CHAPTER 1


1.1 Teedie

The frontier state of Arizona is the keystone of the American Southwest, wedged between California and New Mexico. The climate is arid and dry, the landscape monumental and gigantic. In the years after the Second World War when she was born, Arizona still had a Western frontier look. The people were the grandchildren of frontier families, solid and outgoing. The cactus was the state emblem. Native American tribes lived on their reservations, a world apart from “Anglo” society, as it was called. The bigger cities—Phoenix and Tucson—were expanding out into the desert, fueled by postwar migration to a promised land of opportunity and bright sunshine in the winter.

Into this western land was born Stephanie Lynn Nicks on May 28, 1948, at Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix. Her mother, the former Barbara Alice Meeks, was just twenty, having married the previous year when she was nineteen. Her father, Aaron Jess Seth Nicks, Jr., was twenty-three. They met when both were working at The Arizona Republic newspaper. Barbara wrote in her diary that it was love at first sight, and they were married a month after they met. Jess Nicks was a confident, ambitious young man, beginning to pursue what would become a successful, if itinerant, career in business in the booming Southwestern corporate economy.

Barbara Nicks’s pregnancy had been difficult. She was quite small, only just over five feet tall, and the child was very active in utero, a real dancer, the young parents joked. She was nauseous much of the time and existed mostly on Mexican food, enchiladas, and refried beans. But the birth went well, and the couple was delighted with their tiny, dark-eyed daughter.

Stephanie was the couple’s first child, and as an especially pretty little girl she was doted on by her parents’ families. Jess had two younger brothers, Bill and Gene, who married two sisters, Carmel and Mary Lou Ruffin. Jess and Barbara were closest to Bill and Carmel, whose son Johnathan was the cousin Stevie was closest to. They mostly lived near each other in Paradise Valley, near Phoenix.

Jess and Barbara started calling their daughter Stevie right away, but she couldn’t say this until her teeth came in, so she called herself Teedie (which Barbara called her for the rest of her life). Barbara was a devout Catholic, always wearing a silver or gold cross on a chain, and a practical, frugal homemaker who kept her little girl very close, making most of her clothes from pattern books ordered by mail. Stevie was soon put on a pony like all the little Arizona cowgirls, and she learned to ride not long after she learned to walk.

Almost every summer the family would go to visit Barbara’s mother, Alice, who lived in the town of Ajo, a long and dusty drive into Pima County, near the Mexican border. Alice Harwood was from an old copper mining family. She had been a good singer as a young woman and had two children while living in Bisbee, Arizona, with a man nobody would ever talk about. After she divorced him, Stevie’s mother and her uncle Edward were adopted by Alice’s second husband, a Mr. Meeks, who worked in the rich Bisbee copper mines; he was said to have been abusive, and later died of tuberculosis. “My mother had a hard life,” Stevie would recall. “She was very poor, she was only nineteen when she married, and she had me at twenty.”

Grandma Alice—“Crazy Alice” to the family—lived alone near Ajo (which means garlic in Spanish). Beginning when Stevie was about four, she spent part of every summer in Ajo with her grandmother—and loved it. Alice liked to sing old lullabies to little Stevie. Alice read books to her and told her the first fairy tales Stevie ever heard.

When Stevie was five, her grandfather started her singing career. This was her father’s father, Aaron Jess Nicks, a local country singer (born, like Stevie, on May 28, in 1892 in Phoenix) known as “A.J.” He and his wife, Effie, had split up—she’d gone to California—and by then he was living in a collection of shacks and trailers up in the hills above Phoenix. A.J. made something of a living playing billiards and singing in taverns and saloons, doing songs by Jimmy Rogers, Hank Williams, and Red Sovine; playing guitar, fiddle, and harmonica, sometimes alone, sometimes with a little band—whatever he could scrabble together. He was sometimes heard on local radio, singing jingles for commercials. A smart, sharp, and wiry man, he frequented poolrooms and had spent time during the Great Depression hopping freight trains, riding the rods, living that life. He may have met Woody Guthrie in the hobo camps and rail yards of the sprawling Southwest. He drank.

Starting in 1952, when Teedie was four, A.J. started coming by the house and singing with her. He taught her harmony by having her sing “Darling Clementine” while he took the higher harmony. Then he reversed it, and she picked up the harmonic immediately, by ear. It was complicated for a child, but she could do it. He could tell Stevie was a gifted harmony singer. They sang “Are You Mine” by Red Sovine and other songs. Stevie couldn’t even read yet, but she had the natural singer’s innate ability to repeat the words of a song after hearing them only a few times.

A.J. Nicks started taking his tiny granddaughter along to parties (with her parents), where they sang for friends. The reaction was always sheer delight, and Stevie seemed to love the attention. When she was five, she started singing in local saloons with her grandfather. They had a little act. A.J. would sing a few songs, and then Jess would lift Stevie onto the bar in her cute cowgirl outfit her mother had made. The drinkers loved the harmony singing, and the raucous applause at the end of their act was the best response A.J. had ever gotten in his mostly futile career. For a brief while, A.J., who had been trying his entire life to make it in the country music business, got the idea that little Stevie could be the real deal. Maybe their singing act—an old coot and his granddaughter—could be A.J.’s winning ticket to the Grand Ole Opry. He started paying her fifty cents a week to sing with him.

Her parents stopped it. No, they told him when he asked to take Stevie along to bookings outside the Phoenix Valley. Out of state? Out of the question. A.J. pleaded with them, but Barbara Nicks was adamant. She told A.J. that her five-year-old daughter, who hadn’t even started school yet, was not going on the road with a sixty-year-old man, and that was the end of it. A.J. left the house, angry. He retreated to his lair in the hills, and the family didn’t see him for more than two years. Stevie always had a great fondness for her grandfather, and she would dedicate her first recording to him. But she was also firm in her feeling that “he was a real good singer, but he wasn’t a great musician.”

* * *

Right around then, the Nicks family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Barbara Nicks kept Stevie close to home once she began school. She didn’t exactly discourage friendships for Stevie, but she didn’t seek them out, either, because she knew the family would be moving all over the Southwest over the next fifteen years as her husband moved from post to post, almost like a military family, as he climbed the corporate ladders of big companies: Armour & Company meat packers, the Greyhound Bus Company, and Lucky Lager Brewing. She knew her children would be changing schools a lot, and that some of these lost friendships could be sad. Instead, she signed Stevie up for various lessons: piano, drawing, ballet, and tap. Barbara had an inkling that adorable Stevie could be an actress or even a movie star and kept pushing acting lessons, although Stevie, who was naturally shy, told her mother not to. It was Barbara, an expert, who taught Stevie how to twirl a baton. Barbara also realized that Stevie was nearsighted, and she got her first pair of glasses in the first grade.

In late 1954 the Nicks family moved to El Paso, the bustling Texas border city. A year later Barbara had her second and last child, Christopher Aaron Nicks, born December 18, 1955. Now seven-year-old Teedie had a brother. She hated him, she later said. She’d been the focus of the family’s attention, and now this. She says she’s still telling Chris how sorry she is for being such a bad sister when they were kids. She’s frank about it. “I hated Chris,” she told an interviewer.

Stevie started the third grade at a Catholic girls’ school called Loretto, but she didn’t like it: it was too hard for her, she said later, and she didn’t do well. Also, Stevie proved to be left-handed, and the nuns tried to get her to write with her right hand, which was like being tortured. So she started fourth grade in 1957 at nearby Crockett public school and fit in better. This was really where she learned to sing with other kids. She was a star singer in the school chorus, and even allowed her mother to talk her into being in the class play. “It was called The Alamo, Stevie remembered later, “or something like that. There were only two girls in the play and I was one of them because I could sing. When it was time to say my lines I totally froze. I couldn’t remember. It was the worst moment of my life. When I got home I told my mother, ‘I am not an actress. Don’t ever sign me up for any more plays ever again.’”

Stevie may not have been an actress, but she was a performer. Primal rocker Buddy Holly was from nearby Lubbock, and in the fourth grade Stevie and her best friend, Colleen, brought the house down when they did a tap dance to a record of Holly’s “Everyday.” “I wore a black top hat,” Stevie recalled, “and a black vest, a black skirt, a white blouse, black tights, and black tap shoes with little heels. I had a definite knowledge of how I should look—even then.”

Holidays were a big deal in the Nicks household, and Stevie’s mother particularly liked Halloween. But Barbara could never understand why Stevie always wanted to go out trick-or-treating as a witch. “I always had a great love for Halloween,” she recalled, “and for being a witchy character from when I was six years old. My mom and I argued about it every single year, and she was very tired of making witch costumes.” When Stevie was in fourth grade Barbara made a yellow Martha Washington costume and then finally gave up when Stevie dyed it black.

* * *

In 1958, Pappy A.J. showed up in El Paso. Barbara told close friends that Stevie had been kept away from him, but now there was a reconciliation, and once again the family was singing together around the table. A.J. brought Stevie a lot of records, 45-rpm singles, songs that he thought she might want to learn. There were a lot of Everly Brothers and other country-influenced rock & rollers. Come along and be my party doll. A.J. taught Stevie to duet with him on “It’s Late” by Dorsey Burnette. “Once again A.J. picked up that I could do this. He’d say to me, ‘You’re a harmony singer, honey.’” But Stevie’s grandfather wasn’t doing well. He may have borrowed some money from Jess. Stevie later remembered her father’s upset with A.J., his anguish as he “watched A.J. going down the tubes, trying to make it” in the music world.

In 1959, Jess Nicks was transferred to Salt Lake City, Utah, where Stevie would start the sixth grade. Stevie had made some good friends in El Paso and she was very upset at having to start all over again. Barbara sat her down and told her that all she had to do is to open herself up and make some new friends. Her mother told her, “You will go to school, and you will be independent, and you will never be dependent upon a man. And you’ll have a really good education, and you’ll be able to stand in a room with a bunch of very smart men and keep up with them, and never feel like a second-class citizen.”

1.2 The New Girl in School

Stevie’s family spent the next three years—the late 1950s—in Salt Lake City, one of the most conservative in the United States. But her two years there—eighth and ninth grade at Wasatch Junior High—were spent immersed in the music that was changing America. The Nicks family loved music, especially country and western, as country music was then known. Jess had a good hi-fi record changer in the living room, and Barbara had the radio on for most of the day. (Stevie’s mother liked working and had enjoyed many part-time jobs, but her husband’s business success in old-fashioned Salt Lake City now put social pressure on her to stay home with the children, like all the other wives of Jess’s colleagues.) So Stephanie Lynn spent these crucial years between twelve and fourteen glued to the radio. She had spent her childhood listening to the early fifties hit parade: the doggy in the window, “The Tennessee Waltz,” “Sixteen Tons.” Of the early rockers, she liked Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers the best, especially their heavenly harmonies on “All I Have to Do Is Dream” and “Wake Up Little Susie.” She learned to dance the Lindy, down and up, the prevailing dance of the day. Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” came late to Utah and when it did arrive, it was banned at school dances and country club socials as immoral. The Mormons who dominated the town didn’t think white teenagers should be gyrating like savages. They wouldn’t even let them play the record at the hops. Salt Lake fans could only see the twist on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand TV program, broadcast Monday through Friday from far-away Philadelphia.

Stevie was a baton twirler at school events. Her mother signed her up for dancing classes and guitar lessons. She started writing song lyrics in a little notebook in her looping, left-handed script. She was the most popular girl in the school.

In 1960 the family was enthralled by the presidential election. At the end of the fifties, America was up for grabs between the Republican vice president Richard Nixon and the charismatic young Democratic senator from Massachusetts, Jack Kennedy. Kennedy was a handsome war hero with a stunning wife, some new ideas, a charming Boston accent, and a plea for renewed American vigor (pronounced “vigah”). Stevie’s father, an Arizona frontier Republican, supported Nixon. But Stevie’s Catholic mother adored Kennedy and his beautiful young wife, Jacqueline, and so did Stevie. When Kennedy was elected in November 1960, Stevie at age twelve could identify with the newly branded national notion of the Kennedy family’s ascendancy as a rebirth of Camelot, evoking the legendary Knights of the Round Table, a lost world of romantic legend and myth.

Stevie failed math in the ninth grade, so her parents enrolled her at Judge Memorial Catholic High School for tenth grade. She hated being away from her junior high friends, but this only lasted about a month as Jess Nicks accepted another job. So in 1962 the family relocated again, this time to Arcadia, California. Stevie remembers crying over this news with her best Salt Lake friend, Karen Thornhill, on her front steps: “Well, we moved—a lot. So I was always the new girl. I knew I wasn’t going to have much time to make friends, so I made friends quickly and I adjusted really well, and when I’d say, ‘I’m gonna miss my room,’ my mom would always say, ‘There’s always a better house.’”

Arcadia is one of the wealthier towns in Los Angeles County, at the foot of the majestic San Gabriel Mountains, where Stevie was enrolled in tenth grade at Arcadia High School. The AHS football team was the Apaches, but it doesn’t seem that Stephanie Nicks (as she now called herself) joined the Apache Princesses, the baton-twirling marching team. “[It] was a very hoity-toity school,” she remembered, “very cliquey, and a lot of rich people went there.” But she did join the school’s elite A Capella Choir, where she met a beautiful classmate named Robin Snyder. A great singer, graceful dancer, and one of the most popular girls in the school, she would become much more than a best friend; gorgeous Robin Snyder was more like the twin sister that Stevie never had.

At home Stephanie spent a lot of time in her new bedroom with the door closed, listening to KHJ on the radio, especially loving the girl groups that ruled early sixties airwaves: the Chiffons, the Shirelles, the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas. She liked the sound of the Shangri-Las singing “Remember (Walking in the Sand).” She was starting to notice how songs were put together, with verses and choruses and instrumental hooks. She remembered, “Moving from Utah made me take all the guitar lessons and stuff I’d written on the side and get serious about my music. I was depressed and hurting, and that’s usually the best time for a writer.”

One time Stephanie was in the backseat of the family car when a song came on the radio and her mother began to speak to her. “Hush!” Stevie shouted. “I’m concentrating on this.” This was when her somewhat bewildered parents began to realize that music might mean more to their daughter than just a hobby.

Stephanie wore her hair short in 1962–63. Her natural color was now a light brown, sometimes called dirty blond. She’d begun to have her period back in Salt Lake. She had almost reached her full height, just over five feet, just like her mother. Her myopia had worsened and she needed stronger glasses to read. Coming from Utah, she dressed modestly compared with the California girls, who tended to show a lot of skin. Instead, Stevie dressed conservatively, sometimes in voluminous dresses and skirts, some of which her mother still made. Later her classmates would remember her as a bohemian or “beatnik” presence among the big school’s athletes, cheerleaders, hot-rodders, and surfers—a tiny girl wearing thick glasses and carrying her books in a Mexican straw basket. Stevie said later that she was kind of odd, and that her classmates probably thought she was crazy.

The year 1963 was when surf music took over California popular culture, with local bands the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean riding the wave of striped shirts, churning bass lines, and throbbing pipeline guitars. (Surf music guitar god Dick Dale was of Lebanese extraction, and later said that the style he pioneered was an ancient Middle Eastern way of playing the oud.) At the end of the year, President Kennedy was murdered in a bloody public assassination in Dallas, Texas, dashing the high hopes of a nation. Years later Stevie would talk about what a loss of innocence this felt like to her generation. And then, only a few months later, as if obeying an occult summons to cheer up America, the Beatles arrived from England and charmed America with new songs and insouciance on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show, the same way Elvis Aaron Presley had in 1956. The Beatles rode a wave of their own in 1964 with “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and became the vanguard of the cultural shockwave known as the British Invasion. Along with a host of new bands from England came new styles, new accents, new clothes, new hair (long for boys, long and ironed for girls), new movies, and, of course, James Bond. (At the tail end of this invasion a few years later, Fleetwood Mac would make its American debut as a virtuosic English blues band.)

For her fifteenth birthday, her parents gave Stevie six weeks of guitar lessons with a young man who played in the classical Spanish style. He loaned Stevie a small Goya parlor guitar, and she took to it immediately. After the six weeks he announced that he was leaving for Seville, and Stevie begged her parents to buy the guitar for her. She’d spent so much time practicing in her room that they knew this wasn’t another fad, and so Stevie got her first guitar in 1963.

Around this time Stevie’s father bought a bar nearby in the San Gabriel Valley, with the idea of turning it into a music venue where A.J. could come and play. Stevie’s mother cooked some of the bar food, and she and Stevie would often bring the catering to the bar. On weekends they’d sometimes find Jess and his brothers singing with A.J. and some of the players and pickers from the local country music scene. A.J. wanted Stevie to sing with them, but her mother always demurred and said she had homework to do.

Arcadia High had an annual father-daughter dinner, and in tenth grade Stevie invited Jess to come and sing with her. Jess was a good singer, and he suggested country music star Roger Miller’s current hit song “King of the Road.” They practiced a few times, but when they got up in front of the audience Stevie was so embarrassed that she lost it. She began laughing, couldn’t stop, then Jess started up, and it was a fiasco. Her father later told a magazine interviewer that Stevie wet her pants while on the stage with him.

Stevie kept up her guitar practice and soon was singing with a school group, the Changin’ Times, inspired by Bob Dylan’s stirring protest song “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” This quartet harmonized on Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon” as sung by Dylan’s folk revival colleagues Peter, Paul & Mary. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” is a rather dark song that speaks to the political and cultural convulsions of the era. The Cold War was raging, the Bomb hung over everything, Martin Luther King was agitating for civil rights, Kennedy was dead, and the Beatles were here. The song was confrontational. “Your old road is rapidly agin’ / Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand.” Stevie would later remember how much Dylan’s song meant to her, and she resolved to somehow be part of the big changes to come, and especially to somehow do work that she, too, would be remembered for.

1.3 California Dreamin’

At the end of 1963, Stevie Nicks fell in love. He was a little older, a “really handsome boy,” she said later. He broke up with the girl he’d been going steady with, a girl who was a good friend of Stevie’s, and he and Stevie went out for about six months. But then—on May 28, 1964, Stevie’s sixteenth birthday—he went back to his previous girlfriend. When she found out about this, that she’d been dumped for her friend, Stevie went home, shut herself in her room, and began to cry. “I had fallen for this incredible guy, and he ended up going out with my best friend. And they both knew that I was going to be crushed.”

A ballad is a simple narrative poem composed in short stanzas, often with a romantic theme, often set to music. It’s one of the oldest forms of musical communication still extant. Stevie Nicks wrote her first ballad—called “I’ve Loved and I’ve Lost”—on this unhappy occasion, which also happened to be her birthday, which made it even worse.

“I was totally in tears, sitting on my bed with lots of paper, my guitar, and a pen, and I wrote this song about your basic sixteen-year-old love affair thing that I was now going through.” It was a country-style song that went, “I’ve loved and I’ve lost, and I’m sad but not blue / I once loved a boy who was wonderful and true / But he loved another before he loved me / I knew he still wanted her—’twas easy to see.” (Stevie clearly had an ear for verse; like Bob Dylan, she wrote in “common measure,” the simple meter of many ballads and hymns, as well as most of Emily Dickinson’s poems.)

Stevie: “When I said, ‘I’m sad but not blue,’ I was accepting the fact that they were going to be together. I was horrified but I really loved both of them, and I knew they didn’t do it purposefully to hurt me.

“I finished that song, hysterically crying. And I was hooked. When I played my own song later that night, I knew—from that second on—that I was not going to sing a lot of other people’s songs. I was going to write my own. From that day forward, when I was in my room playing my guitar, nobody would come in without knocking, nobody disturbed me. They even let me miss dinner if necessary, it was that important to me. They could hear that I was working, at sixteen years old, and they would leave me alone. I started singing a lot more at school, and I sang whenever I could, for whatever I could possibly find to do. If it had anything to do with music or singing, I did it.”

At the same time that she knew she could sing a love song, and really put it over, Stevie also knew that she could use some romantic experience. “At sixteen I could sing a love song pretty well,” she said later. “My dad would go, ‘That’s a good song, honey.’ And my mom would go, ‘That’s just beautiful, Stevie.’ And they would be thinking, ‘We know for a fact that she’s only been on one date, and she was back in two hours.’”

* * *

In June, Stevie and Robin Snyder got their hair streaked by a friend who was going to a beauty school. “I had my hair streaked at the end of my tenth-grade year and got in a lot of trouble for it,” Stevie recalled thirty years later, laughing. “They didn’t just streak it blond, they streaked it silver. My hair was totally ivory. I was grounded for six weeks. But when my hair changed, everything changed. I got to wear grayish plum eye shadow. There was no way I was going back.”

In the summer of 1964 Stevie bid a sad farewell to Arcadia High and her friend Robin Snyder—they vowed eternal friendship—because the Nicks family was on the move again. This time they were headed north, to the wealthy suburban towns halfway up the great peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose. They fetched up in San Mateo, and Stevie began her junior year at Menlo-Atherton High School in nearby Atherton.

M-A, as the school is known, was and is one of the great American public high schools, and it has a reputation for academic rigor. Many graduates went on to prestigious Stanford University in nearby Palo Alto. Today these towns are better know as Silicon Valley, legendary birthplace of personal computing, but in 1964 the San Francisco peninsula was mostly still farmland, with vast strawberry fields stretching along California Highway 101, backing up to the San Francisco Bay.

Stevie Nicks was at first intimidated by M-A, a wealthy, politically conservative school whose parking lot was full of Detroit’s finest: Corvettes, Sting Rays, GTOs, the early Ford Mustangs. The car-crazy greasers drove ’57 Chevies, and there were even a few ’32 Ford coupes, the little deuce coupe of Beach Boys fame. But her mother gave her the pep talk about opening herself up and making new friends, and as always Stevie was encouraged. She was also the living embodiment of “The New Girl in School,” Jan & Dean’s hit single from that summer—a beautiful California girl that the guys wanted to date and the girls wanted to be like (or hate). Stevie’s classmates took to this guitar-toting new girl immediately—these kids knew star quality when they saw it—and soon Stevie found herself a close runner-up for 1964 homecoming queen and then was nominated for vice president of M-A’s Class of 1966. She established her musical aptitude quickly and soon was a regular at school assemblies and talent shows, appearing at M-A’s Sports Night Dinner in a demure skirt, low heels, and a low-key beehive hairstyle, de rigueur for girls in those days. She did well in class and began keeping journals, expressing herself in private jottings, poetry, and drawings. She dressed herself in the preppy “Ivy League” style common to all the kids from well-to-do homes. She was a “good girl,” a self-described “prude,” unlike some of the faster girls in class with serious reputations for backseat love during The Carpetbaggers at the drive-in.

“If you were going out with somebody,” she remembered later, “you went to a movie, and then you came home and parked in your driveway, and you made out—in a not-a-big-deal way—and then you came in the house.”

* * *

Stevie’s senior year at M-A began in September 1965, the pivotal year of the American sixties. The civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were the big issues of the day, with student protests at the University of California in nearby Berkeley gaining national attention. California bands like the Byrds were adapting Bob Dylan songs and inventing a new style, folk rock. And the local music scene was in full boil as well. Two garage bands from nearby San Jose, the Count Five and the Syndicate of Sound, would have coast-to-coast hit singles (“Psychotic Reaction” and “Little Girl”) in 1966. Up in San Francisco new bands were forming; within a year the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company would coalesce with a dozen other groups into an organic movement that would spread the so-called San Francisco Sound around the planet.

Locally, Stevie bought her guitar strings at Dana Morgan’s Music Store in Palo Alto, where all the aspiring young players hung out. She acquired an “official” boyfriend, Charlie Young, a handsome star of the M-A Bears football team. She scored an ace in English class when she set Edgar Allan Poe’s morbid poem “Annabel Lee” to music in order to make it easier to memorize as a song, and then sang it in class. (Poe has long appealed to teen readers who instantly recognize a fellow sufferer.) She would record her version of “Annabel Lee” forty-five years in the future. (Another original ballad Stevie sketched in 1965, “Rose Garden,” would appear on her album Street Angel thirty years later.)

Late in 1965 a new folk rock group from Los Angeles calling themselves the Mamas and the Papas (Hells Angels slang for gang members and their girlfriends) released a new song, “California Dreamin’,” written by the group’s leader, John Phillips. The celestial four-part harmonies the quartet specialized in appealed to singers like Stevie, and the song became a national hit record. When the group’s album came out a few months later, it introduced passionate, brokenhearted classics like “Monday Monday,” “Got a Feelin’,” and “Go Where You Wanna Go,” and Stevie was hooked on this harmonically sophisticated new way of getting folk rock songs across.

Around the end of the year, Stevie took her guitar over to a local church that offered Wednesday evening sessions for young musicians. “It was called Young Life,” she said. “Everybody went just to get out of the house on a school night. It was fun. Even I went, and I didn’t go anywhere.”

She was talking with some kids from school when a tall boy with longish dark hair walked in. She recognized him from M-A; he was a junior, a year younger than she. After a bit, Lindsey Buckingham, age sixteen, sat down at the piano and began playing the opening chords of “California Dreamin’.”

“Well, I just happened to know every word and could sing the harmony, and I thought he was absolutely stunning. So I kind of casually maneuvered my way over to the piano.” Stevie chimed in, singing Michelle Phillips’s high harmony part while Lindsey sang the melody. They glanced at each other; she noticed his eyes, cold blue like lake ice. They sang the whole song while the room went quiet, everyone mesmerized. Then it was over. People clapped a bit. Lindsey was, she guessed, “ever-so-slightly impressed. Not to let me know it, but he did sing another song with me, which let me know he did like it a little.” Nothing more was sung that evening. “It wasn’t any kind of big deal,” Stevie remembered. “He was singing ‘California Dreamin’,’ and I joined in. It was just a one-off, three-minute moment.”

Stevie Nicks wouldn’t see Lindsey Buckingham again for three years. But she later said that she never stopped thinking about him from time to time.

* * *

Then, in the middle of her senior year, Stevie Nicks got herself a recording contract. She described this to England’s Guardian newspaper much later. “I had a record deal early on. When I was a senior in high school, a friend of a friend of my dad was a big deal at 20th Century Fox [the movie studio, with its own record label]. So I flew to LA with my guitar, sang for them, and signed a contract with a producer called Jackie Mills. But he quit soon after, and luckily there was a ‘main man’ clause in my contract that meant that now I was released from it. I wasn’t upset. Even at that age I was smart enough to realize that I didn’t want to be stuck on a label with people that I didn’t know.”

* * *

After the 1966 new year, Stevie’s senior year flashed by. She needed stronger glasses. She applied to colleges at her parents’ insistence. “I wanted to go to hairdressing school,” she later maintained, “but they didn’t go for that idea at all.” She kept up her music; her favorite song was Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” from Blonde on Blonde, especially the line “But she breaks just like a little girl.” (“Just Like a Woman” would appear much later on Street Angel as well.) She was photographed in a modest off-shoulder sack dress at the M-A senior prom in June, and shimmied and shook while doing the frug, the most popular high school dance of the day.

In September 1966 she began classes at La Canada Junior College. Stevie continued to live with her family, close to her loving mother, Barbara, commuting to school in a little car that she could hardly drive because she was so nearsighted. The following year she transferred to San Jose State College, where she was often seen on campus carrying her guitar. “I should have gone to hairdressing school,” she insists, “because that would have really benefited me more.” Soon, “I was singing with Lindsey the whole time, and found it real difficult to study.”

1.4 Fritz

Lindsey Adams Buckingham was born on October 3, 1949, in Palo Alto, and grew up in Atherton. His father, Morris “Buck” Buckingham, owned a coffee importing company, Alta Coffee, in Daly City, which had been founded by his own father in the 1920s. Lindsey was the youngest of his mother Rutheda’s three sons, the older brothers being Greg and Jeff. Lindsey has described his childhood being like Ozzie and Harriet, a popular fifties TV comedy about a “normal,” typically contemporary suburban family in California. (The program launched the successful music career of the couple’s youngest son, Ricky Nelson, who often performed at the end of the show.) A big part of the Buckingham family’s life centered on the swimming pools of the Menlo Country Club and the famous Santa Clara Swim Club, where all three boys swam competitively. (Lindsey’s older brother Greg, who swam for Stanford University’s world-class program, would win a silver medal at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.)

When Lindsey was about six years old, he saw cowboy star Gene Autry strumming a guitar on television and asked his parents to buy one for him. So from the Atherton five-and-dime store came a little plastic Mickey Mouse guitar. To Buck and Rutheda’s surprise, Lindsey showed some rhythmic aptitude, strumming along to his brother Jeff’s collection of 45s. A bit later he appeared at a grade school assembly in black slacks and a starched white shirt, playing a thirty-five-dollar Harmony guitar, singing (or miming) Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Lindsey was deeply influenced at an early age by local heroes the Kingston Trio, calypso collegians who emerged from Palo Alto with the hit single “Tom Dooley” in 1958 and went on to a successful and enormously influential career playing college concerts around the country. The Trio was really the vanguard of the folk revival to come a few years later, and young Lindsey was captivated by the series of Trio albums his brothers brought home: The Kingston Trio;… From the “Hungry i”; At Large. He was especially enthralled by the banjo playing of Trio founder Dave Guard, whose fluid style would affect Lindsey’s own unusual finger-picking way of playing guitar. By the age of thirteen, even though he never took lessons and couldn’t read musical notation, Lindsey was developing into a good guitarist himself through constant, obsessive practice.

Another major influence came in 1963, when the Beach Boys’ records started getting airplay in California. Brian Wilson’s dreamy reveries about surfing, girls, and cars were delivered with moody blue chord changes and soaring vocals unlike anything heard in rock & roll and pop music. Their 1966 album Pet Sounds made an indelible impression on Lindsey, to the point where Brian Wilson’s melodic sensibility would have a major impact on Lindsey’s musical direction. These two archetypal California groups—the Beach Boys and the Kingston Trio—were the two foundations on which Lindsey’s career as a musician, songwriter, and arranger were based.

Lindsey played guitar and banjo while in high school, copying records by the Beatles, Elvis, the Everly Brothers, and country music stars Hank Williams and Marty Robbins. He was much more interested in music than swimming, and when he finally quit the M-A swim team, the coach told him he was a loser. But by then he didn’t care, because Lindsey had joined his first real band, Fritz, composed of friends from high school.

* * *

Fritz was formed in the fall of 1966 by Lindsey (on guitar and bass) and classmates Bob Aguirre on drums and Javier Pacheco on keyboards. Jody Moreing was the singer and her cousin Cal Roper played bass. The original name of the band was the Fritz Rabyne Memorial Band, named for a rather awkward German exchange student at M-A who reportedly didn’t appreciate this honor, so they shortened it to just Fritz. They started playing Top 40 songs like “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” the Byrds’ great satire on the Monkees, the artificial band cynically created in Los Angeles for a TV show. Satire or not, the song’s ending—“Don’t forget who you are / You’re a rock ‘n’ roll star”—made a deep impression on a lot of aspiring young musicians.

At the time he joined Fritz, Lindsey didn’t own an electric guitar, so Bob Aguirre borrowed a Rickenbacker twelve-string from a friend he was playing with in another band. Javier Pacheco was an aspiring songwriter, and they began working on his songs in the garage of the big Buckingham ranch house in Atherton. They gradually worked out band arrangements for a set list that included numbers called “Dream Away,” “Lordy,” “Sad Times,” and “John the Barber” (Pacheco’s father was the Buckingham family’s longtime barber). Fritz’s first real gig was at a senior class assembly at M-A in the spring of 1967. Lindsey’s brother Greg came by with some of his Stanford buddies, one of whom, David Forest, liked the band and said he could maybe book them into fraternity house parties for decent money.

Now the young musicians began having delusions of grandeur. Maybe, after a lot of hard work and gigging, Fritz could join the growing roster of the San Francisco bands, playing original songs in front of psychedelic light shows in the city’s repurposed old ballrooms and auditoriums: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Charlatans, Moby Grape, the Sons of Champlin, Ace of Cups, Spirit, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. In Oakland across the bay, Sly & the Family Stone were fomenting a revolution in dance music, combining the funk of soul music with the hard rock of the other Bay Area bands. These groups played almost every weekend, often on bills with top English bands—Cream, the Who, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers—at a handful of venues around San Francisco. Top rock promoter Bill Graham had been putting on rock concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium at the corner of Fillmore and Geary since 1966. The Family Dog hippie commune staged shows at the Avalon Ballroom at 1268 Sutter Street, a favorite venue of the communitarian Grateful Dead. In 1968 Bill Graham would lease the Carousel Ballroom at Market and South Van Ness Avenue and rename it the Fillmore West. These shows were promoted with avant-garde psychedelic posters and on the new FM rock stations pioneered by San Francisco’s KSAN. They inspired a new kind of audience, “girls dancing like they were catching butterflies on acid,” according to guitarist Carlos Santana, a Bill Graham protégée.

Graham also showcased San Francisco bands in San Jose, and these sometimes wild shows in 1967 were the first time Stevie Nicks saw the two women who would become her role models: Grace Slick, the elegant lead singer of Jefferson Airplane; and Janis Joplin, whose raw, bluesy vocals powered Big Brother and the Holding Company. Little did Fritz know it then, but a year later they would be opening for a lot of these legendary bands.

Lindsey graduated from M-A in June 1967 and would start at San Jose State in September. He wanted to keep Fritz going, because the more they rehearsed, the better they sounded. But then Jody Moreing left to join the New Invaders, a bigger band working out of San Jose. Cal Roper left for college, and Lindsey moved over to play bass. Javier hired Brian Kane to play lead guitar. Fritz auditioned two girl singers, but neither had the onstage presence that Jody had. Finally, at a band meeting at Lindsey’s house, he mentioned that there’d been a girl a year ahead of him at M-A who was kind of cute and could really sing. He’d seen her at college toting a guitar case. Maybe she would do. Her name, he said, was Stevie Nicks. Javier said he knew her from M-A. Lindsey said, yeah, give her a call.

Stevie was in her first year at San Jose State (where she had decided to study speech therapy, since it was the major closest to her aspiring singing career). A few months earlier, in the fall of 1967, she’d had an epiphany when she first heard Linda Ronstadt (from Tucson, Arizona) of the Stone Poneys sing “Different Drum” on Top 40 radio in a powerful voice that delivered a passionate message about a young woman wanting her independence from a man who just wants to settle down. Much later, looking back, Stevie remembered, “I heard Linda Ronstadt, and I just said, ‘That’s it! That’s what I want to do’ … although I didn’t look as good as her in cut-offs.”

More than ever, an ambitious Stevie now knew what she needed to do: write songs and sing them with a band behind her, like Linda, Grace, and Janis. She wrote in her journal that nothing was going to get in her way. But where could she find a band? It was at this fortuitous moment that the phone rang, and on the other end of the line was Bob Aguirre from high school, saying that “Linds,” the bass player in his band, recommended her as a good singer, and would she be interested in coming by his house for an audition?

And so Stevie Nicks, in her twentieth year, packed up her guitar, and a friend drove Stevie, in her own car, over to Lindsey Buckingham’s house in Atherton, and into a future that she might have faintly foreseen at that moment in her life, a glimmer of what was to come.

1.5 Hands Off Stevie Nicks

They hired her. Sometime in the summer of 1968 Stevie Nicks joined Lindsey Buckingham and friends in Fritz. And this was only one of many big changes to come that year. Her father was reassigned to Chicago, so the family home was sold and Stevie moved into a little apartment with friends so she could continue at San Jose State. (The college made headlines that summer when two of its star sprinters won Olympic medals in Mexico City and raised black-gloved fists at the awards podium to protest against racism in America.)

Joining Fritz was a big deal for her. Bob was a good drummer and Lindsey was versatile, could play almost anything. “They were good,” she recalled. “They were really playing, so it was almost as bad as joining a big rock-and-roll band, because they were serious. I was the only girl and I was always late for everything, but now it was ‘You be there!’ But I was one on-time person, mostly. I had no social life at all, but I would get paid, at least.”

Stevie learned Javier’s songs, and he thought she did them as well as or better than Jody. She brought along two songs of her own, “Funny Kind of Love” and “Where Was I?” and played them on her guitar. She seemed to fit right in as a band singer, working with the microphone and moving to the rhythms in an attractive way, kind of slinky like Grace Slick. The band’s first paying gig with Stevie Nicks onstage was arranged by Greg Buckingham in the fall of 1968, playing to a huge crowd in the main quad at Stanford.

Bob Aguirre: “I knew right away what she would bring to the party, and it worked! I remember that her first gig with us was at the Quad at Stanford—a big deal with lots of people there—and Stevie did a version of Linda Ronstadt’s “Different Drum” that brought the house down, that we had to do again, by popular demand. The writing was on the wall.”

After the concert the band was approached by a Stanford freshman who was so impressed by Fritz’s performance that he wanted to be their booking agent. His name was David Forest and he was the social chairman of his Stanford dormitory. He realized that he could make money by booking the top local bands he was hiring for other gigs at high schools and college fraternities. Forest asked if they wanted to work more, and explained that he could get Fritz regular gigs at $125 for four 45-minute sets per night. He took a $25 fee on top of that. Fritz came back and said they’d do three sets for $150, take it or leave it. Forest took the deal, even though Fritz absolutely refused to play the most requested songs by the frat boys: “Gloria,” “Louie Louie,” and “Satisfaction.”

* * *

And so Fritz started playing around Santa Clara County, up and down the peninsula, hairy young Bob Aguirre driving the decrepit Ford equipment van, working the Stanford frat parties and local high school dances, plus the Bay Area community colleges like La Canada Junior College in Redwood City and De Anza in Cupertino, performing mostly Javier’s songs but also quirky numbers like “Bonnie and Clyde,” which was actually Lindsey playing “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (from the 1967 hit movie about the bank-robbing lovers) on the banjo. They worked up a version of “Codine,” folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s song about codeine addiction, with Stevie dramatically acting out the ravages of addiction withdrawal that often got the most applause of the evening. (The band would be eye-rollingly annoyed every time Stevie stole the show this way.)

Gradually, the guys in the band began to get frustrated that Stevie Nicks seemed to be getting all the attention. People clapped politely when the band members were introduced at the end of their sets, but Stevie usually provoked a roar and general cheering. David Forest reported that when clients—especially the fraternities—called to book a band, they first asked for the group that had the cute little chick singer with the dirty blond hair.

Things were looking good for the former high school band. They even got a permanent place to rehearse, in the unused banquet room of the Italian Gardens restaurant in San Jose. At Fritz’s peak they rehearsed there four days a week and did shows on Friday and Saturday nights.

Meanwhile, Fritz had a policy: Hands off Stevie Nicks. This was from day one. It was barely discussed, but there wasn’t going to be any intraband dating going on with Fritz. And this was fine with her. The guys all had girlfriends, anyway. (Lindsey was going with a girl called Sally.)

Recalling her days on the road with Fritz, Stevie said, “Nobody in that band wanted me as their girlfriend because I was too ambitious for them. But they didn’t want anyone else to have me either. If anyone else in the band started spending any time with me, the other three would literally pick that person apart—to the death. They all thought I was in it for the attention. These guys didn’t take me seriously at all. I was just a girl singer, and they hated the fact that I got a lot of the credit.”

Years later, an interviewer asked Stevie when was the first time she ever felt like a rock star. She replied that shortly after joining Fritz, she was walking across her college campus in 1968, carrying her guitar, and that’s when she knew in her bones that she was going to be a rock star someday.

All this time, she kept writing poems and lyrics in the journals she always carried. In early 1969, thinking about the boy who broke up with her in high school, she wrote a sexy lyric called “Cathouse Blues.”

* * *

By late 1969, Fritz had graduated to San Francisco’s legendary electric ballrooms. It was a thrill to open for Moby Grape at the Fillmore West or for Creedence Clearwater Revival at Bill Graham’s Winterland, an old skating rink at the corner of Post and Steiner that the impresario had opened as a rock venue in 1968. For the next eighteen months Fritz opened shows for Leon Russell, Chicago, and the Santana Blues Band. They appeared twice on Ross McGowan’s local TV dance show. They opened a huge concert called Earth Day Jubilee at Cal Expo, the big state fair in Sacramento, the other acts being B.B. King and the Guess Who. They supported Santana again at the Monterey/Carmel Pop Festival, right before Woodstock in the summer of 1969. They tried and failed to get a gig opening for Led Zeppelin in San Francisco, but Bill Graham wanted a bigger act for Jimmy Page’s new English band—which was the hugest thing at San Jose State that year. “Their music was everywhere,” Stevie remembered. (Somewhat oddly, Fritz never opened shows for Fleetwood Mac, the surging British blues band starring London guitar god Peter Green. Fleetwood Mac—reliable, crowd-pleasing, virtuosic—was a favorite of Bill Graham’s, who actively promoted them and gave the band all the work they wanted in the San Francisco area.)

Janis Joplin had left Big Brother to go solo, an industry trend as talent managers separated the biggest rock stars from their original bands and started over with hired musicians. Fritz opened for Janis’s new Kozmic Blues Band at the Fillmore West in early 1970. Stevie: “When I first saw Janis she was very angry. The first band had run overtime and she came on the stage screaming, scared me to death. I was hiding behind the amps. She told them to get the fuck off her fucking stage—and they wrapped it up! Twenty minutes later, on walks this girl in silky bell bottoms, a beautiful top, lots of gorgeous jewelry, wearing sling-back low heels, feathers in her crazy big natural hair. Lots of attitude, arrogance, sang like a bird, the crowd in the palm of her hand.… She was not a beautiful woman, but very attractive. I was very taken with her.”

Less taken with the hard-living singer were the guys in Fritz, who hung out with her and her band in the dressing room. Janis was swigging from a bottle of Southern Comfort, chain-smoking and cussing out everyone in her Texas drawl. They thought she was coarse, vulgar, and not someone you’d want to be in a band with.

* * *

In the spring of 1970 there was a student strike at San Jose State to protest the American invasion of Cambodia. Strike organizers put together a concert with Fritz as the main act, and they played for hours, and in the end Stevie lost her voice for the first time.

That summer Fritz opened some of Bill Graham’s rock concerts at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds. These drew big crowds, and big acts. They opened for Janis Joplin’s new Full Tilt Boogie Band at the Fairgrounds on July 12, 1970, and also for Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies that summer in front of a reported 75,000 fans. Jimi noticed Stevie backstage, and he seemed to her to be a very humble, sweet, unpretentious person. During his act, as he was tuning his guitar, Hendrix looked over and saw Stevie watching him from behind the amplifiers. He stepped up to the microphone, pointed at Stevie, and told the crowd, “I want to dedicate a song to that girl over there.” Legend has it that the song he played for her was “Angel.”

“I saw him play once,” she later said of Hendrix, “and I remember thinking, I want to wear white fringe. I want to tie a beautiful scarf in my hair.”

Through all this Stevie Nicks watched and learned, taking her lessons as she found them. “So from Janis I learned that to make it as a female musician in a man’s world is going to be tough, and you need to keep your head held high. From Jimi, I learned flamboyance, grace, and humility.”

But neither star would see the end of 1970. A few months later, both Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died of drug overdoses, a national tragedy, both at the age of twenty-seven.

1.6 The Music Machine

Much later, Stevie recalled this period with her first band as one of the happier times in her life, “when I first lived on my own, with my friend Robin.” Certainly the sense of style, costume, and fashion that would underpin her future career were formed in the intense cultural matrix of the San Francisco Sound. Stevie moved in both music circles and student circles. She was impressed by the early groupies’ original style that scrambled genres and broke fashion rules in the same way these girls also aggressively broke sexual norms. The groupies mixed contemporary styles (which they often sewed or knocked off themselves) with vintage clothes and outdated mod stuff from thrift stores. They used feathers, boas, and fishnet to attract attention. Heavy on the makeup, lots of flashy dyed hair. They liked costumes—flapper dresses, bordello-chic lingerie, Barbarella sci-fi outfits, velour suits with kinky masculine brogues, Native American buckskins—all topped with floppy broad-brimmed hats or classic veils.

(But Stevie also was well aware that the real lives of the so-called groupies weren’t all dressed-up glamour. Their world was competitive and often tawdry, even dangerous because of the drugs, and many a dirty-look dagger did Stevie receive backstage from these feral girls hunting rock stars. Some of this sordid atmosphere would surface ten years later in the song “Gold Dust Woman.”)

Then there was the prevailing style of the college coeds, and the hippie girls milking goats in the new farm communes sprouting north of San Francisco, listening intently to Joni Mitchell’s confessional albums and reading Sulamith Wulfing, the visionary German artist who painted vivid depictions of angels and fairies (and a major inspiration for Stevie Nicks): these were young women in shawls, woolens and long tweed skirts, hair long and straight, wearing sturdy boots, peasant blouses, tie-dyed dresses, turquoise, jet, and silver, with the occasional brocaded sheepskin vest that someone had brought back from Afghanistan.

Stevie liked to shop at an ultrahip San Francisco boutique called Velvet Underground, where Janis Joplin and Grace Slick bought much of what they wore onstage. If anyone, it was Grace Slick—electrifying siren of acid rock—whom she most admired as the archetypal female rock star. Grace was tall and aristocratic, a former debutante from suburban Chicago. She was older than most, born in 1939, and performed the Airplane’s anthemic, hard-rocking songs with the élan of someone who’d had sophisticated dance training, moving across a stage with slinky feline assurance. Stevie liked that it wasn’t “Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane,” that Grace was part of a band and not on a solo trip like Janis had been in the end. Grace looked great in silk bell-bottoms and stiletto-heeled boots. She wore Victorian blouses and antique clothing to photo shoots. Her soaring vocal bravado on the band’s 1967 Top 10 singles “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit” had turned the Airplane into a national brand, a group of hippie artists with commercial clout. Some of Grace’s distinctive style definitely rubbed off on Stevie, in those years when Fritz was one of the better local bands in the Bay Area.

In fact, people remember Fritz as an exciting psychedelic rock band. Back in the early days of the group, Fritz had competed in a battle of the bands in San Jose with the Count Five and the Syndicate of Sound, both groups with national hit singles behind them. Count Five won the battle, but afterward Stevie got in their faces. “You’re good,” she told the astonished Counts, “but you’re not as good as me.”

* * *

But then, in 1971, it all fell apart. Fritz would disband that year. It would be a months-long process, and it ended in a lot of recrimination and remorse for everyone involved. When it was over, Stevie and Lindsey Buckingham would embark on the most important relationship of their lives.

It started to change when David Forest, the band’s de facto manager, decided to move to Los Angeles, and he wanted Fritz to go with him. He would get them studio time, they’d demo their songs, he’d get them a record deal. LA was where it was happening in the music business. San Francisco was so 1967. What Forest didn’t tell Fritz was that Bill Graham had taken an interest in the band, and thought he might be able to do something with the group. But Forest had a point. The big LA bands—the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Love, the Flying Burrito Brothers—sold more records nationally than the Bay Area bands. They had much more exposure to the media. And he may have noticed that when Stevie and Lindsey sang together, it sounded a lot more like Southern California country rock than anything else.

This LA move was controversial, and the band meetings were heated. Stevie didn’t much want to go to LA, which was generally thought of as plastic, crass, and uncool by the hippie musicians in San Francisco. Javier Pacheco, who wrote the songs and ran Fritz (according to Stevie) “with an iron hand,” was against the idea as well. He protested that there were sharply different regional values at work here. Did Fritz want to be overproduced, like Crosby, Stills & Nash? He said that Fritz was already beyond the commercial limitations of the polished Tinseltown record business. Later he wrote, “How do you [re]fashion a group whose music is inspired by the Dead and the Airplane to suddenly turn into the Monkees?” But in the end, Javier would be outvoted by his band mates. Fritz would try to head south. The next step was to find a producer interested in recording the band in Los Angeles.

* * *

In 1971 Keith Olsen was the chief engineer at a grungy, second-rate recording studio in Los Angeles called Sound City. Olsen was a little older and had played bass guitar with the Music Machine, an ahead-of-its-time Los Angeles garage band that dressed in all black and played with black leather gloves. They had a national hit single with “Talk Talk” in 1966. Like many ambitious recording engineers, he aspired to the greater satisfaction and rewards of producing records, taking a band’s songs and reshaping them into a commercial format that would sell to the huge postwar baby boom, an audience that bought so many millions of records that by the mid-1970s the music industry was the most lucrative entertainment component of the American economy, even bigger than Hollywood.

Olsen was at the end of a long list of producers that another agent named Todd Shipman was trying to persuade to go to San Francisco and see Fritz. Every LA studio pro with any record company connections said no—except Olsen, who was always up for a free trip north to hear a promising new band. At the least he could record demos of some of their songs if they were any good. He flew in and was met at the airport by Bob Aguirre driving the seatless Fritz van; Olsen sat on the drum cases on the way to the band’s gig, a Friday night dance at a Catholic high school.

“They were OK,” he recalled, “but not the super band of the future.” But Keith Olsen was struck by the harmony singing and the sexy rapport between Stevie and Lindsey. There was definitely energy there. He allowed that he could get Fritz some free studio time, on a Sunday, if they came down to make some song demos with him in LA.

Stevie didn’t much want to do this, and neither did Javier, but soon the band piled in the van and made the long drive to Los Angeles on a Saturday. They checked into the famously band-friendly Tropicana Motel on Sunset Boulevard. When they got to Sound City Studio in industrial Van Nuys on Sunday morning, they found the door locked. They had to take it off its hinges to get inside. The studio was a dump, with rotting Chinese take-out food containers and overflowing ashtrays from the previous night’s sessions. Soon Javier noticed that Lindsey’s demeanor was changing as he watched Keith Olsen, a seasoned studio engineer, manipulate the knobs and faders of the sixteen-track recording console for the first time. Lindsey was fascinated, entranced. Worse, he looked bored when the band listened to the tapes they’d made. The mostly hook-free tunes kind of sucked; they may have sounded OK at a beer-sodden fraternity party, but they just didn’t have the dynamics of a great record. Javier could almost feel his band slipping from his iron fist while they were still in the studio.

They cut demo tapes with Keith Olsen of four of Javier’s songs. “Something wasn’t right,” Olsen recalled. “There were too many weaknesses.” Before Fritz went home, Olsen recalls, “I took Lindsey and Stevie aside and said to them, ‘You two really have a unique sound together … but the rest of your band will hold you back. I’d like to continue to work with you, but I think you’d do much better as a duo.’”

They looked at each other, then told Olsen that they would talk it over and get back to him. The race was now on for real.

1.7 Trading Old Dreams for New

When Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham returned home, they took a few days to think about what Keith Olsen had offered. Stevie called her mother. Lindsey spoke with his father and brothers. At one point she asked Lindsey what would happen if she decided to stay, and he said he didn’t know what he’d do in that case. Everyone felt bad for the other guys in Fritz, but that’s show business. Unspoken were the social and racial implications of the two cuter and more talented Anglos leaving behind the two journeymen Hispanics, Pacheco and Aguirre. But that’s California. Stevie saw it as a betrayal. Lindsey didn’t think so. They had something major going between them, he told her, and they were just taking it to the next level. There was a lot of talk between them about races to be run and about winning as opposed to losing.

But she still wasn’t sure she wanted to be in Los Angeles. The city had just had that big earthquake: bridges flattened, cracks in the earth, the sky turned yellow for days. “I didn’t want to go that much,” she said later. “I never thought that I’d make it in Hollywood. And I never thought that I’d want to stay.”

But in those fraught days Stevie and Lindsey were growing closer. Sometimes she had stayed overnight in the Buckinghams’ guest room when the band came home late. Now she started sleeping there more. Lindsey broke up with his girlfriend Sally. “We started spending a lot of time together,” she recalls, “working out songs” with lots of shared intimacy and eye contact. When they finally made the decision to break up the band, they kept it to themselves for a few days, and it wasn’t the only secret they shared.

There may have been an erotic aspect to killing this attachment of five years and taking off to greener pastures. Stevie later said that she never felt entirely comfortable with what happened. “All through Fritz Lindsey and I were dating other people. I’m not sure we would have even become a couple if it wasn’t for us leaving that band. It kind of pushed us together.”

Stevie and Lindsey dreaded the last band meeting. Later Stevie told Behind the Music: “We had to tell these other three guys—that we loved—that we were going to break up the band, and that Lindsey and I were going to Los Angeles. And it was very difficult.” They said they couldn’t resist Keith Olsen’s offer to produce them, that it was a main chance for them. They held hands, the first time anyone had seen this. (Bob Aguirre: “They weren’t real out in the open about it. All of a sudden they were together.”) They said they were both dropping out of college—Stevie was only a few credits shy of graduation—and running for the rainbow in LA. And that was basically the end of Fritz. Bob Aguirre stayed friends with them, but Javier was bitter and later complained about the “lying and manipulative” way that David Forest had treated them, just as Bill Graham had (supposedly) taken an interest. Forest himself went on to a checkered career as an agent, a pimp, a gay-porn producer, and eventually went bankrupt.

* * *

But it was the beginning of the epic love of Stevie and Lindsey. She was twenty-three; he was a year younger. “I loved him before he was famous,” she said on TV later. “I loved him before he was a millionaire. We were two kids out of Menlo-Atherton High School. I loved him for all the right reasons.” And, to an interviewer: “We did have a great relationship at first. I loved taking care of him and the house. I washed his jeans and embroidered stupid moons and stars on the bottom of them, and made it so he was perfect.”

This love would become greater with time. The Stevie & Lindsey Saga would inspire some of the greatest love songs of their generation, and indeed of the entire rock movement. The songs are in heavy rotation even now, decades on. This love would then suffer neglect and jealousy and finally would expire, but only on the surface. Their love would burrow underground, forgotten by everyone but the lovers, where it would smolder for decades like a dormant volcano, occasionally erupting into passionate explosions of romantic fire and magma. (Some say this love still exists.)

* * *

September 1971. The deed was done, and Stevie and Lindsey prepared to move south. Keith Olsen invited them to stay at his house in the Hollywood Hills until they could get on their feet. But then fate intervened and Lindsey got sick. The symptoms were low fever, lassitude, and weakness. The diagnosis was glandular fever or mononucleosis. The doctor told Lindsey to rest, nothing else until he started to feel better.

So while they waited (and waited, for seven months) for Lindsey to recover, and while Stevie looked after him, they started making songs. The Hand of Fate may have dealt Lindsey a bad card, but now Dame Fortune favored him with a timely family inheritance of $12,500, enough to live on for a year. He and Stevie went shopping and bought a used BMW, a pre-owned electric guitar, and an old Ampex half-inch, reel-to-reel tape recorder. The inheritance came at just the right time, Stevie remembered. “It was a goodly amount of money, especially then, and especially for two people who had no money. Lindsey bought an Ampex four-track—he’s very brilliant and I can’t even plug in the stereo—and his dad let us have this tiny little room in his coffee plant. All the workers would leave around seven [P.M.] and we’d get there around seven-thirty and leave at six in the morning. It was this big, huge building; it was scary, and we’d lock ourselves in and work. It was just me, Lindsey, and the Ampex, everything we owned on the floor of this tiny room, and we’d just sing, and play, and record. We did seven songs and it took us a year. We thought they were really good.”

As the months at the coffee plant in Daly City dragged on, Stevie’s new song lyrics started to take on issues about their relationship. Lindsey was not an easy boyfriend to have. She found him to be bossy, hyperopinionated, and overcontrolling. He made her study records by the Beatles and the Kingston Trio so she could learn songwriting form—verses, chorus, a bridge. It was annoying. Forbidden to smoke marijuana by his doctor, major pothead Lindsey was often irritable and short with her. New songs like “Races to Run” and “Lady from the Mountains” explored relational issues like mastery and jealousy. “Without You” was about adjusting to a tense new relationship. “After the Glitter Fades” and “Nomad” mirrored her unease about moving to LA. This didn’t seem to faze Lindsey, who was focusing more on turning her words into music than on what they actually might mean. “I loved her lyrics,” he said later. “I loved providing the styles in which we would interpret these songs.”

And Lindsey was writing, too, in an amazing burst of artistic creativity. He was, after all, a bass player who was also teaching himself how to play electric lead guitar. Early in his recovery he was too weak to sit up, so he taught himself to play while lying flat, using downward strokes. This developed into an almost unique personal style: playing a “bass” part on the lower strings with his thumb while using the first three fingers—and mostly his fingernails—for melody and rhythm. One of the first songs he completed this way was a lovely instrumental for his new girlfriend, called “Stephanie.”

Lindsey was also teaching himself the craft of sound engineering with his four-track machine. Stevie would watch him intently, for hours, concentrating under his headphones, recording with one little microphone, obsessing over details, dubbing in her vocals over the lead and bass guitar parts, with Bob Aguirre’s drums on the bottom of the rock songs. She noticed that he would vigorously rub his hands together in pleased enthusiasm when he achieved an effect he was seeking. This is where Lindsey’s earliest songs—“So Afraid” and “Frozen Love”—came from.

In late 1972 they had seven songs they thought were good enough to bring to Keith Olsen. They packed their clothes, a few possessions, the tape recorder, and Lindsey’s guitars, and made the six-hour drive to Los Angeles. They found Olsen at busy Sound City, supervising the electricians and crew that was installing the studio’s brand-new recording console, and generally being elated at the prospect of making records at this gleaming desk. At the end of the day they followed Olsen home to his house off Coldwater Canyon Boulevard and moved into his back room until they could land a place of their own.

So Stevie Nicks was dragged reluctantly, if not kicking and screaming, to Los Angeles by her new boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham. He was so sure this was the right road to follow, and she was so devoted to him that she went along, and indeed, she never lived to regret it.

1.8 Sound City

Stevie Nicks remembered that she and Lindsey Buckingham were apprehensive the first night they were taken to Doug Weston’s Troubadour nightclub on Santa Monica Boulevard in late 1972. The Troub, as it was known, had been the social clubhouse of the LA music scene for more than ten years. Everyone played there, and many went on to become legends. The bar scene was intimidating.

By then the previous generation of sixties California rock stars had moved on (or died). The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas and Papas, the Burrito Brothers, Joni Mitchell, and all the laid-back sixties musicians were now living up in Topanga Canyon and Malibu and couldn’t be bothered to drive into West Hollywood and be seen in the Troub’s noisy, smoky bar area, packed with musicians, dealers, and hustlers, all on the make.

Their places were taken by a glamorous and talented new breed, many of them singer-songwriters: Linda Ronstadt, the braless beauty from Tucson; handsome young Jackson Browne; lanky Texan John David Souther; Hollywood brat Randy Newman; nasty drunk Warren Zevon; and especially charismatic Don Henley and Glenn Frey, the two principals of “Eagles” (as they insisted on calling themselves), the hottest group in America right then. They were surfing the crest of a new wave of psychic energy as California recovered from the serial traumas of the American sixties, which in Los Angeles had ended with the gruesome multiple murders by the so-called Manson Family and the subsequent trials and recriminations about an era of revolt and license that had gone horribly wrong.

But now there was a change in the air. The American seventies had an air of promise. In Los Angeles the music scene was alive with possibility and confidence, typified by the amazing success of the ultracommercial Eagles. The band had actually come together at the Troubadour bar when Linda Ronstadt, the greatest voice of her generation, hired singer-guitarist Frey (from Michigan and in Longbranch Pennywhistle with John David Souther) and the band Shiloh’s singing drummer Henley (from Cass County, Texas) to play in her band. This mutated into Eagles, and all year Stevie and Lindsey had been listening to their irresistible Top 10 smash hits on the car radio: “Take It Easy,” “Witchy Woman,” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” The Eagles were hated by establishment rock critics for their glossy superficiality and slick production values, but their records sold in the millions (mostly to women) and the songs were everywhere. (Many fans didn’t think the Eagles were even the best band in Los Angeles. That honor went by popular acclaim to guitarist Lowell George’s jazzy rock band, Little Feat.)

“We were scared to death when we first moved to LA,” Stevie later recalled, but they needn’t have been. They were immediately perceived as a sexy, star-bound couple. People who encountered them recall an aura about them, a radiance. They were Mr. and Mrs. Intense, he in his curly locks and icy blue eyes and she in her long straight hair and her piercing gaze when you talked to her. (This was because she could barely see you without her reading glasses.) They seemed to share an internal strength as magnified individuals. When they walked into the room—whether at the Troubadour or the Ash Grove or the Palomino Club or McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica—heads turned to check out this power couple newly arrived in LA, trying to make it big. Few who met them doubted that they would. Even brilliant but crazy Warren Zevon was nice to them.

* * *

But their demo tape of seven songs couldn’t get arrested.

Lindsey had brought the Ampex and the tapes, which Olsen plugged into Sound City’s new recording desk, and made a bunch of copies, which he tried to pedal to recording executives eager, even desperate, to sign the next Eagles. In early 1973 their demos were rejected by all the big labels: Columbia, Warner Bros., Reprise, Elektra, Atlantic, RCA, Polygram, Mercury, ABC-Dunhill, and talent manager David Geffen’s new Asylum Records. Nobody heard a hit record in “Rhiannon,” “I Don’t Want To Know,” and “So Afraid.”

“Every record company in the world passed on us,” Stevie said later. “We were devastated, but we still knew we were good.” And Keith Olsen still believed in them, knew they had something special together, and he encouraged them to keep going. Olsen worked it out with Sound City’s owners so the duo could work on new song demos, for free, in unused studios and after hours. This was at least something for the disappointed pair. Stevie and Lindsey had no record deal, and no management; they were lonely in these early days, were running out of money, and they missed their families. But now at least they had the Sound City Studio family behind them, and it was something like a family, and that was a good reason for them to keep going. It was a help to know that people they liked had faith in them.

* * *

Sound City was a former warehouse behind the railroad tracks in Van Nuys, then the industrial heart of the San Fernando Valley, northwest of downtown Los Angeles. There was a Budweiser brewery nearby, so the neighborhood always smelled of burned hops and fumes from the diesel beer trucks that rumbled through the streets day and night. 1540 Cabrito Road had been the Vox guitar factory in the sixties. The Rolling Stones had famously visited during their first American tour in 1964; it’s where Stones founder Brian Jones got his iconic white teardrop-shaped guitar that was frequently seen on TV from 1964 to 1967. The building itself was shabby and in ill repair. The parking lot flooded when it rained.

The recording studio was started by local businessman Joe Gottlieb a few years later to cash in on the record boom in the wake of the big LA bands. There were two studios, control rooms, and a reception and lounge area. The whole complex was carpeted in brown shag, even some of the walls, and it was widely regarded as unsanitary. There was no janitor. The girls at the front desk were supposed to help keep the place tidy, but sessions often ended long after the receptionist had left for the day, and the facility was awash with coffee cups, empty bottles, and full ashtrays. One of Sound City’s claims to fame was that Neil Young had sung the wonderful vocals for his multiplatinum album After the Goldrush there in 1970. On the album sleeve Young is depicted lying amid the empty soda cups and grungy shag of the studio lounge.

That year Gottlieb sold an interest in Sound City to a West Virginia entrepreneur called Tom Skeeter, who was moving to California to get into show business. When Keith Olsen joined the company a year later, he persuaded Skeeter to order a new mixing console from British sound engineer Rupert Neve. Then Neve’s company took more than a year to custom-build the console to Sound City’s specifications. Neve boards were then (and still are) considered the holy grail of analog recording. They were extremely rare (especially in America), custom made, and highly coveted. Sound City’s board, when it arrived in Van Nuys at about the same time as Stevie and Lindsey, was the only one of its kind in North America. Tom Skeeter paid a whopping $76,000 for the console; by contrast he also bought a three-bedroom house in Teluca Lake for $36,000, so this was a sizeable investment.

Stevie and Lindsey had a bunch of new ideas they wanted to try out, so as it happened the first song that Keith Olsen worked on with the brand-new Neve board was one of Stevie’s new songs, “Crying in the Night.” It was an auspicious beginning for the musicians, the producer, and Sound City, a studio taking a chance on two scared and lonely kids from out of town. For the next two and a half years, Stevie and Lindsey basically lived at Sound City. “It was like our home,” she later agreed. “[Owners] Joe and Tom were like our parents.”

1.9 “Not for Long”

Summer 1972. While Stevie and Lindsey were crashing in the back bedroom of Keith Olsen’s house, he was called to New York to mix a James Gang show in Central Park. Their old car’s transmission had died, so he loaned them his car—a new Corvette Sting Ray, gold colored, with 350 miles on it—on the condition that they drive him to the place where the limousine would be picking up the band—at five in the morning—and then pick him up three days later. At dawn on the appointed day, Stevie appeared in a nightdress, her hair in a towel, and blearily drove Keith down steep Coldwater Canyon Boulevard to the rendezvous in the Valley. Olsen: “Stevie in a long, heavy cotton robe, trying to drive a stick-shift car, which she’d never done before, where the end of the robe got caught up in the pedals. As she rode away after dropping me off, the lead singer of the James Gang said, ‘Keith, you’ll never see that car again.’”

When Olsen got to his hotel in New York, there was a message waiting for him to call home. “Lindsey got on the phone and told me everyone was OK but the car was in my neighbor’s bedroom. Stevie had parked the car [on the steep hill], pulled on the brake—one click—and went back to bed. Forty minutes later, the car rolled down the hill, went over a cliff, was hurled into the air and into the bedroom of the house below me. (Come to think of it, I think Stevie still owes me for that car…)”

* * *

Stevie and Lindsey may have felt lonely when they first arrived in Los Angeles, but that wouldn’t last long. One of the first friends they made was Richard Dashut, the twenty-two-year-old assistant engineer at Sound City. He was local, from West Hollywood, with dark long hair, friendly eyes, and a great laugh. He’d started out as the janitor at Crystal Sound in Hollywood, keeping an eye on the big stars of the day as they worked in the studio: James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Crosby, Stills & Nash. He wasn’t allowed to even touch the sixteen-track mixing board outfitted with the big Dolby units that every studio used to have. Richard met Keith Olsen and talked himself into a job doing maintenance at Sound City. But after a couple of weeks he was promoted to Olsen’s number-two engineer, which is when he met Buckingham Nicks, as the duo was called in the production deal they had just signed with the studio.

Richard recalls: “They were staying at Keith’s house and working with him on songs. Lindsey and I were friends five minutes after we met, smoking a joint in the parking lot. This was my first day in my new job. I met Stevie next, and twenty minutes later the three of us decided to get a place together, since I was looking around and they had to move out of Keith’s. Eventually we rented an apartment in North Hollywood, near Universal Studios. It quickly became a madhouse. I’d come home after twenty hours working with Keith at the studio and literally trip over Lindsey’s microphone cables because he’d be up late working with his Ampex four-track machine. Various other musicians would be passed out on the floor sleeping off the effects of all the pot and hash that we smoked, all the time. Sometimes I’d go into my room and find Stevie sleeping in my bed because she’d had another big argument with Lindsey, who liked to boss her around. It wasn’t an easy life for us. You had to be resilient, but we were young.”

One of those other musicians on the floor was Robert “Waddy” Wachtel, who had migrated to LA from Brooklyn. He was a spectral, gangly guitarist with long wild blond hair and wire spectacles perched on a big Brooklyn nose. He was a Stones-inspired hard rock musician who’d already been featured on Linda Ronstadt’s albums, and like Buckingham Nicks he had a quasi-production deal going with Sound City. Wachtel recalls, “I was working at Sound City, doing my stuff, trying to get up the next rung on the ladder, and so were they. And we became very tight friends, you know? Stevie was still very innocent at that point. She was like this little folksinger girl. Lindsey and I were both totally addicted to the music. He had a four-track Ampex tape machine, and they were making these great demos of their songs. I started working on their album, and from then on the three of us were always together, basically. I was always at their house. We were just sitting around, on the floor, talking and playing our guitars and smoking lots of hash.”

It was around this time that Stevie and Lindsey (pka—“professionally known as”—Buckingham Nicks) signed their deal with Pogologo Productions, a new company owned by Keith Olsen and Tom Skeeter, who recalled, “We signed them to a production deal. They wrote the songs. We provided the studio, the engineers, and the tape.” There would be no retainer or salary for them until they got a recording contract with a major label, so they would have to get jobs. Also signing Pogologo contracts at this time were their pals Waddy Wachtel and the hot young percussionist Jorge Calderon.

There had been some contention about “Buckingham Nicks.” Band names were important. Was it quite right? There were a lot of duos working in those days: Delaney & Bonny; Loggins & Messina; Brewer & Shipley; Seals & Crofts; Batdorf & Rodney. They all had the ampersand. Some thought the registered name should be “Nicks & Buckingham” since she was obviously going to be the draw, not him. Then someone said the name Buckingham Nicks might be too English. Like, Buckingham Palace. Like, Buckinghamshire. The Duke of Buckingham, et cetera. Then Warren Zevon came to—he was often out cold—and pointed out that Buckingham Nicks had four syllables but all the big English bands of the day had three: Led Zepp’lin, Jethro Tull, Judas Priest, Humble Pie, Spooky Tooth, Wishbone Ash, Blodwyn Pig, Steeleye Span, Savoy Brown, Fleetwood Mac. Even Rolling Stones. But they signed their deal, in the end, as Buckingham Nicks.

* * *

Keith Olsen now really put them to work. For this producer “preproduction” really meant rehearsal: shaping songs, working out arrangements, putting the ideas on paper because the reefer-addled musicians would forget what they’d done the day before. The next step after agreeing on an outline was to build the foundation of the song on cassette. The cassette tape was the template; the rest was built from there. It meant long and often tedious, detailed work in the studio as ideas and sounds were added and subtracted using the miraculous Neve board, which produced a hyperreal playback that everyone loved. While this was going on, when Stevie wasn’t singing she curled up on the control room sofa, her legs tucked under her, watching everything, with her journals, tissues, and remedies because she was usually not feeling well.

When she wasn’t needed in the studio, she went to work. They weren’t making any money, and Lindsey’s inheritance was spent. He and Richard Dashut would take turns bouncing checks at the International House of Pancakes and the Copper Penny, two chain restaurants where a lot of music-friendly people had jobs. Lindsey worked briefly at painting houses and telephone sales, but he gradually moved into Sound City to work on their songs full time. Someone had to make the rent.

Stevie started out cleaning Keith Olsen’s house. She was the daily. She’d show up with her mops and brooms, a rag on her head. If no one was at home she’d play Spinners records on Olsen’s massive home stereo rig. (She was really into “Mighty Love.”) Once she padded through a meeting that Olsen was having at home. Someone said, “Who’s that?” and Olsen said, “That’s the maid.” (Not for long, Stevie thought to herself.)

Stevie got a temp job as a dental assistant, but only lasted one day. She waited tables at the Copper Penny, did well in tips, always had a little silver in her pocket. She did hostess shifts at Bob’s Big Boy, a burger chain. “I made the money that supported Lindsey and me,” she remembered for the London Telegraph years later. “I paid for the apartment, for the car, for everything. And I loved that!”

But there was resentment as well. She gave Rolling Stone a different spin on that period: “We were broke and starving. I was cleaning the house of our producer for fifty dollars a week. I come home with my big Hoover vacuum cleaner, my Ajax, my toilet brush, my cleaning shoes on. And Lindsey has managed to have some idiot send him eleven ounces of opiated hash. He and all his friends are in a circle on the floor. They’d been smoking hash for a month, and I don’t smoke because of my voice. I’d come home every day and have to step over these bodies. I’m tired, and I’m lifting their legs up so I can clean up and empty the ashtrays. And all these guys are going, ‘I don’t know why I don’t feel very good.’ I said, ‘You want to know why you don’t feel so good? I’ll tell you why—because you’ve done nothing else for weeks but lie on my floor and smoke hash and take my money!’”

* * *

After recording a few demos, Stevie and Lindsey auditioned for the head of 20th Century Records, who said he liked them but couldn’t sign them without proper management, which they didn’t have. They went to see Lou Adler, a talent manager who owned Ode Records and who had signed the Mamas and the Papas. Adler listened to half of one song and told them thank you very much.

Through these difficult times Stevie kept writing lyrics in her omnipresent journal. “Without You” was from then; also “Planets of the Universe.” (Both would show up on albums years—decades—later.) “Gold Dust Woman” in its earliest form was from then. “Designs of Love” became “That’s Alright” on Mirage, ten years in the future. They got their first piano when Keith Olsen gave them an old carved upright, painted white. Learning to write on piano for the first time, Stevie came up with “Lady from the Mountains,” which became “Sorcerer” later on. She was the lady from the mountains, Northern California. Lindsey was the sorcerer. “Who is the master?” the singer asks, in their continual struggle for control. “‘Lady’ is me figuring the piano out,” Stevie later averred.

Also around this time, Stevie read Triad, a romance novel by Mary Leader set in Wales, a tale of witchcraft and possession, sorcery and magical powers. She was also hearing Led Zeppelin’s majestic “Stairway to Heaven” on the car radio every day as that epic anthem invaded the mass consciousness of her generation in those times. If Zeppelin could sing about mysterious ladies and bustles in hedgerows, she figured she could, too. All of these were part of the backstory of “Rhiannon,” which was beginning to come together as Stevie sat, for hours, at her white piano, hunting for the music that would take her where she wanted to go.

1.10 Frozen Love

While Buckingham Nicks were pursuing a recording contract, other currents were swirling around in the musical torrents of Los Angeles. They had been there for a year now, and people were starting to take notice. But when they tried to get paying gigs around town, promoters instead offered them deals to form a Top 40 cover band and play the steak-and-lobster circuit from San Diego to Santa Barbara, playing “Take It Easy,” “Witchy Woman,” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling” at Chuck’s Steakhouse three nights a week for good money, five hundred dollars a week. The gigs were there for them, they were told, all the work they could handle, and they should take the offer because nobody was going to pay money to see Buckingham Nicks in the foreseeable future. They agreed that if they did this, it would be like prostituting themselves, and they would lose whatever they had going for them, even at that low point.

So no gigs, but Keith Olsen arranged a showcase for Buckingham Nicks at Art LaBoe’s on the Sunset Strip so label executives could take a look at them, up close. They rehearsed for this together, and it wasn’t sounding right. Stevie was nervous. Stage fright was rare for her. She told people that she was born to get up on a stage and sing, that she’d been trained to do this by her grandfather when she was five years old. That evening the only ones to show up were Waddy Wachtel and a friend of his.

Then Waddy had this notion that Stevie should sing country songs. “When I met Stevie and I heard her sing, I was very much into Dolly Parton at that point, which was wild because I never heard a note of country music when I lived in New York. And so I gave Stevie a Dolly Parton album and I said, ‘You’ve got to learn this girl’s work. You gotta get a load of this chick!’ And she couldn’t believe it. So we started to play around town, doing Dolly Parton tunes, some other country songs, a couple of [their] originals, and Lindsey and I would play guitar great together. We had another friend, Jorge Calderon, who played bass with us. It was the four of us, just knocking around town like that.”

They were still working on their stuff at Sound City (for free, unheard of) with Richard Dashut, when Buckingham Nicks suddenly got a recording contract. Keith Olsen had played their tapes to a guy who was partners in an independent label, Anthem Records. He said he wanted to sign Buckingham Nicks and send them to London to record at Trident Studios, where the Rolling Stones often worked. But then the partnership broke up, and that deal fell through. But then the Anthem guy got a distribution arrangement with Polydor, a major label. For once, someone said yes to Buckingham Nicks. The Anthem/Pogologo deal was said to be worth about $400,000, huge money back then, but Pogologo recording artistes Buckingham Nicks were told only that their album had a green light with a most generous recording budget of $25,000.

They were ecstatic, so relieved. There’d be an album and a tour. Fame and riches were in the future. The album would be released late in 1973, and then another. What they had foreseen and what people had predicted for them would come true.

Stevie quit working at Bob’s Big Boy.

For the next six months they cut ten new tracks under Keith Olsen’s supervision. Waddy Wachtel and other friends played on the sessions, but now Olsen brought in some of the top studio musicians in Los Angeles. Drummer Jim Keltner (widely considered the best in town) played with Delaney & Bonnie and Eric Clapton. When Keltner wasn’t available, Elvis Presley’s drummer Ronnie Tutt was flown in from Las Vegas and paid double scale, $220 an hour. Bassist Jerry Scheff also played with Elvis and had worked with the Doors. Stevie attended all the sessions, often wearing long charcoal-colored skirts over her ballet leggings, watching everything from the control booth sofa. She wrote letters to her parents (now living in Phoenix again) on Sound City letterhead that famous people were playing on their record, and that Lindsey himself was going to be famous someday.

They finished sequencing the record in late spring, 1973. Stevie’s “Crying in the Night” began the LP’s first side and was an acoustic plea for a man to beware of a woman who was back in town, a dangerous woman. It had a sense of Joni Mitchell fronting the Eagles, and Stevie’s rattling tambourine was way up in the mix. Lindsey’s “Stephanie” was a guitar portrait of Stevie, touching and tinkling, also an homage to Brian Wilson’s musical direction. Lindsey’s “Without a Leg to Stand On” came next, sounding like a song by Cat Stevens, the very precious (and popular) English minstrel. Lindsey sang lead on Stevie’s new ballad “Crystal,” which described romantic love as a quest, a journey through mountains and fountains, sustained by a string section. (“Crystal” was New Look Fleetwood Mac avant la lettre, and would be reprised on that band’s first album.) The album’s first side ended with an actual anthem, Stevie’s “Long Distance Winner,” about a romance with a difficult, untamable man. “Winner” emerged as somewhat epic in scope, with a blowout jam at the end.

The album’s flip side began with Lindsey’s “Don’t Let Me Down Again,” a fast California rocker with the brilliant Jim Keltner driving the train. “Django” was Lindsey’s tribute to gypsy guitar genius Django Reinhardt, and also to the song’s composer, John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Stevie’s “Races Are Run” followed, an oddly modulated song about winning and losing at life’s competitions, and about a relationship that had to end. (When Javier Pacheco heard “Races,” he thought it was about them leaving Fritz in the lurch.) Two of Lindsey’s songs wound up the sequence. “Lola (My Love)” sounded like another homage, this time to Ry Cooder. And “Frozen Love” (cowritten with Stevie) was astute, about a love that had gone stale, with layers of strings and synthesizers and a major Lindsey Buckingham rock guitar symphony with three separate movements, a Big Statement from a new guitarist. Close reading of Stevie’s lyrics could suggest that, from her point of view at least, the Buckingham Nicks romance was nearly over.

* * *

With the recording completed, it was time to make the album jacket photographs. They wanted Waddy’s brother Jimmy Wachtel to shoot them, but that was vetoed by Polydor’s art director. Stevie and Lindsey duly reported to the Burbank studio of photographer Lorrie Sullivan, whose brief from the company was to make it sexy. This was an album from and about a hot couple; sex was what the label thought they were selling. So Stevie went shopping and with her last hundred dollars bought a loose, filmy white blouse that exposed a little skin, figuring that would do it. They went through hair and makeup while the set was lit for a close-up of the charismatic pair. Lindsey came out blow-dried and darkly handsome, with a carefully groomed moustache. Stevie was more brunette than blond, with long colored feathers dangling from her ears. The photographer snapped off a few rolls of film, and then she asked the couple to take off their shirts.

Stevie balked. She told Sullivan that she was a prude, and that her family would not approve of a bare breast on her first album, let alone a nipple. She was wearing a flesh-colored bra; maybe they could work with that instead. The photographer explained that it would be too hard to retouch the bra under the dangling feather; it would look fake. That’s when already bare-chested Lindsey lost patience with her. “Don’t be paranoid,” he snapped at her. Then he lowered his voice and growled, “Don’t be a fucking child. This is art!”

“This is not ‘art,’” she hissed. “This is me taking a nude photograph with you, and I don’t dig it.”

Stevie was intimidated. She felt trapped by the people looking at her. Under pressure, she took off her blouse, then her bra, and was directed to pose behind Lindsey’s right shoulder, exposing the side of her right breast. In the resulting picture she looked directly into the camera with her dark eyes. She looked like someone else. She also looked tense.

After this, Stevie went to her parents’ home near Phoenix and had an ovarian cyst removed. She was in bed for five weeks after that. When the proofs of the album jacket were sent to her, Stevie showed them to her mother. Barbara Nicks told Stevie, “We’re going to have to think about this before we show it to Dad.” Stevie wanted it kept from her father, but this wasn’t possible. When Jess Nicks saw his daughter’s album jacket he was annoyed, and he let Stevie know it.

Around this time, Stevie wrote a song lyric titled “Garbo,” after the film star Greta Garbo, who refused to wear revealing costumes on screen. The lyric was a tribute to all the Hollywood actresses who were forced into doing scenes they didn’t really want to do.

This incident really bothered her. When the album came out later in 1973 she was mortified, even though it was quite chaste by contemporary standards. Her father was still not amused. Even A.J. complained. She tried to explain that she’d been bullied into taking off her shirt. “From the very beginning,” she said later, “Lindsey was very controlling and very possessive. And after hearing all the stories from my mother and how independent she was and how independent she’d made me, I was never very good with controlling people and possessive people.” She told herself that she would never let anything like this happen again.

1.11 Heartbreaker

Polydor Records released the Buckingham Nicks album in September 1973, when Stevie Nicks was twenty-five years old. The record promptly bombed.

The album jacket was dark gray and somber. The singers radiated an off-putting anxious glamour. (The same image, dyed in the solarization process, was on the jacket’s reverse.) Stevie’s name was misspelled “Stevi.” There was no track listing, just lyrics. Jimmy Wachtel’s insipid interior photo showed the pair smiling, dressed casually in bell-bottom jeans, with Lindsey’s hand insinuatingly close to Stevie’s crotch. The album bore a dedication to A.J. Nicks, identified as “the grandfather of country music.” (In Nashville, they must have wondered about this.)

No one seemed to like the record. Polydor executives hadn’t even wanted to release it. They said the songs lacked imagination and had no commercial potential, but their deal with Anthem meant that they were contractually obligated to put the album out. There was no radio promotion budget (i.e., bribes of cash and cocaine to program directors), and barely any publicity at all. Radio DJs told the Polydor promo guys that the songs weren’t original enough, and that Stevie’s voice was too “nasal” for the FM stations. Hard-rocking “Don’t Let Me Down Again” was released as a single. (Polydor advertised it in the trade publication Record World: “A beautiful single by two beautiful people.”) There was little airplay, except for in the college town of Madison, Wisconsin, and in Cleveland, where disk jockey Kid Leo played the single and album tracks on hard-rocking WMMS-FM.

The single didn’t make the Billboard sales charts. Neither did the album. The press ignored Buckingham Nicks, which wasn’t reviewed by Rolling Stone, Creem, or Hit Parader, the most important American music publications. In the only published interview Lindsey did, he was asked about the duo’s inspirations. He answered that their songs were influenced by Cat Stevens, and his guitar playing owed something to Jimmy Page’s acoustic work with Led Zeppelin.

Lindsey then put together a band so Buckingham Nicks could play out. Bob Aguirre came down to LA at Lindsey’s request and played drums, and Tom Moncrieff, their old friend from Fritz days, played bass. Buckingham Nicks played another showcase at the Troubadour and only twenty people showed up. There were a couple of reviews in local papers, neither very supportive. Billboard, the weekly bible of the record business, dismissed them as “a lackluster male-female duo.” Then Waddy Wachtel joined on second guitar, which took the Buckingham Nicks Band up a major notch. This is the band that played at the Starwood in West Hollywood (which usually featured glam bands) in late 1973. In November they opened for stellar songwriter John Prine at the Troubadour, and played other shows as well. Set lists (according to drummer Aguirre, who’d quit Dr. Hook’s Medicine Show to make the gig) included “Lola,” “I Don’t Want To Know” (just written for the next BN album), “Monday Morning” (same), “Races Are Run,” “Crystal,” the guitar instrumental “Stephanie,” “Lady from the Mountain,” “You Won’t Forget Me,” and “Don’t Let Me Down Again.” A cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker” was a star turn for Waddy. The encore was heavy-duty anthem “Frozen Love,” Lindsey Buckingham’s electric guitar showpiece.

Buckingham Nicks made their East Coast debut at a showcase for press and radio at Manhattan’s Metro club. Stevie arrived in New York with a sore throat and a streaming cold. Billboard sent a writer, who thought Lindsey seemed overwhelmed by his duties as both lead singer and lead guitar. As for Stevie: “Ms. Nicks also encounters problems, chiefly in her solo style, which points up the occasional roughness of her voice and the strident quality to her top end that makes duets bracing, but proves less than fruitful when she takes the stage alone.” Later the cold turned into the flu.

After that, Buckingham Nicks went south and opened some shows for headliner bands. They opened for LA country rock band Poco in Atlanta and for guitarist Leslie West’s thunderous Mountain in Birmingham, Alabama. The local rock station had been playing cuts from Buckingham Nicks, and so they were pleasantly surprised when the fans seemed to know some of the songs, and they got an ovation and were called back for an encore.

* * *

Then, in the late winter of 1974, they were fired. Polydor dropped Buckingham Nicks. The label execs said that returns of Buckingham Nicks were enormous (retailers could return unused product for credit), and that Polydor’s sales staff now had to prepare for Eric Clapton’s big comeback album after years of heroin addiction.

Stevie: “We were dropped by Polydor after about three months, and Lindsey and I were devastated, because we’d just had a taste of the finer things of life, and now we were back to square one.

“So Lindsey went back to writing his angst-laden songs [like “So Afraid”], and I went back to being a waitress: ‘Can I get you anything? More coffee? Some cake?’ I was all right with that—I didn’t mind being a waitress—but we couldn’t believe it! We thought we had made it! Famous people played on our record! We were living the highlife! We were stunned!”

Discouraged, somewhat humiliated, Stevie told Lindsey she wanted to quit music, at least for a while. She thought seriously about going home, but during long soul-searching phone calls, Barbara Nicks advised her to try to keep going. “My mother would say, ‘Stevie, don’t forget—you’re on a mission.’”

* * *

But somehow the contentious couple’s luck managed to hold. Keith Olsen and Joe Gottlieb had put too much energy into them to stop now. They told Stevie and Lindsey that they could keep working at Sound City for free, same as before, until they had enough new songs to try to get a new deal with another label.

It was a hard time for them. There were bruising fights with harsh words about winners and losers that left Lindsey sleeping on the living room sofa with his guitar and Stevie in their bedroom with her toy poodle, Ginny. But later that spring, Lindsey and Richard Dashut got to work on their new songs while Stevie and her friend Robin Snyder (who’d relocated to LA) worked waitress shifts in corny flapper outfits at Clementine’s, a Roaring Twenties theme restaurant in West Hollywood.

Stevie: “I’d get home at six [P.M.], fix dinner and straighten up, ’cos they’d been smoking dope and working on songs. Then from nine to three [A.M.] I’d join Lindsey on the music. Then I went to bed, got up, and went to my waitress job.”

And so they pressed on, determined to make new music against hard odds.

* * *

The year 1974 would be an important year for Stevie and Lindsey. It was a time of political upheaval, with the agony of the Watergate scandal hearings and that summer’s resignation of President Nixon, the first in American history. The Vietnam War was still in progress, with defeat looming over the horizon—another first for America. American cities were riddled with crime and prone to bankruptcy. It was the era of killer bees, Deep Throat, The Exorcist, and the kidnapping of the California publishing heiress Patricia Hearst by an armed radical faction that styled itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. (Most of them died in a fiery shootout in Los Angeles, shown live on TV.)

What impacted most Americans were the long lines at gas stations during the Arab oil embargo in the wake of the 1973 Middle East War. Not since the Second World War, when gasoline was rationed, did Americans have to line up for fuel. Sometimes the lines seemed endless, and frustrations could boil over into arguments and fights. It was in one of these gas lines that spring that Lindsey’s father suffered a heart attack and died in his car while waiting his turn to fill his tank. He was only fifty-seven years old. Brother Greg Buckingham called to tell Lindsey the sad news.

Stevie: “I answered, and had to hand him the phone.” She’d never seen Lindsey cry before. They went back to Atherton for the funeral, with Stevie doing her best to comfort Lindsey’s distraught mother. Lindsey was subdued for a long time after that. “I don’t think he ever got over his dad,” Stevie said later.

Richard Dashut: “I had moved out to a one-bedroom apartment near Fairfax [Avenue, in West Hollywood]. After Buckingham Nicks bombed, Stevie and Lindsey ran out of money, so they moved in with me. Back went the four-track, the cables, the stoned musicians sprawled on the floor, and we worked on the demos for the next Buckingham Nicks album: ‘So Afraid,’ ‘Monday Morning,’ and ‘Rhiannon.’”

* * *

Then opportunity knocked in the form of Don Everly, of the legendary Everly Brothers. Brother Phil had angrily thrown down his guitar and walked out of the long fraternal partnership during a show at Knott’s Berry Farm in California, leaving Don to go it alone. He had recorded an album of new songs, and Warren Zevon put together a touring band with himself on keys and Waddy on guitar. When Waddy left to do session work he got Lindsey the job, with Lindsey also singing Phil’s harmony parts with Don. The money was OK and much needed, and the tour would give Lindsey good experience and national exposure. He’d be away for about six weeks.

At least the place was clean while he was gone, and Stevie needed a break from her grueling routine of working all day and then singing on demo tapes until three in the morning. She could come home in her Clementine’s outfit and collapse. “Stevie is so friendly, and such a good woman,” Richard said later, “and we laughed all the time when we weren’t out slaving.”

While Lindsey was on tour, Stevie was invited to stay at a ski lodge owned by Warren Zevon’s in-laws in Aspen, Colorado. Aspen then was still fairly rustic, with faint echoes of the old frontier mining town, and cool movie stars like Jack Nicholson gathering nightly for drinks in the funky saloon of the Jerome Hotel. Stevie thought she could use some time alone in Aspen to work on new songs. She packed herself, her guitar, and tiny dog Ginny into their old Toyota, and made the long drive to the Colorado mountains.

Stevie later wrote, “I was in somebody’s living room, sitting cross-legged on the floor with my Goya guitar,… thinking about what to do with my life. Should I go back to school, or should I go on pursuing a music career with Lindsey?” She was thinking about the rejection they had suffered, how much it had shattered their pride and hurt them as a couple. “And we weren’t getting along. I sat looking out at the Rocky Mountains, pondering the avalanche of everything that had started to come crashing down on us [and] at that moment, my life truly felt like a landslide in many ways.”

She’d only been there for a few days when Lindsey showed up—in a rage. Don Everly had cut short his tour in frustration after disrespectful fans ignored his new songs and demanded to only hear the hits, from “Bye Bye Love” to “Cathy’s Clown.” Stevie was having problems of her own—breathing in the rarefied alpine air was difficult for her, leaving her with a a chronic sore throat—and she was, in Lindsey’s opinion, less than comforting to him. This led to the inevitable shouting match (and maybe worse) before Lindsey stormed out, abandoning his girlfriend—ill and alone—in the freezing Colorado ski town.

Stevie later wistfully recalled this incident, which led to one of her best, most popular, and enduring songs: “‘Landslide’ I wrote in Aspen. That’s where the snow-covered hills came from. And I was definitely doing a lot of reflecting when I was up there. Lindsey was on the road with the Everly Brothers [sic], and I was very unhappy and very lonely … and trying to figure out why he was out with the Everly Brothers and I was in Aspen with forty dollars and my dog, and my Toyota that went frozen the day we got there. And we thought he would make like, lots of money. He didn’t. He came back to Aspen and he was very angry with me. And he left me. [He] took Ginny the poodle and the car and left me in Aspen … [on] the day that the Greyhound buses went on strike. I had a bus pass because my dad was the president of Greyhound. I had a bus pass; I could go anywhere. I said, ‘Fine, take the car and the dog—I have a bus pass.’ I also had a strep throat. He drove away. I walked in and the radio is saying that Greyhound is on strike all over the United States. I’m going ‘Oh no—I’m stuck.’ So I had to call my parents, and they—unwillingly—sent me a plane ticket because they didn’t understand what I was doing there in the first place. So I followed him back to Los Angeles. That was like October [1974]. It was all around Halloween.”

1.12 Landslide

When Stevie returned to Los Angeles she couldn’t bring herself to go back to the apartment she shared with Lindsey and Richard. Instead, she briefly camped out in Keith Olsen’s back room in Coldwater Canyon and wrote most of “Landslide.” It was a song about romantic disaster, the seismic upheaval of a woman of twenty-six years losing her partner, the ground, sickeningly, giving way under her feet. The “children” are getting older, and she’s getting older, too, her biological clock ticking, she could feel it. Would she ever even have children? She had hopes, but she also had her doubts. She’d been waiting tables and cleaning houses for three years. She was tired, emotional, exhausted. Keith Olsen could hear Stevie Nicks softly crying down the hall as she worked on her heartbroken new song.

Adding to her sadness was the death of her grandfather, A.J. Nicks. Her father told her she didn’t have to go to his funeral in Phoenix, and she was relieved. She’d written a song for him while he was dying but never played it for him.

Barbara Nicks became alarmed at how Stevie sounded during their phone calls. It was like talking to a sickly old woman, not her little Teedie. She dispatched her husband to Los Angeles to see what was going on. Jess Nicks was shocked to see his daughter so thin and unhappy. Stevie: “There were times when my dad would say, ‘How long are you going to do this? You have no money, you’re not happy, you work constantly, you work at restaurants, you clean houses, you get sick very easily, you’re living in Los Angeles, you don’t have any friends—why are you doing this?’ And I would just say, ‘Because this is what I came here to do.’”

Jess Nicks then strongly suggested that Stevie put a time limit on her quest. Give it six more months, he advised, and if it doesn’t happen, go back and finish college. The family was behind her, but there should be an end game. Her parents had been sending her a little money almost every month, but it couldn’t go on forever. Reluctantly, Stevie agreed to some kind of vague timetable.

She recalled, “I think they saw in me shades of my grandfather A.J. He was a country-and-western singer who never made it and drank too much. He was so unhappy, trying to make it. He turned into a very embittered person and died that way.” A few months later, Jess Nicks suffered a cardiac arrest, but Stevie couldn’t get to Phoenix in time before her father underwent an open-heart operation. She was afraid he might die before she could make something of herself, which would make him so proud of her.

Now Stevie Nicks was even more determined to keep at it. When she eventually returned to their apartment she looked at Lindsey and read him the riot act. “I basically walked back into the house and said, ‘Lindsey, let’s go. Let’s do this.’ I wrote ‘Landslide’ about whether or not I was going to give it all one more chance. You know the rest of the story.”

She played the first verse and chorus of “Landslide” for Keith Olsen, who agreed that the melancholy ballad had strong possibilities, but it needed more inspiration. Stevie: “I was over at Keith’s house, and he had these great speakers that were as tall as me. And Joni [Mitchell]’s record [Court and Spark] had just come out, and I put it on. He went away; it was just me. I took some LSD—it felt like a safe place to do it and it was the only time I ever did it—and I listened to this record for three days. She was able to stuff so many words into one sentence and not have them sound crowded. She was talking about what it was to be very famous, and to be a woman living in a man’s world. She had been in the world of fame much longer than me, and she had gone out with every famous rock star that there was. And she was such an amazing guitarist that they all respected her. That was unheard of. She was in the boys’ club. She talked about what I saw coming. Even though Buckingham Nicks had tanked, I knew that we were going to be very famous, very rich, and that this fame thing was going to overwhelm us. So when I listened to this record, it was like a great old premonition just being laid out in front of me.”

Stevie also noted that it sounded like most of Joni’s new songs had obviously been written on the piano, not the guitar (or her mountain dulcimer).

So, on piano, Stevie began reworking the song she thought could make this prophesy come true. Her interest in the Rhiannon material had started with the sound of the name itself. It rang a bell for her. Stevie had bought a novel called Triad: A Novel of the Supernatural, by Mary Leader, at an airport bookstore the year before. (Triad was published in 1973.) “It was about a girl named Rhiannon and her sister and mother, or something like that. I just thought the name was so pretty that I wanted to write something about a girl named Rhiannon. It was only later I found out that Rhiannon was a real mythical character!”

The book was a story of sorcery and witchcraft inspired by the old Welsh myths. The writing style was impossibly romantic; reading the novel, Stevie felt like she was watching scenes in a film:

And down the glorious pathway flew three singing birds. One was white, and one was green, and one was gold as morning. Their singing was sweet, the thundering of hooves was loud. The sound flowed like water over his tired aching body. The words of his old nurse came back to him: the three birds of Rhiannon …

But Stevie’s vision of Rhiannon was different than the book’s narrative. “It was the name that interested me,” she insisted. “It was a kind of superbeing that I made up. She was the only supernatural character that I’ve ever written a song about.” Her vision of the Welsh goddess was numinous—something that could be felt and experienced but not actually seen. The various poems she wrote about Rhiannon were paired with an older melody in her head called “Will You Ever Win?”—a variation on the theme of winning and/or losing that had preoccupied her and Lindsey ever since they left home for LA.

When she moved back into their cramped apartment around Thanksgiving, she got up late one morning to go to work at her waitress job at Clementine’s. She left a C-60 cassette containing a piano demo of “Rhiannon” propped against the coffeepot, with a note for Lindsey that read: HERE IS A NEW SONG. YOU CAN PRODUCE IT, BUT DON’T CHANGE IT.

* * *

November 1974. Stevie and Lindsey continued to work on the new songs at Sound City: “Monday Morning,” “So Afraid,” and “Rhiannon,” also versions of “Nomad” (aka “Candlebright”), “Lady from the Mountain,” “Castaway,” “Mistaken Love,” and the earliest attempts at “Gold Dust Woman.” But they weren’t really working together. Stevie complained that Lindsey was changing her songs too much from her original intentions, and that they didn’t sound the way she wanted them to sound. This was a huge problem and an issue between the two of them. According to Keith Olsen, this simply couldn’t be helped. He recalled, “Stevie writes these little repetitive loops that she crafts melodies around. This is one of the unique aspects of the way she writes, [but] sometimes this gets old—quickly. So a more commercial, chordal form needs to be implemented, and this is what she sometimes considers too much change from the original material.”

Even Stevie had to admit that she was very dependent on Lindsey to remake her poems and melodic notions into actual songs. “He takes my little skeleton songs and turns them into finished pieces,” she said later, but she was adamant that he took too many liberties with her music, and she told him so. This “hostile dependency” was tearing the couple apart. She needed Lindsey’s creative mind, his fluid music, and resented this intrusion on the treasured independence her mother had instilled in her. Lindsey lately had been paranoid and cold to her; she told friends that Lindsey was more interested in his guitar than in her, and this left Stevie feeling drained by the conflicting emotions of their arrangement. They’d been through three hard years of stress together. Now the fights and harsh words grew worse. Sometimes Stevie was physically afraid during Lindsey’s rages. Even their Toyota was broken, its reverse gear having given up the ghost.

Stevie couldn’t take it anymore—being anxious all the time—and moved in with Robin Snyder. Stevie remembered, “Lindsey and I couldn’t be together [as a couple] and try to work together. It wouldn’t leave us anywhere to go at the end of the day.” The once loving friendship between the two ambitious young musicians was beginning to fray and unravel.

* * *

And then something happened. Early in December, Stevie was working in Sound City’s Studio B, at the rear of the building. Richard Dashut was at the controls, listening to her play a piano rendition of the entire “Rhiannon” cycle, including the much faster storm-dance segment toward the end. She wondered aloud into the microphone whether some “really important” bird sounds could be added to the track. She asked, “Don’t you think Rhiannon is a beautiful name?” Just then, as if in answer to an occult summons, there was a commotion in another part of the building. Stevie walked into the hall and could hear the sound of Lindsey’s guitar solo on “Frozen Love” blasting at top volume from Studio A.

Then she saw him. He was a giant, six-foot-six, with long straight hair under his weathered cowboy hat and a big, aquiline nose. He had on a flannel western shirt and sported a tweed vest with an old-fashioned pocket watch and chain across his skinny frame. With him were two little blond girls in frilly dresses and sandals, obviously his daughters. He was listening to the guitar solo with big ears, his head bobbing to the throbbing pulse of the hard rock guitar as he pounded the track’s rhythm on his knee. She thought she recognized him. She’d seen him on TV, maybe. He was a rock star, an English rock star. She whispered to Richard, “Who is that?”

“That’s Mick Fleetwood,” he answered, “from Fleetwood Mac.”


Copyright © 2017 by Stephen Davis