Stevie Wonder
Lunacy, loveliness and lyrics like an anguished howl. It’s all in this brilliantly told biography of Fleetwood Mac legend Stevie Nicks
Gold Dust Woman Stephen Davis St Martin’s Press €27.99
At nearly 70, Stevie Nicks remains a rock legend. Rumours, the album she made with Fleetwood Mac in 1977, was for a while the best-selling record of all time, thanks in large part to Nicks’s songs and unique stage presence.
Although Stephen Davis hasn’t been able to interview Nicks for this biography, there’s no doubting his insider’s knowledge. In the Nineties, the rock journalist ghostwrote the autobiography of Mick Fleetwood, the British drummer who co-founded Fleetwood Mac back in Sixties London and who was, for a time, Nicks’s lover. So Davis has an access-all-areas pass into the life and times of Stephanie Lynn Nicks, the Arizona high-school cheerleader who became the voice not of one generation, but of three and counting.
At the dawn of the Seventies, she and her boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham had formed a rock duo that didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Salvation came from the most unlikely direction. Fleetwood Mac, a middle-ranking British blues band, had washed up on the West Coast and was in need of new members. Buckingham agreed to join but insisted his girlfriend was part of the package. Since Mick Fleetwood fancied Nicks on sight, it was a done deal.
Tensions started to bubble immediately. As Nicks whirled around the stage in her top hat and chiffon shawl, Buckingham seethed and sulked. Meanwhile, Christine and John McVie were on the point of divorcing. No wonder the lyrics on Rumours, their second album, are like an anguished howl from the psychic front line.
In this frank, but fair, retelling of her life, Nicks comes across as a nice girl who became a lost soul. After finally managing to get clean of cocaine, she fell prey to prescription sedatives. On the rebound from Mick Fleetwood, who had dumped her for her best friend, she ricocheted from lover to lover, including The Eagles’ Don Henley.
None of this is remotely new, but her story is so extraordinary, so over-the-top in its lunacy and also in its loveliness that it can bear any amount of repeating. And Davis, with his deep knowledge of the musical period, is exactly the right person to do it.