The “evil” Fleetwood Mac song Lindsey Buckingham thought was about him
Every great rock tune usually has some little bit of magic behind it. Whether it’s the way someone was playing guitar at that moment or the band’s willingness to listen to each other and share in their pain as the tape rolled, there’s usually some blood on the pages after most are finished with their masterpieces. Everyone might want to use that power for good, but Lindsey Buckingham thought Fleetwood Mac created something dangerous on ‘Gold Dust Woman’.
Then again, the ins and outs of Fleetwood Mac weren’t all that different from everyone else’s misbehaviour in the 1970s. Aside from writing the best tunes they possibly could, the amount of time that they spent shoving stuff up their noses was just as prevalent in bands like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith as well.
The one thing that the band had on their competition was drama…and lots of it. Even when artists like Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan would write songs about their relationships, not many of them had their exes sitting right next to them as they nailed down the takes of every single song.
Even though the recording of Rumours sounds like it was pure hell from an emotional perspective, ‘Gold Dust Woman’ is not transparent about Stevie Nicks’s relationship with Buckingham. The idea of someone picking up the pieces after a shattered romance might be a bit on the nose, but this could very well be the same kind of witchy fairytale that Nicks was used to making on ‘Rhiannon’.
As far as Nicks could see, the song has more to do with the groupies culture going around at the time, remarking in the book Making Rumours, “I wrote ‘Gold Dust Woman’ before we had started Rumours. It’s about groupie-type women who would stand around and give Christine and me dirty looks. But as soon as one of the guys came into the room, they were overcome with smiles”.
There was one target in the room most of the time, though, and Buckingham knew that there was a little more truth about him and Nicks than she let on, explaining, “[‘Gold Dust Woman’] is an evil song. It’s very dark, and I’m guessing that the acrimony was directed at me”.
It’s not like Buckingham would have been that far off in terms of where the anger came from. The two had just broken up before the album started, and the fact that the recording of some of the songs would erupt into a shouting match did nothing to smooth the waters between them.
Even though the song has had interpretations relating to people, there’s probably one gold dust woman that everyone was following around this time: cocaine. Considering how much the band were using at this time, the spiritual side of the song feels like it’s describing a witch that’s trying to lure you away with visions of white powder.
In fact, if there’s anything evil having to do with the song, it’s probably the excess behind the sessions. The band may have still been firing on all cylinders, but the cocaine-fueled sessions introduced the world to the narcotic sixth member of the group.
