New Stevie bio book

[David]

Thanks for the alert. I’ll definitely order it. The author is a wacky academic, and I have a feeling that the book is filled with wacky academic twaddle about Stevie — elevating her into some sort of proto-feminist in rock (“One of the advance reviewers of the book pointed out that Stevie Nicks had to be better than the men around her, which is something I certainly wanted to demonstrate,” for example, or “Nicks is now as iconic [as] the heroines of historical legend, Hollywood film and gothic literature whose imaginings she channels”).

But in this face-to-face interview on the Princeton UP page, the author says that the Everly tour Lindsey joined was a miserable experience. Not only did I not remember Lindsey saying that the tour was miserable for him, I also wondered what the Everly article on Wiki actually said about the details of the tour.

First off, Lindsey actually said in 1977 that the tour (with Don Everly) was one of his biggest professional thrills, so I don’t know where this academic got the idea that the tour was so miserable. Second, and unrelated to this book, Lindsey has only ever said that he toured with Don in 1974, after the brothers had split up. That was when Stevie stayed in Aspen, writing “Landslide” and “Rhiannon.” But the Wiki entry says that Lindsey toured with both brothers in 1972 — without supplying a source!

So did Lindsey tour with the Everly Brothers in 1972 and tour again with Don in 1974 (singing Phil’s part on a song or two)? An academic devoted to genuine research and scholarship — instead of collating all the crap we already know about and buttering it with lit-crit language — would have at least identified riddles like this one and tried to solve them. There never was a great book about Fleetwood Mac and there probably never will be. Something about the subject just draws the buzzards and the fast-buck grifters.