Gold Dust Woman by Stephen Davis

Author:Stephen Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER 5

5.1 Stevie Faces Death

Now it’s late 1980. Ronald Reagan, the arch-conservative former California governor, has been elected president of the United States. The American eighties are under way and would be nothing like the sixties and seventies. For an ambitious, hard-charging rock star like Stevie Nicks the eighties would be big hair, big tits, new styles, swagger, and pomp. The music would be more pop than rock—synthesizers, synth drums, sequencers, Duran Duran, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper. MTV would start broadcasting music videos around the clock in 1981, which meant the wardrobes got brighter, with more pastels, big shoulders, hard edges. Stevie’s new eighties styles would explore the implications of the feminine as applied to power and strength, and her stage clothes would become an even more iconic part of the self she would project to her fans through song and presentation.

On December 8, 1980, Stevie and Jimmy Iovine were at his house in the San Fernando Valley when someone called to tell him that John Lennon had been shot in front of his apartment building in New York. Jimmy went into shock. They turned on the TV to hear that the former Beatle was dead, murdered by a fan. Jimmy had been one of Lennon’s favorite studio engineers on his mid-seventies solo projects, and the two had grown close. Now Jimmy was inconsolable.

She’d been living with Jimmy for about six months when this happened. “He was finishing Tom Petty’s album,” she recalled, “and since nobody really knew where I was, I was starting to get itchy to begin work on Bella Donna and it seemed like it would just never happen. Jimmy had told me many times about his incredible friendship with John. It was a real-life fairy tale that ended one gray day. A terrible sadness came over the house; there was simply nothing I could say.” Stevie packed up and went home. Jimmy would have to do this by himself.

But Stevie would face death herself in the next few weeks. Her mother called to say that her Uncle Bill was in the hospital with cancer and wasn’t expected to live. Stevie was on the next plane to Phoenix where she joined her parents, Aunt Carmel, and cousin John at her uncle’s bedside. Late one night Stevie and John were keeping vigil when Uncle Bill went into cardiac arrest. They called for a nurse but there was no response. Stevie dashed into the hall and ran down the long, shadowy corridor, but it seemed no one was on duty. She plunged down some dark stairs, but the door to the floor below was locked. In a panic, she came back up again. She ran back down the hall to her uncle’s room, but when she walked in he was already gone. Bill Nicks was her favorite uncle, and Stevie now went into mourning herself, appearing mostly in black for a while.

The deaths of these two men were intense for Stevie. That empty hospital hall would soon be featured on one of her best songs.

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