Grammy winning singer-songwriter, Stevie Nicks snorted so much cocaine and became so addicted to the drug that she had to be shadowed to keep from falling off stage when performing and needed to have someone tuck her into bed at night.
The Queen of Rock and Roll in the 1970s and 1980s not only had a huge hole in her nose from the cocaine, but she was warned of the imminent possibility of a brain hemorrhage if she kept up her high level of consumption.
But it was the shocking rumors that she had reverted to using the ‘devil’s dandruff’ in her vagina and rectum for the ultimate high that was the eventual motivation for her to go into rehab in 1986 at the Betty Ford addiction treatment center in Minnesota.
The Fleetwood Mac singer admitted: ‘You could put a big gold ring through my septum. It affected my eyes, my sinuses. It was a lot of fun for a long time because we didn’t know it was bad. But eventually it gets hold of you, and all you can think about is where your next line is coming from.
‘All of us were drug addicts. But there was a point where I was the worst drug addict. I was a girl, I was fragile, and I was doing a lot of coke and I was in danger of brain damage’, she told author Stephen Davis for his upcoming book, Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks.
Stevie Nicks opens up about her battles with addiction in the new book, Gold Dust Woman, The Biography of Stevie Nicks by Stephen Davis. She reveals that getting off of prescription pills felt like someone ‘pushed me into hell’. Pictured: Nicks in 1983
Nicks fell for the Eagles’ guitarist Joe Walsh but the drugged up couple were ‘on their way to hell’ and the breakup ‘nearly killed’ her, she says
The 69-year-old admits that overcoming her addiction to pills was harder to quit than her $1 million cocaine habit that she had gone to rehab for in 1986. The Fleetwood Mac (pictured together in 1990) singer said she’ll never forgive the ‘groupie’ psychiatrist who just wanted to hear ‘rock and roll’ stories so he kept her hooked on pills
Once out of rehab, Nicks began seeing a psychiatrist at the suggestion of her friends because she refused to go to AA meetings.
The unnamed Beverly Hills ‘shrink of the hour’ prescribed tranquilizers, such as Valium, before dishing out Xanax and Klonopin.
Nicks recalled: ‘I asked why I had to take it. He said, “Because you need it.” So I took it for seven years until I just turned into a zombie’.
That addiction cost her 47 additional days in rehab in 1993 and getting sober again was a far more horrific experience than getting off of cocaine.
‘I felt like someone opened up a door and pushed me into hell,’ the singer confessed.
The doctor was a groupie who just wanted to hear rock and roll stories so he kept upping Nicks’ dosage to keep her coming back – and talking.
‘That doctor – he’s the only person in my life I an honestly say I will never forgive. All those years I lost – I could have maybe met somebody or had a baby or done a few more Fleetwood Mac albums or Stevie Nicks albums.
‘So I’ll never forgive him. If I saw him on the street and I was driving – well, I don’t have a driver’s license and it’s good, because I would just run him down’, Nicks told Rolling Stone.
Nicks’ first dreams of a career with stage lights started when she began singing for family friends and in local saloons with her grandfather at age five.
Little Stephanie Nicks loved the attention, the applause and the reaction to the cowgirl outfit made by her mother.
The Queen of Rock and Roll in the 1970s and 1980s tore a huge hole in her nose from cocaine and was warned of the imminent possibility of a brain hemorrhage if she kept up her high level of consumption. Pictured: Nicks in June
The Fleetwood Mac singer admitted: ‘You could put a big gold ring through my septum. It affected my eyes, my sinuses. It was a lot of fun for a long time because we didn’t know it was bad. But eventually it gets hold of you, and all you can think about is where your next line is coming from’. Pictured: Fleetwood Mac in 1997
As her father climbed the corporate ladder working for Armour meat packers, Greyhound Bus Company and Lucky Lager Brewing, the family moved from Phoenix, to El Paso, Texas, Salt Lake City and finally Arcadia, California.
Her new home was around 13 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Valley – close enough to Hollywood.
At Arcadia High, Nicks jumped into baton twirling for the school’s Apache Princesses but she admits she wasn’t academically inclined.
She started dating early in her teens and had her first heartbreak by her first boyfriend on her 16th birthday when he told her the relationship was over.
Her teenage heart was crushed but she was inspired to write her first ballad on her new guitar – ‘I’ve Loved and I Lost’.
Nicks was moving up from the tiny girl who wore thick eyeglasses, voluminous skirts and carried her books in a Mexican straw basket – to bigger dreams while listening to rock music on Los Angeles’ KHJ radio station.
After her senior year of high school in 1966, her parents urged her to apply to colleges but she wanted to attend a hairdressing school.
That idea was quickly nixed so Nicks went to junior college, still insisting that studying was difficult and hairdressing school would have benefited her more.
At San Jose State, her epiphany arrived in 1967 when she heard Linda Ronstadt sing the chart-topping song, ‘Different Drum’ with the group the Stone Poneys.
‘I heard Linda Ronstadt and I just said, “That’s it! That’s what I want to do…although I didn’t look as good as her in cut-offs”.
In the summer of 1968, Nicks joined Lindsey Buckingham in a band called Fritz. It marked the beginning of an epic love affair that eventually deteriorated from neglect and jealousy – or so most people thought
Mick Fleetwood had heard tapes of Nicks and Buckingham’s music and wanted them to join his band but Buckingham was hesitant and viewed the group as a meat grinder. Pictured: Nicks and Buckingham in 1998
She wrote in her journal that ‘nothing was going to get in her way’. She wanted to write songs and sing with a band.
In the summer of 1968, Nicks joined Lindsey Buckingham in a band called Fritz.
It marked the beginning of an epic love affair that eventually deteriorated to neglect and jealousy – or so most people thought.
Nicks did odd jobs to keep the rent paid for the couple, including house cleaning, dental assistant and waiting tables, while Lindsey smoked opiated hash and was filling in on Phil Everly’s harmonies after Phil walked out of the Everly Brothers fraternal partnership.
Tired of her day jobs, Nicks felt a hostile dependency was brewing.
After kicking around Los Angeles for seven years trying to get a record deal, her big break came when Fleetwood Mac came knocking.
Mick Fleetwood had heard tapes of Nicks and Buckingham’s music and wanted them to join his band but Buckingham was hesitant and viewed the group as a meat grinder.
‘I saw Fleetwood Mac drive up in these two old clunky white Cadillacs, with huge tail fins, and I was in awe,’ Nicks said.
She eagerly inked a deal to join Fleetwood Mac in 1975. Nicks and Buckingham got their relationship back together – ever so briefly — with less fighting.
‘We were going to work with these hysterically funny English people every day, making great music,’ Nicks said.
Her pill addiction cost her 47 additional days in rehab in 1993 and getting sober again was a far more horrific experience than getting off of cocaine. Pictured: Nicks in 1975
Motherhood was an impediment to Nicks ambitions, so she thought. She thought she would never bear children and probably never marry. Pictured: Nicks in 1983
The new additions to the band were each paid $200 a week in cash, a handsome sum to struggling musicians.
The band hit the road on rigorous cross-country tour dates with the help of Peruvian marching power – the best crystal cocaine served to the band members in bottle caps before each concert.
When Buckingham and Nicks finally broke up again, men were lined up on Nicks’ doorstep.
First to come calling was the Eagles’ drummer, Don Henley and they became a semi-secret couple for a year.
Lonely for his sweetheart on the road with the Eagles, Henley sent a private jet to pick up Nicks.
While he was out of town, Nicks confessed she went out with his close pal, singer-songwriter and well-known seducer, the ‘broodingly handsome’ Texan, John David Souther.
By Christmas 1976, Nicks decided that because she was getting so much attention with Fleetwood Mac, she needed larger breasts.
She went for silicon implants and reasoned it only would it make her bigger hips look more in proportion, standing a mere 5″ 1′ tall. However, they eventually leaked and had to be removed.
Motherhood was an impediment to Nicks ambitions, so she thought. She thought she would never bear children and probably never marry.
When Nicks and Buckingham (pictured in 1998) joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975 they were each paid $200 a week in cash, a handsome sum to struggling musicians
Nicks had affairs with the Eagles’ Don Henley (left) and Mick Fleetwood (right) throughout her time with the band
Nicks said she needed to be viewed as a sex goddess but also as a girlfriend, essentially a ‘bubble-headed nymph’.
But as bad luck would have it, Nicks became pregnant by Henley even only seeing him occasionally.
Henley was initially favorable to the idea of having a child but grew ambivalent, disappearing back on the road with the Eagles so Nicks got an abortion.
She moved on to an affair with Paul Fishkin, president of Bearsville Record, before sliding into an affair with Mick Fleetwood.
The two worked the road on worldwide tours that were gruesomely long and exhausting – given the amount of drugs everyone was consuming.
Nicks had vision problems after forgetting to take out her contacts for weeks at a time. Then she came down with bronchial spasmodic asthma.
By late 1980, there was a revolt within the band when accountants claimed no money had been made despite touring for eight solid months.
‘Where was all the f**king money’? they asked Fleetwood, the band manager.
Fleetwood’s defense was that overhead was to blame. ‘The tour had run on rock cocaine, high-degree marijuana, French wine, Dutch beer and Russian Vodka’, writes the author.
The band spent frivolous money, including sending an empty jet back to LA to pick up a cocaine dealer on the band’s payroll when nightly supplies had dwindled.
Nicks’ best friend Robin Anderson succumbed to terminal leukemia. Robin had just had a baby and Nicks thought she should marry Robin’s husband, Kim Anderson, and take over her friend’s wifely and mothering duties. They married and divorced in 1983
Fleetwood Mac spent frivolous money, including sending an empty jet back to LA to pick up a cocaine dealer on the band’s payroll when nightly supplies had dwindled
‘You couldn’t tell Stevie Nicks she couldn’t have a grand piano in the repainted presidential suite of the Waldorf or the Ritz or the Four Seasons in Tokyo’, writes the author.
But despite the money woes, the hard feelings passed. They all had a thrill riding the rocket to stardom.
When Nicks’ best friend Robin Anderson succumbed to terminal leukemia, she went off the rails with grief.
Robin had just had a baby and Nicks thought she should marry Robin’s husband, Kim Anderson, and take over her friend’s wifely and mothering duties.
It was a drug addled idea but the couple went through with it until Nicks said she received an other-worldly message from Robin that the marriage had to end. Three months after tying the knot, the marriage was over.
Nicks’ biggest heartbreak came in 1983 when she fell madly in love with Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh.
She met him in a hotel bar and when he cradled her in his arms, she remembered thinking, ‘I can never be far from this person again’.
Although Walsh was her ‘one’, he ended up being the one that got away.
Nicks went on to have a successful solo career as well as more years with Fleetwood Mac. Pictured: Nicks in 1991, two years before she went back to rehab
Nicks’ biggest heartbreak came in 1983 when she fell madly in love with Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, who she claims was ‘the one’. Pictured: Walsh and Marjorie Bach in August
‘We were probably the perfect, complete, crazy pair’, she said. ‘He was the one I would have married, and that I would probably have changed my life around for a little bit, anyway. Not a lot’.
Nicks became motherly and smothering, buying him clothes and tending to his every desire.
‘I loved him. I really looked after him, and that’s what probably scared Joe the most.
‘We were busy superstars and we were doing way too much drugs. We were really, seriously drug addicts. We were a couple on the way to hell’.
While her heart cried out for Walsh, he was always distracted by some new toy he had just bought, his computer lab, new gear or keyboards.
For three years, she waited by the phone in case he called but he rarely did. So Nicks ate to ease her pain.
Davis’ new book is out November 21
The breakup was ugly.
Nicks was in the studio when Walsh came over and was hanging with the studio crew while ignoring her.
Tired of waiting, she told him she was leaving and wanted him to come with her.
He tersely responded – ‘Oh I meant to tell you, I can’t see you – I’m leaving tomorrow to go back on the road’.
It was a bitter cold goodbye for all that expended passion.
Walsh jetted to Australia the next day and left a message that Nicks was not to try to contact him him.
‘It nearly killed me,’ she confessed.
‘We had to break up or we thought we’d die. We were just too excessive. But there was no closure. It took me years to get over it – if I ever did. It’s very sad but at least we survived’.
That was in 1986. But she was still in love with Walsh 20 years later.
‘There was no other man for me. I look back at all the men in my life, and there was only one that I can honestly say I could truly have lived with every day for the rest of my life, because there was respect and we loved to do the same things.
‘I was very content with him all the time. That’s only happened once in my life’.
‘This man, if he’d asked me to marry him, I would have. There was nothing more important than Joe Walsh – not my music, not my songs, not anything. He was the great, great love of my life’.
Nicks went on to have a successful solo career as well as more years with Fleetwood Mac.
She has survived the drug addled years and is back on the road, performing and twirling on stage in layers of lace as the gold dust woman.