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Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks
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Original price was: $20.00.$12.99Current price is: $12.99.
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Stevie Nicks is a legend of rock, but her energy and magnetism sparked new interest in this icon. At 68, she’s one of the most glamorous creatures rock has known, and the rare woman who’s a real rock ‘n’ roller.
Gold Dust Woman gives “the gold standard of rock biographers” (The Boston Globe) his ideal topic: Nicks’ work and life are equally sexy and interesting, and Davis delves deeply into each, unearthing fresh details from new, intimate interviews and interpreting them to present a rich new portrait of the star. Just as Nicks (and Lindsay Buckingham) gave Fleetwood Mac the “shot of adrenaline” they needed to become real rock stars—according to Christine McVie—Gold Dust Woman is vibrant with stories and with a life lived large and hard:
—How Nicks and Buckingham were asked to join Fleetwood Mac and how they turned the band into stars
—The affairs that informed Nicks’ greatest songs
—Her relationships with the Eagles’ Don Henley and Joe Walsh, and with Fleetwood himself
—Why Nicks married her best friend’s widower
—Her dependency on cocaine, drinking and pot, but how it was a decade-long addiction to Klonopin that almost killed her
— Nicks’ successful solo career that has her still performing in venues like Madison Square Garden
—The cult of Nicks and its extension to chart-toppers like Taylor Swift and the Dixie Chicks
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Categories: Women Writers
Product name:
Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks
Price:
Original price was: $20.00.$12.99Current price is: $12.99.
Danny R. Smith –
I always liked Stevie Nicks and found this biography to be informative and entertaining. I especially loved learning about the wonderful things she did for our veterans returning from war over the last several decades. Good book for any fan.
Kindle Customer –
Absolutely fantastic look into the life of the queen of rock & roll. Her dedication to the music, her life long collaborations with Lindsey, and her love of family revealed the hardships of the music business. She is the rock and roll survivor for all time. Highly recommend reading this book.
JL Populist –
I found this book to be a good read. Of course the focus is Stevie Nicks. What I liked as much as the information about Stevie Nicks was the material about what transpired in the studio both with her and Fleetwood Mac.
The source for and circumstances for the songs was a strong point for the book. Particularly songs from Christine McVie and Stevie.
All of her songs seem to tell a story about her life.
The band dynamics and dysfunction are legendary. That makes the success of the Mac albums even more remarkable. Particularly “Rumors”.
The book tells Stevie Nicks’ story from birth on. It shows the human side of the signature voice I first heard on the radio as a pre-teen and tells the story behind the songs.
I liked the book. Sources are listed at the end of the book and it was edited very well.
PJC –
Very well presented book
Micheline –
I bought this after reading Mick’s biography, because there is just so much about the band’s history he just glosses over. He doesn’t want to mess with their legacy by getting honest about some of their worst moments. I also read Ken Caillat’s book on Making Rumours, which sheds a lot of light onto their behind the scenes dynamics while making that album. You just have to wade through a lot of detail from a sound engineer’s perspective, which was kind of interesting. He doesn’t shy away from some of their worst moments and neither does Stephen Davis’s book about Stevie. This book explains some of their dysfunctional breaks by revealing the incidents behind them. The infamous attempt Lindsey made to strangle Stevie after an argument at a group meeting where he said he was leaving the band comes to mind. They argued and he chased her around and outside of Christine McVie’s house and had her over a car hood, strangling her until several others intervened. However, he says he has “no memory” of the abusive things he’s done. Unfortunately for him, other people remember them very well, and Stephen Davis interviewed them for this book. He also quotes Stevie’s diaries, which he wouldn’t be doing unless she had loaned them to him for the purpose. So she may not have “authorized” this biography fully, but she certainly cooperated with it. And it has the ring of truth. It’s as close to an authorized biography as you are going to get with this bunch, because some things are just too damaging to share, and they are still protective. Which is their right. But it is still the most interesting book I’ve read about them, and filled in a lot of gaps for me. They lived their lives like the edge was the norm. Not much middle ground for them.
Richard J Rohman –
This book is a fairly easy read. I was worried at the beginning that it would be way to much detail as the author described Arizona, where Stevie grew up. I quickly came to appreciate the detail of this author. As is typical when I read a rock biography of one of my musical heros, I came to see Stevie Nicks as more human. I feel that I learned a great deal and have a better understanding of her life, talent, relationships, drive etc.
no1designer –
If you are a Stevie fan, you will not want to miss this book.
Amazon Customer –
Bought it for my gf, she absolutely loved it! Well worth it if you are a Stevie fan!
BOB –
Stephen Davis’ ‘Gold Dust Woman: THE Biography of Stevie Nicks’—the title is the first offender. The use of ‘the’ as a modifier implies that this is the only biography of Stevie Nicks that exists. This is not a true statement even if this biography is the one that has been promoted most heavily. To be fair, the title the book was given may have been the doing of the editor/publisher. I know that authors do not always have the final say over every aspect of their books.
I started the book with an open mind. I know some basic facts about Stevie’s life. In fact, I saw Buckingham Nicks in Birmingham, AL in 1974, when they were the opening act for Mountain, a band my brother and I liked that were similar to Cream—not a huge surprise as their bass player, Felix Pappalardi, had produced and played on some Cream recordings. Buckingham and Nicks were mostly unknowns then and they recorded one album. However, they were dropped from their label after not drawing sufficient sales, even with the topless cover photo, which I found that Stevie was on record as protesting but was coerced into posing for, yet another instance of what happens when an unknown (i.e., powerless) woman protests against a record label/movie studio, etc. She always has to ask herself if her moral/ethical principles are more important than the chance of greater success? Stevie, like most other unknown young women in show business, had no bargaining chip. After they were dropped from the label, even before they were dropped from the label, Stevie was waitressing and cleaning houses while her partner in life as well as music Lindsay Buckingham stayed home and wrote more music. At the end of 1974, Mick Fleetwood, the drummer and manager of the British band Fleetwood Mac, now residents of the U.S., was looking for yet another guitarist after the latest in their succession of guitarists Bob Welch announced he was leaving. Mick heard a song, “Frozen Love,” from an album by Buckingham Nicks played for him by his producer friend Keith Olson and was immensely impressed. Once the members of Fleetwood Mac met Buckingham and Nicks they were informed that they were a package deal. If they wanted Buckingham, they must also take Nicks as a second female singer after veteran Christine McVie so the decision was left up to Christine. She would cast the deciding vote based on whether she and Stevie could get along personally. Fortunately, they did and the rest was the history they made on the rapid rise to the top. Stevie began 1975 waitressing and cleaning houses to earn money for rent and ended the year a globe-trotting and performing millionaire.
The author can’t seem to resist inserting a bit of snark to garnish a statement. For example, when describing Lindsay Buckingham’s song “Without a Leg to Stand On,” which he very accurately compares to Cat Stevens, he describes Cat as “the very precious (and popular) English minstrel. Did we really need to know how he felt about Cat Stevens?
At one point, he writes, “quicker than you can say Rhiannon”—a misfire of an attempt at making a verbal cliché witty in my view.
.”She’d never done anything without Lindsay Buckingham, who’d shaped her sound like a surfboard”—another misfire of a metaphor.
“Their biggest hit was beyond-legendary “The Train Kept a-Rollin.” What is ‘beyond-legendary’ exactly? I’m only familiar with legendary music myself.
“Jack Nicholson, Hollywood’s biggest star”—is that a fact? He’s not just one of the biggest stars but THE biggest star, as if that is indisputable, verifiable fact, eh?
There are several other similar examples of hyperbole, exaggeration, and sarcasm but I won’t cite all of them because I don’t want the snark to devour my review.
However, there is one other curious matter that I think needs to be highlighted. I had read on the book jacket that Stephen Davis had co-authored Mick Fleetwood’s first autobiography, ‘My Twenty-Five Years in Fleetwood Mac’, published in 1992. I just read and reviewed Mick’s more recent autobiography, ‘Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac,’ which is co-authored by Anthony Bozza, published in 2014. All this is to shed some insight over why Stephen Davis titles one chapter, “The Writer”. This chapter opens with the sentence, “While Fleetwood Mac was in London, Stevie Nicks was disconcerted by the presence of a writer who was helping Mick Fleetwood with his autobiography. They didn’t usually let writers mingle with the band. “I don’t think anyone in the band welcomed it,” Mick said later.” There are several references to this writer. The chapter also goes on to say that other members of the group agreed to be interviewed by the writer, who happens to know about Mick’s and Stevie’s affair as well as Mick’s affair and later marriage with Stevie’s close friend, Sara Recor,” possibly the, or one of, the inspirations for Stevie’s song, “Sara.” When Mick informs Stevie of this, she says he knows she’d say no to an interview and that she plans to write her own book later. All of this chronicling of an episode about ‘the writer’ and Mick Fleetwood’s first autobiography sheds a strange light on these proceedings, partially because some of the writer’s descriptions of Stevie are none too flattering and mince no words, but mainly because there is no ‘full disclosure’ statement anywhere in the chapter where Stephen Davis admits that ‘the writer’ was him.
All of this extensive criticism is not meant to imply that ‘Gold Dust Woman’ has no value or sheds no insight into Stevie Nicks. I learned that she was a fan of Evangeline Walton’s adult fantasy series, a retelling of the medieval Welsh Mabinogian epic writing, of which one of the volumes was titled ‘The Song of Rhiannon’, from which Stevie got the inspiration for her classic song. She even bought the film rights to the four-book series but to date none of the films have been made. The trappings of this Welsh witch have become trademarks of Stevie’s performing persona over the rest of her career. There are websites dedicated to the various shawls and chiffon capes that she has worn on stage over the years. The word ‘Rhiannon’ was even ostensibly adopted by Stevie (rather than another verbal affectation of the writer) as an adjective, as in “she is very Rhiannon.”
We also learn more about Lindsay Buckingham than he would probably care for us to know, including the extent of Lindsay’s verbal as well as physical abuse of Stevie. I won’t speculate on the matter beyond that except to say that one of Lindsay’s subsequent significant others, Carol Ann Harris, has written an account of her life with him titled ‘Storms: My Life with Lindsay Buckingham.’
Unsurprisingly, this biography is somewhat less favorable to Mick Fleetwood than Mick was in his own autobiography. One of the main bones of contention was over Stevie’s song, “Silver Springs,” one of the songs recorded for ‘Rumors’ and originally intended to be on the album despite Lindsay’s objection as it was a thinly veiled expression of Stevie’s view of their breakup. It was replaced with another of Stevie’s songs, “I Don’t Want to Know,” because of its length. The song had a special meaning to Stevie in that she gave the rights to her mother as a gift i.e., all publishing and performing royalties would go to her mother and help her financially in her last years. Not only was it not included on ‘Rumors’ but it was only included as the B-side to the single, “Go Your Own Way,” until a later Fleetwood Mac best-of compilation in 1992. Stevie had asked Mick to include it on a collection of her songs but was denied.
Ultimately, Davis is respectful of Stevie Nicks as a person as well as a songwriter and performer while not hesitating to shed light on her shortcomings. In his ‘Author’s Notes and Sources’, he states that this is an unauthorized biography, meaning that Stevie Nicks provided no interviews directly to him but that he has used “reliable published interviews, taped interview transcripts, and Stevie’s own writings to let the reader hear her “voice” in a consistent register, to get a feeling for her interior life in her own words.” He says he has avoided suppositional language when writing about her, yet he has not used as much nuance when it comes to statements about other people, such as the examples I cited above.
Because this biography serves the informational purpose of providing many of the facts of her life as well as some insight into her character, I am rounding up my two and a half star personal rating to three stars. I do hope that at some point, Stevie will get the comprehensive biography that she deserves.
Salomé –
Un libro imprescindible para entender la historia de la música que hizo única a una época.
Laura Piovesan Pizani –
Fantástica e peculiar história de vida, retrato muito transparente de acertos, erros e conexões. Stevie Nicks é uma verdadeira lenda viva, cantora e compositora muito diferenciada. Eu já tinha uma conexão muito forte com suas músicas, e depois de ler a biografia a empatia e a admiração chegaram a um outro patamar. Recomendo a todos os interessados em história do pop/rock. Uma pena ela não ser muito conhecida no Brasil e não ter versão traduzida para alcançar um público maior.
Big Brown –
I love biographies and memoirs and this one is a winner.
Anne S. –
Das Buch ist klasse. Leider kam es mit zerkratztem und eingerissenem Umschlag an. Da es aber fast nirgendwo mehr zu bekommen ist, behalte ich es.