Review: 'The Complete Illustrated History of Fleetwood Mac'

Fleetwood Mac's story is often more interesting than their music. At their best, they courted legit weirdness (the invigorating and eclectic Tusk) or at least made finely crafted radio-ready pop that burned with personal intensity (Rumours). That intensity was a consequence of their oft-told story: a genuine rock soap opera of hook ups, break ups, packing up, and shacking up. However, they began as a hit-or-miss British blues band and went through several nondescript incarnations on their way to becoming the cross-Atlantic juggernaut that recorded and stirred Rumours. Even that mega-selling monster is a hit-or-miss affair with Lindsey Buckingham's bitter Buddy Holly riffs and Stevie Nicks's bewitching ballads sitting alongside Christine McVie's MOR soft pop stylings.

Originally published in 2016, and now being reprinted, Richie Unterberger's The Complete Illustrated History of Fleetwood Mac traces the group from their beginnings as a vehicle for Peter Green's bluesy slow hand through their metamorphosis into the Buckingham-Nicks machine. Unterberger's writing is informative and as straight-forward as a McVie torch song but a welcome bit of Buckingham oddness intrudes on the narrative with LP-overviews by an all-star roster of guest contributors, such as Dominic Priore (Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!), Barney Hoskyns (Small Town Talk), Martin Popoff (Anthem: Rush in the 1970s), Zoë Howe (Stevie Nicks--Visions, Dreams, an Rumours), and Anthony DeCurtis (Rolling Stone). There are also plenty of full-color and B&W pics of Stevie Nicks in her top hat and Mick Fleetwood with his mouth hanging open.

Review: 'Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks'

Stephen Davis’s The Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga is the infamously salacious story of the seventies’ hugest hard rock group, and often considered to be the definitive rock biography for its grotesque tales of sex slavery, Satanism, and sand sharks. The decade’s hugest soft rock group, Fleetwood Mac, perhaps didn’t slam out riffs as devastatingly as Zeppelin did, and they certainly never did half the horrid things Davis accused Zeppelin of doing, but their self-zombification through cocaine is legendarily decadent.

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.