Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  There would be no meetings with Stevie at her New Year’s party. Well before the witching hour she and her simpering female entourage disappeared into her private quarters for the evening, where they gathered in the luxurious master bathroom with its superior acoustics and sang together late into the new year.

  *

  For all of Stevie’s disinterest in appearing in films, there was, in 1978 Hollywood, this idea about a major movie based on her Rhiannon material. Stevie had started thinking about this idea after seeing the amateurish, clumsy “fantasy sequences,” imbued with ancient ruins and romantic decay, in Led Zeppelin’s 1976 concert movie The Song Remains the Same. (She really liked the bit where guitarist Jimmy Page, who was famously obsessed with black magic, morphed from a costumed wizard into the laser-wielding Old Man of the Mountain.) Then, toward the end of 1976, a fan sent her a novel, The Song of Rhiannon, published in 1972, the year before Stevie wrote “Rhiannon.” The novel was part of the Mabinogion Tetrology by Evangeline Walton, a four-book retelling of the ancient collection of Welsh myths known as the Mabinogion. These stories provided Stevie with much more information about the Rhiannon energy than she had ever known. It became “a project”: a movie deal. Stevie contacted the seventy-year-old author, and in early 1978 embarked on an epic road trip to visit Walton at her home in Tucson, Arizona. Evangeline Walton—white-haired, adorned in turquoise and Indian silver, heavily made up to disguise a chronic skin condition—received Stevie and her friends graciously and spoke with her about “special knowledge” for what seemed like hours.

  Stevie remembered this meeting years later: “She was living in this little tract house in a subdivision, and you went inside, and it was all dark, gothic and curtains.” Candles provided the only light. “On the mantelpiece was a big stone lion inscribed with the words ‘Song of Rhiannon.’ I thought, this is so wild. The world is small somehow, you know? If you look at the dates, it was kind of like Evangeline’s work ended on Rhiannon, and then mine began. It’s almost like this has been laid out for me, by the gods—or whoever.”

  Walton (who lived until 1996) later described Stevie’s approach as well-meaning, commercialized, naïve. Certainly, she told Stevie, there were people who called themselves “witches,” and wrote books on how to cast spells, and even held so-called coven meetings here in Tucson, but this was understood to be play-acting. They were harmlessly pretending to be witches, not fearfully accusing others of bewitching them.

  But still, this was a risky business, Walton advised. Most humans think of themselves as a vortex of some kind of power, and some believe their feelings and intentions can influence human affairs in supernatural ways. Some people can project their power, and if they are malevolent, they believe they can blight crops, curse houses, and cause human suffering, even death. It was also dangerous to its practitioners. She reminded Stevie that twenty innocent people (and two dogs) were hanged for so-called witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. You can sing a song about an old Welsh witch, Evangeline Walton told Stevie Nicks, but you’d better not encourage people to call you one. In essence, Evangeline advised Stevie that it was in her best interest to lay off the witchy hokum.

  At some point during this encounter, the idea was broached to buy the film rights to the Mabinogion Tetrology. Evangeline Walton told Stevie Nicks that she would think about it. Stevie left Tucson and was driven north to Phoenix, determined not to let this energy go.

  *

  Early in 1978 Stevie bought a big Mediterranean-style house in Paradise Valley to be near her family when she was in Arizona. The 7,200-square-foot house was in a gated enclave with mountain views and an enormous sky. Construction began immediately on a new kitchen, a mirrored ballet studio, and also a small recording room for making song demos. The basement was converted into the Song Vault, which held Stevie’s growing archive of tapes, journals, notebooks, and costumes. Among her friends, Stevie was notorious for never throwing anything away.

  Around this time Stevie also bought a new Jaguar sedan. When she and her girlfriends—big hair, big heels, flashy clothes—entered the Beverly Hills Jaguar showroom, the salesman thought they were secretaries on their lunch hour and ignored them. It took awhile for Stevie to persuade him to sell her a car. When she gave him her driver’s license, he told her it had expired the year before. Someone else had to drive the Jaguar back to the house. Stevie Nicks never bothered to renew her driver’s license, since she was driven everywhere by friends, lovers, or chauffeurs. She considered herself almost too blind to drive. “I see things mostly in soft focus,” she told an English interviewer. “I see things like in a dream.”

  *

  In February Stevie and Sara Recor and some other girls flew to Hawaii, where Stevie rented a beach house on the paradisiacal island of Maui, elysian star of the islands. There were hammocks slung from the palm trees on the beach in front of the house, and they enjoyed sipping wine in the dappled light while watching the spectacular purple sunsets as Pacific breezes caressed their bodies and souls. Stevie was convinced she was overweight and wouldn’t go out unless wrapped up in full skirts and layers of blouses. Then, totally lovesick Mick Fleetwood rang up and said he was coming, too, and would they please meet his plane. But on the day he arrived, the girls dropped some acid and went to the wrong airport. Somehow Mick found his way to Stevie’s house, and she could see he was in bad shape, done in by alcohol, guilt (he’d lied to his wife about why he was going to Hawaii), and the pressures of managing the band and other clients like Bob Welch, whose new solo album French Kiss was about to become a big success. Mick told Stevie that he needed her and desperately needed to be near her. He said he felt their affair was cooling down and he didn’t want that to happen. But the thrill of hidden, reckless romance still appealed to both of them, and all Stevie could do was try to reassure him that everything would work out in the end. She felt sorry for the overwhelmed drummer, who’d left school at fifteen to make it as a musician in Swinging London. Stevie told Sara and the other girls to be nice to Mick.

  Mick knew his former brother-in-law George Harrison was vacationing in Maui, so Stevie invited him over. They spent a memorable afternoon by the pool, Stevie in pigtails, nicely tanned, smiling, flirting, teasing the relaxed, bare-chested, chain-smoking Beatle, trying to get him to write a song with her. This didn’t work, but it was fun.

  Gradually Mick began to relax and feel better in the tonic of the islands. He began to hang out by the pool with Sara Recor while Stevie was working on songs. According to Mick, “Sara was a good singer, and she knew all the old country songs that Stevie liked. They’d sing all night, calling themselves the Twang Sisters. At the time Sara was working as a model for the Elite and Casablanca agencies. She was gorgeous, charming, gregarious, funny, and extremely warm.” Fleetwood couldn’t help being enchanted by Sara’s beautiful full-breasted figure. In fact, he couldn’t take his eyes off Sara, and Stevie noticed and teased him about it.

  The next day something fateful happened. They heard there was a fun nightspot called Blue Max in the village of Lahaina; there was a band on that night, and they decided to go. They piled into a couple of cars and arrived just as the band was going on. Stevie was instantly recognized at the door, and they were given tables by the little stage. Stevie was immediately taken with the band’s girl singer, an exotic-looking, black-haired twenty-two-year-old who looked like a madonna in a Renaissance painting. This was Sharon Celani, from Los Angeles, whose band had been working Hawaii’s steak-and-luau circuit for a couple of years. And she was a great band singer. What pipes! Sharon’s movements were subtle, understated, and very sexy. She was a true star. Stevie liked her so much that when the band lit into Linda Ronstadt’s big hit “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” she grabbed a tambourine and climbed onstage in a chintz skirt and a pink blouse and started to wail backup vocals for Sharon on the chorus. The Blue Max crowd went crazy. “She sang with me,” Sharon said later. “No one could believe it. We did all her tunes.”

  S
haron and Stevie talked between sets. Stevie mentioned that the tropical atmosphere was a temptation to try to write but that she didn’t have a piano to work on. Sharon remembered, “I called up a friend and arranged to get a piano brought to Stevie’s place. When she got the piano she invited me over to sing with her on a new song idea, and I’ve been singing with her ever since.” Over the next few weeks, Sharon Celani quit her band and returned to Los Angeles with Stevie Nicks. She moved into Stevie’s house, joined the entourage as a trusted junior member, and started singing with Stevie on the home-studio demo tapes that would evolve into Stevie’s songs on the next Fleetwood Mac album. The relationship between Stevie and Sharon has remained strong for forty years and continues through this writing.

  4.2 Wait a Minute, Baby

  Stevie Nicks stayed in Hawaii to write when Mick Fleetwood returned to Los Angeles. He had to find a studio to record the band’s next album, and then try to figure out what that album was going to be like. The label and their fans wanted it to be like Rumours, still selling millions in the agora. But Lindsey Buckingham declared himself in open revolt. He’d seen the manic energy of punk heroes the Clash and their spitting young fans in London, where Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Elton John, and all the older musicians were mocked for being out of touch with their audience and reviled as “dinosaur bands” and Boring Old Farts. In New York young groups like Talking Heads, Television, and Blondie were turning punk rock (which didn’t get played on the radio or sell many records) into New Wave, a power-pop movement that both got on the radio and sold albums. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours sound was now old hat to Lindsey, and he insisted it would be prostitution if they tried to duplicate it. It would, Lindsey told Mick, be mortifying to be called a boring old fart. The era of the longhaired, spangled rock star was over. Now he was David Byrne from Talking Heads, a cool guy in short hair and a loose suit. Elvis Costello had just arrived in LA from England with a dazzling songbook of short, sharp tunes. Waddy Wachtel told Lindsey that Linda Ronstadt was going to do three of Costello’s songs on her next record.

  Lindsey was basically saying he wanted to return Fleetwood Mac to the harder, adrenalized sounds of “Oh Well” and “Rattlesnake Shake” via new ideas and maverick invention. His ambition was to somehow graft a punk/New Wave sound onto their band’s soft rock ambience—and make it work.

  Mick bought into this, because Lindsey was right. You’re either an artist or a whore in the music business, and Mick knew that Lindsey’s intentions were pure. Besides, who could now tell Fleetwood Mac what to do? They had been a blues band, then a jam band, then a rock band, then a soft rock supernova. The Rumours groove had to be part of a progressive continuum, not the endgame. And there was more: Lindsey wanted to work on his songs for the next album at home. He wanted to avoid being in the band’s studio with Stevie; he somehow even wanted to avoid producing her songs, but Mick told him he had to.

  Then Stevie came home, and was driven to band meetings at Mick’s mansion on Bellagio Drive in exclusive Bel Air by Sara Recor. Mick wanted the band to buy a studio of its own, but this was vetoed as too expensive. Instead they invested over a million dollars to customize Studio D at Village Recorders in Westwood during that summer. A new recording console was bought and installed. Rare woods from Brazil and volcanic stones from Hawaii went into the décor. The control room was comfortable, like a rock star’s home. The lounge had English ale on tap and a display of Africana and weird objects. The as-yet untitled next album would be one of the most expensive ever, before anyone played a note. (Mick: “When it was all over more than a year later, we’d spent one-point-four million on the studio, and we didn’t own it. The questions changed from ‘When are you breaking up?’ to ‘How much did that album really cost?’”)

  Rumours sold two million more records, cassettes, and eight-track tapes that spring.

  *

  May 1978. Stevie is writing as the band starts experimenting with new music. She wanted to revive “Smile at You” and “Sorcerer/Lady of the Mountains,” both rejected from Rumours by Lindsey, who didn’t like them. She had the beginnings of “Angel,” about Mick Fleetwood, and “Little Child,” about herself. She worked on these with Tom Moncrieff to make demos to take to the band. There was also an as-yet wordless piano demo she was calling “Sara” after her close friend.

  That month Lindsey and Carol had a barbecue at their June Street home for the Mac family. Stevie had been invited, but didn’t show up after Mick informed her that he’d confessed (almost) everything about their affair to Jenny. Jenny told Carol about this at the party, and the secret romance between Stevie and Mick was hidden no longer. Lindsey said he’d known all along that it would happen. A few days later Stevie attended John McVie’s wedding to his secretary, Julie Reubens, at his house in the Hollywood Hills. It was a rock star–studded event with all the big English musicians in Los Angeles drinking to the couple’s health. Stevie wore white, upstaging the bride. Then she got into a shouting match in an upstairs bedroom with a distraught Jenny Fleetwood, who lit into Stevie with ferocious intent to shame her. Stevie denied that she was having an affair with Mick, but Jenny wasn’t having it. Their raised voices caused alarm among the guests. Robin Snyder was summoned and led a now mortified Stevie out of the room.

  In the aftermath, Jenny sent Mick’s parents back to England, then she and the girls went home as well. Jenny Boyd and Mick Fleetwood divorced for the second time. Jenny wouldn’t speak to Stevie Nicks for decades, a silence finally broached when Jenny asked to interview Stevie for her doctoral dissertation about rock stars and drug addiction. Stevie agreed, and the two old friends made up (sort of).

  *

  In the summer of 1978, after they began their next record, Fleetwood Mac went out on tour. They continued to perform before their witchy backdrop of wintry bare trees and a cloudy full moon. They started in Wisconsin before heading to Dallas, Texas, where they were headlining the sold-out Cotton Bowl. Not much conversation on the customized Boeing 737 jet aircraft, a long way from the rented station wagons of yore. At the foot of the ramp a local Dallas TV crew thrusts a camera in just-deplaned Stevie’s face while John Courage is distracted. She peers intently through brown eyes without her glasses, longish blond hair flowing in the breeze. She’s sporting a red backpack. “We need to go out and play,” she tells the reporter. “Fleetwood Mac does not want to be just a recording band.” Asked if she liked Texas, she says, “Sure. I lived in El Paso for five years when I was little.” Then JC sweeps her away and into a Lincoln stretch limousine, which joins a convoy of six cars taking the group to their hotel.

  The Cotton Bowl was the biggest place the band had played, the audience the largest Stevie ever had to win over. She did it with a dramatic, show-stopping dance of Rhiannon. Her voice was a bit ragged but she sounded like she meant it. The stage went dark midway through the song as Lindsey began his guitar solo. The blue light shone on Stevie crouching by the drum riser, waiting for the finale. When Lindsey was done, Stevie drifted across the stage, her black chiffon cape trailing, spinning a bit in her stacked heels, black ribboned tambourine in hand, and then finishing the piece in a shredding rave-up that ended in a deep bow as the band crashed to a climactic thump. Lights out! Standing ovation.

  After the show Mick took a call from his sister Sally in England. His father was dying and he’d better come quick. Stevie didn’t have time to reach out to him before he’d left Dallas for London. A couple of big shows were postponed, and the tour stayed in Dallas to await Mick’s return.

  Stevie used this downtime to record the first version of her new song, “Sara.” This happened at a Dallas studio owned by Gordon Perry, an old friend of Keith Olsen’s whom they’d known from Buckingham Nicks days at Sound City. Perry’s studio was in a deconsecrated church, which provided a spooky and charming atmosphere. During the making of the first “Sara” demo—sixteen minutes long and referencing everyone in the band and its extended family’s lives and lo
ves—Stevie also became close with Gordon’s wife, Lori Perry. Lori was a lovely, fair-skinned redhead, originally from Los Angeles, and a talented singer and trained dancer. In addition to the “Sara” demo, Stevie also recorded the first demo version of a new song (mostly about Mick) called “Beauty and the Beast” in Dallas that night. Stevie would continue working on “Sara” as Fleetwood Mac stayed on the road through August. A later “Sara” demo has her on piano, with Tom Moncrieff on bass and a beat box. Mick overdubbed a drum track and a studio singer named Annie McLoone added harmony vocals.

  Stevie’s affair with Mick was put on hold while they were touring together, as there is only so much angst that human frailty can put up with. In September Lindsey even helped her think about arrangements for “Angel” and “Beautiful Child” in one of the rare moments when they were in the recording studio together. By then Lindsey had chopped off all his hair and was wearing tailored suits. Gone forever were the floppy silk kimono tops and bell-bottomed jeans. Now Stevie had to admit that her adversary looked pretty damn cute.

  But Lindsey was acting out his anger and confusion. His girlfriend Carol later wrote that he had digestive problems, anxiety attacks over the directions he was taking the band, and that one night he had choked her in a blind rage. A few weeks later, she claimed, Lindsey beat her up and dragged her, with her hair caught in his car window, in Christine’s driveway. “He was a maniac,” producer Ken Caillat said of Lindsey when they began working on the album that would be called Tusk. “Early on, he came in [the studio] and freaked out in the shower and cut off all his hair with nail scissors. The first day [of recording] he said, ‘Turn every knob a hundred eighty degrees from where it is now and see what happens.’ He’d tape microphones to the floor and get into a sort of push-up position to sing. He was stressed out.”