“In the last ten years I’ve just said I’m going to follow my muse. If I want to go somewhere I don’t have to worry about anyone being mad at me.… If it were to happen to me, I’d be thrilled. But when I’m 90 years old and sitting in a gloriously beautiful beach house somewhere on this planet with five or six Chinese Crested Yorkies, surrounded by all my goddaughters who will at that point be middle-aged, I’ll be just as happy.”
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Fleetwood Mac’s On With the Show Tour did great business in the fall of 2014. Their fans cheered the return of Christine McVie, and most of the arenas in America and England were sold out. Things between Stevie and Lindsey were much better, although Christine still described their relationship as “abrasive.” They still did the hand-holding bit for the fans after “Landslide,” but without the old rancor and phony posturing. Backstage, Lindsey complained that the music in Stevie’s dressing room was too loud. (She still liked pushing his buttons.) There was some tension because Rolling Stone wanted to put only Stevie on its cover. (It was that, or nothing.) She told the magazine that she smoked a little pot now, when she wanted to write at the piano. She said her brother was in Arizona, being treated for bladder cancer. She said that she was temporarily living in a luxury mobile home near Paradise Cove in Malibu.
In another interview, Stevie was asked why she hadn’t written a memoir. She answered, “Because I wouldn’t be able to tell the whole truth. The world is not ready for my memoir, I guarantee you. All of the men I hung out with are on their third wives by now, and the wives are all under 30. If I were to write what really happened between 1972 and now, a lot of people would be really angry with me.… I am loyal to a fault, and I have a certain loyalty to these people that I love because I do love them, and I will always love them.… Just because a relationship ended badly, and shitty things happened, you cannot tell the world. But you can write a song about it, in three verses and a bridge and a chorus, that tells the really magical moments.”
Fleetwood Mac kept playing through 2015, and then took a long break. Stevie Nicks could often be found in New York, where she attended multiple performances of School of Rock, the Broadway musical based on the 2003 movie in which Stevie’s had been the only woman’s music played in the film. An exhibit of her Polaroid self-portraits appeared at various galleries in that period. She was completely obsessed with the fantasy TV series Game of Thrones. New York Magazine’s profile of her was headlined, “The Fairy Godmother of Rock.”
In September 2016, Stevie announced a twenty-eight-city tour with her own band. Opening were the Pretenders, with Chrissie Hynde the only original member. Stevie told the press that her solo career was probably the only reason Fleetwood Mac was still together. She said she supported Hillary Clinton’s run for the American presidency (and was later disappointed—even stunned—when the glass ceiling held, and Donald Trump was elected early in November).
A week later, Stevie’s private jet took off from Washington, D.C., headed northeast to a concert in Boston. She was running late, because it had been raining all day after another sold-out concert on the 24 Karat Gold Tour, with Stevie speed-rapping stories and yarns for the fans about some of the lesser-known songs she was playing on this tour. She was now sixty-eight years old.
Her jet landed, also in the rain, at Hanscom Field in Bedford, north of Boston. Black Escalades transported Stevie and the girls to the arena via the city’s grand Commonwealth Avenue, with its nineteenth-century mansions. Stevie told the driver to slow down so she could ogle the gleaming chandeliers in the softly lit rooms of the stately houses. A few hours later, she told the sold-out arena crowd in TD Garden about wanting to buy an old house on Beacon Hill. This drew prolonged cheering: Boston had been a second home for Fleetwood Mac since 1968. Boston had been the first town to play the singles from Fleetwood Mac in 1975. Stevie Nicks and Boston had a long history together.
The Pretenders opened the concert with an hour-long jukebox set. Stevie and her band, working in front of colorful animations and psychedelic patterns, launched into “Outside the Rain” as fans ran back to their seats after beer runs and bathroom visits. Stevie told the hall that they had a hard curfew of 11 o’clock, so her raps about the songs might be semi-incoherent. (Some were.) “If Anyone Falls” got the Garden rocking. Stevie explained that she was going to play some songs she hadn’t performed onstage before. When the unfamiliar “Belle Fleur” segued into “Dreams,” twenty thousand people sang along, softly, in a genuinely touching outpouring of fandom, love, and respect.
Stevie sang nineteen songs that night. The highest moment came after she and the band played “Crying in the Night,” an old Buckingham Nicks song. Speaking to her fans as if they were her comrades and friends, she said, “If you are a creative person—which you all are—you can also go out and follow your dream.… And, forty-three years later, you can stand on a stage, or in your house, and do something you wanted to do since you were twenty-one years old—when you’re sixty-eight years old!”
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Friends said that Stevie, who’d always been politically conservative, was upset at the election of Donald Trump, whose comments about and attitudes toward women she found offensive. She wondered if she should vent to her audiences when she added seventeen shows in 2017 to the 24 Karat Gold Tour. There was more upset when her Facebook page was hacked, and what she called “crazy posts” began to appear in her name. Stevie now lived in a world of viral memes, hashtags, tweeting, and complete concerts phone-filmed on iThings. (She barely knew how to make a call on her smartphone.) Her presence on social media went dark for a while after that. Late in 2016, she told the Miami Herald that even her participation in a rumored new Fleetwood Mac album was in question, because the others had “gone such different ways.”
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers embarked on a fortieth anniversary tour, which Petty indicated would probably be their last big road campaign. Honorary Heartbreaker Stevie Nicks signed up to open for Petty when they played a massive concert in London’s Hyde Park in July 2017. After that, she said, she might try to stay on the road until she was seventy years old, in 2008, and then worlds beyond.
In those days, all her interviewers (annoyingly) asked the old Welsh witch when she was going to retire. To Andy Greene from Rolling Stone, she answered, “I work very, very hard. I have a piece of paper here that says, ‘You keep going and you don’t stop.’ You do your vocal lesson.… I see lots of people my age, and lots of people who are younger than me, and I think, ‘Wow, those people look really old.’ I think it’s because they didn’t try. If you want to stay young, you have to make an effort. If I wanna walk onstage in a short chiffon skirt and not look completely age-inappropriate, I have to make that happen. Or you just throw in the towel and let your hair turn white and look like a frumpy old woman. I’m never gonna go there.”
And further: “I’ll never retire. ‘Stand up straight, put on your heels, and get out there and do stuff.’ I want to do a miniseries for the stories of Rhiannon and the gods of Wales, which I think would be this fantastic thing, but I don’t have to retire from being a rock star to go and do that. I can fit it all in.”
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Summer 2017. Stevie joined Don Henley onstage at his seventieth birthday celebration in Dallas, Texas. “Some friendships never die,” she said, “and this is one of them.” Earlier, Stevie had re-recorded “Gypsy” in a different, more haunted voice as the theme for Gypsy, a fraught TV series about a beautiful psychiatrist’s erotic obsessions that began showing in June. Also in June, Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie was released, a Tango-like album that started as the next Fleetwood Mac project, but changed after Stevie baulked, saying it would take too long to make and no one would buy it. But she evidently decided she wasn’t quite through with Fleetwood Mac, and signed up for an eighteen-month Mac world tour in 2018–2019. “And you won’t see a poster calling this a farewell tour,” Mick said.
And at the end of all that, her most ardent fans knew that Stevie Nicks co
uld retire undefeated, a world champion of rock, a poet of substance, an American legend. Her followers would understand that the events of her life had validated her long-term faith in herself, her unshakeable conviction in her artistic worth, and her magical ability to offer healing, solace, and beauty to the masses with her music, its message, and presentation. Stevie Nicks, this self-described “old woman,” had shouldered her burdens, met her responsibilities, and valorized her country in a way few other women have. No other rock star of her charmed generation could say as much.
Stevie haunting Lindsey as Fleetwood Mac is inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. (Photograph by Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)
Stevie with producer Jimmy Iovine in 1983. (Michael Ochs Archives)
Stevie with Don Henley in 2002. (Photograph by Ray Mickshaw)
Stevie and her mother Barbara at the 1998 Grammy Awards. (Photograph by Ron Galella)
Singing “Sara” with Lindsey on the Tusk Tour in 1980. (Photograph by Richard E. Aaron)
Stevie singing on New Year’s Day, 1990. (Photograph by Mick Hutson)
Stevie and Taylor Swift, one of many younger female stars who say they were inspired by Stevie from childhood. (Photograph by Kevin Mazur)
Stevie with her husband Kim Anderson, March 1983. (Photograph by Ron Galella)
Fleetwood Mac in 1982, the Mirage band. (Photograph by David Montgomery)
Rhiannon comes alive in 1975. (Photograph by Fin Costello)
There are fan websites dedicated to Stevie’s performing shawls. This dark shawl was worn in 2012 at an AIDS charity concert in New York. (Photograph by Kevin Mazur)
This golden shawl was worn at a charity gala in Los Angeles in 2012. (Photograph by Jason Merritt)
The Fairy Godmother of Rock in 2013. (Photograph by Danny Clinch)
Stevie and Mick Fleetwood on Broadway in 2015. (Photograph by Walter McBride)
Stevie with her longtime music director Waddy Wachtel performing on CBS’s The Late Late Show with James Corden in October, 2016. (CBS Photo Archive)
Stevie Nicks at the microphone during a tribute to Tom Petty, Los Angeles, February 2017. (Photograph by Michael Kovac)
Stevie and Tom Petty, February 2017. (Photograph by Lester Cohen)
The fact is that nobody has a clue to what my life was really like.
—STEVIE NICKS
If I should meet thee / After long years,
How should I greet thee?—/ With silence and tears.
—LORD BYRON
AUTHOR’S NOTES AND SOURCES
Fleetwood Mac kept Stevie Nicks away from interviewers for five years after she joined the band. Mick Fleetwood was the group’s spokesman and he wanted it to stay that way. When reporters from the entertainment press did get rare access to Stevie in those days, her interviews tended to be spacey and inarticulate. She was infamously allowed to appear intoxicated and deranged in a notorious Boston TV interview in 1979. This contributed to a generalized image of her as an airhead. But this changed when Stevie started her solo career in 1981 and began giving interviews, a game at which she proved quite adept. For the next thirty-five years she gave intimate, informative, and highly quotable interviews to the media as she promoted her records and concert tours. Interestingly, her most articulate comments tended to be published in English newspapers and magazines, especially if a woman was asking the questions.
Since Gold Dust Woman is an unauthorized biography, I have used reliable published interviews, taped interview transcripts, and Stevie’s own writings to let the reader hear her “voice” in a consistent register, to get a feeling for her interior life in her own words. I have tried to avoid the suppositional language that some biographers deploy, such as “she must have felt” or “she might have wondered.” If the text ascribes a thought or emotion to Stevie, the source is something that she has reliably said, told, or written.
Mick Fleetwood brought me into the Fleetwood Mac orbit in 1987, when we began to work together on his memoir Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac. At that time I conducted interviews with band members, associates, family members, and many others. Our book was published in 1990 and became an international bestseller (and the foundational text for almost every book written since about this band). Mick also asked me to write the booklet notes for albums such as Fleetwood Mac/Greatest Hits and Live at the BBC. While researching Gold Dust Woman, I returned to these original interviews and conducted additional research relating to Stevie’s more recent career as a solo artist, mostly with friends, former friends, musicians, and professional colleagues. Except where noted, most of my sources requested anonymity.
Several published books were helpful in assembling the puzzle of Stevie Nicks’s life and times:
Making Rumours by Ken Caillat with Steven Stiefel (2012) is an in-studio account of the recording of some of Stevie’s best songs while she was leaving her long-term romance with Lindsey Buckingham.
Storms by Carol Ann Harris (2007) is a diary-informed account of the author’s allegedly abusive relationship with Lindsey Buckingham after Stevie Nicks, and a reliable look inside the private Fleetwood Mac “bubble.”
Bumping Into Geniuses by Danny Goldberg (2008) is a memoir by the famous record industry executive that contains the saga of the founding of Modern Records, Stevie Nicks’s record label.
Petty: The Biography by Warren Zanes (2015) provides clear details about one of Stevie Nicks’s most important professional and personal friendships.
Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams & Rumours by Zoe Howe (2015) is an unauthorized biography by a British writer that is good on Stevie’s reception in England, and the making of her album The Other Side of the Mirror.
Simple Dreams by Linda Ronstadt (2013) is a heartfelt, poignant memoir about growing up singing in postwar Arizona.
I Want My MTV by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum (2011) makes sense of Stevie’s crucial early engagement with music videos and the cable channel that played them.
Jenny Fleetwood became a psychologist later in life, specializing in addiction and recovery issues relating to artists. Her book It’s Not Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (2013) has revealing interviews with Stevie Nicks and other luminaries of her era.
The White Goddess by Robert Graves (1948) is indispensable regarding Stevie Nicks’s own source material, and her place in the Welsh bardic tradition. Likewise The Mabinogion, as edited by Charlotte Guest (1902).
Interviews and some descriptive material are taken from the following sources, with thanks to the indispensable Christopher B. Davis’s hard-working 2012 research blog “The Daily Fritz”: ABC, ABC (Australia), Allure, Amazon.com, American Songwriter, Arcadia Apache, Arizona, Arizona Music Hall of Fame, Arizona Republic, Baltimore Sun, BBC, Blender, Billboard, Blackcat, Boston Globe, Boston Phoenix, Cashbox, Charlotte Observer, Chicago Tribune, CHUM, Crawdaddy, Creem, Daily Mail, Details, Der Spiegel, Elle, Entertainment Weekly, Guitar Player, Harper’s Bazaar, Hartford Courant, High Times, Hollywood Reporter, Houston Chronicle, Indianapolis Star, Independent, International Herald Tribune, Interview, KCRW, LA Weekly, London Evening Standard, Los Angeles Times, Melody Maker, Metro, Miami Herald, Microsoft Music, MOJO, MTV, Musician, New Age, New Musical Express, Newsweek, New Yorker, New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Times, Newsday, Nixfix.com, Oui, Parade, People, Phoenix New Times, Playboy, Q, Reading Eagle, Record World, Reuters, Rock, Rock Family Trees, Rolling Stone, Salon.com, San José Mercury-News, San Francisco Chronicle, Spin, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Petersburg Times, Sunday Guardian, Telegraph, The Times (London), Times Literary Supplement, Time, Time Out, Toledo Blade, Toronto Sun, Uncut, Us, USA Today, Variety, VH-1, Village Voice, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, WBCN, WBZ, WMMS, Woman’s Own, WZLX.
Honorable mention to researcher Callie Pillar for her work on the Nicks and Meeks families. Archivists James Isaacs and David Bieber both helped with research materials, as did the British Library at King’s Cross and the Boston Athenaeum.
Thanks a
lso to Elizabeth Beier and Nicole Williams of St. Martin’s Press. This text took a long time to gestate, and their patience was almost infinite. Attorney Eric Rayman vetted the texts whilst touring Andalucia, and for that he deserves mucho gracias.
David Vigliano is my long-suffering literary agent, for whose friendship I have been very grateful; likewise his associates Thomas Flannery, Jr. and Ruth Ondarza. The 77th Street office dogs are called Sunny, Pepper, and Gus. (Pepper’s favorite game is called Bite the Client.)
The following are very Rhiannon: Maria Evangelinellis, David Winner, Pat Healey, Patrick Donnaly, and especially Danny Goldberg.
Few authors can write long books without support from their families. My loving clan includes Lily Davis, India and John Goodridge, Chris Davis, Hana and Howard, and the late Judith Arons. They all made inspiration easy to come by.
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In the twenty-first century the media and the popular press have become fixated on the female celebrity “trainwreck,” defined as a hyper-sexual, over-refreshed, crazy lady—usually a singer or an actress—whose hell-raising, loony judgments and subsequent flame-outs lead to public suffering and even death. Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston played those trainwreck roles until they died. Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan had their moments as well. It has been observed that the outlaw aspects of biography—intrusive, revealing, sometimes transgressive—are the only reason for its survival as a bestselling literary form. With this in mind, I would finally like to thank Stevie Nicks for getting her train back on track when she did, because if she hadn’t, this would have been a much, much darker story, one not much fun to tell.
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