Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  Stevie liked Danny Goldberg immediately and sensed that he could be a valuable ally and asset to her entourage. At only twenty-four, Danny had been vice-president of Led Zeppelin’s phenomenally successful label, Swan Song Records, which not only released the band’s albums but also had success with other English acts like Bad Company and Maggie Bell, the British Janis Joplin. Danny handled all of Zeppelin’s publicity, but had left Swan Song two years earlier, and now had his own (somewhat struggling) public relations firm specializing in rock bands. Stevie liked that Danny was clear-eyed and didn’t take drugs. He was a spiritual guy connected to a fervent group of New Yorkers that conducted meditation meetings in an old church amid the cargo warehouses and sail lofts on Hudson Street, way downtown. Danny was tall, attractive, with long red hair and a funny, reassuring manner.

  Over supper in an Indian restaurant, Nirvana on Central Park South, Stevie told Danny she wanted his advice on how to get Margi Kent’s fashion designs into Vogue magazine. Danny recalled, “I wondered why she didn’t ask the PR person for Fleetwood Mac, or the Warner Records PR department to help, and I was astonished to hear that Stevie had extremely limited clout in the context of the group. Although I, and millions of other rock fans, saw her as the principal star of Fleetwood Mac because of her hit songs ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Dreams,’ she said that she was treated as a space cadet, a ‘chick singer.’” Stevie told Danny of her humiliation that “Silver Springs” had been left off Rumours after she’d given the song to her mother. Danny was incredulous. Rumours had been Billboard magazine’s #1 album for thirty-nine straight weeks (a run that has never been repeated), largely on the basis of Stevie’s songs.

  Stevie explained that she had formed her own circle of advisers and was looking to branch out into solo work, fashion, possibly even film production. Danny naturally offered to do whatever he could to help and asked how to contact her. She produced reading glasses, paper, and pen from her pocketbook and—left-handed—wrote her phone number in large, looping numerals. Paul Fishkin winked at him, and Danny sensed a bond between the three of them.

  Quicker than you can say Rhiannon, Danny was on a plane to Los Angeles. But before he left New York he kept his word about helping Margi Kent. Nevertheless, Vogue didn’t want to know about Stevie Nicks or her wardrobe. Indeed, Seventh Avenue thought nothing interesting had come out of California since West Hollywood designer Rudi Gernreich’s topless bathing suits in 1966, and even then California was known to be anti-style, just a place where you wanted to take off your clothes and splash barefoot in the surf.

  Danny got a warm welcome from Stevie, who’d told her posse to be good to him. “You’ll like him,” she’d said. “He’s vibey. He’s very Rhiannon.” To ingratiate himself, Danny arrived with a rare video cassette of Led Zeppelin’s 1976 concert movie The Song Remains the Same. Stevie loved this. The movie had only had a limited theatrical release, and home video cassette recorders were then still so rare that there were hardly any commercial tapes available. The Zeppelin film went into heavy rotation on Stevie’s home VCR, along with Dumbo and Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.

  For the next few months, through 1979, Danny was a friendly presence at the big pink house on El Contento Drive in the Hollywood Hills. He made friends with Robin Snyder, Stevie’s best friend and speech therapist, and her husband, Kim Anderson. Tall, bearded, good looking, affable, Anderson had been the local promo guy in St. Louis; Danny surmised he’d been promoted to a national job because he was close to Fleetwood Mac. Margi Kent and Sharon Celani seemed to live at the house. Same with Stevie’s younger brother, Christopher. Herbie Worthington, who’d shot Fleetwood Mac’s album covers, was the house photographer. There were other girls around, Stevie’s acolytes, none of whom seemed to be attached to any man.

  Most of the action took place at night in the large kitchen, where Stevie enjoyed preparing fresh tacos and quesadillas for the gang. Music was constantly playing. Stevie seemed to like Tom Petty a lot. (She said if Fleetwood Mac ever broke up, the only other band she could see herself in was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.) Then there was the living room, where she kept her Bosendorfer piano. Danny: “I almost stopped breathing the first time I saw her hunched over the piano, singing trancelike a mournful arrangement of ‘Rhiannon,’ quite different from the recorded version. Many artists are less impressive in person than their image. Stevie was even more magnetic, more compelling, more charismatic. I was besotted.”

  But it never turned into anything other than a close and trusting friendship. Stevie explained that there were many other written fragments of songs about Rhiannon and other figures in the old Welsh myths. Danny suggested that maybe she could get a movie production deal for the Rhiannon material, and she told him to go for it. She would write more songs for it. So Danny got organized. A writer was assigned to write a treatment. Danny: “I remember the euphoria I felt when I got the signed letter of agreement. Stevie Nicks had publicly said I was someone she was in business with!”

  Next Danny flew to Tucson and met with Evangeline Walton, and got her to assign Stevie the rights to her books—for no money unless a movie actually got made. Danny apologized that Stevie’s plans were tenuous at that point. “Don’t worry, dear,” the old Welsh visionary said. “All true artists are a little neurotic.” Danny then set up meetings with Hollywood producers who were happy to tell their kids that Stevie Nicks was in the office today, but no movie deals were forthcoming. After a few weeks of this, Danny was worried that he was wasting Stevie’s time. It wouldn’t be long before the electric gates on El Contento would fail to open for him.

  So he was surprised and flattered when she gave him one of her totemic crescent moons. These were 18-carat golden moon charms, copies of one she’d found in London and had a jeweler reproduce. “She presented [the moons] to her close friends with a solemnity like that of an initiation,” Danny later wrote. “I was deeply touched the night she gave me one. I’d never worn jewelry, but I bought a chain and wore it around my neck for years.”

  As a writer himself, Danny was fascinated by the sources of Stevie’s inspiration. He would observe her at the piano, zoning out for hours, searching for notes in an intuitive style of composition. And then she’d come up for air with something new. “Stevie’s mysticism was entirely self-taught. Not for her studies of Blake, Rimbaud, Ginsberg, nor even the Bible. She was an autodidactic mystic who viewed the universe through the eyes of a middle American,” Danny later observed.

  Danny had a great mother himself, and knew what a good woman was. He wrote that Stevie “spoke in an intense quiet cadence that conveyed the idea that whatever topic she was obsessed with at the moment was of transcendent importance. But she was also extravagantly generous in her praise of others, laughed heartily at other people’s jokes, and created the illusion that everyone in her entourage was somehow her equal.”

  *

  One of Danny Goldberg’s main projects in those days was MUSE, an acronym for Musicians United for Safe Energy, an antinuclear energy group of famous musicians formed after the serious accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in March 1979. Danny was on a steering committee that included Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, and others. These in turn recruited Bruce Springsteen, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (among many others) to perform five nights of benefit concerts in New York that September. Danny had the notion of trying to get Fleetwood Mac on board, since the Tusk tour wouldn’t begin until a month later, in October. Jackson Browne agreed to pitch the idea to Fleetwood Mac, and a band meeting was arranged one night in July at Stevie’s house.

  It was a disaster. The members of Fleetwood Mac and their entourage lived in what Mick always described as “The Bubble,” with little or no idea of what was going on in the real world. But a nuclear accident tended to focus the minds even of spoiled rock stars, all of whom had seen the recent Hollywood movie The China Syndrome about an atomic meltdown. That night at Stevie’s house,
as antique silver salvers of cocaine circulated around the living room, the band sat with Jackson Browne, whom they all respected as one of the better LA singer-songwriters, and listened to his passionate plea for help. He had just been arrested at an antinuclear demonstration at the Diablo Canyon reactor in Northern California, and described the feelings of empowerment that were pulling many of their famous peers into the movement. The New York concerts were going to be historic, he told them, and he thought it would be good for Fleetwood Mac to be part of MUSE, and join in the movement against atomic energy in the United States.

  To Browne’s surprise, Fleetwood Mac seemed uninterested, glazed over, and even bored by the whole thing. Mick told Browne they’d get back to him. Stevie Nicks even gave Browne a piece of her mind. “I said to him, ‘But they could have broken your fingers, those beautiful fingers that write all those beautiful songs. Are you crazy? We need you to write songs. We don’t need you to be in jail.’ He admitted this had occurred to him.

  “I’m not a martyr,” she went on. “I would much rather be around to write the story than die for it and leave nothing behind. I believe you should put your talent where your talent is, and stay out of the rest of it.” This was Stevie’s credo: stay out of politics. “We’re not a political group,” she would later affirm. “My mission is not to stand on a political soapbox.”

  Jackson Browne would report back to his MUSE colleagues that Fleetwood Mac had taken a pass. This episode can be seen as a reminder of those strange days when popular music seemed to have something to do with changing the world.

  4.5 Modern Records

  Paul Fishkin now realized that the time was ripe for Stevie to go solo. When he’d been her boyfriend he never wanted to mention being in business with her. When she’d dumped him for Mick he was too devastated to even think about it. When Mick dumped her for Sara he thought there might be hope. Surely now was the time for Stevie Nicks to raise her banner.

  Danny agreed, especially when due diligence discovered that Stevie was signed to Warner Bros. Records as a member of Fleetwood Mac, but not for solo recordings. No one at Warners had bothered to put Stevie and Lindsey under contract when they joined the band in 1975. They were considered just the latest, probably temporary, members of a constantly fluid, midlevel English band. There was none of the usual “Leaving Member” clauses that gave the label the first option on their solo work. Someone in Legal had blown it. Stevie and Lindsey were free agents, able to contract with any label that might want their solo music.

  Danny: “Now that Paul and Stevie were no longer dating, there was no reason not to talk to her about forming a small record label revolving around her future solo work. She respected Paul as a ‘record man’ who knew promotion and sales, and had confidence in me as a PR guy deeply committed to her solo talent. In retrospect, I’m not sure how I had the balls to suggest it to her, but when I presented the idea of the three of us starting a label together she went for it.”

  The way it was put to Stevie, she would remain in Fleetwood Mac but use her backlog of songs to make solo albums as well. She nodded in agreement when Danny averred that four songs on a Fleetwood Mac album every few years couldn’t provide a big enough outlet for her talent. The economics were basic: she would get the same monies—royalties and advances—that she would normally receive, plus own a percentage of the company. The label could also be an outlet for her musician friends in the way Swan Song had been for Led Zeppelin’s. Basically Stevie was being offered more money and more control, which appealed to the independent streak her mother had instilled in her from childhood.

  The next step, Danny explained, was to forge a short-term contract for two Stevie Nicks solo albums and then look for a partnership with one of the major labels, based on the relationship Bearsville had with Warners. Their assets would be a signed contract, the piano songs for the Rhiannon film project, and the more polished demos of songs like “Lady of the Mountains” that had been left off Mac’s albums.

  At this, Stevie led them to her home studio and played them the demo of a song she’d recently written as a duet for Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, country music stars who were married to each other. But Jennings didn’t want to cut it, so Stevie called Don Henley and he came over and sang it with her. This was “Leather and Lace.”

  Stevie wanted to know what to call their label. Paul suggested Modern Records, a gesture toward the cool early independent labels out of New York. The industry, he said, would totally get it, but Stevie didn’t like the idea. “I like old things,” she insisted. “I like vibey things, frilly things. I am anything but modern.” In the end, she never provided another idea, and Modern Records became her bespoke label.

  Stevie next told Paul and Danny that Tusk was coming out, and she was about to disappear on tour for a year. They said they would pull things together while she was gone and would keep her informed. The three of them put their hands together and shook on it. Stevie murmured a blessing. Danny Goldberg tried not to cry with happiness. True to her word, Stevie Nicks signed the deal documents two weeks later.

  *

  October 1979. Stevie was thirty-one years old when Tusk was released. Her five songs anchored the twenty-song double album and were probably responsible for most of its meager sales compared to the mighty Rumours, still flying out of record stores. Instead of a willowy, mystical Stevie Nicks, the Tusk album cover featured coproducer Ken Caillat’s mutt, Scooter; this dog was hated by both Stevie and Christine for bothering their little terriers at recording sessions. (Stevie told Caillat that she had a curse put on Scooter. When the dog died a couple of years later, Stevie told a grieving Caillat she was glad the curse had worked.) The album’s proto-eighties graphics and messy collages by society photographer Peter Beard left most fans puzzled and unimpressed.

  Sales of Tusk were slow from the outset, since the sixteen-dollar price tag equals about fifty in current money. The choice of album track “Tusk” as the first single was a mistake; radio programmers complained it didn’t sound like Fleetwood Mac and so they didn’t play it. Then there was Warner’s epic blunder of broadcasting the entire album over Westwood One, a national FM radio network that reached across America and beyond. Almost anyone who had a decent stereo set had a cassette recorder attached to the amplifier and receiver, with the result that millions of fans stayed home that night and taped Tusk, the entire album, thus avoiding retail outlets completely. Then the other rock radio networks blacklisted the band for excluding them. Critics savaged Tusk as disappointing, boring, and pretentious, at the same time praising Stevie’s songs as either touching or rousing iterations of her persona as high priestess of rock. (Some critics also recognized what Lindsey was trying to do—not be boring—while also noting that one only heard Stevie and Christine’s songs on the radio.)

  Everyone proclaimed Tusk would have made a killer single-album release. There was a lot of “I told you so” directed at Lindsey, and at Mick, who had supported his insistence on making it new. Then, after the band started touring, sales picked up. Tusk would sell four million albums and tapes in the first couple of years, but it was considered (by some) as a commercial “albatross” compared to Rumours. (Later critics would relate Tusk to Rumours as the Beatles’ White Album had been to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: a challenging, individualistic, experimental collection after a brilliant and wildly successful group effort.)

  Other promotional stunts came off better. On a sunny autumn day later in October, Fleetwood Mac arrived on Hollywood Boulevard to commemorate their new star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was a mad scene, with a thousand fans sitting on bleachers and the USC Trojans blaring out “Tusk” in full uniform. The crowd began screaming when they saw Stevie arrive, drowning out Mo Ostin’s speech about how important the band was to the label and the industry in general. They screamed again when Stevie stepped up to the podium, her billowing white satin dress blowing in the wind. “Thank you for believing in the crystal vision,” she told the fans. “
Crystal visions really do come true.”

  *

  The truth was that no one in Fleetwood Mac felt like going on tour for a year. They were all emotionally exhausted and in some cases creatively played out. When they gathered at Christine’s house for a photo call for their tour program, no one was smiling. Stevie wasn’t speaking to Mick. Lindsey—short hair, Armani suit—was rude to her. Christine was involved with Dennis Wilson and was convinced he was cheating on her—all the time. John was drinking again. Mick and John Courage tried to soften the blow by chartering a jet airliner so they wouldn’t have to fly commercial. They had some of the most expensive hotels in the world repaint their presidential suites and install white grand pianos for Stevie and Chris. Stevie’s concert wardrobe—six costume changes per show—cost well into six figures. The tour’s contractual refreshment rider stipulated gargantuan backstage buffets that no one hardly ever touched because they were running on the priciest Peruvian cocaine and could hardly look at food, let alone eat. The backstage bar bill at each show could have sent someone to college for a year. Their flights were met by so many black stretch limos—one for each band member and even some of the support people—that their hotel convoys looked like funeral corteges. If it sounded decadent, Mick said later, well it was: “But it also helped to keep us going during the most challenging and exhausting years of our lives.”

  Still, the band sounded tired during several weeks of rehearsals at the venerable Sunset Gower Studios complex, where Fred Astaire danced and Busby Berkeley had filmed olympian movie production numbers. Stevie (recovering from a root canal dental procedure and on painkillers) and her ever-growing entourage of ladies would arrive around eight o’clock. The autumn nights were chilly, and Stevie rehearsed in long tweed skirts and woolen leg-warmers. When she wasn’t needed she’d run offstage and huddle with her girls, safe in their embrace. She told Mick that most nights she didn’t even want to come and rehearse. It felt more like a job to her than fun. He reminded her that Fleetwood Mac was a job, a good sort of job, but hard work all the same.