Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  *

  In October 1978 Lindsey invited everyone to a Halloween party at his house on June Street. Stevie’s faction gathered at her house in the hills for makeup and wardrobe. Stevie would be going as a white witch. Mick would be a vampire in a long cape. Lindsey would be the pope. Christine was Aunt Jemima in full mammy outfit and blackface. McVie was uniformed in full Nazi SS regalia (one of his obsessions). Sara Recor was going as a princess, with her long auburn hair trailing to her waist. Just before leaving in a limo convoy, Stevie noticed Mick and Sara huddling together and wondered what they were talking about.

  A month later, in November, Stevie took a phone call from Jim Recor, Sara’s husband. He explained that Sara had left him for Mick Fleetwood. In fact, she had taken her things and moved into Mick’s house in Bel Air. Jim said he was sorry to be the bearer of such bad news, and Stevie thanked him for letting her know, since no one else had bothered (or dared).

  Stevie Nicks was very hurt by this betrayal, and she went into a state of shock, locking herself in her bedroom for two days. She couldn’t eat. “I lost Mick and my friend Sara on the same day,” she said later. “No one told me, except Jim.”

  “I had started to see Mick Fleetwood romantically,” she later explained to an interviewer, “and I had a very dear friend whose name was Sara, who just went after Mick. And they fell in love, and the next thing is Sara’s husband calling me to say, ‘Sara moved in with Mick this morning, and I just thought you might want to know.’ That was three months into a thirteen-month album. So I lost Mick, which honestly wasn’t that big of a deal because that was a rocky relationship. But losing my friend Sara? That was a huge blow. Sara was banished from the studio by the rest of the band.… No one was speaking, and I wouldn’t even look directly at Mick. And that went on for months, but it was great fodder for writing. The songs poured out of us!”

  And later, Stevie Nicks would have her revenge.

  4.3 Crazy Land

  So in December 1978, Stevie Nicks decided to tough it out. When Mick, who looked miserable and terribly rattled, tried to explain, she cut him off with, “Mick, I don’t want to talk about it.” She worked on a lyric called “Freedom”: “My intentions were clear I was with him Everyone knew / Poor little fool.” Stevie was comforted by Robin, now Robin Anderson, having married Warner Bros. promo guy Kim Anderson a little before.

  Then Christine McVie suddenly dumped Mac’s veteran lighting director Curry Grant, who moved out of her faux English country house in the hills. Within a few weeks, Beach Boys drummer (and longtime LA wild-man-about-town) Dennis Wilson moved in with Christine and started spending her millions on cocaine, cars, and other women. (Ten years earlier, Dennis had helpfully brought the homicidal Manson Family into the Beach Boys’ orbit.)

  Now the studio ambience was really deadly, since no one in the Mac circle approved of Mick stealing their friend Jim Recor’s wife. Sara Recor was blamed for the whole affair and lost all her friends except Carol Harris. All were fearful that Stevie was now going to quit the band and embark on a much-anticipated career as a solo artist.

  Stevie remembered this era with not a little sadness. “That whole thing was a nightmare. I went up and sat on a mountain for three hours and watched my life pass before me. Then I had to get up the next day, get dressed, and go into work, and not ever look at Mick for months. It was horrible, horrible: months of sitting in that room, five days a week, all day long and all night sometimes, sitting on the couch just watching, writing in my journal and watching some more, and crocheting scarves by the dozen. It was a very strange atmosphere.

  “I’d have been very happy to sit it out in the lounge, but I wasn’t gonna not know what was going on, not be a part of the music that was being made in my name. So I was gonna sit there and watch everybody. I was like, ‘Lindsey, with your new ideas—be damned. Mick—you be damned also. Christine, John, and I will watch and make sure you guys don’t go round the twist and mess up everything for us. We’ll be keepers of the gate while you guys go to complete and utter crazy land.’”

  Crazy Land was full of cocaine. The men snorted massive rails of white powder up their noses while Stevie and Christine wore tiny silver spoons on chains around their necks, discreetly sniffing small doses until the men ran out and came looking for theirs.

  Another reason Stevie might have preferred to remain in the studio, where a pair of giant African elephant tusks towered over the console, is that handsome young assistant engineer Hernan Rojas had caught the roving eye of a now single (and lonely) Stevie Nicks. This bloomed into a relationship with Rojas (who was engaged) that also contributed (in terms of Stevie’s newest lyrics) to the over-egged pudding that became the next Fleetwood Mac album—almost a year later.

  *

  Lindsey later maintained that Stevie hardly ever came to Studio D at the Village Recorder, except to work on her own songs. These were songs of heartbreak but also songs of love and hope. The lyrics were stream-of-consciousness poetic phrases that led into other fragments and ideas. “Angel” was an upbeat, funny song about Mick. “Sometimes the most innocent thing … wide eyes tell stories … a charmed hour in a haunted song.” Her singing is strong, passionate, more mature than the voice on Rumours. “Try not to reach out … Try hard but you never get through.” Lindsey’s arrangement echoes the colorful chordal textures of Brian Wilson, tending toward the bluer side of the music. (Almost all of Lindsey’s songs on Tusk would lean toward the Beach Boys’ classic groove, overlaid with a saw-toothed edge of New Wave bands Talking Heads, X, and Devo.)

  Stevie’s “Beautiful Child” was arranged as a soft lullaby, evoking tender memories of being a child and wanting to have a child. “Too trusting, yes, as women often are … I will do what I’m told.” It’s a memory of holding, comforting, and being comforted, and of childhood’s loss and end. Lindsey sings the chorus with her, as if holding her hand in reconciliation.

  “Storms” was gloomy, pathetic, wonderful; beginning with an organ madrigal, the lyrics evoke empty nights and an empty bed. It’s disconsolate storytelling, directly addressing her lover: “Every night that goes between I feel a little less As you slowly go away from me / This is only another test … So I try to say good-bye, my friend … And not all the friends in the world can save us.” Stevie uses a soft, girlish voice to indicate the depths of her feelings about what she has gone through in the year 1978. “Those lyrics came out when I was really hurting,” she said later.

  (The first time Stevie played the “Storms” piano demo for the band, Lindsey told her it was crap—but might be salvageable. This devolved into a scream fest, ending with Stevie in tears and Lindsey storming around the studio in a fury. No one ever told Lindsey that his songs were boring, because everyone was afraid of his withering sarcasm and his rages.)

  Then there was “Sisters of the Moon,” a stirring rock song about female solidarity and the mystical pull that the lunar orb has on our planet and our women. Here the drums are high in the mix, the electric guitar a wailing banshee of fear. The lyrics are muddy and seem only half finished. Stevie’s intent is occluded, like a phase of a waxing moon; her delivery is mysterious. More of a mood than an actual song, “Sisters” would prove one of the most popular and durable of Stevie’s songs. (Some observers have related the song’s material to Sisters of the Moon, a famous series of watercolors from the 1930s by the British artist Leonora Carrington that featured idealized magical heroines and spiritual intermediaries such as Diana the Huntress, Fantasia, Iris, the goddess Rumour, and the Gypsy queen Indovina Zingara.)

  Stevie’s “Fireflies” was a speeding Southern California rocker with strong harmony singing between Nicks and Buckingham over a hypnotic rhythm track from Mick and John, with a brilliant guitar lick from Lindsey, and with a heroically sung chorus. (The great “Fireflies” would be left off the Tusk album but would resurface as a single B-side in 1981.)

  “Sara” was the song of Stevie’s they worked hardest on. People close to Stevie said that it
was typical of her bigheartedness that she could still so ardently declare her love for the friend who had so let her down. Under Lindsey’s thumb, and over many weeks, the long piano demo was cut down from a quarter hour to six-and-a-half minutes. It began with “Wait a minute, baby,” a shuffle from Mick’s brushes, and a calm, measured vocal, drowning in the sea of love. There were magical chordal changes and a floating, soothing, hypnogogic chorale. There’s the great dark wing of Mick roaring up the hill in his Porsche or the Ferrari. With total conviction and unshakeable belief, Stevie pours it on. “The night is coming … anywhere … Ask me and I’m there.” Lindsey’s ascending triad of chords takes “Sara” and her soft, euphoric mood into ethereal realms of breathless pop atmospherics. Would you, she asks as if to herself, “swallow all your pride?”

  In the end, “Sara” was Stevie Nicks staking out a new claim, indeed perhaps swallowing her pride about Lindsey’s agency in her music. In the future, she seemed to indicate, she would pursue a sort of rapturous grandiosity to which she expected her audience to respond and accept. Big emotions and ardent declarations of love would be her hallmarks. “Sara” would be the template for future songs that would require Stevie to turn deadly negatives into triumphant positives. The song would anchor the first of the four Tusk sides after a lethargic ballad, some faux punk rock drummed on shoe boxes in Lindsey’s bathroom, and more cod-Wilsonian pet sounds. “Sara” would wake Tusk up and give the punters reason to turn the record over.

  *

  Over the years, “Sara” became the most asked-about song by Stevie’s interviewers, even more than “Rhiannon.” Much later, she could laugh about it in a revealing talk with Entertainment Weekly:

  “It’s not about Sara, who was one of my best friends—even though everybody thinks it is. I used her name because I loved the name so much. But it was really about what was going on with all of us at that time. It was about Mick’s and my relationship, and it was about one I went into after Mick. Some songs are about a lot of things, some songs only have one or two lines that are the main thing, and then the rest of it, you’re just making a movie, writing a story about this one paragraph—that little kernel of life. ‘When you build your house’ was about: when you get your act together, then let me know, because until you get your act together, I really can’t be around you.”

  Was that about Don Henley?

  “He wishes! If Don wants to think the ‘house’ was one of the ninety houses he built and never lived in … If anyone said that, they’re so full of shit!”

  Others mentioned Joe Simon’s soul-stirring song “Drowning in the Sea of Love” as an inspiration.

  Some time later a songwriter sued Stevie, claiming she’d stolen the song. There was a small out-of-court settlement to make this person go away. Stevie had worked extremely hard on “Sara,” and she was hurt by the allegation.

  *

  Spring 1979. Fleetwood Mac convened in arid sunny weather at an empty Dodger Stadium in the Chavez Ravine section of Los Angeles to make a promo film for the big-band production number “Tusk.” This was an old Mac warm-up riff that had been turned into a mock hoodoo tribal chant. The fully uniformed Trojan Marching Band of the University of Southern California recreated their part from the album in prancing stadium formation while Stevie, lithe and so pretty in much longer hair, heeled sandals, and a cotton summer dress, showed off her considerable solo baton twirling skills. McVie was on his yacht somewhere in the Pacific, and was represented at the shoot by a life-size cardboard cutout wielded by Mick.

  It was around then that Stevie and her pretty blond acolyte Mary Torrey found themselves in a cocaine-fueled recording studio late one night with Lindsey and John Stewart, formerly of the Kingston Trio. Stewart’s banjo had been a big influence on Lindsey, who was producing Stewart’s solo album, Bombs Away Dream Babies. As a favor to Lindsey, Stevie attended the vocal sessions for “Gold,” Stewart’s song about driving over mountainous Kanen Dume Road from Malibu to the Valley, where the great LA studio musicians were turning music into money. But Stevie was tired and stoned and said she didn’t much feel like singing that night.

  John Stewart: “I had the lyrics to ‘Gold’ written out on enormous cue cards because Stevie can’t see too well. Mary went back in the booth [to sing] and I grabbed Stevie and said, ‘Stevie, come on, let’s just do the verses on this song, it’s not gonna take long.’ They turned on the tape and held up the cue cards. I put my hand over Stevie’s mouth when she wasn’t supposed to sing and hit her in the back when she was. She did it in one take and I got her on the song.”

  This is also where Stevie first met the great rock drummer Russ Kunkel, one of the most in-demand musicians in town. She liked tall, balding Russ immediately. He was famously a charming ladies’ man, and she was a single woman. There was an attraction between Stevie and Russ, an energy that would become a crucial partnership down the road.

  “Gold” was a Top 10 hit record when it came out later that year. Stevie’s vocal was mixed way high, and the single got on the air, even crossing over to country radio stations. (Stevie also sang on the album’s “Midnight Wind.”)

  Mick Fleetwood claimed that Stevie threatened to quit the band when they decided to name the new album Tusk. “I didn’t understand the title,” she said later. “There was nothing beautiful or elegant about the word ‘tusk.’ I don’t recall it being Mick’s joke about a … that went right over my little prudish head. I wasn’t even told that until after the record was done, and then I liked the title even less.” But Fleetwood Mac was still an infantile British phallo-centric imperium, and Mick simply ignored her.

  They had so many new songs that Mick and Lindsey decided to make Tusk a double album. Rumours was still selling in the millions. What could go wrong? To them it made sense. Lindsey wanted the double album for all his new-style songs to make an imprint on their now enormous audience. That summer, they previewed the new songs for the Warner Bros. executives, who vividly foresaw their Christmas bonuses flying out the window as they listened to Christine’s moody blues and Lindsey’s New Wave rants. They told the band that only four Stevie Nicks songs were not enough; they begged for more and were turned down. It was a time—1979–1980—of economic recession in America; an expensive double album might not be a very commercial proposition. Fleetwood Mac chose to ignore this sage advice from label president Mo Ostin.

  In August 1979 Fleetwood Mac convened in New York at the studio of photographer Richard Avedon, who shot the group for their album jacket at enormous cost. Then their label said, “You’re going to put a really sexy picture of Stevie Nicks on the album jacket, right?” They said, “No, we’re putting on a picture of our producer’s ugly dog.” Tusk would be released in late September 1979, but its fate was already sealed by some dumbly arrogant decisions made that summer.

  4.4 Secrets

  While Fleetwood Mac was busily screwing its new album into the ground, Stevie Nicks spent much of 1979 engaged in a quiet, top-secret campaign to further her own interests and those of her closest friends. By the end of the year Stevie would start her own record label, her own band, a slew of hit singles and albums, and a career as a solo artist that would propel her to even greater fame and fortune than she could ever have aspired to with Fleetwood Mac.

  Mick Fleetwood and Lindsey Buckingham would be sorry they had ever crossed little Stevie Nicks.

  This process had its beginnings with Stevie’s new clothes. After the release of their new album, Fleetwood Mac would embark on its biggest tour yet, a year of a hundred shows in the United States and the Pacific between October 1979 and January 1981. Stevie and her wardrobe designer, Margi Kent, decided that the Welsh witch’s black chiffon look and shag-cut hair was now passé. Stevie’s golden mane would now be long and fall below her slender shoulders. Stage clothes would be looser, colorful, and flowing, using different fabrics: laces, crepe, leather, organza, satins. The gauzy capes would give way to cropped jackets and corset-laced vests, plus layered looks in w
itchy tones. The iconic top hats would be replaced by elegant feathered berets or fascinators. Different shawls would be deployed to evoke different songs. A beautiful golden shawl was produced for “Gold Dust Woman,” and a spectacular wine-red one for “Sara.” Stevie loved Margi Kent’s designs, loved the fittings and the mirrors and the banter of couture. She felt that Margi—and indeed all her entourage—were artists like herself who deserved the same kind of recognition that she was enjoying. It was this altruistic sense of bringing friends along for the ride that indirectly led to Modern Records, Stevie’s new boutique record label.

  Fleetwood Mac headlined some big outdoor shows that spring and summer. When the tour hit New York, Stevie called former flame Paul Fishkin and asked him to come over to her hotel. Paul explained that there was a press party for the English band Foghat that night, and since he was the president of Bearsville Records, and since Foghat was their bestselling act, he had to attend. Stevie said she’d tag along as his date. A few hours later she picked Paul up in a black stretch limousine, and he told the driver to take them to Lincoln Center, the gleaming West Side arts complex. (Some livery companies used by Fleetwood Mac in those days were reportedly instructed not to send black drivers for Stevie Nicks.)

  The party was in the Performing Arts Library next to the opera house. Stevie, then at the height of fame, caused a stir when she walked in wearing a black velvet dress with a cinched waist, a louche black beret over her frizzy long hair. Paul introduced her to his best friend (and Bearsville publicist) Danny Goldberg, then twenty-nine. Paul mentioned that Danny had worked for Led Zeppelin; Stevie focused her deeply peering gaze on him, and started peppering him with questions about Jimmy Page. Danny was taken aback and then rallied under her onslaught. “I was momentarily intimidated by her glamour,” he recalled, “but was soon put at ease by her warm, self-deprecating manner.” Paul told Danny that Stevie needed some public relations advice, and Danny agreed to meet them for dinner the next evening.