Stevie getting sober

[Villavic]

This is how Mick Fleetwood tells in his book about Stevie's cocaine addiction getting worse, and how she rehabs. It's before and during Tango sessions:

Through all this, Stevie Nicks had been working and touring to promote her third solo album, Rock a Little. She had spent a million to make it, and Frontline kept her away from us while they were selling it. I went on part of her long 1986 tour, playing percussion in a hot band that included Waddy Wachtel on guitar, and I could see that Stevie was running herself right into the ground. She was drinking and doing a lot of cocaine. Every night I'd watch her launch into one of her dancing spins on stage, and each night the spins got more and more dizzy until I was afraid she was going to fall off the stage during a show. "Stevie," I said, "you're going to hurt yourself. You've got to work on getting away from being so high while you're onstage."

She would cry. "Oh Mick, I know it! I don't wanna be like this. I don't wanna need this stuff so much. I'm gonna do something after the tour's over." I knew what Stevie meant. You can't go cold turkey on a major tour after years of partying and having a good time. But now the party was over. It had become an addiction, a way of life. Later, while Fleetwood Mac was laboring in the studio, Stevie and her band went to Australia, where her drinking worsened and she fell off the stage twice. I was afraid she would injure herself, or worse.

Stevie finally showed up in January 1987.....
Complicating matters slightly in the spring of 1987 was Stevie's admission to the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs to get her life under control. This was done through an "intervention" by friends, members of her family, and the management company. Stevie spent twenty-eight days in a successful treatment for alcohol problems, but she didn't like being coerced into entering this facility, and Frontline was fired shortly thereafter. (Later she told me that the treatment made her change her way of thinking, and was worth it.)

..... So the little time we had with Stevie was somewhat disoriented, but she did come through with good songs. ,,,,"Welcome to the Room, Sara" was a graphic depiction of her experience at the Betty Ford Center, where she had checked in under the pseudonym Sara Anderson. (This song is extremely moving when understood in that context.)