Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks

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 Fleetwood Mac 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. By 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. (Nov.)

This review has been corrected to fix a typo.