not have them sound crowded. She was talking about what it was to be very famous, and to be a woman living in a man’s world. She had been in the world of fame much longer than me, and she had gone out with every famous rock star that there was. And she was such an amazing guitarist that they all respected her. That was unheard of. She was in the boys’ club. She talked about what I saw coming. Even though Buckingham Nicks had tanked, I knew that we were going to be very famous, very rich, and that this fame thing was going to overwhelm us. So when I listened to this record, it was like a great old premonition just being laid out in front of me.”