Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  *

  Rumours reached #1 on the Billboard and Cashbox sales charts on May 21, 1977, knocking off the Eagles’ Hotel California. As Mick had predicted back in damp and cold Sausalito, Rumours stayed at #1 for the next eight months, a historic position for a band that had been written off a few years before. The passions that the band had suffused into their new songs sounded real to their audience, who picked up on the raw authentic feelings that were on offer. “The truth about Rumours,” Stevie said later, “was that Rumours was the truth.”

  Fleetwood Mac stayed on the road for the rest of the year to promote their album, sales of which were bumped up by two more hit singles, “Don’t Stop” (#3 that summer) and “You Make Loving Fun” (also in the Top 10 in October). Everyone in the band, including Stevie, felt like they were on an unstoppable rocket to stardom, powered up by the Heineken bottle caps brimming with star-quality cocaine that were distributed to the band by JC before the shows. “This was the heyday of Fleetwood Mac,” Mick recalled of 1977. “It was full-on work, touring, airplay, success. We all felt we were on the old roller coaster, and we were heading up.”

  *

  In June the band took a break. Stevie and Lindsey both worked on new albums by local rocker Walter Egan and their old friend Warren Zevon. (Walter Egan fell crazy in love with Stevie, ruining his marriage. His ardor wasn’t really returned, and he was reportedly crushed.) Then Stevie met a young record executive, Paul Fishkin, when Fleetwood Mac attended a big Warner Bros. convention for its affiliated labels in Los Angeles. Paul was about thirty, well dressed, soft-spoken, darkly handsome (everyone said he looked a lot like Lindsey), and the president of Bearsville Records. Stevie was taken with him, asked to meet him, and started an affair with him that would later prove to be pivotal in her career.

  Paul Fishkin, when he got to know Stevie and her scene a little better, was amazed by how she was treated by Fleetwood Mac. She was the band’s big draw, but she had zero pull in the group. She couldn’t get the songs she wanted on their album. She had no management of her own to help her in dealing with Mick, who was managing the band, which to Paul seemed like a major conflict of interest. He could hear that her voice was almost completely shot, but when he went to a few Mac concerts, the band played on as if this vocal problem wouldn’t be a big fucking issue someday soon. Stevie kept belting out the raving, shredding finale of “Rhiannon” at the climax of every show, as if she could grow new vocal cords overnight. When Stevie told Paul Fishkin that she didn’t quite know what to do about any of this, he vehemently suggested that she should consider leaving the band and starting a solo career if she was so unhappy. She told him she didn’t have the confidence and the wherewithal to do this. From what he’d observed, he told Stevie that someday she was going to be a bigger star than Fleetwood Mac. If she kept writing on the level she was working in, she could even have her own boutique record label, and could keep some of the money skimmed off the top by Warner Bros. Of course he offered to be of help to her with this monumental decision.

  This gave Stevie Nicks something to think about. And she continued the romantic interlude with intelligent and astute Paul Fishkin, which lasted until Fleetwood Mac went to Australia later in the year.

  3.6 Behind the Curtain

  For her whole life, Stevie Nicks had always been a self-described girly-girl, but when she broke up with Lindsey Buckingham she assumed a new persona of public and private hyperfemininity that she would become famous for. She would take up the ballet and be photographed in lace, pink leotards, and toe shoes. She still enjoyed the company of men and needed them for her work, but in her private home life she surrounded herself with attractive and artistic females who looked after her and whom she could sing and dance with all night. She told her close friend, the beautiful, ultrafeminine former model Sara Recor, that she didn’t think she would ever fully trust a man after what she’d been through with Lindsey, who now seemed so against her all the time.

  This coincided with a considerable shockwave-of-fame mystique as her songs became more and more well known. Fans picked up on the “special knowledge” and her “crystal visions” and started bombarding her with mail containing esoteric material, as if her special knowledge embodied mystical, theosophical, alchemical, and astrological doctrines. Fanzines sprouted up with weird interpretations of her songs, as if Stevie Nicks was a hierophant, an interpreter of sacred mysteries and principles. Her fans started thinking of themselves as adepts of a secret society, initiates in a cult, sisters of the moon. Even an acerbic rock critic like Lester Bangs would headline an essay in Detroit-based Creem magazine—“Stevie Nicks: Lilith or Bimbo?”

  Of course there was backlash, too, from the rock press. This was 1977 after all, the year two sevens clashed, the year of the punky reggae party. Creem:

  Yes it’s 1977 and Stevie Nicks is the most popular, most visible, woman in rock. And she’s a joke. She’s an airhead, a puffball.… Stevie is a California girl prone to writing songs about witches, mysticism, and all the other shit one would conjure while sautéing in a Jacuzzi.… But although Big Mac’s sound has been consistently bland, you can’t blame Stevie—she’s tried to provide some comic relief.… But punk is coming, and it’s gunning for mega-ultra-supergroups like Fleetwood Mac. A new generation of women rockers will rise and they will play unpretty, untwirly music. Nicks’ reign will soon be over. In the future, she and Fleetwood Mac will be a footnote, a footprint frozen in the tar pits of the bloated corporate rock age.

  At some point that year Stevie Nicks became pregnant by Don Henley. This was weird since she’d decided she didn’t want to have children of her own. She’d sometimes stay with him when they were in town at the same time during tour breaks. By then he was living in a wing of Eagles manager Irving Azoff’s house in Benedict Canyon while he was building a new house of his own off Little Ramirez Road in Malibu. One night they were having supper with Azoff, and Stevie spoke with him about possibly managing her, if she ever went out on her own. Later, when she told Don about the baby, she said she thought it was a girl named Sara. At first Don was good about it. There were gifts, flowers, more private planes (she would fondly remember a little red Lear jet), and attentive phone calls. But then, as time passed, Don seemed less than thrilled about this idea; he started keeping his distance, and Stevie—disappointed after his immediate, enthusiastic assent—underwent a procedure to end the pregnancy. The Eagles went back on tour, Fleetwood Mac returned to the road, and she didn’t see Don Henley for a while after that. Years later, after Henley had spoken publicly about this pregnancy, Stevie gave an interview to Billboard during which she was asked about this in reference to one of her songs. She replied, “Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara. But there was another woman in my life then named Sara; so it’s accurate, but not the entirety of it.”

  Stevie never forgot those Lear jets. “I was on the road, he was on the road. It picked me up after my show, flew me to Atlanta. I stayed there that day and his show, and then right after the show that little cranberry red Lear jet was waiting for me. It was wonderful. It was one of the most romantic things that ever happened to me in my whole life. It’ll pass before me on my deathbed.”

  *

  Fleetwood Mac toured all that summer, emotionally ravaged but playing great shows. Stevie felt bad after her ordeal with the pregnancy but was more concerned about her band mates. Mick’s (re)marriage was coming apart. Described in the press as a glowering, heavily bearded Svengali, he was spending more time at Stevie’s house than he was with his family. Christine was in the process of dumping the lighting guy, another trauma in the touring party. McVie, listening nightly to his wife’s love songs about the lighting guy, was drinking. They all were, except Stevie, who said she only took a shot of tequila before going onstage. Lindsey was drinking more than she’d ever seen. Her large velvet-covered journal for August 24, 1977, contains drawings of birds, angels, flowers, and stars, plus the entry: “On
e more time, on the plane. As usual, Lindsey is his usual asshole self. I am slowly coming to the conclusion that Lindsey and I are at an end. So sad to see good love go bad.… Worried about Christine. Wishing some spiritual guidance would come from somewhere. Where are the crystal visions when I need them?”

  Kenny Loggins (now gone solo) was opening for Fleetwod Mac, and Stevie enjoyed hanging out with Sara Recor, whose husband was his road manager. Stevie recorded (uncredited) vocals for Loggins’s disco-tinged “Whenever I Call You Friend”—“sweet love showin’ us a heavenly light”—which would be a Top 10 record the following year. Fleetwood Mac also played a benefit concert in Tucson promoted by her father in connection with a foundation for heart disease. This began a long association with Jess Nicks, who in retirement was getting into promoting concerts in Arizona with his brother Gene.

  The exhausting tour continued into the autumn of 1977. At one point they played a month of concerts with only one day off. Then Lindsey—spent from leading the band every night in a haze of drugs and alcohol—fainted in the shower in a Philadelphia hotel suite, and some shows were postponed. His doctor later told him he had a mild form of epilepsy, which some thought might have been causing Lindsey’s sometimes violent mood swings.

  In late October Warner Bros. released “You Make Loving Fun,” which was another hit single, and quickly sold another two million copies of Rumours by Thanksgiving. By the end of the year the album would have sold its eighth million copy and been at #1 for thirty-two weeks in 1977. At that point, an emotionally depleted Fleetwood Mac took ten days off before heading out to Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaii.

  Sometimes on those darkening November evenings, as storm clouds gathered to pour rain down on the hills above Santa Monica and landslides closed the Pacific Coast Highway, Stevie could hear the feral roar of Mick Fleetwood’s black Porsche 911 as it climbed the steep road to her house. This was “the great dark wing” that would surface later in song. He took her on long rides along Mulholland Drive, running above the Hollywood Hills with sparkling views of the lights of the San Fernando Valley in the dark. The vibrations between them were uncertain, weird. He knew she was seeing a record executive. She knew he was sneaking out on his wife and children. Mick’s parents, who often toured with the band and whom Stevie adored, were living with him as well.

  They didn’t talk much, Mick later said. They were just getting comfortable being together, away from the high tensions in the band and the demands of touring. Anyway, cocaine sometimes inhibits conversation when taken in quantity. Everything was very secret. It wasn’t physical, this thing, at least not yet. Stevie’s girlfriends were sworn to silence.

  The late-night rides continued after Fleetwood Mac’s sold-out concerts in New Zealand. Stealing out of the hotel’s basement garage at midnight after the show in Wellington, so as not to upset Lindsey, they were driven by a Samoan chauffeur on a long journey through mountain ridgebacks and valleys. It was spring in the Antipodes, and the windows of the Daimler limousine allowed fresh air into the dark cabin where Stevie sat holding hands with Mick Fleetwood, breathing. When they arrived at a famous lookout just before dawn, they got out and strolled along a deer path, waiting for the sun to break through the clouds overlooking a vast, greening landscape. Then the morning mist condensed into a cool shower, and the couple’s clothes stuck to their skin.

  The ride back to the hotel was in a hellacious lightning storm, Mick later said, like something in King Lear. Shakespeare sometimes used tempests to separate or unite his characters, and so it happened here. After clinging to each other in the limo, Mick accompanied Stevie up to her suite. She lifted her face to him, and he said, “I think I’d like to stay here tonight.”

  *

  This was now a love affair, and it continued in a haphazard way after Fleetwood Mac arrived in Australia that December. Christine found out about it but kept quiet. Lindsey and John were in the dark. There wasn’t much band interaction in the hotels, anyway. The shows were rowdy, as the Australian fans embraced Fleetwood Mac as if they were mystic emissaries from their ancestors’ Wales. “Rhiannon” often stopped the shows, as audiences wouldn’t cease clapping and demanded encores of a spent Stevie Nicks, who was struggling with vocal strain. Then Jenny Fleetwood arrived in Sydney, had no idea what was going on, and was sort of awkwardly kept out of the way at the concerts by John Courage until one night Jenny and Mick were standing behind the curtain, holding hands, waiting for the band to go on. Mick gave Jenny a squeeze, stepped around the curtain, found beautiful Stevie Nicks waiting there, ready for action, and the secret lovers embraced in a lascivious soul kiss, with Mick’s wife only mere inches away from them behind the scrim. Ten years later, Stevie told Mick it was one of the most amazing moments of her romantic life.

  *

  Back in California for the holidays, they all tried to settle down. Stevie retreated to her house and began making song verses out of the writings in her journals. “Sara” would come out of this; also “Angel,” “Storms,” and “Fireflies.” Stevie and Mick kept their affair private, and very on-off, which was most convenient for Stevie; but she insisted Mick have a quiet word with Lindsey, fearing that her former boyfriend would freak out and quit the band if he found out any other way. Mick sat Lindsey down and told him that he was in love with Stevie, and that was that. Mick didn’t mention this to his wife, and for the next six months he would try to be two places at once while Fleetwood Mac made their difficult and flawed next album.

  Stevie broke up with Paul Fishkin but kept him as a friend. She told her new boyfriend Mick Fleetwood—who was suspicious Fishkin might be encouraging Stevie’s much rumored future solo career—that she might need Paul again someday.

  CHAPTER 4

  4.1 Special Knowledge

  Stevie Nicks gave a big New Year’s Eve party at her house to celebrate the massive professional successes of 1977 and welcome in 1978. Guests curious about her house on El Contento Drive passed through imposing metal gates, meandered along a gravel drive, passed Stevie’s VW in the driveway with its BBUNNI license plate, and were welcomed into a pinkish Spanish Colonial mansion softly lit by fabric-covered lamps and furnished in contemporary California décor. Persian carpets covered the blond parquet floors. Vintage wicker seating was upholstered in flowery chintz with pillows covered in Hermès silk scarves. There were flowers on every table, stained glass in the windows, scented candles everywhere, silver-framed photographs of friends and family. The circular entrance hall contained Stevie’s Bosendorfer baby grand piano (the first thing she bought when the staggering seven-figure royalty checks began to arrive), covered by an amber-colored antique shawl. In the living room an Art Deco glass table featured an ancient-looking tome titled Magical Beings. Stevie circulated among her guests with a gilt-edged mirror bearing mounds of cocaine and rolled-up twenty-dollar bills. She was trailed by her little dog, who was rumored to have an appetite for cocaine herself. A splendid buffet laid out on the dining room’s antique sideboards went almost untouched. Linda Ronstadt’s recent smash album Simple Dreams was on the stereo, featuring the expert guitar work of Waddy Wachtel (especially on “It’s So Easy”).

  Even Lindsey and his girlfriend Carol came to the party. (Carol later wrote that Stevie glared at her every time they were in the same room, as if Stevie was telling her that she wasn’t good enough for him. Carol devoutly wished they could be friends, but of course it never happened.)

  They all had a lot to celebrate. Warner executives at the party told them Rumours was expected to sell ten million records by the end of January 1978. (Indeed, as the year went on, the album would become, for a time, the bestselling album in recording history.) Stevie, Lindsey, and Christine each made about six million dollars apiece from album sales and publishing, with nonwriters Mick and John making about half that. Within a few weeks Fleetwood Mac would sweep the televised American Music Awards and then the Grammys, and would reappear again on the cover of Rolling Stone under the headline “The Pe
ople’s Choice.” And the future was rosy. Record retailers were screaming for new product to sell. Advance orders for Fleetwood Mac’s next album were expected to be the highest ever. They would make a new album in 1978 and sell it all over the planet in 1979, playing what would be the most lucrative concert tour ever. After that, the sky was not even a limit, but the pathway to the stars.

  There were a few people at the party that Stevie didn’t know, well-dressed couples schmoozing with the Warner Bros. staffers. They turned out to be executives from Warner’s film division who had inveigled their way into her house in a desperate attempt to try to get a meeting with her. For now Stevie Nicks was considered to be a prime catch in Hollywood. Movie bosses had seen her clips on TV, had heard her music on their car stereos as they drove to work in Burbank, Hollywood, and Universal City. Stevie Nicks was red-hot in 1978 and could’ve been in pictures, if she had the slightest interest. “I’m no actress, believe me,” she replied when asked about this. Since Stevie had no independent representation, she didn’t know that inquiries about her availability from movie guys, talent agents, and casting directors were referred to the Fleetwood Mac office and fended away by Judy Wong, since Mick Fleetwood had no intention of losing the band’s cash cow to a Hollywood film career.