Gold Dust Woman

Starred review from July 10, 2017
Drawing on interviews with Stevie Nicks, her family, friends, and music associates, Davis (who cowrote Fleetwood with Mick Fleetwood) offers a captivating portrait of the singer whose songwriting and stage presence gave the faltering British blues band a boost in the mid-1970s. He traces her early years in Arizona, where her parents discovered that she was a natural harmony singer, and California, where she tried her hand at songwriting. She met guitarist Lindsay Buckingham when she was 22 and at that point decided on a life in music. In the early ’70s the pair formed Buckingham Nicks and released an album to modest success in 1973. One year later, Mick Fleetwood stopped in the studio where the duo was recording, was taken with Buckingham’s guitar playing and Nicks’s beauty, and invited the couple to join his band. Davis chronicles the band’s now-well-known cocaine-fueled days and nights, extravagant tours, bitter in-fighting, and sexual betrayals, and illustrates the toll this tumult took on Nicks. Ny the early ’80s, she had embarked on a solo career, working only sporadically with Fleetwood Mac thereafter. Davis’s candid, energetic book reveals the life of the woman who’s arguably one of rock’s greatest singer-songwriters.

October 15, 2017
An unauthorized biography of Stevie Nicks (b. 1948), best known as the lead singer for Fleetwood Mac. Rock biographer Davis (More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon, 2012, etc.) begins with his subject's Welsh ancestry, taking it as a window into the mystical element in many of her songs. Nicks was born in Phoenix but spent much of her youth in California. Music was in her family, with a grandfather who sang country songs in bars and took her along to sing harmony when she was still very young. In high school, she learned guitar and started writing folk songs. Meeting another young guitarist, Lindsey Buckingham, put Nicks on the road to a musical career, though she spent several years waiting tables and hoping for breaks while they scuffled. When Mick Fleetwood came looking for a replacement lead guitarist, the engineer suggested Buckingham. He brought along Nicks, and with the new additions, Fleetwood Mac went from being reliable second-stringers to the hottest group on the planet. Davis gives readers a look into recording sessions and concert tours, playing up the personality clashes and shifting romantic entanglements that made up the mystique of Fleetwood Mac in its heyday. Given the "unauthorized" character of the book, Nicks' impressions and feelings are more or less secondhand, quoted from interviews by others or guessed at by band mates and friends. This is less a problem than it might be, since Nicks has been fairly open, at least since the early days when the band kept her under wraps. As usual, the author is good at keeping readers--even those not totally enthralled by Nicks' music--turning pages. Things get slower when Davis recounts her solo career, though there were frequent reunions and continued drama between her and her band mates, especially Buckingham--and, of course, the drug problems and other personal crises that come with being a rock star. An entertaining rock biography, even if you're a take-it-or-leave-it fan of the singer.

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September 1, 2017
The world is overdue for a definitive Stevie Nicks biography. This isn't it. Despite Davis' pedigree as a music journalist and the author of Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga (1985), he hasn't given the singer her due. Instead, he has produced an incredibly readable yet ultimately breezy narrative one might find on an exceptionally thorough episode of Behind the Music, culled from repurposed interviews, many with Nicks' bandmate Mick Fleetwood, whose memoir Davis coauthored. A renowned addict who dallied with music-world celebrities when she wasn't recording songs with the notoriously dysfunctional Fleetwood Mac or any number of legendary songwriters and producers, Nicks' life lends itself to rock-doc conventions, but the reader wishes Davis had pushed himself to think about Nicks' place in the male-dominated sphere of 1970s arena rock, or at least talked to some of her associates outside the band. In lieu of original reporting, Davis harps on his central metaphorthat Nicks is a druggy Welsh witchand fills too many pages with excruciatingly cliched Celtic myth.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2017

The latest unauthorized biography about legendary Fleetwood Mac member and solo artist Stevie Nicks (b. 1948) is what you'd expect--a dishy retelling of her much-reported sex, drugs, and rock and roll-filled life--but with a lot of foofy words and sexist descriptions of the singer-songwriter, including an emphasis on her age, looks, and weight. This book has been in the works for several years (St. Martin's reportedly purchased the rights in 2012), and author Davis (Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga) has cobbled most of the content from previously published interviews, magazine articles, track-by-track liner notes from Nicks's various albums, and books by insiders such as bandmate (and former lover) Mick Fleetwood. Interestingly, Davis first entered Fleetwood Mac's universe when he began helping the musician pen his memoirs in 1987; his recollection of this experience is the freshest part of this book. VERDICT This title may attract curious new or casual fans looking to learn about Nicks's life, but die-hard admirers of the performer will find little new in its pages. [See Prepub Alert, 5/15/17.]--Samantha Gust, Niagara Univ. Lib., NY

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2017

Top rock journalist/biographer Davis chronicles the life of gold-dusted Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac and solo-career fame, with topics ranging from the affairs that inspired her greatest songs to her various drug dependencies.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.