Storms (17 page)

Now that I had officially moved in with him, Lindsey had made it a priority for us to find a home. Or rather, he'd planned to hire a new realtor and I'd do the house-searching while he continued his interviews.

He ended up choosing a realtor named Pam Sorens, and she and I had the exciting but heavy responsibility of finding a suitable “mansion.” Over the next week and a half, Pam and I looked at a dozen houses that seemed better suited to geriatrics than rock ‘n' rollers and I was beginning to despair of ever finding the right home for Lindsey and me. And then, like yet another fairy-tale ending, I was shown a house built over fifty years before we were born that seemed to have been waiting for us to find it.

After looking at two disastrously inappropriate houses that morning, Pam and I pulled up dejectedly in front of a huge brick Tudor-style home in the heart of old Hollywood's Hancock Park. As soon as I stepped through the huge wooden front door, I felt with a rising excitement that I had found our home. One look at the stained-glass windows depicting knights in armor, medieval princesses, daggers dripping blood, and at the stadium-size living room with its thirty-foot-high wooden ceiling made of hand-painted, fourfoot-square drawings of unicorns, King Arthur, and Lady Guinevere, and I knew that I'd found a “castle” that was perfect for two inhabitants of the Court of Fleetwood Mac.

“It's so Fleetwood Mac, Pam!” I exclaimed as I turned in a slow circle in the living room, trying to take it all in.

I'd fallen in love with the two-story, five-bedroom house in just three minutes. A huge entry hall surrounded a sweeping staircase that led to both sides of the upper story. Here, there was a small, creepy library (it locked from the outside), three bathrooms, and four bedrooms. The house had a lot of dark wood panels throughout it, with Victorian lamp sconces to light the interior.

Downstairs, along with the gigantic living room, there was a glassed sunroom, kitchen, dining room, two dens, and a maid's quarters of two rooms. Huge upstairs balconies overhung a backyard with a large swimming pool and landscaped grounds. Because the yard backed up to a golf course, the green grass seemed to go on forever. Within twenty-four hours Lindsey put an offer on the house and it was ours. After three months of bank escrow, that was. We could wait. We were leaving L.A. almost immediately for the road. From this point on, I would be by Lindsey's side.

After the hardships of Europe, touring the U.S. was fabulous: no bad weather, no horrible food, and both Lindsey and I were healthy. But the most important thing was the change in our relationship. We were now living
together. Our feelings for each other were deeper and, most importantly, there was a permanence about us that wasn't there before. And, on the road, it was obvious to not just the two of us but to everyone around us.

Our happiness was pretty hard to miss. We constantly held hands, whispered into each other's ears, and finished each other's sentences in conversations with everyone. We were aware of the disgusted looks being thrown our way by one and all, but we simply didn't care. Even if we had cared, we wouldn't have been able to change how we were with each other. And yet being so happy amid the wreckage of other band members' old relationships was unnerving not just for Lindsey and me, but for everyone in the inner circle.

Luggage tag on the Rumours tour.

The band's fame had grown astronomically in just a few short months, and so had their fan base. Even though I knew in theory how big Fleetwood Mac was getting, seeing it with my own eyes was exciting and a little scary. Now when the band's plane landed at a city for a concert, there were always at least seventy-five to one hundred fans waiting behind temporary wood barriers some two hundred yards from the plane, and after the shows there were kids waiting at our hotels clamoring for autographs. We never registered under our own names at hotels. Just like all famous rock musicians, every band member had a fake name that changed with each tour. For the
Rumours
tour we were “Mr. and Mrs. Pat Pending.” Later, on the
Tusk
tour, Lindsey would insist upon “Mr. and Mrs. Russ Hunk”, just to see me squirm every time I ordered room service.

As the concerts zipped by, the Fleetwood Mac family settled into a series of concert rituals that would be followed for the next eight years. These rituals never varied. Like the special handshake of a child's secret club, they were a routine that Fleetwood Mac believed in and followed every time.

The rituals began as soon as we entered the venue for that night's show. Everyone was treated to back-of-the-wrist bumps of blow the minute we walked into the band's main dressing room in the backstage area. An hour and a half before the show, if there were any local press or VIP visitors roaming around the dressing room, they were kicked out of the backstage, leaving the inner circle of Fleetwood Mac free to do whatever it was they needed or wanted to do. The band members got dressed, snorted blow, made drinks, and threw sarcastic remarks at each other—remarks designed to wound and cut just enough to peel back the surface of old scars without, God willing, causing a full-scale war before the concert.

Sitting watching this battle of words show after show, I wondered if there would ever come a time when the rage and hurt between John and Christine or between Stevie and Lindsey would end. As the years passed, this pre-show verbal sparring would escalate from sarcastic entertainment into vicious battles.

The banter stopped when J.C.'s ten-minute countdown began. On cue, Christine morphed into a gentler, English-rose version of Janis Joplin, with her raucous jokes and laughter—all she needed to complete the incarnation was a feather boa. Lindsey was Lord Byron, brooding and beautiful, his long fingers stroking the polished surface of his guitar in a completely unconscious caress as he leaned seductively against the wall. Mick's eyes became manic as he pounded his drumsticks harder and faster, looking at least a foot taller than his near-skyscraper height in his black velvet suit, ballet shoes, and trademark wooden balls.

Stevie turned pale and fragile-looking, her seductive power simmering on a low heat as she waited for the spotlights to hit her before she let its fire flare on stage. John stood dressed in shorts and casual shirt, giving me a wink and a wry smile as intelligence and sardonic wit shone from his eyes. His biting sarcasm and wicked humor were only on display for the trusted family members. Unlike the other four, John's stage persona was the exact opposite of what he was in everyday life. While playing a quiet, unassuming soul on stage, he was anything but that when among us.

“One
minute
, everyone—line up and I'll send you out in style”, J.C. intoned as he dumped blow on the backs of the band's extended fists, and then, as our private security surrounded them, they walked silently out of the dressing room. Down endless corridors strewn with ever-present black
and gray cables they walked, past anvil equipment cases adorned with Fleetwood Mac's penguin mascot, up metal stairs, and onto the blacked-out stage. Another show was up and running.

The audience's reception had become almost complete adulation and, for some, obsession with the band and their music. Even if some nights Christine's, Stevie's, or Lindsey's voice was ragged, every fan in the soldout venue went insane over each and every song. “So Afraid” always got a standing ovation, “Don't Stop” brought thundering cheers, and Stevie's “Rhiannon” was an absolute showstopper. I never tired of watching her perform what had become her trademark song. The track itself was amazing, but on stage it became sheer theater as she sang out the lyrics in her husky, sexy voice and twirled like a possessed spirit behind the microphone.

Stevie Nicks.

Halfway through the song the stage would go dark. A lone blue light encased Stevie as she crouched on the right side during Lindsey's intricate guitar bridge. The backdrop of the withered tree and full moon was hit with red and gold spotlights and the forest of Rhiannon came alive. Haloed in blue, Stevie slowly stood, arms crossed in front of her face, her sheer black chiffon cape shadowing her features as she crossed to the center of the stage. With her back to the mike, she started singing the haunting lyrics about love and a white witch.

Whirling around feverishly, Stevie screamed the words again as every one of us stood frozen watching her. “Rhiannon … Rhiannon …” she wailed, stomping her five-inch platform boots to the music, and then the stage went dark and the fans exploded in applause. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that they had just watched a potent incarnation of the witch Rhiannon—and they had. It was just another piece of Fleetwood Mac magic.

While the band played, the “family” continued its rituals backstage. J.C. began to run the scene. First, the band's personal security washed and dried beer-bottle caps and filled each one with a huge hit of cocaine. After the caps were lined up on separate cheap trays, a napkin was thrown over the whole shebang and a trusted band bodyguard carried them down the hall to the stage.

He climbed the stairs in the shadowy darkness and placed the trays on the tall black speakers at the back of the stage. During the show the band would fade back to the speakers at every opportunity and give themselves a bottlecap pick-me-up. On Christine and John's side of the stage, vodka tonics were replenished as needed, and on Lindsey's side, Ray Lindsey, his roadie, always kept a joint going. Between songs an ever-present cloud of smoke hovered around Lindsey's head as he strolled back to toke up as often as he could. Mick ducked down behind his drums, tooting up like the master that he was, and Stevie tripped off to stage right during every single break to change a shawl and snag a bottle cap of blow.

In the last ritual of the night, after the show each band member was offered a folded white paper bundle of cocaine to take back to their room for personal use. It was a sheer miracle that a stray local policeman patrolling the auditorium or backstage didn't make world headlines by busting the entire band and entourage for drug possession.

But things like that happened in the real world. Not in ours. That it could happen simply didn't occur to us in those days. We lived by a set of rules that didn't exist outside the golden curtains that surrounded us. And there wasn't anyone with enough power to tell us that we were wrong.

The fact that blow was illegal didn't bother us at all. The fact that this drug was dangerous and not only could—but
would
—rule and damage the lives of almost all of us didn't even cross our minds. Never once did anyone voice any concern about the fact that cocaine had become not just
commonplace but seemingly as necessary as the band's mikes. Basically, cocaine had become just a fact of life within the world of Fleetwood Mac, and for some of us, myself included, it would become one of the most important band rituals of them all.

After weeks on the road Fleetwood Mac returned home to play the Forum in Los Angeles. It was the biggest venue in the city and it was completely sold out. The acoustics were fabulous and playing in it was like being on the cover of
Rolling Stone.
If you sold out the Forum, you'd “arrived” in the music industry. The band was to play to an audience of over nineteen thousand fans and they were feeling completely, insanely freaked. It wasn't the size of the audience that had them on the edge of a nervous breakdown: it was the simple, brutal fact that in L.A. they would be playing in front of their musical peers—rock giants like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Don Henley, David Bowie, Mick Jagger—any or all of them could be sitting in the audience. It didn't really matter who you were or how much commercial success you had in the record industry, playing in front of people whose opinion matters to you and who are themselves your musical idols was a recipe for high-octane stress.

Rumours
was already a phenomenon in the record industry: the reviews, interviews, and chart position couldn't be better. A history-making performance at the Forum was not only expected of Fleetwood Mac but was of absolute critical importance: to their fans in the audience, to their peers, and, most of all, to the band themselves.