The Fleetwood Mac song written as an ode to cocaine: “Everybody was doing a little bit:
The tales of some of the most prominent bands in history are inseparable from drugs. Whether it be The Beatles, The Rolling Stones or even Guns N’ Roses, the list is extensive. One of the most successful outfits whose story is inseparable from narcotics, however, is the great Fleetwood Mac.
Demonstrating this, founding member and original frontman Peter Green would see the trajectory of his life and career altered by extensive LSD use. In general, cocaine was ever-present in the most commercially successful period of the band in the mid-late 1970s.
There’s no doubt that Stevie Nicks and the rest of Fleetwood Mac soon became monster cocaine snorters. The group wrote most of their acclaimed album Rumours while snorting huge amounts of the drug.
Fleetwood Mac used so much cocaine during this era in the 1970s that, of the many rumours, one claimed that if it were all collected, it would stretch into a line of over seven miles. Talking about their extensive use of the drug, drummer Mick Fleetwood claimed in his 2014 memoir that the group used it “as if it were simply another available service at your disposal”. He then noted that all their albums from this period were created with “white powder peeling off the wall in every room of the studio”.
As Fleetwood Mac were so familiar with cocaine during this era, it was only natural that it should influence their material. The song ‘Gold Dust Woman’ from their 1977 masterpiece Rumours is the most notable example. In an interview by Hole frontwoman Courtney Love for Spin in October 1997, Stevie Nicks, the piece’s author, confirmed that “gold dust” is a metaphor for cocaine.
At this stage, before her snorting ended up burning a huge hole in her nose, Nicks was still enraptured by the possibilities the song offered. ‘Gold Dust Woman’, sees Nicks describe the suit of armour the drug provided her. The potential cocaine offered her as a songwriter seemed huge for Nicks, and this perception would almost end up costing her life.
Nicks explained: “Everybody was doing a little bit–you know, we never bought it or anything, it was just around – and I think I had a real serious flash of what this stuff could be, of what it could do to you… And I really imagined that it could overtake everything, never thinking a million years that it would overtake me. I must have met a couple of people that I thought did too much coke, and I must have been impressed by that. Because I made it into a whole story.”
When speaking to VH1 for The Making of Rumours in 1997, Nicks elucidated the song’s meaning in more detail, revealing a symbolic purpose behind the track. She said (via In Her Own Words): “‘Gold Dust Woman’ was really my kind of symbolic look at somebody going through a bad relationship, and doing a lot of drugs, and trying to just make it – trying to live – you know, trying to get through it to the next thing.”
The drug would become as much a part of the Fleetwood Mac story as the songs themselves. While that is certainly not a wonderful thing, it did, at the very least, provide at least one incredible song for us to love.
