Stephen Davis (1) (1947–)

Born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1948, Stevie Nicks moved with her family to San Mateo, California in 1964, where she met guitarist Lindsey Buckingham at a church gathering while she was in high school and experimenting with singing and songwriting. The two collaborated in a band and began living together in a cocaine and hashish fueled haze; Ms. Nicks worked as a waitress and house cleaner while the extremely talented, but martinet Mr. Buckingham practiced his guitar and slept off his highs. Eventually, in 1968, they joined the San Francisco band called Fritz, opening for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, and then in 1975, Mick Fleetwood asked them to join his popular English blues band, which was looking for new life after a series of musicians left. Both Ms. Nicks and Mr. Buckingham, along with Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie, were the primary songwriters of the newly configured band, all of them using their personal tortured relationships as inspirations for their songwriting that produced the songs on the wildly successful Rumours. Mr. Buckingham was very controlling of Ms. Nicks, belittling and sometimes physically abusing her; and the belligerent sexual tension between them was fuel for many songs each of them wrote. Mr. Davis chronicles Ms. Nicks’s musical career both with Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist, her heavy drug use and subsequent rehabilitation, and her entourage of women friends, with whom she was extremely generous but who made her feel safe. Overall, an entertaining rock biography.… (meer)

This book took me right back to Junior High and High School - years when Fleetwood Mac was in constant rotation on the radio.

I had to stop reading to go re-listen to the songs and watch old concert videos on YouTube.

I had some idea of the messy love affairs, but I hadn't known how extensive the drug use was. Although thinking back to the 70s I think it was almost assumed that rock bands were using drugs.

I also had no idea of the all-star line up of musicians who collaborated with Stevie once she started her solo career. Really well-written and well-researched biography.… (meer)

This book is the equivalent of reading the National Enquirer. It is a horrible book intentionally written to defame Led Zeppelin strictly for the profit of the author. The main source for the book is fired tour manager Richard Cole, who admitted later to selling stories to Stephen Davis when he was hard up for money. Tales from others in the book also reek of an exchange of money for dirt.

I can’t say it any better than Charles Cross said it in “Led Zeppelin Heaven and Hell”: “…Most of the stories revolve around Richard Cole himself rather than the members of Led Zeppelin. ‘Hammer of the Gods’ is one of the best-selling books ever written on any rock band, and a surprising number of fans actually seem to believe that it is an authorized biography done with the support of the band. Yet even while Cole dishes the dirt on his former bosses (who fired him in the late 1970s), he admits to having a drug problem while working for Zeppelin. In ‘Hammer of the Gods,’ Cole says he was ‘smacked out of my mind on heroin’ by the time he was fired, so perhaps his perspective is not the one to judge Led Zeppelin from in the first place.”… (meer)