Gold Dust Woman

by Stephen Davis

  It was hard work preparing for this next phase, but Stevie was enjoying doing it sober for the first time. She was in her element: rehearsals, repetition, learning other people’s new songs, hair and wardrobe, the discipline of a new campaign. Lindsey seemed slightly more mellow, and Stevie even liked his girlfriend (although she did ask her not to take her picture with her ever-present camera). At the same time, Lindsey could still be sarcastic and condescending to Stevie when he was frustrated. She chose to ignore his boorishness as much as possible. She was used to it.

  And so, after a ten-year hiatus, Fleetwood Mac returned for two concerts filmed on consecutive evenings in late May 1997 in Burbank before an adoring audience of friends, family, label staffers, and fan club members. The band was augmented with synths and percussion. Both concerts were filmed by an MTV crew, since The Dance would have its video debut on the cable network. “Welcome to our little soirée,” Christine told the audience after the second song.

  Stevie appeared in witchy black widow’s weeds, with long, tousled blond hair and clear eyes. Gold chains dangled from her neck and bangles from her wrists. There was a glint of a diamond on her right hand. A black silk scarf hung from her mike stand. She still looked heavy, but was very pretty at age forty-nine, and her movements were predicated on modest twirls and gestures. Her vocal coaching had improved her voice and returned it to an echo of what she had sounded like as a much younger singer. She used a speaksing technique on hypnotic “Dreams,” which brought out more of the song’s expressions of deep regret. She sang glistening backup with her girls on “Everywhere” from Tango. Mick pounded muffled drums to give “Rhiannon” her aura of bare ruined choirs and romantic flight. Singing at a lower pitch, Stevie deployed vibrato effects to say, in the intro, “and I still cry out for you—don’t leave me—don’t leave me.” The formerly Dionysian “dreams unwind” finale was now a more tensile, vestal ritual—“Take me by the wind, child, take me by the sky, take me now—and he still cries out for her—Don’t leave me—now…”

  Stevie wore a gorgeous reddish gold jet-beaded shawl for “Gold Dust Woman” and danced a staggering parody of dope addiction before she snarled the “running in the shadows” chorus as if she were trying to teach a hard-won lesson to her audience. They played “Gypsy” fast and straight ahead, with Stevie twirling ecstatically during the guitar solos. (And it has to be said that Lindsey’s always clever playing had reached some kind of apex as he bore down to amplify the lead guitarist’s role of rhythmic drive and musical impression.)

  Stevie and Lindsey played “Landslide” by themselves on a dark stage, after Stevie looked over at her father in the audience and said, “This is for you, Daddy.” The fans whooped at the line, “I’m getting older, too.” At the end, after a slightly wobbly vocal rendition of “Landslide,” Stevie embraced Lindsey with what may have been genuine tenderness, or a gesture of reconciliation for the fans and the cameras. A few days earlier she had told an interviewer that she was conscious that the band’s fans valued the epic romance of herself and Lindsey Buckingham. It was part of the legend and had to be respected.

  Lindsey switched to banjo for “Say You Love Me,” then took over and played his new song, “My Little Demon.” Then Stevie offered a slow and stately “Silver Springs,” which sprouted wings and soared with five voices on the chorus. The cameras captured Stevie glaring at Lindsey, and roaring at him as she sang the ominous warning that he would never get away from the sound of the woman who haunts (and still loves) him. “Thank you very much,” she told the cheering audience, “we really appreciate it. ‘Silver Springs’ is a great old song.” Then Stevie performed a clunky dance with her tambourine during “You Make Loving Fun,” before delivering her new song, “Sweet Girl,” which describes her global travels, “always on call / missing whole cities.”

  The concerts wound down with a supercharged “Go Your Own Way”; the arrival of the uniformed USC Trojan band for “Tusk”; the finale of “Don’t Stop”; and the classic Fleetwood Mac encore: Christine McVie at the piano by herself, lulling her listeners with “Songbird.”

  The album and video releases of The Dance were delayed when Lindsey decided the band hadn’t performed to his standard in either concert. When they chose the best songs, they replayed and re-sang almost everything. Using Pro Tools and Auto-Tune digital engineering, almost the entire show was “repaired, replaced, and retuned” (according to the disgruntled Ken Caillat) until Lindsey’s perfectionist vision had been attained. But this paid off when The Dance was released the following August. The album debuted at the top of Billboard’s chart. “Silver Springs” was released as a single and also sold well, which meant that Barbara Nicks would finally get paid royalties for the song her daughter had given her.

  Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac spent the autumn of 1997 on a forty-four-concert tour, which was fine with her. Cosseted and pampered by private planes, five-star hotels, and an attentive road crew, all she had to do was show up and sing, and she said later this period was crucial to her continuing recovery. The tour also grossed a reported $36 million. Reviewers were generally kind to the aging musicians, but some mentioned Lindsey’s showboating and overextended guitar solos. One review of a Texas concert noted, “Unfortunately, some incredibly self-indulgent moments ruined the band’s pleasant, if nostalgia-driven spell, which was primarily woven by the tambourine-playing gypsy that is still Stevie Nicks at forty-nine. Every time she twirled [in] her chiffon and velvet outfits while teetering in suede platform boots, the entire arena went nuts.”

  About halfway through the tour, it started getting to Lindsey that Stevie was getting all the love from the fans, who responded to the tormented howling of his own songs by making beer-and-bathroom runs. Acting out his rage with his guitar, his segments were likened to exorcisms by more than one newspaper critic. Around this time Stevie stopped embracing her old boyfriend after “Landslide.” Instead, the duo exchanged perfunctory nods and Stevie walked back to her place on the stage.

  Mountains of cocaine were no longer served at the preshow buffets. John Courage by now had retired, and the band now kept a greater distance between themselves and the crew. By the end of the tour Stevie noticed that Christine was unhappy and drinking more than usual. And Stevie told her people that Lindsey had been sullen or mean to her on almost every occasion when they were together off the stage. After the final show, Stevie pointedly told Mick that this was going to be her last Fleetwood Mac tour—for a very long time.

  8.3 Hall of Fame

  On January 11, 1998, Stevie Nicks and a small entourage flew from Los Angeles to New York, where they checked into the Waldorf Astoria hotel on Park Avenue. The next night, all dressed up in black velour and lace, Stevie took the elevator to the ballroom downstairs, where she and Fleetwood Mac were inducted (by Sheryl Crow) into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. (The actual hall had opened in Cleveland in 1995.) Fellow inductees included Santana, the Eagles, Gene Vincent, the Mamas and the Papas, and Lloyd Price. This is where Stevie recruited Sheryl Crow to work on her next solo album, and where Don Henley recruited Stevie to sing at benefits for his Walden Woods project, which sought to protect forest land adjacent to Walden Pond in Massachusetts, made famous by Henry David Thoreau. In the postinductions concert, Stevie and Lindsey sang “Landslide” and pretended to be civil to each other, before the whole band played “Big Love.” Mac’s founding guitar hero Peter Green played his “Black Magic Woman” with Santana, who’d had a Top 10 single with the song in 1970.

  *

  Now her new label Warner Bros. wanted Stevie’s new solo album, her sixth, but she put them off to spend the winter compiling a megacompilation to complete her contract with Atlantic Records. Stevie, her brother, and her assistants spent several months in her Paradise Valley house, choosing songs from hit singles to deep album cuts to studio outtakes and demos; also single B-sides, live tracks, and movie songs; also picking snapshots (mostly Stevie’s Polaroid prints) and primo images by Herbie Worthington and Ne
al Preston that depicted Stevie in all her varied personae: hieratic priestess, noir femme fatale, Scythian princess, Will o’ the Wisp spirit, satanic abbess, Astarte, Alice, the Queen of Sheba, prima ballerina, atomic cowgirl, waif, wraith, fairy godmother, et cetera. Stevie wrote and dictated an introduction and expressive production notes for some of the forty-six tracks on three compact discs, which would feature in the box set’s sixty-four-page booklet. She asked Danny Goldberg to write a short history of Modern Records. Stevie remixed “Blue Denim” and other Street Angel mixes that she’d never approved because she was just out of rehab and totally dazed, and also cut a new version of “Rhiannon” that would set a certain record straight. She wrote, “With all the bootlegged versions of ‘Rhiannon’ out there, I just decided to go into a studio with a great grand piano and play ‘Rhiannon’ to you now, as she is today. I feel her wisdom is much evolved … and you will hear that in the piano, and in my voice. People say, ‘Do you really want to go through that again?’ And all I can say is, ‘It is my pleasure.’”

  This solo piano variation on a theme of Rhiannon is chunky and chordal, with Sharon Celani descanting harmonically, and some new ideas: “Dream on silly dreamer / Try hard, try harder … you can’t leave her.” Stevie accelerates the tempo after a repetition of the first three verses, providing a stark and minimalist rendition of the wild-eyed dance of Rhiannon that she recycled every night onstage as an ingénue singer with Fleetwood Mac. This was Rhiannon in 1998—an older and wiser Welsh witch.

  Enchanted was released by Modern/Atlantic in April 1998, just as Stevie Nicks was turning fifty. It was one of the most ambitious, vault-emptying CD compilations that any rock star had yet attempted, and it met with quick success for an expensive package, reaching #85 on Billboard’s chart. Superior digital mixing technology gave a newly haunting majesty to great songs like “Nightbird.” “If Anyone Falls” roared like a pride of lionesses. “Stop Draggin’” and “Stand Back” were luridly brighter, and “Rooms on Fire” sounded like it was cut in a cathedral. “Reconsider Me” (by Warren Zevon, a Rock a Little reject), was released as a single and didn’t chart. Late that summer, after a blistering “Stand Back” on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show on NBC, Stevie and her band began a thirty-seven-concert solo tour on May 27 in Hartford, Connecticut. Slimmed down, with long straight hair, traveling with her seven-piece band and her vocal coach, and fighting an unusual bout of stage fright, Stevie was able to unleash a new, throaty singing energy that her fans didn’t think they would hear from her again.

  She was also working on a new way of presentation. The stage was ultrafeminine, with rose-colored fabric and doily patterns. She began in a tight black bodice, as if to reclaim her old figure, and then added layers of shawls, waistcoats, and more shawls as the evening went on. In Hartford she gave the fans a seminar on her shawls. The golden shawl for “Gold Dust Woman” was so old, she said, “that it should be falling apart, but it isn’t—just like me.” This provoked general laughter. The crimson “Stand Back” shawl was from her earliest days with Fleetwood Mac. (Her truest fans knew this was a departure, since she’d always sung “Stand Back” in a classic polka-dot shawl.) She said she was through with her stacked-heel boots after the previous year’s Mac tour. From now on she would play in black high-top Nike boots. For many the highlight of the show was when the band “unplugged,” and sat on bar stools around Stevie for an acoustic set that included quieter songs like “After the Glitter Fades” and “For What It’s Worth.” The encore was usually the Heartbreakers’ “I Need to Know.”

  Fans and reviewers who had seen Stevie playing less-than-stellar shows in their towns with Fleetwood Mac the year before were now happy to see her return to form with her own musicians. A perceptive Chicago reviewer covered her concert at the World Music Theater in the city’s near suburbs:

  The endlessly blond rock diva muscled into upper registers that were only rumors for her last year, whirled and twirled unencumbered by ancient feuds and ambivalent band mates, and glided across the stage visibly thrilled to be emancipated from another greatest-hits set list. Turning 50 appears to have lit a fire under those 5-inch heels and rivers of flowing shawls.

  Wrapped in a lacy black antique dress and adorned with wispy layers of earth-toned scarves, Nicks baby-stepped her way onstage, her trademark elbow-length blond mane brushed exquisitely. Watching Nicks sing her classic “Rhiannon” convinces the most rational skeptic that she’d lose her voice if you cut off her hair.

  Touring to promote a new retrospective CD box set, Nicks sounded innocent, even nervous as she told the crowd that she intended to perform some songs she’d never sung onstage before. Where Nicks appeared drained and weary last November [1997] with Fleetwood Mac at the Horizon [venue], she looked radiant at the World, as if she were auditioning for a gig with a band she’d been dying to join. That edge made the evening.

  On July 21, a Colorado fan/stalker was held by security when he tried to get into Stevie’s show in Englewood, near Denver. A judge had already granted Stevie’s lawyers a petition for a restraining order against the fan, who was obsessed with meeting her. Hauled before the judge, the fan explained to the court that Stevie Nicks was a famous and well-known witch, and she had the power to cure him of his unwanted voices and his homosexuality.

  Late in the tour Stevie and her girls were in a helicopter making a descent onto a large field in the upstate New York town of Bethel, where the Woodstock Festival of Art and Music had been held on Max Yasgur’s farm in 1969. Stevie told the girls that she’d wanted to do this ever since she saw the choppers ferrying the big rock stars onto the site in the 1970 Woodstock movie. She was headlining the first night of a weekend festival called A Day in the Garden, along with Don Henley, Ten Years After (who’d played in 1969), and Ziggy Marley & the Melody Makers. Stevie later said that she got chills when she and Don sang “Leather and Lace” a hundred feet from where Jimi Hendrix had blasted out a war-cry version of “The Star Spangled Banner” at dawn, almost thirty years before.

  *

  When the Enchanted Tour finished, Stevie returned to Paradise Valley to rest. There she learned that Christine McVie not only had quit Fleetwood Mac, but she had sold her house in Beverly Hills, her cars, and her grand piano; she was divorcing her husband and moving back to England. She told Mick that at age fifty-five, she’d had enough of Fleetwood Mac. Her father had died the year before, and there was an old ruin of a house in Kent that she wanted to restore, and then retire to an English countrywoman’s life of damp tweeds and wet dogs. Christine had also given interviews that indicated she may have gotten tired of Stevie and Lindsey. She complained of Stevie’s dabbling in “astrology and stuff” and Stevie’s “so many boyfriends.” She said the trouble with “the Americans in Fleetwood Mac” was that they had little sense of humor and took themselves “much too seriously.”

  “Christine just flipped out,” Stevie recalled, “and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I’m having panic attacks.’ She moved back to England, never to be heard from for years. Mick stayed in touch with her, so we always knew she was okay. I never expected her to come back, and I missed her a lot.”

  Then Lindsey’s girlfriend had a baby, Lindsey’s first child, and this is when Stevie finally said that she accepted that there was no way that she and Lindsey were going to grow old together in an old folks’ home. Stevie had never consciously given up on Lindsey Buckingham, until then. The next time an interviewer asked her about their old romance, she answered, “It’s over. It doesn’t mean the great feeling isn’t there. It just means that … you know, we’re beauty and the beast. It means that the love is always there, but we’ll never be together, so that’s even more romantic.” Asked when she knew it was really over, she replied, “The day his first child was born. I knew that was it. That was the definitive thing.”

  *

  For a little over a year Stevie had been seeing a much younger man, a divorced waiter with two children, who was twenty years her junior. She like
d him, but he wasn’t someone who could escort her to the Grammy Awards and other industry functions she was asked to attend. She recalled, “I went out with somebody for a little over a year who was quite enamored with me. He was way too young for me, though. I was nearly fifty and he was nearly thirty. We had a riot, but I said eventually he would make me feel extremely old, so I ended it. But I’m never not open to the possibility of romance.” She told friends that the waiter was an embarrassing situation for her. “He really cared about me,” she said.

  Then she started seeing an old flame. “I’d had a relationship with someone I’d gone out with a long time ago. It didn’t work out then, and it didn’t work out now. It just proved my theory that you can never go back.” Stevie’s next boyfriend was a younger musician whose career was stalled. Stevie was mentoring him, offering love and encouragement. Then she was offered a huge cash advance in a new publishing deal, and she didn’t feel she could share her delight with this person. “I was tickled and thrilled and I made the mistake of telling someone who was struggling in this business. As the words came out of my mouth, I could see that he didn’t think it was funny. So I knew our relationship was never going to happen, because I can’t be a person who is not going to share that moment.”

  For the next three years Stevie would turn these and other loves into material: ideas and lyrics that would become the inspirations for the twelve songs on Trouble in Shangri-La, which took so long to make it wouldn’t come out until 2001.

  8.4 Adult Contemporary

  Sheryl Crow was thirty-six years old when she started writing and producing new tracks with Stevie Nicks in Hawaii in late 1998. Stevie loved Sheryl’s songs like “Everyday Is a Winding Road” and “My Favorite Mistake,” and she pressed Crow for details of her life. Both Sheryl and Stevie were baton-twirling teenage prom queens who went on to sing in local bands. The difference was that where Stevie wanted to go to hairdressing school, Sheryl went to the University of Missouri and then taught music in grade school while honing her skills as a multi-instrumentalist. Stevie ruefully told Sheryl that when she was thirty-six, back in 1984, she was hopelessly addicted to cocaine and about to have a breakdown that landed her in rehab. She said that in another year she would have died from overdosing on something stupid, like too much cough syrup. Stevie said that at thirty-six her life was slipping away, and what saved her was her music. It gave her the strength not to let go and made her realize she wanted to stay in the land of the living, write more songs, go on tour, and have some more fun. They talked for hours about having children (or not), with Sheryl concerned that her biological clock was ticking louder every day and Stevie relieved that her time had run out. Stevie did tell Sheryl that she was almost sure that she would have met someone, and might have had a child, but for her eight wasted, heavily medicated years.