However, Davis’s new biography of the Mac’s central star, Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie
Nicks is more relentlessly sad than page-turningly sleazy à
la Hammer of the Gods. This is due to
the main villain of a story with quite a few of them. Lindsey Buckingham apparently subjected the
singer to decades of mental and physical abuse, from the relatively early days
of their musical/“romantic” relationship when he browbeat her into posing nude
on the cover of their Buckingham/Nicks
LP to when he physically attacked her in front of the entire band while planning
to tour behind Tango in the Night to
his general cold, calculated, and creepy behavior toward her through the more
recent reunions. It’s painful to read about how her successful solo career
seemed to free her from Buckingham’s proximity yet she serially fell back into
working with him again for various reasons. The devastating punch-line of this
story that comes with the birth of Buckingham’s first child in 1998 is even
more painful and a sad statement on the dependent nature of abusive
relationships.
There isn’t much that lightens the mood of Gold Dust Woman, though the fact that
Davis is so firmly in Nicks’s corner is heartening, and he reaffirms his
mastery of writing a rock biography that is more than a rock biography by
creating actual atmosphere, which is not necessarily considered an essential
element of the rock biography. He does so by setting an appropriately witchy
mood by delving into the mystical history of Wales to build Nicks’s cultural
background or recreating the dank, stygian atmosphere of the “Gold Dust Woman”
recording session. At times, Davis can get a bit repetitious—we could feed the
world’s poor with a dollar for every time he refers to “Rhiannon” as the “old
Welsh witch”—but as a whole Gold Dust Woman
is a fine biography— though a depressing one that may make you want to take a long
break from the music Lindsey Buckingham masterminded.
