Gold Dust Woman Page 9

  Mick hung up the phone and sat down in their rustic canyon kitchen with Jenny, who’d made him a cup of tea. The sun was down behind Saddle Peak, and holiday lights were twinkling on the other side of the creek. He told her about the phone call. “What about John and Chris? They don’t know about this?” Mick told her not to worry. All would turn out well. “Somewhere up there,” he told his beautiful young wife, “is a little magic star, looking out for us.”

  *

  Later that night, Lindsey and Stevie had a few friends over for smoke and champagne, a quiet New Year’s Eve gathering, and they were talking about whether 1975 was going to be a better year for them. That’s when Keith Olsen walked in with a big grin on his face. “Hey, I’ve got some news … Fleetwood Mac want you to join them.”

  Stevie was shocked. Lindsey, Keith, and Richard Dashut just started to laugh; 1975 was looking better already! But Keith Olsen said he had to spend the rest of the night trying to convince Lindsey Buckingham to take the offer.

  Keith had told Mick that he would get back to him about the Fleetwood Mac offer after the new year, so Stevie and Lindsey had a couple of days to think about it. At first Lindsey didn’t think it was such a great idea. It meant the best songs they’d been working on all year would be presented to music fans as a Fleetwood Mac product. Buckingham Nicks would be over for good. Was this, he wondered, a total sellout of their hard work and integrity? Or were they so dead broke that they should just sign on the bottom line and just do it?

  Stevie’s outlook was quite different. She was tired of waiting tables. And joining Fleetwood Mac was a way of getting her boyfriend back. “We were breaking up when Fleetwood Mac asked us to join,” she told Billboard years later. “And I was working as a waitress to keep our little Toyota running. We weren’t making five hundred dollars a week playing four sets a night at Chuck’s Steakhouse because Lindsey wanted to play original music, so I went along with that.”

  When they got Mick Fleetwood’s amazing offer, according to Stevie, “I said, OK, this is what we’ve been working for since 1968. And so, Lindsey, you and I have to sew this relationship back up. We have too much to lose here. We need to put our problems behind us. Maybe we’re not going to have any more problems, because we’re finally going to have some money. And I won’t have to be a fucking waitress.”

  Lindsey wasn’t totally convinced. As much as he liked Peter Green’s playing, which he mentioned he would now have to replicate onstage every night if they joined Fleetwood Mac, he said he wasn’t sure what this band was—now. They’d gone from one lineup to the next. Why had their guitar player quit? He told Stevie he felt ambivalent, not about getting back with her as a couple, but about casting their lot with this English blues band from the sixties.

  The next day, Stevie “scraped together every dime I could find, went to Tower Records [on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood], and bought all the Fleetwood Mac records they had. And I listened to all of them. Lindsey only listened to the songs that had been hits in England. And I told Lindsey that I thought we could do a lot for this band. ‘We’ll do it for a year, save some money, and if we don’t like it, we’ll quit.’”

  Lindsey argued, somewhat irrationally, that Buckingham Nicks in his opinion could still—somehow—break out and be a success. Stevie: “I said, ‘You wait around. I’m sick of being a waitress. We are joining Fleetwood Mac, and we are going to be great!’”

  There was also another idea Stevie was working through here. After listening to the albums, looking for a thematic thread that ran through their songs, she came up with a word—“mystical.” From “The Green Manalishi” of 1968 to “Hypnotized” in 1973, the songs had an inner core of wonder and the mystic that appealed to her. Later she recalled, “Since I have a deep love of the mystical, anyway, this really appealed to me. I thought, this might really be the band for me because they are mystical, they play wonderful rock and roll, and there’s another lady, so I’ll have a pal.”

  Nevertheless, she decided to keep her waitress job at Clementine’s for another couple of weeks, just in case things didn’t work out. With the benefit of hindsight, she later recalled that “Fleetwood Mac came along at the right time, because it was about to become not much fun anymore.”

  2.3 Tough Little Thing

  Early January, 1975. Waddy Wachtel got a phone call at his place in North Hollywood. He was just back from playing guitar on a Linda Ronstadt tour. “The phone rings, and it’s Lindsey. And he goes, ‘Man, I gotta run something by you. I got a strange situation here.’ And I go, ‘What?’ And he goes, ‘Well, this guy named Mick Fleetwood came to Sound City looking for production with Keith Olsen. And Keith played him our stuff. And he wants us to join Fleetwood Mac.’ And I went, ‘Yeah? What the problem?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know if we want to do it, you know? We still got Buckingham Nicks.’ And I said, ‘Lindsey, the only mistake you’re making right now is that you’re on the wrong phone call. I want you to hang up, and call Mick Fleetwood, and tell him—Yes! Call him—now! Call him now—and say yes!’ And I added that the only thing wrong with the equation was that they didn’t want me also.”

  Still, Lindsey had deep reservations. “Listen to me, Stevie,” he pleaded one night. “A hundred fucking people have been through Fleetwood Mac. It’s like a meat grinder.”

  “You listen, Lindsey,” she retorted. “We’re doing this. I’m tired of being a waitress!”

  So Lindsey did call Mick, who invited them to dinner at a Mexican restaurant so they could get together socially before any decisions were made. Lindsey accepted and later regretted it. Stevie: “I said, ‘Lindsey, we’re starving to death here. If we don’t like them we can always leave.’”

  The real purpose of the dinner was for Christine McVie to meet Stevie. Mick had played the Buckingham Nicks album for the McVies, and they both quite liked it, but, as Mick put it, “Christine had to meet Stevie first, because there would have been nothing worse than two women in a band who didn’t like each other.”

  The dinner was set up by Judy Wong, an old friend of the band from both London and San Francisco. She was now part of Seedy Management, Mick and John’s fledgling attempt to manage themselves. Fleetwood recalled, “Lindsey had come up to our house on Fernwood in Topanga Canyon. Judy Wong was there, and we soon adjourned to a Mexican restaurant in the Valley called El Carmen to meet John and Chris, who were driving in from their beach house in Malibu. Stevie Nicks was waiting for us, still dressed in her twenties flapper outfit from her waitress job.”

  Stevie: “I saw Fleetwood Mac drive up in these two old clunky white Cadillacs, with huge tail fins, and I was in awe.” (She was in even greater awe a bit later when she found out that Jenny Fleetwood’s sister Patti was married to George Harrison.)

  Mick: “We settled in at our table, ordered drinks, and then just started smiling. We were checking each other out, and we all felt there was something magic in the air. We were also getting off on the margaritas. Lindsey offered to play an audition, and I explained that we didn’t think it would be necessary. In fact, nobody had ever auditioned to be in the band.”

  Mick knew that Chris had some reservations about having another woman in the band. She’d told him earlier, “Do me a favor. As long as me and Stevie hit it off, everything will be fine. Otherwise…” But as the evening cruised on, Mick could see that Stevie was sympathetic to Chris’s position, and that Chris got this, and the two girls were getting along very well. Christine asked Stevie where she lived and laughed when Stevie said she had an apartment on Orange Grove Avenue in West Hollywood. She told Stevie about her mother’s words, finding their miracle in an orange grove. As Stevie chatted to Chris about the trials and tribulations of Buckingham Nicks, Chris regarded Stevie closely and thought to herself: “Tough little thing.”

  But the tough little thing was already smitten. “Mick was dressed beautifully in a velvet three-piece suit with a fob watch in his vest pocket. John was so handsome. We were just having the best time with them
. And I kept thinking, Oh my God, I can be in this band.” As for Christine McVie—blunt, tough-talking, hard-drinking, chain-smoking rock road queen—Stevie sensed that she had found an older sister, one who would be her friend and mentor in this possible new life.

  Mick: “Before the dessert came, I leaned across the table and simply asked them: ‘Do you want to join?’ Stevie and Lindsey looked at each other, and Lindsey said yes. I said, ‘We’d love to have you in the band.’ And that was it.”

  Next, Mick explained Fleetwood Mac’s situation, which was tenuous. Mick, John, and Chris were in California on tourist visas. They had no immigration papers or “green cards” that would allow them to work and earn money in America. The lawyers were working on this. The $200,000 advance from the record company (about a million dollars in current money) was still in Bob Welch’s bank account. Keith Olsen had said Stevie and Lindsey were broke, so they were immediately put on a salary of $200 per week, each, as new members of the band. Some of their back rent was paid as well.

  “We were breaking up, Lindsey and me, when Fleetwood Mac asked us to join,” Stevie said later. “But then I got an apartment on Hollywood Boulevard and he moved back in with me, and we kind of put our relationship back together. Things were better between us. We weren’t fighting about money, we had a really nice place, and we were going to work with these hysterically funny English people every day, making great music.”

  *

  After this meeting, Christine returned to England to see her mother. The new Fleetwood Mac began when Lindsey found a garage on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica and began rehearsing with Mick and John. He hadn’t played with a veteran rhythm section of such high voltage, and this new energy took his own guitar work to a higher level. Stevie worked on songs at their apartment and was actually feeling happy for the first time since they’d moved to Los Angeles. She remembered, “We got paid in cash, two hundred dollars a week for each of us, so I had hundred-dollar bills everywhere. And since we hadn’t spent any money in five years, we didn’t even know how to spend money. I was putting hundred-dollar bills through the wash and then finding them all crumpled and bleached out, and then hanging them on the line with the rest of our stuff.” Stevie had a premonition that they would soon be rich. “I said, ‘That’s it. I’m never looking at another price tag again.’ And I meant it.”

  For almost the next two years Stevie and Lindsey would remain a couple, a relatively contented one. “How could you not be happy,” she said later. “You were going with a drop-dead gorgeous man who sang like an angel, and the world was yours, and you were in a band that was already famous … I mean, things were looking up!”

  2.4 Nothing Ordinary

  Mick Fleetwood’s idea was to rehearse the new band for a month and then take it directly into the recording studio in February 1975, even before they ever played in public. Stevie and Lindsey brought their demo tapes of new songs to the McVies’ modest apartment on the beach in Malibu. They played in-progress versions of “So Afraid,” “Monday Morning,” “Landslide,” and “Rhiannon.” There was approval all around and smiling faces. Then Chris played them two of her new songs, which she’d written on a beat-up Hohner portable electric keyboard while gazing out at the roiling winter ocean: “Over My Head” and “Say That You Love Me.” She also had a bluesy song called “Sugar Daddy” and a lulling tune, “Warm Ways.” Lindsey suggested recording Stevie’s “Crystal” from the Buckingham Nicks album, but in a different tempo and better production.

  The first vocal rehearsal took place a few days later in the basement of the band’s agency, International Creative Management on Beverly Boulevard. It was the first time that Christine, Stevie, and Lindsey heard how their voices sounded together, and it was immediate choral magic. Christine recalled, “This was my first rehearsal with them. They were in the band, but I’d never played with them before. I started playing “Say That You Love Me” and when I reached the chorus, they started singing with me. I heard this incredible sound—our three voices—and said to myself, ‘Is this me singing?’ I couldn’t believe how great this three-voice harmony was. My skin turned to goose flesh, and I wondered how long this feeling was going to last.”

  Fleetwood Mac worked out their new music over the next few weeks. Mick was over the moon as he watched Stevie Nicks dance around the agency basement as he played changing rhythms for her. He knew there was nothing like this out there, and the punters were going to love her. And Lindsey was proving to be the most original guitar player the band had heard since the halcyon days of Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac.

  *

  One Sunday evening Mick invited Stevie and Lindsey to his house in Topanga for supper—shepherd’s pie and salad and not a little red wine—and a history lesson. As Jenny got the meal together, and the little girls played with toy ponies, Mick told them he felt the urge to give them the full story of the band, to give them the sense, as he put it, that “nothing ordinary ever happened to Fleetwood Mac.”

  He began with Peter Green, who’d formed the band. Peter was Mick’s idol—he only referred to him as the Green God—and would have been one of the major rock stars if he hadn’t gotten bored with the band after four years. Peter was so self-effacing that he wanted two other guitarists—Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan—in the band. But when Fleetwood Mac arrived in San Francisco for the first time in 1968, they were met at the airport by Judy Wong, Jerry Garcia, and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, who wanted to meet the famous English guitar hero, Peter Green. Playing in San Francisco a lot, Fleetwood Mac’s three-guitar attack developed a rambling, jamming style akin to the Dead’s. But in 1970 the band was playing in Germany, and Peter Green had fallen in with a spiritualist LSD cult and taken way too much acid with them, after which he quit Fleetwood Mac, got rid of his material possessions, and became a recluse. He grew his fingernails so long that he couldn’t play the guitar anymore. He asked the band’s management to stop sending him royalty checks for hit records “Albatross” and “Black Magic Woman.” When the checks kept coming in the post, he took an air rifle to the management office and threatened them, for which he was arrested and barely escaped prison. Mick often tried to contact him, but the Green God never returned his calls.

  Fleetwood Mac pressed on without their leader, and British blues star Christine Perfect, now married to John McVie, was persuaded to join the band. In 1971 they were in California when a powerful earthquake hit Los Angeles and wrecked the city. Fleetwood Mac was due to play the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Strip, but the band’s manic rock guitarist Jeremy Spencer didn’t want to go after having awful premonitions of doom. When the band checked into the Hollywood Hawaiian Motel, Jeremy said he was going out for a walk and never returned. Four days later the roadies found him in a locked warehouse belonging to the Children of God, a notorious robe-wearing religious cult whose emissaries snatched runaways off the streets of Hollywood and brainwashed them into joining the sect. Jeremy now answered to the name Jonathan. He told them he was quitting the band and abandoning his young wife and child, who were back in England at Fleetwood Mac’s communal country house. No one could believe this, but it happened. To save the tour, Peter Green agreed to sign on for a few concerts on the condition that they would be instrumental jams and little else.

  Spellbound by this cinematic narrative (Mick punctuated the story with his emphatic body language and bug-eyed wonder), Stevie asked what happened to Jeremy. Mick said he was still with the Children of God (and indeed would remain so for decades to come).

  Now the band slunk home to England and tried to figure it all out. This was when their friend Judy Wong recommended Bob Welch, who’d been playing in a band in Paris. Hired without an audition on the basis of good vibes when he visited the band’s house in Surrey, Welch was credited by Mick for saving the band because he started writing good songs and generally was organized and friendly, and they loved having an American in the band. Back on the road in America in 1972, driving from show to show in a pair of rented stat
ion wagons, Fleetwood Mac carried on, but not without friction. John McVie was drinking and fighting with Christine. He’d thrown a wood-working awl at her in the Gorham Hotel on 55th Street in New York. She ducked just in time, and the tool stuck in the door where her head had been. Then Danny Kirwan had a mental breakdown on the back end of a long tour of American colleges. He’d been acting unprofessionally for weeks, getting the others upset. Mick described him as a walking time bomb. Just before one show he broke his guitar, and then smashed his head against a toilet wall. Danny’s blood was spattered everywhere. The band went onstage without him, and that was Danny’s last gig after four years. Mick had to tell him he was fired, the first musician ever let go from Fleetwood Mac.

  Despite all the band’s troubles, their albums continued to sell, and another round of American concerts was booked for 1973. Needing new people tout de suite, they hired guitarist Bob Weston away from Long John Baldry’s band and blustery blues belter Dave Walker from Savoy Brown, another English blues band. Walker, Mick explained, was a little rough around the edges for the band, but he was great with crowds and was a master at “Howyadoin, Cleveland!” Back to the U.S.A. went Fleetwood Mac and things seemed to go well, with Mick’s wife on the road with him for the first time. Halfway through, Mick was clued in that Jenny was having an affair with Bob Weston. There was a big row, and Mick admitted to Stevie and Lindsey that he wasn’t a good husband, that he was more married to the band than to Jenny, whose birthday he could never seem to remember. Anyway, Jenny was sent home and Mick tried to carry on under emotionally fraught conditions, but finally couldn’t take playing with Bob Weston, whom he had befriended and who had betrayed him. The tour was stopped in the Midwest. Mick called their manager, who exploded that he was sick of their antics. The band flew back to England, and the management sent out a substitute band to fulfill the remaining tour dates. (These new musicians were falsely told that Mick would be joining them for the rest of the tour, and were subsequently bottled off the stage when they tried to tell fans they were Fleetwood Mac, causing an industrywide scandal.)