Stevie Nicks: Turning Rainbows into Music and Music into Gold

[SpyNote]

From Danny Goldberg's new book Bumping into Geniuses: My Life inside the Rock and Roll Business

Chapter 7
Stevie Nicks: Turning Rainbows into Music and Music into Gold

I knew that Peter Grant was right that rock stars held the real power in the business, but it took me some time to make it work for me. My ambitions were such that it wasn’t enough just to be thought of as a good PR person, since rock PR rarely led to career opportunities other than more rock PR. By the spring of 1979 it had been three years since I had left Swan Song, I was soon to turn twenty-nine with thirty looming ominously on the horizon, and I was consumed with the fear that my success with Zeppelin had been a fluke. The money that came in from PR fees didn’t always pay my monthly bills. I took a series of loans from my parents that added up over time to thirteen thousand dollars and I didn’t have any plan except to just stay in the game. I was saved by Stevie Nicks.

I met Stevie when she was dating Paul Fishkin, who was president of Albert Grossman’s Bearsville Records and one of my best friends. Bearsville’s first hit had been “We Gotta Get You a Woman” by Todd Rundgren, who had grown up with Paul in Philadelphia and had written the song about him. Paul’s adolescent shyness had long since left by the time I had met him during my brief stint working for Grossman’s music publishing company. He had long curly black hair and a bushy black mustache and was a bit of a dandy, dressed in the expensive and well-tailored velvet-and-leather hippie clothing prevalent at the time. Paul always seemed to have an attractive woman on his arm but also had a gregarious affability that made him one of the guys.

Paul had developed an expertise in pop and rock radio promotion and was so instrumental in getting the blues-rock group Foghat to million-selling (platinum) sales status that Grossman gave him a 20-percent interest in the Bearsville label and the title of president. (Title inflation meant that the “president” was the number-two person in most record companies, typically reporting to the “chairman.”) Not long thereafter Paul retained my company to do the PR for all of Bearsville’s artists.

Paul had met Stevie at a Warners sales convention and a roman had promptly blossomed. Fleetwood Mac’s album Rumours was the best-selling album in America at the time. (It would remain number one for thirty-nine weeks, a feat that has never been duplicated.) Stevie had written and sung “Dreams,” the biggest hit on Rumours, a haunting, beautiful, and bitter song about her highly publicized breakup with Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. Lindsey had reciprocated by writing the biting “Go Your Own Way” about Stevie.

Paparazzi had no interest in rock stars in the 1970s, but Stevie was a glamorous and highly recognizable figure in the rock subculture. She had a vivid stage “look” defined by billowing chiffon skirts, shawls, top hats (or, later in her career, feathered berets), layers of lace, and her long curly blond hair. Only five feet one in her stocking feet, she habitually wore six-inch suede platform boots and walked with the confident, erect posture of a beauty queen.

The first time I met Stevie was when she came as Paul’s date to a press party I staged for Foghat at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center. In those days she had a perfect hour-glass figure dressed in a slightly subdued version of her velvet-clad stage persona. Stevie was at her defining moment as a rock icon and I was momentarily intimidated by her glamour but was soon put at ease by her warm, self-deprecating manner.

The party was the culmination of the best PR stunt I ever pulled off. Foghat’s success was based on the rock radio hit “Fool for the City” and “Slow Ride” and extensive touring orchestra by Premier Talent. The band had been virtually invisible in the rock press. Their signature sound was an energetic and entertaining version of British blues that was unapologetically derivative of Cream and Zeppelin. Even if a journalist liked them, there was nothing interesting to say. I discovered that the singer, Lonesome Dave Peverett, was a true blues aficionado, and he brought my idea of a tribute-to-the-blues concert in which Foghat would play with some of the blues masters who had inspired them. The blues guys, long out of fashion in the post-Fillmore era, were easy to get. The concert was at the Palladium in New York, and Foghat jammed with Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Otis Blackwell, Johnny Winter, and Honeyboy Edwards. The show was covered approvingly in The New York Times and Rolling Stone. We filmed it and got four songs broadcast on the syndicated TV show Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. Profits from the concert were used to buy a collection of blues albums for the Lincoln Center library, the unveiling of which was the rationale for the party, which would get Foghat a second PR hit.

I had dinner with Paul and Stevie the following night. She wanted my advice on how to get Margie Kent, the woman who designed most of her clothes, into Vogue magazine. I wondered why she didn’t ask the PR person for Fleetwood Mac, or the Warner Records PR department to help, and I was astonished to hear that Stevie had extremely limited clout in the context of the group, which was managed by its drummer and cofounder, Mick Fleetwood. The band had formed in 1967, another British blues outfit, and had been through a series of leader guitarists when Lindsey Buckingham was invited to join in 1976. Buckingham was then living with Stevie. They had made a Buckingham/Nicks album, which sold almost nothing, and they were broke. Stevie was working as a waitress at the Clementine Restaurant in L.A. when they got the offer to join Fleetwood Mac. Although I, and millions of other rock fans, saw her as the principle star of Fleetwood Mac because of her hit songs “Rhiannon” and “Dreams,” she was treated as “a space cadet” or “chick singer.” She was devastated that one of her favorite songs, “Silver Springs,” had been excluded from the Rumours album, presumably to limit the amount of songwriting income she would receive. Stevie explained how she had created an alternative group of advisors. In addition to Margie, her circle included Robin Snider, who gave her lessons to strengthen Stevie’s vocal chords against the rigors of the road, and Herbie Worthington, who took dozens of photos of her and was sufficiently talented that the group had hired him to do the Fleetwood Mac and Rumours covers.

Paul had advised me that this was a time to pitch a PR client but to create, instead, a friendship. It was a complex and delicate situation, talking to an individual member of the world’s biggest rock group, but he had a strong sense that there was business there as long as I was cool about it. Paul himself did not want to be perceived as a businessperson but as a boyfriend, so this left the door open to me to investigate. I offered to do what I could to help and was rewarded with her home phone number, and I contrived a trip to Los Angeles almost immediately.

At the time Stevie was living in a pink house on El Contento Drive in Hollywood that had been built for the silent screen star Vilma Banke in the 1920s. The house was always filled with members of her entourage, first among equals of whom was Robin Snider. Robin’s influence derived from the fact that she had gone to high school with Stevie and was her oldest and most trusted friend. In their early twenties Stevie and Robin had worked as waitresses in numerous restaurants together. Robin was a natural blond with classic good looks that reminded me of a younger version of the actress Lee Remick. She was the only girl in Stevie’s circle who was in a stable relationship, engaged to a tall, handsome album promotion person from Warner Records named Kim Anderson. (Kim had been the local guy in St. Louis, and as far as I could tell he was promoted to a national job soley on the basis of his access to Fleetwood Mac.) Robin was interested in learning more about the business side. For a time she worked for my PR company, assigned to get press for the legendary Brill Building songwriter Barry Mann. She was tenacious enough to get decent results, but she soon tired of the repetitive nature of pitching stories and the rejection that went with the territory and returned to life as Stevie’s full time aide-de-camp. I always felt Robin was responsible for much of my subsequent success in getting Stevie to bet on me.

The center of action in Stevie’s house was either the kitchen, where she liked to make tacos, or the living room, which had a Bosendorfer piano, one of the first luxuries she had bought when she made money from Fleetwood Mac. I almost stopped breathing the first time I saw her hunched over the piano, singing trancelike a mournful arrangement of “Rhiannon” quite different from the recorded version. Many artists are less impressive in person than indicated by the carefully produced version of their vocals that record production affords. Stevie was more magnetic, more compelling, and more charismatic. I was besotted. (In a way a fan is besotted. I was not the kind of guy Stevie was interested in romantically and I knew it.) It turned out that Stevie had written fragments of songs based on Welsh cosmology, in which Rhiannon was a goddess. Over the course of time we talked about the possibility of the songs forming the basis for a movie.

I didn’t know anyone at Vogue, but I had a friend who did fashion PR who was sufficiently taken with Stevie to make an effort. He was unsuccessful. Vogue cared nothing about Stevie Nicks or her clothes, but the effort bought me time to get to create a deal between us, empowering me to “produce” a movie based on the songs, in the unlikely event I could get one off the ground. Although no money exchanged hands, I remember the euphoria I felt when I got the signed letter of agreement. Stevie Nicks had publicly said I was someone she was in business with!

To give some creditability to the “project” I was dispatched to Tucson to meet with Evangeline Walton, the seventy-five-year-old author of a series of paperback popularizations of the Rhiannon myth. Walton had a rare disorder that had made her skin a vivid shade of purple. She had no illusions about the value of her books and agreed to assign them to us for no cash unless a film was actually produced. (“Don’t worry, dear,” Evangeline said when I explained the tenuous nature of Stevie’s plans, “all true artists are a little neurotic.”)

Stevie proceeded to write more Rhiannon-themed songs, of which she made piano/vocal demos to be part of our presentation. I was mesmerized by her intuitive writing process. She would sit at the piano and zone out for hours and come out with a song. Stevie’s mysticism was entirely self-taught. Not for her were studies of Rimbaud, Blake, or Ginsberg, nor even the Bible. She was an autodidactic mystic who viewed the universe through the eyes of a middle American.

All stars have big egos, but Stevie’s was unique in my experience. In order to feel “vibey” she wanted those of us around her to feel that way too. Stevie wanted praise and reassurances, especially in response to her songs. But she put considerable energy into making people around her feel important.

Thus, according to Stevie, Herbie Worthington wasn’t just a photographer, he was a genius. She wanted as many friends as possible in the studio to listen to her new songs or listen to her new ideas, and in return she made everyone around her feel that somehow we were part of what she did. Stevie peered at whomever she was talking to with an uncommon intensity (in part because her contact lenses did not totally compensate for her farsightedness). She spoke in an intense quiet cadence that conveyed the idea that whatever topic she was obsessed with at the moment was of transcendent importance. But she was also at others’ jokes, and created the illusion that everyone in her entourage was somehow her equal.

Stevie had asked a local jeweler to create several dozen crescent moons out of eighteen-carat gold, which she presented to her close friends with a solemnity like that of an initiation. I was deeply touched that night she gave me one and although I had not ever worn jewelry before and haven’t since, I bought a chain and wore it around my neck for several years.

The first home video recorders had recently come on the market and we spent many a night watching fantasy films like Dumbo and Beauty and the Beast and brainstorming about Rhiannon. Notwithstanding the fact that between us we had zero experience in writing or making movies, Stevie was a big enough star that many power brokers in the movie business wanted to hear the Rhiannon movie pitch.

My role was to set up the meetings and to chime in occasionally to give structure to her rap. We visited legendary producer Ray Stark at his Columbia Pictures office, but he wanted to jettison the Welsh mythology and use the songs as the backdrop for a remake of an old Kim Novak movie he owned the right to called Bell, Book, and Candle. Jon Peters, then living with Barbra Streisand, was in no good mood to give power to another strong-minded woman, and Stevie, already feeling powerless relative to Fleetwood, didn’t want to be a trophy rock celebrity in a Peters Hollywood film. Don Simpson, then a production VP at Paramount and soon to become the legendary production of Flashdance, visited El Contento and stayed late and free-associated with Stevie and me in a way that made us utterly comfortable. But hanging out was one thing and the commercial movie business was another, and Simpson passed. We met with the great British producer David Puttman, who impressed us with the beauty of Ridley Scott’s The Duellist, but after a brief flirtation with a deal, Puttman and Scott went on to greener pastures. We had a similar near miss with Australian direction Gillian Armstrong, whose feminist period piece My Brilliant Career similarly enthralled Stevie.

I was nervous that I had used a lot of Stevie’s time with no tangible results, but perseverance paid off when David Field at United Artists bought our treatment, subject to my partnering with Rob Cohen, who had produced several films for Motown and was at the time finishing The Wiz. There wasn’t much money involved. I think I got around ten thousand dollars and Stevie around fifty thousand for the option, but getting paid anything at all on her own and not as a member of Fleetwood Mac was a milestone for Stevie. That I had delivered it differentiated me from pure hanger-ons.

Paul Mayersberg, the man who had written the David Bowie vehicle The Man Who Fell to Earth, was hired as a screenwriter. Although the film was never made, the process took the better part of a year, during which time I further consolidated my relationship with Stevie. I still have a cassette somewhere of the Rhiannon songs that Stevie wrote, and hope that they see the light of day. They contain some of her best poetic lyrics. Around the same time, Stevie played me a children’s song called “The Goldfish and the Ladybug,” which she imagined could be an animated TV special. I was able to get a development deal at the ABC network after she met with their two most senior executives, Fred Pierce and Tony Thomopoulous, but it, too, would eventually run aground based on the chasm between Stevie’s rich imagination and the commercial limitations of the business.

All these meetings required me to spend an increasing percentage of my time in Los Angeles. My two main assistants at my PR company in New York were appalled by my apparent obsession with Stevie. Over the next few months both of them resigned, worried that I had either lost my mind or was abandoning them. I hated losing them, but I knew how rare an opportunity it was to bond with someone as commercially talented as Stevie. While my New York friends were trekking down to CBGB enjoying and, in some instances, creating a new current of punk rock music that would reverberate for decades, I was cheerfully working my way into the heart of the L.A. rock business.

I had kept a place in Los Angeles ever since I left Swan Song, first in a spare room in Michael and Pamela Des Barres’s apartment in Hollywood and later a series of places on my own. Although it was not the sole center of the music business (New York, Nashville, and London were at least equally important), it was the home of Warner Bros. Records, Elektra Records (which had moved there from New York), and A&M Records, three of the premiere labels for rock and roll. L.A. was also a source of rock and roll creativity, having spawned the Doors, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, and the Byrds and, more recently, the Eagles, Linda Rondstadt, and Jackson Browne. And L.A. was home to such music business icons as David Geffen, Dick Clark, Lou Adler, Phil Spector, and Berry Gordy.

*****

For reasons I have never been able to understand, L.A. always had a wider variety of good rock stations than New York did and by the late seventies L.A.’s radio tip sheet, Radio and Records, had influence on broadcasters that superseded that of Billboard. For many years the definition of a radio hit would be to be deemed a “breaker” R&R, based on a mathematical formula the editors cooked up to compute radio airplay. Pop radio indie promotion rates were based on R&R’s weighting of stations: three thousand dollars per record added for a big station called a P1, two thousand for a secondary called a P2, and one thousand for the smaller P3s.

Southern California was also home to the most commercially talented session musicians of the late seventies, guitarists Waddy Wachtel and Ry Cooper, bass player Leland Sklar, drummers Russ Kunkel and Jim Keltner, among others whose playing animated records by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and literally dozens of successful and classic records. Stevie sang background vocals on a hit song “Gold” by John Stewart, written about these hit makers. It referred to Kanan Road, which connected Malibu, where Stewart lived, to the San Fernando Valley, where many recording studios were located: “Drivin’ over Kanan,/singin’ to my soul,/There’s people out there turning music into gold.”

Because of Fleetwood Mac’s quirky history Stevie was signed to Warner Bros. only as a member of Fleetwood Mac, not for solo projects. Typically, when a record company signed a band, they also had “leaving member” clauses, which game them options on solo projects by the members. Fleetwood Mac had signed to Warners in 1967, and the band had settled into the mediocre sales of a respected but journeyman British blues band that had a habit of changing guitar players every couple of years. Thus, the label had not signed the latest in series of what they viewed as commercially irrelevant backup musicians when Lindsey and Stevie joined Fleetwood Mac in 1974 to perform on the band’s ninth album. The “real” members of the band were perceived to be the founders, bassist John McVie, his ex-wife Christine, who sang and played keyboards, and charismatic drummer Mick Fleetwood, who also managed the band with an iron hand. With the mysterious magic by which certain songs overcome layers of record company assumptions, “Rhiannon,” which Stevie both sang and wrote, helped grow Fleetwood Mac’s sales from a plateau of one hundred and fifty thousand, where they had resided for years, to over four million.

Because of Stevie’s flamboyant appearance she was often underestimated as a songwriter. Very few lyricists would be capable of transforming such a little-known Welsh myth into a popular song. By the time Warner Bros. figured out they had a new star, she had no incentive to precipitously sign over her solo rights, and since they had no reason to believe that she had plans to record on her own, they had left well enough alone.

When Stevie broke off her relationship with Paul to have a passionate and initially clandestine relationship with Mick Fleetwood, Fishkin was heartbroken, but he was enough of a careerist to see the same opportunity I did. Now that they were no longer an item, there was no reason not to talk to her about forming a small record label revolving around her future solo work. Stevie would be feeling a little guilty about having dumped Paul so unceremoniously. And she respected Paul as a “record man” who knew promotion and sales, and had confidence in me as a PR guy deeply committed to her solo talent. In retrospect I’m not sure how I had the balls to suggest it to her, but when I presented the idea of the three of us starting a label together she went for it.

The business proposition was that she would receive the same royalty and advance that she would get in the marketplace, plus own 10 percent of our company. (Her 10 percent was economic only. Decision making was equal between Fishkin and myself.) One of the key selling points of this new venture was that it would also be a vehicle for Stevie’s friends. In addition to her presence on the John Stewart hit, Stevie and Lindsey had done guest vocals on “Magnet and Steel,” a single by their old friend Walter Egan that was also a Top 10 hit, and she had sung a duet with Kenny Loggins on his song “Whenever I Call You Friend,” which was also a smash. We felt that there was a kind of creative mafia attracted to her that could spawn a real record label.

Even at the peak of her romantic excitement about Mick Fleetwood, Stevie knew that this was the same guy who had refused to include “Silver Springs” on the Rumours album. Moreover, she knew that her own romantic history consisted of short relationships and she obviously wanted to preserve an artistic and professional lifeline for herself that would survive any future breakup.

We created a short-form agreement for two albums and prepared to shop for a deal for a joint venture, patterning a business plan on the Bearsville/Warners deal, which Fishkin knew so well. In addition to Stevie’s signature and the giant shadow of Fleetwood Mac’s continued sales, we had piano demos of songs she had written for the Rhiannon movie as well as a number of more produced songs and demos of material that had been rejected by Fleetwood Mac, in addition to a stunning duet she had written for Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter of a song called “Leather and Lace.” Fortunately for us, Jennings had passed on it. Stevie’s demo featured an astonishing vocal by Don Henley (another one of Stevie’s exes) doing the male part of the duet.

Stevie understood that in order to get top dollar we might need to talk to various people, but we promised her that we would go to Mo Ostin of Warner Bros. first. She felt a personal affection for Mo and his wife, Evelyn, and also appreciated the fact that her success as a member of Fleetwood Mac had all occurred with Warner Bros. (The customized license plate on Stevie’s Volkswagen was BBUNNI in honor of the Warner Bros. famous animated mascot.)

Mo Ostin was the most revered record executive in Los Angeles. I was in awe of him but hardly knew him. Mo didn’t get to New York often and, unlike Wexler, had little interest in current or former rock critics. A year earlier I had sat in one of the Warners conference rooms while Jim Steinman played the piano and Meat Loaf sang songs from the unreleased Bat out of Hell to Mo and his equally legendary head of A&R, Lenny Waronker. Bearsville had paid for the album, which had been produced by Todd Rundgren, but Bearsville’s deal required Warner’s approval to release records and Mo and Lenny had been underwhelmed by the record. The in-office performance didn’t change their minds. Consequently Fishkin had to sell the album to another label and Bearsville missed out on the huge profits from the twenty million copies that the album went on to sell. Paul felt that Albert Grossman had not really gone to the wall for the Meat Loaf album, which was one of the reasons he wanted to start his own company with me.

The rationale for the Bearsville deal had been to be in business with Albert Grossman, whom Mo considered a heavyweight and a peer. He perceived Paul as little more than a glorified promotion guy. Grossman was not happy about the fact that Paul and I were starting a new label. He would be losing Fishkin, who had been running his company day to day, and he had a nagging sense that somehow Stevie should be signed to Bearsville, not to our new company, in which he had no financial stake. Grossman and Mo had the same personal attorney, who belittled our prospects to the Warner Bros. chairman.

Even more significant than Albert’s opposition to our fledgling business was the growing ire of Mick Fleetwood. I spoke to him the night before we were planning to set up meetings about the label. Suspecting that she hadn’t reflected on the consequences of our deal, I had asked Stevie if she had discussed our venture with Mick. I figured that within a few hours of our first calls she would be getting a lot of flack. Stevie turned to me and said in a nervous, quivering voice “No—no. I haven’t told Mick”—and then plaintively added, “Can you tell him?”

I had only met Mick in brief encounters going in and out of Stevie’s house and explained to him what we were doing. “Well,” he said in a deep British-accented voice, “it’s interesting that you bring this up, because we actually have a plan for a new deal that includes Stevie that we were just about to show her.” I explained that we had already made a deal for her solo albums. Mick politely thanked me for letting him know and I reported back to Stevie that I had given him the heads-up.

The next day we and our lawyers met with Mo, fulfilling the promise to Stevie to go to him first. Although short in stature, Mo was a larger-than-life personality, with an unusually loud, deep voice and a commanding presence akin to that of a king of a small but wealthy nation. We would have taken a somewhat lesser deal from Mo than anyone else, but he had no interest at all. He listened to our proposal with gelid eyes and told us, “Maybe I would make a Stevie Nicks solo album, but I am certainly not interested in another joint venture.” Which was a way of telling us to go f**k ourselves.

The next day I was called by Fleetwood Mac’s lawyer, Mickey Shapiro, who explained that our contract with Stevie was blocking Fleetwood Mac from getting an increased royality rate. He tried to strong-arm me, saying, “You can’t expect Mo Ostin to create a new label around an artsy-crafty album that Stevie is going to make on her own.” Fleetwood called Stevie and yelled at her, but she started crying and told him to talk to me. This time the politeness was gone and he was screaming at me at the top of his lungs, “Danny, you didn’t tell me she had signed a piece of paper.” As calmly as I could I reminded him that I had told him we had made a deal with her. “But you didn’t tell me she had signed.” Apparently he thought that anyone spaced out enough to hang around Stevie’s house all the time was too flaky to have a contract drafted.

In retrospect it seems incredible to me that, while they were lovers, both Stevie and Mick had been negotiating business deals that affected each other and never told each other; but at the time it just seemed like par for the course. Stevie was impervious to the pressure from the group. We were helped by the fact that Lindsey Buckingham had also rejected the notion of signing away his solo career to help Fleetwood Mac get a better deal going forward. Stevie was enjoying the empowerment that came with doing her own thing, was protective of her friends, and was offended at the belittling of her solo aspirations. She would show them who was artsy-craftsy. Mo’s wife, Evelyn, called Stevie, crying, “Please don’t do this to my Mo,” but Stevie calmly explained to her that we had gone to him first and he had passed. Paul and I felt a pleasant shock. We seemed to have pulled it off.

But we weren’t there yet. The other labels we went to were daunted by the multimillion-dollar package we wanted and were nervous about the negative buzz regarding Stevie’s solo project that was emanating from the Warners and Fleetwood camps. Their version of reality was that it was the full group of five that created the commercial sound and that on her own Stevie was too spacey to have commercial success.

We were saved by corporate in-fighting almost as odd as that of the band. Atlantic Records and Warner ros. were both wholly owned divisions of Warner Communications, but they were fiercely competitive. Atlantic had recently promoted Doug Morris, a former songwriter (“Sweet Talkin’ Guy”) who was a friend of Fishkin. Doug had built a small record company called Big Tree Records on the strength of his ability to identify hit singles and his shrewd mastery of the motley crew of independent promo people who influenced Top 40 radio. Big Tree had a series of hits with such long-forgotten one-hit wonders as Lobo, Brownsville Station, Hot Chocolate, and England Dan and John Ford Coley and had been distributed by Atlantic. Although Big Tree did not sell any albums, Ahmet was dazzled by Morris’s abilities and brought him in to reactivate the Atco label. Anxious to prove his mettle in the rock arena, he acquired in his first deal Pete Townshend’s solo album, and he saw Stevie Nicks as a similar opportunity. Although Doug had a gift for self-deprecation, he had a keen grasp of the politics of the record business that led Paul to nickname him “Columbo,” a reference to the rumpled TV detective played by Peter Falk who inevitably trapped murders who underestimated him.

Doug perceived by the Warners people as a second-tier executive. He resented them and was thus undeterred by their similarly condescending attitude about Stevie’s solo project. In future decades Doug would emerge as the preeminent American record executive, but at the time he was still amassing power at Atlantic and was given permission to make our deal only if we had options for three additional Stevie Nicks albums, making it a five-album deal instead of only two.

Stevie’s reaction was mixed on hearing the news, and several days went by with no affirmative response. It took one more episode in the soap opera to get our deal set up. One of Stevie’s best girlfriends was a woman named Sara Recor, whose husband Jim, managed Kenny Loggins. (She inspired Stevie’s Fleetwood Mac song “Sara.”) One night I visited Stevie, hoping to maneuver her into a talk about the extra albums, and I found her in tears. Sara and Mick Fleetwood were having an affair. Stevie had been betrayed by both her lover and one of her best friends. I tried hard as possible to empathize, but I had a hard time repressing a selfish hunch that Stevie’s romantic disappointment might be good for Paul and me. Sure enough, the next day Stevie called me and solved our problem. “I hadn’t gotten back to you because I was worried about upsetting Mick. That’s not important to me anymore. You can have the five albums.”

The drama surrounding Stevie’s solo contract was made even more surreal by the fact that during these negotiations Fleetwood Mac was in the middle of recording Tusk. Lindsey was obsessed with the edgy music of punk rockers like the Sex Pistols and the Talking Heads and tried vainly to make the album hipper than Fleetwood Mac was destined to be. Stevie contributed three of her best songs, “Sara,” “Sisters of the Moon,” and “Beautiful Child,” any of which I would have been thrilled to have for her solo debut.

I wanted to name the company Goldfish Records, which included both of our names and was also part of one of Stevie’s song titles. But that would have put my name first. Paul suggested Modern Records, a kind of ironic reference to the vibe of the halcyon days of the early indie rock labels. That was fine with me too. Stevie hated the name. “I like frilly things, vibey things, old things. I am anything but modern,” she complained, but she had a smile on her face and didn’t press the issue and didn’t come up with an alternative. So we were Modern Records.

Stevie went into the studio with a young engineer named Tom Moncrieff, who had produced the Walter Egan record. One night Doug Morris came to the studio when they were cutting a new song. After a couple of hours of lying on the floor listening to what was going on, Doug leaned over and whispered to me, “He doesn’t even know she is singing out of tune. We’re ****ed. We need a real producer.”

I had been so fixated on getting the deal done and keeping Stevie’s spirits up that I had not focused on such a fundamental fact, but I knew immediately that he was right. The problem was that Stevie was devoted to Moncrieff, who had helped her build a home demo studio and who wore one of her golden moons. I immediately thought of Jimmy Iovine, who was the only record producer whom I had a personal relationship with. Fishkin was comfortable with him and most importantly, Jimmy had just produced the album Damn the Torpedoes for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and I knew that Stevie was a big Tom Petty fan.

I had first met Iovine shortly after the release of his first hit as a producer, Patti Smith’s album Easter. It featured what would be the sole hit single of Patti’s career, “Because the Night,” which had been cowritten with Bruce Springsteen. Knowing Patti’s fierce pride as an auteur I was a little surprised that she would have done the song of one of her contemporaries, and I asked Jimmy if it had been hard. He nodded but explained how they bonded in the making of the album and when it was almost done he had said, “Patti, it’s like this. We need a hit.”

Jimmy and I were both clients of attorney David Sonenberg, who was also Meat Loaf’s manager and had put us at the same table when Bat out of Hell was performed at the Bottom Line. When I first met him, Jimmy was living with Carol Miller, a much-beloved rock DJ on WPLJ. They soon broke up, however, and Jimmy and I often went to shows together in New York, two single guys in the rock business on the make. Many nights we found ourselves with nothing to do after midnight and would eat a late snack at the all-night Midtown restaurant Brasserie and compare notes on how we each could advance another rung up the ladder.

Iovine was to have an illustrious career, but it was not without its setbacks. Inexplicably, Patti did not use him for her next album but switched to Todd Rundgren (the resulting album, Wave, sold less than half of Easter.) A similar disappointment had occurred with Bruce Springsteen. Iovine had engineered and mixed the legendary breakthrough album Born to Run. For some reason Springsteen and his manager/producer, Jon Landau, had chosen a different engineer for Springsteen’s follow-up album. It was a testament to Iovine’s self-discipline and perennial view of what he called “the big picture” that he was able to hide his wounded feelings sufficiently to remain friends with both Springsteen and Smith for decades to come. But in 1978, when he had been passed over by both of them, it took great resourcefulness and tenacity to find another genius. After a few forgettable albums he produced to stay in the game and pay for the rent, he bonded with Tom Petty and produced the album that would take both of them to the next level, Damn the Torpedoes. As had been the case with the Patti Smith album, Jimmy was worried that there was not the right lead single. When the album was almost done he asked to listen to songs that Petty had written but rejected for inclusion on the album and plucked “Don’t Do Me Like That” from the reject file. It became the lead single that broke the album.

I introduced Jimmy to Doug and they hit it off, so the next step was for him to meet Stevie. Jimmy was keenly aware of who had written and sung the biggest hits for Fleetwood Mac, but Stevie’s first reaction when I mentioned his name was negative. Her first instinct was to be protective of her friend whom she was already working with and she was dubious about having a “New York vibe” on her album. However, she softened somewhat when I got her an advance copy of the forthcoming Petty record, which she played incessantly.

To get her off the dime I got Petty to come with me to the studio to personally tell Stevie about Iovine’s process. I was a little out of my depth. Tom Petty had a look in his bloodshot eyes of a stoner who was pretty sure that even during my hippest moments I was not quite hip enough to be worth his attention. But he did what had been asked out of loyalty to Jimmy. Tom swept Stevie off her feel with his shambling rock and roll intensity and understated Florida charm. He earnestly extolled the virtues of Iovine’s indispensable role in the new album. Stevie said the words I’d been longing to hear—she would meet Iovine. Out of Stevie’s earshot Petty called Jimmy from the studio and dissipated any lingering anxiety Jimmy had about making the trip to L.A.: “Get your ass right here, Iovine,” Tom drawled. “Her voice sounds just like it does on the radio.”

By this time Stevie and her piano had moved to a duplex condo on the beach in Marina del Rey. I drove Jimmy out there. At a certain point in the evening she took him for a walk on the beach and when they came back a few hours later it had been decided that he would produce her first solo album. A week later Jimmy had moved in and would be her boyfriend as well as her producer for the next year.

Iovine’s streetwise Brooklyn persona added a macho presence to Stevie’s entourage. One of Stevie’s greatest compliments to a person she considered soulful was to refer to them as “very Rhiannon.” Jimmy tended to mock a lot of the mystical affect and told me emphatically, “I am not very Rhiannon.” He pointedly refused to wear on of the golden moons. But he shared with her a vision of the exquisite balance between Stevie’s idiosyncratic rock and roll self-expression and major superstar success. Most of the tracks were recorded with the best L.A. session guys, including Waddy Wachtel on guitar and Russ Kunkel on drums. It was Kunkel who came up with the groove on “Edge of Seventeen.” The song title had come about when Jane Petty told Stevie in her southern accent that she had met Tom at the “age of seventeen” and Stevie misheard it as “edge,” and then fell in love with the resultant phrase. Henley agreed to re-sing “Leather and Lace.” Stevie maintained her sense of female fairy-tale rock and roll world by adding her friends Lori Perry and Sharon Celani as background singers on most of the album and heavily featuring them on the artwork.

But Iovine fretted that Stevie didn’t have “the song.” The track record of solo albums by individuals from big groups was decidedly mixed, and in the ensuing months, Tusk sold only a fraction of what Rumours had, putting Fleetwood Mac on a potential downward slide compared to where they had been even a year or two before. The obvious idea was to see if Stevie could do a song or two with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who were on their way up. The first thing they cut together was a song called “The Insider,” which featured a gorgeous blend of Tom and Stevie’s voices singing one of Petty’s best lyrics, a searing portrait of the rock and roll subculture. But as artistically compelling as “The Insider” was, it did not have the kind of melodic hook that hit songs were made of.

Then they cut “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” a classic call-and-response duet with a one-listen chorus. Later, when “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” the number-one single in America, I posed a question to Jimmy. Tom Petty had written and produced both songs and the tracks were performed by his band the Heartbreakers. Yet “The Insider,” which was merely a great album track, wound up on Tom’s album while “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” which was a smash, ended up on our album. How had he convinced Tom to agree to that? Jimmy grinned in appreciation of my recognition of what he had pulled off and replied, “Danny, there is something that you and I both do. When the bad guys do it it’s called manipulation. What do we call it when we do it?”

Stevie had originally called the title song “Belladonna,” based on having read about the psychedelic drug of the same name. I was nervous that it would attract antidrug attention, which would distract from the mainstream appeal of the album, and in my sole creative contribution to the album other than making the introduction to Iovine, I persuaded her to make it into two words, “Bella Donna,” which meant “beautiful lady” in Italian.

Critical opinion was irrelevant to the marketing strategy. The New York reviewers of the time viewed punk rock as the primary purveyor of rock authenticity and had no incentive to chew over the works of massively successful Southern California rock artists. I reprised my Zeppelin strategy, telling writers that she was too big to ignore. Stevie didn’t agonize over the press the way Zeppelin or the Eagles did, but she did call David Fricke, weeping in gratitude over the story he had written for a Rolling Stone cover. We used her mainstream celebrity to get her onto Good Morning America. Meanwhile Stevie had decided that she wanted separate management for her solo career and hired Eagles manager Irving Azoff. The planets were lining up.

Figuring it would be of some use internationally, we made a performance video of Tom and Stevie singing the single, and it was one of the few available by major artists when MTV began broadcasting in 1982, a few months after Bella Donna came out. “We used to laugh about how often we played that video,” Les Garland, the original head of programming for MTV, recalled. Stevie’s cascading golden hair and iconic flowing gowns made her the ideal video artist of the early eighties. For years Stevie, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, and Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart were the only female rock singers seen regularly on MTV.

Doug made sure that Atco’s promotion and sales team focused like a laser on Bella Donna, and “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” went to number one on both rock radio and pop radio airplay charts. Bella Donna was selling really well but not quite as well as new albums by Foreigner and Journey, two of the most popular of the “corporate rock radio” bands at the peak of their popularity. SoundScan, the system of measuring album sales by toting up over-the-counter sales via bar codes, would not emerge for another decade, and in 1980 the Billboard chart was done more or less the same way it had been when I worked there in the late sixties. Hundreds of stores were called for information, but the final creation of the chart was done by one guy named Bill Wardlow. Doug took Stevie to dinner with Wardlow and as a quid pro quo for the personal attention, the next week Bella Donna was officially the number-one album in the country according to Billboard, despite the fact that anecdotal reports indicated that it was really number three. In response to howls of protest from people involved with the other acts, Bella Donna was number one for only a single week—but that still made it a number-one album.

The second single, “Leather and Lace,” on which Henley had reprised his vocal, was a huge multiformat hit although Henley was not available for a video. I got it into my head that I should direct a video for “Edge of Seventeen,” the third single. I felt that Stevie’s own environment, filled with cosmic drawings and knickknacks, and her own private flamboyance would be a great visual accompaniment to the song. Somehow I forgot that the most important thing about a video is how the performer herself looks. The cinematographer we got lit her in a way that was unflattering. The video itself was an amateurish mess and had to be totally scrapped. Luckily she had recently shot an HBO special and we were able to excerpt her performance of “Edge of Seventeen” to maintain her exposure on MTV. I had a significantly enhanced respect for video directors and never tried dabbling in their field again. The experience reminded me that it was the artist’s job to be creative and my role was to be their advocate. Although Stevie was irritated for a few weeks, she soon forgave me and never mentioned this embarrassing error in judgment. We then released a fourth single, “After the Glitter Fades,” which got the album another couple of months of rock airplay. The album sold three million copies in the year after its release and eventually sold more than eight million.

The vaguely cosmic and romantic nature of Stevie’s music produced the kind of fan intensity usually associated with sixties artists. One afternoon while I was out, our receptionist, Larry Flick, was confronted by an agitated young man who was convinced that we had Stevie tied up in the back of the office. He had come to this conclusion because Stevie had not responded to his fan mail. Larry had the presence of mind to say he would go to the back of the office and look for her, whereupon he went into a locked office and called the cops. Another time I got an agitated call from a fan who claimed that her song “How Still My Love” was really written for him. He explained his code name was “Still.”

Stevie had a way of translating her life into art. Her song “Beauty and the Beast” drew from her attraction to the Cocteau film as well as from her tempestuous relationship with Fleetwood. One day she bought an Art Nouveau lamp in which the light bulb shone through dark blue glass and soon thereafter turned it into the impressionistic rock song “Blue Lamp,” which appeared in the Heavy Metal soundtrack. It was a neat trick that reinforced the awe of her entourage. We all saw the same things she saw, but only she knew how to turn them into songs.

The fairy tale of rock drama was abruptly replaced by real life when Robin Snider (her married name was now Robin Anderson) was diagnosed with leukemia. Robin had become pregnant shortly before being diagnosed and gave birth to a baby boy named Matthew shortly before she herself died. Stevie and Robin’s widower, Kim Anderson, consoled each other, briefly lived together, and actually got married, although the marriage was annulled several months later.

In 1983, when Stevie was ready to record her second solo album, The Wild Heart, her romantic relationship with Jimmy had run its course but he was still her record producer. Whereas Bella Donna consisted of songs that Stevie had been culling for a lifetime, the new album had to rely on songs written in the previous year. There was not an obvious hit single like “Leather and Lace,” and it had not escaped Tom Petty’s notice that Stevie’s solo album, buttressed by one of his songs, had sold far more than had the Heartbreakers’, so another Petty song was not an option. Jimmy reached out to Prince to play on and produce a track. I arrived at the studio one day to find a giant white-haired bodyguard hulking over the lithe, petite doe-dyed superstar as he added a driving synthesizer beat to the song “Stand Back.” “Prince is exactly like Jimmy,” Stevie told all of us as Jimmy shrugged his shoulders in bemusement.

In the two years since Bella Donna MTV had grown explosively and had become the primary means of exposure for rock music. The first single from Wild Heart was originally “If Anyone Falls” and was switched to “Stand Back” at the last minute as a result of feedback from radio people. The video director had written a Civil War scenario for the first song, which he decided to adapt to the more uptempo “Stand Back.” I did a cameo role as an injured Confederate soldier with a bloody rag tied around my head. My gratification from my close-up was short-lived as we all realized that, although the video had lush production values and Stevie looked great, it had no aesthetic relationship to the modern groove of “Stand Back.” We had to scrap the expensive video and quickly replace it.

Iovine had struck up a friendship with movie producer Joel Silver, who suggested Jeffrey Hornaday, the choreographer for the recently released hit movie Flashdance, and who was anxious to prove he could direct. Stevie and Hornaday concocted a stylized performance video augmented by dancers.
Hornaday was in his mid-twenties, with long blond hair. His boyish appearance masked an intense ambition, which was stoked by his girlfriend at the time, actress Lesley Ann Warren. She accompanied him at every stage of production, sometimes literally whispering advice in his ear.

During the first rehearsal Stevie asked Jimmy to give her feedback. The two of them had maintained a strong creative connection and Jimmy was able to communicate approval, humor, and concern through body language as he paced back and forth during her run-through. Lesley misguidedly accosted Jimmy and suggested that he was “distracting” Stevie. This almost instantly shattered the video shoot into opposing camps, with Hornaday and Lesley on one side and the people who worked with Stevie on the other.

A couple of days later Hornaday showed Jimmy, Paul, and me an edit, and Jimmy quickly listed half a dozen changes he expected Stevie would want. Hornaday angrily said, “Let’s see what Stevie says.” A few minutes later Stevie made her entrance into the editing bay, looked at the video, and listed exactly the same problems that Jimmy had predicted. Hornaday began arguing with her about the merits of his “vision.” Jimmy jumped up from his chair and, waving his finger at Hornaday, insisted, “There is no argument. This isn’t a movie. This is Stevie’s video. You do what Stevie wants.” Taken aback by Iovine’s hostile tone, Hornaday answered, “**** you, man,” at which point Iovine, still standing, punched him in the face, toppling Hornaday over. Hornaday was a dancer and a natural athlete, but his attempt to retaliate was blocked as we all jumped in to restrain both angry guys and Stevie, weeping, flung her body physically in between them.

Shortly thereafter the editing room cleared out, leaving just me, Lesley Ann Warren, and Joel Silver. “You know,” said Lesley, “I think this was really good. Everybody got their feelings out.” Silver looked at her with scorn and replied, “Lesley, there is nothing good about this.” But in fact, when the changes Stevie wanted were made, it was the right video for “Stand Back.” Hornaday’s choreography had given Stevie the modern affect the song needed.

When I had started working with Stevie, I was one of very few who believed in her talent outside of the context of Fleetwood Mac. Now she was a proven superstar on her own, supported by some of the most successful executives in the business, and I felt I had little to do other than cram into photos for trade magazines. Modern’s contract with Atlantic prevented me from working on outside projects. Morever, Fishkin and I had personal disagreements, which transformed what had been a joyous partnership into a burden for both of us. So when the opportunity arrived to sell my half of Modern and “cash out,” I took it. Fishkin and I made up eventually. I stayed friends with Stevie, who helped me out on numerous subsequent occasions, and years later she asked me to write the liner notes to Enchanted, an anthology of highlights of her solo career.

Bill Clinton famously used one of Lindsey’s songs, “Don’t Stop,” in his 1992 campaign, so Stevie, as a member of Fleetwood Mac, incongruously became a fixture at iconic events of the Clinton administration. Her solo persona also endured. A pivotal scene of Jack Black’s film School of Rock portrayed the high school principal, played by Joan Cusack, inspired and liberated by listening to “Edge of Seventeen.”

In 2000 I spoke to Sheryl Crow just before she produced some songs for Stevie, and she cited her as an inspiration in the same tones in which hard-rock bands talked about Led Zeppelin or punk rockers about Patti Smith. The Dixie Chicks recorded “Landslide,” creating yet another generation of weddings at which the song would be played. And in 2007, on a visit to Courtney Love’s house in L.A., I noted that in her bedroom there was a single photo, an oversized print of Stevie swirling in full flight.

In her own intuitive and supposedly spaced-out way Stevie helped propel the careers of several executives who would dominate the music business for the next several decades. A quarter of a century after Bella Donna was released, Doug Morris was the preeminent executive in the record business, the chairman of the Universal Music Group, by far the dominant record company in the world. Jimmy Iovine was chairman of Interscope, the biggest and the most influential label, and Irving Azoff had forged his new company, Azoff Management, into an aggregation of sixty talent managers who collectively represented more musical talent than any other company.

End of chapter

[Sanne2]

Wow interesting, thanks for posting!

[strandinthewind]

WOW --

He certainly has a cool story to tell. I think it is cool that pretty much all of the stories of La Nicks in that era detail how cool and kind she was. Moreover, she was sincere.

Thanks for posting this!

[David]

Originally Posted by SpyNote

From Danny Goldberg's new book Bumping into Geniuses: My Life inside the Rock and Roll Business

Chapter 7
Stevie Nicks: Turning Rainbows into Music and Music into Gold

I met Stevie when she was dating Paul Fishkin, who was president of Albert Grossman’s Bearsville Records and one of my best friends. Bearsville’s first hit had been “We Gotta Get You a Woman” by Todd Rundgren, who had grown up with Paul in Philadelphia and had written the song about him.

Supports my theory that this connection is the reason for Stevie's doing the Roxy "Back to the Bars" concerts with Rundgren in 1978.

and Herbie Worthington, who took dozens of photos of her and was sufficiently talented that the group had hired him to do the Fleetwood Mac and Rumours covers.

Worthington shot the group cover before Stevie even joined, the one in 1974.

[MacMan]

That was really interesting Daniel! Thanks for posting it.

[vermicious knid]

I especially love all the detailed information about the movie. Imagine Stevie playing a Kim Novak role! This is the synopsis from netflix:

Book, Bell, and Candle
The same year they co-starred in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, James Stewart and Kim Novak teamed up for this popular screen version of a hit Broadway comedy. Novak is a witch in modern-day Greenwich Village, who casts a love spell on already-engaged Stewart. The spell works, but Novak wants Stewart's love the old-fashioned way -- with magic of the romantic variety.

Aw, come on. That would have been fun.

[vermicious knid]

I can't wait for part two. Danny says that they didn't get much money for their "treatment", but his $10,000 would have been more like $30,000 today, and Stevie's $50,000 would be more like $160,000 today. I used the year 1978 in the inflation calculator.

[michelej1]

I read a review that said the author practically worshipped Stevie, so I figured there would probably be good stuff about her in it. Thanks so much for posting this.

Michele

[equeen102289]

Thank you very much for this! I love reading stories from inside people.

[dnightshade]

Originally Posted by SpyNote

From Danny Goldberg's new book Bumping into Geniuses: My Life inside the Rock and Roll Business

Chapter 7
Stevie Nicks: Turning Rainbows into Music and Music into Gold


I was nervous that I had used a lot of Stevie’s time with no tangible results, but perseverance paid off when David Field at United Artists bought our treatment, subject to my partnering with Rob Cohen, who had produced several films for Motown and was at the time finishing The Wiz. There wasn’t much money involved. I think I got around ten thousand dollars and Stevie around fifty thousand for the option, but getting paid anything at all on her own and not as a member of Fleetwood Mac was a milestone for Stevie. That I had delivered it differentiated me from pure hanger-ons.

To be continued...

Awwww . . . no one could ever accuse Danny Goldberg of being a Hanger-On!!!

[Sanne2]

So, the question remains: did she sleep with him?
Maybe an answer in part 2?
Dun, dun, dun.......

[SpyNote]

I thought it was a good read. I always appreciate stories from insiders who actually worked closely with Stevie. (More of the chapter is added above after the asterisks.)

There are, however, some inaccuracies as far as the chart data goes (e.g. Rumours topping the charts for 39 weeks instead of 31 and saying it has never been repeated when Michael Jackson achieved 37 weeks at #1 with Thriller in 1983), Stop Draggin' hitting #1 when it peaked at #3 ) and misidentifying Lindsey as the songwriter of "Don't Stop." While minor mistakes, he was probably better off leaving out those details and focusing more on stories about working with Stevie and the people around her.

Goldberg's perspective pretty much reinforces the idea that rock stars and the people in their world live in a bubble. At one point, he describes how nice it would if Stevie's cassette of demos with the Rhiannon songs saw the light of day. I'm not sure if he was referring more to the completed Rhiannon movie or if he's completely unaware that most fans already have bootlegs of those songs.

[vermicious knid]

We had a similar near miss with Australian direction Gillian Armstrong, whose feminist period piece My Brilliant Career similarly enthralled Stevie.

I think I have made a discovery. Take a look at the hairstyle of the main character in this movie, which was released in 1979.


Stevie began to wear her "bird's nest" hair during the Tusk tour. Coincidence? I think not.

[vivfox]

Although I, and millions of other rock fans, saw her as the principle star of Fleetwood Mac because of her hit songs “Rhiannon” and “Dreams,” she was treated as “a space cadet” or “chick singer.” She was devastated that one of her favorite songs, “Silver Springs,” had been excluded from the Rumours album, presumably to limit the amount of songwriting income she would receive.


I guess now we know the real reason Silver Springs was excluded.

[SpyNote]

Originally Posted by vermicious knid

I think I have made a discovery. Take a look at the hairstyle of the main character in this movie, which was released in 1979.


Stevie began to wear her "bird's nest" hair during the Tusk tour. Coincidence? I think not.

And so the high priestess of rock and roll is born!