Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  *

  At the end of November they began sequencing the new album, now called Rumours. This was a nod to the endless gossip in music circles about who was sleeping with whom in Fleetwood Mac: whether Stevie Nicks had left or was about to leave the band and embark on the expected solo career; whether Stevie Nicks was indeed a witch (because when you portray a witch on late-night rock shows, a lot of stoned fans buy it and start thinking of you as a witch, or at least someone with “special knowledge”).

  Lindsey’s “Second Hand News” would begin the album with a Southern California rock shuffle and a frank admission of getting dumped by his girlfriend. Stevie’s “Dreams” came next, her “little” voice and sad lyrics set to the “Spinners” track from Sausalito. (She’d written “Dreams” just after she started going out with Don Henley.) Crystal visions were kept to herself, her dreams dashed, and described as reveries of loneliness and heartbreak. The great “thunder always happens” chorus segues into a prophecy that the rain will wash away one’s romantic woes.

  The album’s first side continued with Lindsey’s defiant “Never Going Back Again” and then Christine’s rousing anthem “Don’t Stop,” urging her husband and everyone else to keep going, whatever obstacles fate throws in the road. Lindsey’s angry “Go Your Own Way” came next, with its lurid, “shackin’ up” accusation of infidelity that was so upsetting to Stevie; she thought it made her look like a tramp, which she never had been. The song would become emblematic of the famous romantic irruptions in the band; from then on “Go Your Own Way” ended Fleetwood Mac shows into the next century. The side ended with Chris’s lovesick piano ballad, “Songbird.”

  The second side began with “The Chain,” a compilation of various riffs and vamps (notably Christine’s “Keep Me There”) with a melody and lyrics adapted from Stevie’s notebooks at almost the last minute. Lindsey sings lead vocal while Stevie dominates the accusatory chorus that ends with the powerful “runnin’ through the shadows” refrain. The finished song is basically Stevie’s, but the five band members split writing credits, mostly as a way of bringing in Mick and John to share lucrative publishing rights. “Keep us together” was the band’s prayer for stability and unity in the face of almost impossible odds.

  Christine’s “You Make Loving Fun” came next, a love song for her flame Curry Grant, a song that helped launch the soft rock/adult contemporary radio format beginning in 1977, with great guitar playing and soulful electric piano by Chris.

  Next was Stevie’s “Silver Springs,” a paean to regret over an epochal lost love. At almost eight minutes long, the song was a gossamer spider’s web of prophetic emotion and blunt warning: “Time cast a spell on you … you won’t forget me … my voice will haunt you … you’ll never get away.” Lindsey supplies a very moving guitar solo that seems to weep with deep regret, along with Stevie’s “fragile” vocal persona. This stark incantation was followed by Christine’s “Oh Daddy,” which insiders knew was a heartfelt night letter to Curry, whose eye was said to be always roaming elsewhere in the band’s incestuous circle.

  Rumours was programmed to end in a very dark place with Stevie’s terror-stricken “Gold Dust Woman.” A sinister rhythm track evolved into a doom-laden, sepulchral vision of crying, addiction, and agony. When the tribal tom-tom signals the dance of the Gold Dust Woman and her weird familiars—the black widow, the dragon, the shadow of a woman—the track ends with tormented harpy-like screaming, banshees wailing over forbidden moors, discarnate spirits seeking to inhabit vulnerable souls. At the end of Rumours, all that was left for the emotionally exhausted listener was to pick up the pieces and go home.

  *

  When they played this sequence for Warner Bros., Fleetwood Mac was told their album was way too long. Each side of a vinyl album could only be about twenty-two minutes long, or the audio quality would deteriorate. Something would have to be cut or replaced. The obvious choice for the production team was “Silver Springs.” First, the song was way too long; second, Lindsey hated it.

  Mick knew that “Silver Springs” was Stevie’s pet project. There would be a big fucking row if they took it off the album. They wrestled with the song for days, trying to get it down to manageable length. Verses were dropped, the guitar solo cut way back. They finally got it to just over four-and-a-half minutes. But it was still too long for either side of Rumours, and at Warner’s insistence the song was dropped. To try to placate Stevie, who they knew would be crushed, “Silver Springs” would appear as the B-side of the album’s first single, “Go Your Own Way.” (This pairing was considered apposite by some: letting Lindsey and Stevie fight their problems out on opposing sides of the 45.)

  To replace “Silver Springs” they recorded “I Don’t Want to Know,” an older song of Stevie’s, without telling her. Sung by Lindsey, it sounded great, real cowgirl rock with soulful words—“Take a listen to your spirit / It’s crying out loud.” At just over three minutes in length, it fit nicely between the other songs on the LP’s second side. Warners signed off on this sequence, and they finally sent off the Rumours tapes to be mastered and pressed.

  Now someone had to tell Stevie Nicks that her special song “Silver Springs” wasn’t going to make it onto the new album. This task fell to Mick Fleetwood, who dreaded being the deliverer of a message that he knew must break her already burdoned heart. The day came, and Stevie arrived at the studio with her whispery gaggle of girls. Mick took Stevie out to the parking lot and gently tried to explain the situation, and that it was a done deal. Stevie took it calmly, not saying anything. She stared at him for a while, then gathered up her entourage and left. Mick Fleetwood had a horrible feeling that she might not come back.

  Stevie was furious. She told her friends that she would never forgive Fleetwood Mac for this disrespect. She blamed Lindsey for making the song too long. The worst part was that she’d given the song’s publishing rights to her mother. She explained, “When I first recorded ‘Silver Springs,’ I gave it to my mother as a present. My mother would never take a penny from me, so I figured the only way I could actually give her some money was to give her a song to put away for a rainy day. She got the whole thing—publishing, royalties, everything. It was her favorite [of my] songs. She’d even opened an antique store and called it the Silver Springs Emporium. Then they took it off the record, so it was very much a dud gift. It was like, ‘Well Mom, guess what? It’s not going on the record, and I’m really sorry.’”

  This was humiliating because it showed Barbara Nicks, who always advocated an independent life for Stevie, how little control her daughter had over her music. It also cost her a fortune when Rumours took off the following year. But Stevie’s mother continued to own the song, and it paid off twenty years later when a reissued “Silver Springs” became a big hit.

  3.5 Crystal Ball

  Before the 1976 Christmas holidays, Stevie Nicks underwent a breast augmentation procedure in which silicone implants were inserted to increase her bust size. She was assured that this was safe and that the implants would never leak. Both she and her dressmaker were happy with the resulting change in her body image. “I had them done in December 1976,” she recalled (ruefully) later on. “I’d only been in Fleetwood Mac for one year and I was getting a lot of attention. I had always thought my hips were too big and my chest was too small, so we went ahead with it.”

  The surgery came at around the same time she realized that she had broken with Lindsey Buckingham for good. She had harbored a faint hope for a possible reconciliation with him, but it wasn’t going to happen. They weren’t speaking anyway, and he and his girlfriend were living with Richard Dashut and were said to be looking at houses in the Hollywood Hills. Stevie wanted the world to know that she had left Lindsey and not the other way around. This was important to her. “I broke up with him,” she told a TV interviewer. “He didn’t not want to be with me. We’d been uncomfortable together for a while.”

  It was also at this pivotal time that Stevie firmly decided
that she would dedicate herself to her muse and to her career, and that she would never bear children. She even said that she probably would never marry. She told close friends that this feeling dated to when she’d first joined Fleetwood Mac. At that decisive moment she saw only one way forward for her, and the burdens of motherhood would be nothing but an impediment to her ambitions. (Like many rock stars, who remained somewhat childish into adulthood, Stevie didn’t even like children that much.) She later explained that she needed a certain kind of autonomous authority to be in a band: “I wanted to be respected, as a musician, by every single dude on that stage. And if I walked out, and if I’d made that choice, the dynamic would have been much different.”

  *

  In late November, Stevie and entourage turned up at photographer Herbie Worthington’s studio to shoot the Rumours album jacket. Mick had said he wanted something Shakespearean, so this was Mick in his black waistcoat and breeches, with Stevie in her stage outfit without the top hat. Her velvet boots were replaced by black ballet toe shoes; her hair fell down her back in a feathered shag; and she posed with her leg draped provocatively over Mick’s left knee. Mick held the same crystal ball featured on the Fleetwood Mac album, which was now well over four million units sold and still counting. The band photos on the back cover portrayed the newly buxom Stevie in a beige rayon wrap-dress drawn in at the waist by a scarab brooch, showing a hint of cleavage—to die for.

  Lindsey Buckingham was angry. He felt the whole band should have been on the cover of Rumours.

  Another photo session was scheduled for the cover of Rolling Stone. The idea was to show Fleetwood Mac in bed together, so Stevie arrived at photographer Annie Liebovitz’s studio in a sexy pink satin nightgown. Shooting from above the bed, she posed Stevie nestled up against half-naked Mick, with her legs resting on John, who was reading Playboy. Chris and Lindsey were cuddled on Mick’s other side. Not everyone in the resulting image was smiling, but Stevie and Mick were all grins. Much later Stevie confided that this first horizontal body contact with Mick Fleetwood felt good to her and would lead to mischief later on.

  To everyone’s astonishment, after the shoot Stevie and Lindsey were the last ones on the bed. They got to talking, quietly. He asked her about what he called “the boob job,” and implied that it was a turn-on. There was intimacy in the air, and so everyone else left the room. Then Stevie and Lindsey started making out. Then it became heavy petting. There was some embarrassed coughing outside the door. Then one of the assistants came in and said they needed the room for another session. The moment subsided, and Stevie Nicks was driven home with a case of lover’s remorse. She tried to make a song out of it, but inspiration was slow to arrive.

  Stevie spent that Christmas in Phoenix with her family. Her mother asked about Lindsey. Stevie said that it all came down to a big fight they’d had in their apartment when they returned to LA from Sausalito. Lindsey had been really angry with her. There was a lot of yelling. It had gotten physical and he’d thrown her down to the floor. “That’s when it all blew up,” she said. “That’s when I stopped it.” That’s when she walked out on him.

  It had been a horrible breakup, and still hurt. Her brother Chris, whom Stevie kept close to her, idolized Lindsey and was crushed. Stevie felt bad about saying good-bye to this guy—her man and friend of seven years. All the normal assumptions—marriage, kids, family—were out the window. Yet she still loved him and felt she always would. And worse, she needed him for her music. She relied on his innate ability to understand her intentions, what she meant to convey musically in her songs. Nobody else had this.

  As for Lindsey, he was angry about everything. He blamed Fleetwood Mac and the pressures of being in the band for the breakup with Stevie. He told his girlfriend Carol he didn’t like Stevie, but he was still in love with her. Even decades later, he confessed to an interviewer: “I was devastated when she took off.”

  *

  February 1977. Stevie Nicks was twenty-eight years old. Warner Bros. shipped 800,000 Rumours albums to record stores that had placed advance orders, the largest such in the company’s history. The FM soft rock stations that had been playing “Rhiannon” for eighteen months now began to play “Dreams” and “Go Your Own Way.” The album’s first single, “Go Your Own Way”/“Silver Springs” (released in December) was in the Top 10. The band was on the cover of Rolling Stone, which praised Rumours to the skies and glamorized it (and especially Stevie Nicks) as the sexiest group in the booming music business—a business that in the mid-1970s had become a major industry, one that was outperforming the movies, the theater, publishing, everything.

  That month, after collecting a shelf full of Grammy awards for Fleetwood Mac, a somewhat rusty Fleetwood Mac convened at SIR Studios on Cahuenga Boulevard and played together for a month, preparing for the long international tour promoting Rumours. Concerts would begin with “Say You Love Me” and feature songs from both albums. Lindsey played Peter Green’s “Oh Well.” The encores would begin with “Go Your Own Way” and end with “Songbird,” a lullaby that said goodnight to the fans.

  By the beginning of March the band was sounding like one of the best rock groups on the planet, but there was serious concern for Stevie’s voice. It sounded raw to those who knew her, and somewhat forced on the higher notes. She had basically shredded her vocal cords on the long previous tour, declaiming “Rhiannon” to the skies night after night. She was trying various therapeutic elixirs of cognac and honey to ease the strain, but Mick Fleetwood was worried, and rightly so; they would need to cancel weeks of shows later in the year so Stevie could rest her voice.

  She had vision problems as well. A few days before playing A Day on the Green, a big show promoted by Bill Graham in the Oakland Coliseum on May 7, she hurt her corneas when she left her contact lenses in while partying for two days. She was almost blind as Graham carried her piggyback from the band’s trailer to the outdoor stage. She managed to get through the show in front of seventy-five thousand, but only just. Then the doctors ordered her eyes to be bandaged for a few days, during which Stevie groped her way around. The band played pranks on her, teasing her, putting things out of her reach. Even her trusted girlfriends dressed Stevie in mismatching outfits and assured her that she looked great.

  They spent the next six weeks playing all over the United States, traveling by expensive chartered aircraft, playing mostly arenas holding around fifteen thousand fans. Stevie was accompanied by Robin Snyder and her dog Ginny. The audiences were fervid, mad for Fleetwood Mac, especially in the South. Jefferson Coliseum in Birmingham, Alabama—erstwhile stronghold of Buckingham Nicks—had sold out in an hour. It was the same with Madison Square Garden in New York City on June 29. (Newspaper reviews of this show noticed Stevie’s vocal strain. Rolling Stone said that she “lurched” around the stage, monitored by “frantic” roadies to prevent her from falling.) The sports arenas and university halls were packed with young girls in witchy hats and black capes, mimicking Stevie’s stage clothes—the black chiffon ensemble, the five-inch heels, the wickedly formal man’s top hat with its voodoo associations. The fans stood for all her songs, sang all the words, waved to her, cried out to her, begged to hear “Rhiannon” and the new single, “Dreams,” released April 1, 1977. Stevie’s girly fans waited for her by the stage doors, straining against metal barriers, hoping to catch her. Sometimes she paused to speak with the girls as JC hustled her, exhausted (exhilarated), from the venue to her limo; the girls told her they loved her, gave her flowers, slipped silver bracelets onto her wrist, or pressed turquoises into her hand for luck.

  Not all the early shows on the Rumours tour were brilliant, sometimes reflecting tensions within the band. One night Stevie threw a postshow tantrum. She’d missed a cue during “Rhiannon” and Lindsey had to cover for her, which she found humiliating because she had to apologize. She was weeping and wailing in the dressing room, a major drama, and then melted into the arms of Robin Snyder, who cradled her like a child.

&
nbsp; Some of Stevie’s most crazed fans were young men. One of the wildest shows the band played that month was at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. “When they saw Stevie walk onstage,” Mick remembered, “the roar that came out of nine thousand midshipmen can only be described as inhuman. We’d never heard anything quite like it.” When Stevie performed the rite of the Gold Dust Woman for the young sailors, dozens of floral bouquets (and a roll of toilet paper) came flying onstage.

  After the shows, Stevie and Christine usually rested in their hotel suites, avoiding their exes drowning their sorrows in the bar. Stevie had steam treatments in the bathrooms for her sore vocal cords, and she and Robin did ballet exercises to keep limber. “As of the Rumours tour,” Stevie later recalled, “if there was a presidential suite, the girls got it. Or two presidentials, we got them, me and Chris. That was the way of the world. For women, it’s harder. You have makeup, hair, nails, all this shit you have to do. The boys bitched about this, but in the end it was like: happy wife, happy life.”

  *

  By then Rumours had sold a million albums after only a month in the record stores. The remixed “Dreams” single, with Stevie’s fragile vocal, got played on AM radio now, and went to #1 on the Billboard chart, which boosted Rumours into a huge sales spurt, moving another million or so albums in May. (As of this writing, “Dreams” is still Fleetwood Mac’s only #1 single release.)

  The band next flew to England, where they played in London to a house full of their old fans, to whom Fleetwood Mac meant a British blues band. Stevie was very touched to see how much this meant to Mick, Chris, and John. A little more than two years after fleeing England, Fleetwood Mac had returned as big stars, playing in Birmingham, Manchester, and London. During a night off they spent a (freezing) night as houseguests in Eric Clapton’s (unheated) country house, where he was living with Patti Boyd Harrison, Mick’s sister-in-law. Fortunately, cocaine elevates the body’s temperature, so everyone survived this rock & roll house party. Then it was on to European gigs in France, Germany, and Sweden. There was a horrible problem in Holland when Dutch customs stopped the band at the airport. Looking for drugs, acting on a bogus tip, they strip-searched Stevie, Christine, and the wardrobe and makeup girls. John Courage swore this would never happen again. Next time Fleetwood Mac played in Europe, the band traveled in private train cars, exclusively.