[SOFT ROCK PLAYING]
Take note of Stephen Davis.
He has written more than a dozen books.
Majority of them about music, including the blockbuster Led Zeppelin
Hammer of the Gods, the fifth English edition of which
is soon to be published.
Six of these books have been New York Times bestsellers, including the brand
new Gold Dust Woman, the biography of Stevie Nicks,
out now on st. Martin's Press.
And if I may do a quick humble brag for a moment, listeners.
He does thanks to yours truly in this book.
And I only mention that because we dicuss that during our chat,
I didn't want you to be confused.
Steven Davis and I became friends a number of years
ago when I was a music editor of a newspapers.
And we ended up going to quite a few shows together.
And like some of the most dangerous roll stories, Steven Davis's life in music
began with a drive by.
I'll let him tell you about it.
[MUSIC STOPS]
When I was eight years old, a black car pulled up to the front of our house,
in Long Island, and a man, a priest, got out wearing a Roman collar.
And my mother answered the door.
And he said, my name is Father so-and-so,
and I'm from the local Episcopal church, and the music teacher at your son,
Stephen's, school says that he has the best voice in the school,
and we want him in the choir.
And my mother said, oh, you know, I don't know.
And we're not Episcopalian.
And and the father said, and it pays $20 a month.
Two rehearsals and two services a week.
And this is 1955 or '56 or something like that.
That's good money for a kid, believe me.
A lot of comic books and milkshakes.
And so for the next three years, I was a trained, professional chorister
at the Episcopal cathedral on Long Island, New York.
And and I learned to sing.
And I learn to sing well with other people.
And that began my lifelong love of music.
Before that car pulled up, were you genuinely, really excited about it
anyway?
My father was a big music fan.
My mother listened to the radio all day, and my father collected jazz records.
Miles Davis, I grew up with that stuff and, you know,
the more commercial side of '50s you know, jazz.
I didn't really get excited too much about music
per se, in terms of buying records, until I was about 10 years old
and the Kingston trio came along.
This is '58 '56.
And I wanted to have all those records.
I mean, they influenced everybody from Bob Dylan, to Lindsey Buckingham,
to almost anybody who was alive then.
And then, you know, the early '60s come around, and Kennedy--
there's a bloody public assassination.
And, you know, the nation's hopes are foundering.
And three months later, as if in response to an occult summons,
the Beatles show up on the Ed Sullivan Show and kind of changed everything.
But I've always thought, as someone who writes about music,
I've always thought that, in the long run, the advent of the Beatles
won't be the main music that that era is remembered for,
because this is also when Brazilian music came north, and bossa nova
and entered the American culture in '62 '63 '64 with these incredible records.
And what were you getting into them at the time?
Yes.
Oh, totally.
We were all on the radio.
My father was buying the records.
Jazz Samba, Getz Au Go Go, you know.
Getz Gilberto.
Astrud Gilberto's solo record.
Luiz Bonfa's records.
I mean, we had them all in the house.
And I was as mesmerized by that music as I was,
you know, by the advent of the Beatles.
But anyway, I sang in high school.
I went to Boston University.
And was writing also a through line, as well as music?
No no no no.
Not yet.
No, not yet.
I wasn't really a writer until I went to Boston University.
Boston University was great because it was this giant place in the late '60s,
and I didn't really go to class, because we went to demonstrations instead.
I burned my draft card on the steps of the Arlington Street Church
with about hundreds of my friends.
There was about 1,000 people there that day.
This was 1967.
And at the same time, this is one of the San Francisco
bands started coming to Boston and playing at the Boston Tea Party.
The Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding
Company, which was Janis Joplin's band.
And this incredible, you know, this organic movement unto itself.
And that, you know, you hadn't really seen
this before-- of like families of bands from one town.
And the came through and it was just mind boggling.
At the same time, bands were coming through from England.
Most notably Led Zeppelin.
Fleetwood Mac was the house band at the Boston Tea Party in 1968.
Yeah that's interesting because, with these books that I've read of yours,
I can feel it from the writings that you were there
at a lot of those early ones, right?
I was there, man.
And having fun, and taking notes.
Where you taking notes and stuff?
Yeah, taking notes I started writing for the college paper
at Boston University, which was one of the largest circulation university
papers in the country.
And I started writing about music, mostly in order to get free tickets.
You know, when the Doors came to town in the spring of '68,
they played in a now-m demolished theater on Massachusetts Avenue,
near Berklee.
It's called the Fenway theater.
And Jim Morrison came out in a peacoat and a hat and this,
you know, Tom Tom sort of war drum rhythm behind him,
and he started screaming.
And I thought to myself, man this is the energy I
want to be around every day for the rest of my life.
You know, because it was just incredible.
This was before people knew how to put on rock shows.
But he had this instinctive thing of holding an audience of people
his age just completely in the palm of his hand.
In fact I know, having written his biography,
that when that audience moved on and the audience turned into high school
kids and junior high school kids, he didn't know what to do with them
and, you know, that's when he quit the Doors.
The audiences were too young, and they were just too dumb and too crazy.
And he said, man the stuff that's going on stage is amazing,
but the shit that's going down in the audience is unbelievable.
That is a funny thing, and I feel like you do deal
with that in a lot of your acts, like in Hammer
of Gods, when you're talking about how Zeppelin was so frustrated that it
was, like, the original rock generation's younger
brothers and sisters.
Yeah the baby boomers, the older baby boomers,
weren't programmed to like Led Zeppelin.
They just sounded like someone screaming.
But man, my little brother.
The men don't know, but the little brothers understand.
So now, during this time you're writing about all this music,
and you're starting to feel like that's something you can do as far as not just
to get into shows.
I can do this.
But were you also playing still, and singing?
No.
No, you dropped that.
I dropped out of singing and playing music until later.
But in 1969, I wrote the first front page story of a new paper
called The Cambridge Phoenix, which later became The Phoenix, which
later became The Boston Phoenix.
It was a new at one point, right?
It was the real paper.
It was a split off, I was there too.
But the fact is that music was so big in Boston,
it was such an important part of student life
and just the people who lived here, that there
was enough advertising from people selling stereos, and amplifiers,
and guitars, and tickets, and anything related to music,
that two competing weekly papers showed up in Boston.
One was called Boston After Dark, or BAD,
and the other was The Boston Phoenix.
And these were fat.
We were publishing 80- 90-page papers every week.
There were two of them.
Yeah.
And were are you writing for both?
No I was writing for The Phoenix.
And then we had a guy writing for us called John Landau who was also
a big music editor at Rolling Stone.
And when he went to Rolling Stone, full time I
became the music editor of The Phoenix.
And then I became the associate editor of Rolling Stone.
He hired me.
The only thing I have in common with Bruce Springsteen
is that we were both invented by John Landau.
And so this gave me, at age 22 or something
like that, a national forum because Rolling Stone was kind of it.
Were you still in school then?
No I was out then.
I was I was living in Cambridge with my girlfriend, and her dog,
and various photographer friends in a kind
of a communal scene in Cambridgeport.
Where the rents really cheap at that point or was
Cambridge always Cambridge?
I think we paid $180 a month for a whole house, a beautiful house,
near the BU Bridge.
It was great.
I mean, it was a very lucky time for us to be alive
and doing that, because for a young writer like me,
there was only a few things you could write about and make a living at it.
One was politics, one was sports, and the other was music.
Or you could go to Vietnam and be a war correspondent, you know?
None of that stuff appealed to me except, you know, writing about music,
and hanging out with musicians, and smoking dope, and living that life,
and going on tour with bands and stuff like this.
So you burnt your draft card, and your number never got called?
No I had a draft physical later on, and they said, where's your draft card son?
And I said, well I burned it on the steps of the Arlington Street Church.
They said, well step over there.
And I also had a--
like many people, you know, I knew a doctor who wrote a letter for me.
If you didn't want to go to Vietnam, you didn't really have to, you know.
Unfortunately 55,000 people didn't know that.
And we were talking about this the other day,
a lot of people not enjoying their grandchildren today because, you know,
whoever started this.
I blame JFK, but that's another story.
Sorry yeah, tangents.
We edit them out.
That's fine.
You can leave it in, I don't care.
But anyway, music.
I left Rolling Stone after a couple years.
Did you like it there?
My job was to do the record review section.
Right.
And so I met all the other writers.
They all had to come through me.
And Me and Landau worked out of the New York office, not San Francisco.
I mostly worked out of home.
So I never had anything to do with the office politics.
Hardly met Jann Wenner maybe once, you know.
But again, it gave me this national audience for my stuff,
you know, at age 23, 24.
And so when I left Rolling Stone, I started writing
for the New York Times about music.
Front page stories on Sunday, you know.
I had a friend called Robert Palmer, Bob Palmer,
he was the chief music critic for The New York Times.
And he came back from a vacation in Morocco,
and he said, well you've got to go to this village of the master
musicians of Joujouka.
These are a 2000-year-old rock band.
He actually said, this is a 5,000-year-old rock and roll band that
was discovered by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones.
The first record on Rolling Stones Records
was Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka.
I go, where is that?
He says, oh it's in the hills south of Tangier.
I go, oh I have to go?
He says, you have to go.
It could completely change your life.
So I wrote a proposal to the National Geographic,
and they sent me a photographer first class to Morocco.
Hired a car, and made our way into the reef, into the Jabalya foothills,
and spent six months with the master musicians of Joujouka.
And they taught me how to play music.
Really?
Flute, drums, everything-- I was just immersed with them.
All they did was smoke keef and play music all day.
And then they would go to these festivals.
How many people were there, are we talking about?
Well back then, there were 30 master musicians.
15 guys playing the rhaita, which is like a double reed oboe,
and 15 guys playing the drums.
And it was the 5,000 year old rock and roll band.
I mean their music was descended from stuff
that had come from Damascus, when the Arabs moved west in the ninth century.
And some of the rituals that they do recall,
you know, Roman rites like the lupercalia,
where you dressed up in goatskins and you whip the women for fertility.
I mean this is pretty serious stuff.
I wrote a book about it called Joujouka Rolling Stone years later.
But in any case, I came back.
I left a writer, and I came back a musician,
and that's what really changed my outlook
on music and the commercialization of music and what it was all about.
Huh.
How did you communicate with them?
I took along a friend of mine, Bob Palmer, this writer,
who said, take along this guy who speaks fluent Arabic.
I speak fluent French.
The photographer spoke Spanish very well.
So between the three languages, you know, we got along real fine.
But it was mostly the language of music and humanity.
I was in my twenties, and most of these guys were in their fifties and sixties.
Some of them had fought with Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
But it was just great.
And the food, the music, the people, the goats--
everything-- it was just one of these life-enhancing experiences.
And I came back a musician.
I came back able to play things on the guitar that I couldn't play before.
It was magic and, you know, just part of my legendarium.
Around this time, reggae was hitting.
So I went right off to Jamaica and started hanging out with Bob Marley,
and that's where my first book comes from--
Reggae Bloodlines-- not just Bob Marley but the whole movement.
It was 1974, 1975, and there was this cultural shockwave coming out
of Jamaica--
not only music but politics.
You know?
A socialist prime minister-- the CIA was down there undermining him.
There were food shortages and tanks in the streets.
And meanwhile, Bob Marley's at home, pumping out
this incredible, revolutionary music.
And Burning Spear, Jimmy Cliff, Meditations, Heptones--
so I got really into reggae.
Mm-hmm.
Now, did you know, coming off of the trip to Morocco
and then going to Jamaica--
you knew that the first one was an amazing experience
while you were in it.
Did you know as soon as you got to Jamaica
that this was something-- you know?
My family has a long history with Jamaica.
My grandmother used to go there when I was a kid,
so I had heard a lot about it.
Yeah.
I'm a big James Bond fan, so I'd read the Ian Fleming
books that take place in Jamaica.
So I, kind of, was prepared with--
you know, I had arranged a really nice house in Kingston, and we had a--
I neglected to say that the reason that we went there the first time
was to write an article for The New York Times.
But this was seen by an editor at Doubleday,
and she gave me and my photographer friend,
Peter Simon, a pretty good advance.
Yeah.
So you know, we were flush with cash.
We went down to Jamaica and we stayed for months.
And again, we're hanging out with Bob Marley and his crew,
and Burning Spear, and all these contemporary guys,
driving around the island, going up to the mountains to visit the ganja farms,
hanging out with Prime Minister Michael Manley,
because we had an assignment from The New York Times Magazine as well.
And it was mostly just the music that was--
but you know, at the same time, reggae couldn't
get played on the radio in Jamaica.
Because the JBC, the broadcasting company, wanted to play, you know,
The Commodores--
disco music.
So there was this tension in Jamaica.
In the early days, Bob Marley and his pal, Skill Cole,
had to take cricket bats to the radio stations and tell the DJs,
if I don't hear my record in an hour, we're going to work on your car.
And a lot of windshields got smashed before Bob Marley got on the radio
in Jamaica.
So it wasn't a tourist paradise.
It was really a contentious battlefield in Kingston.
You know, you didn't want to be caught outside at night, necessarily,
and so it was pretty rough.
Did they take you in?
You know--
Oh, very much so, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
There were also people who were saying that we were there
to steal their culture.
Yeah.
But we didn't care.
You know, we were young and dumb.
You know, and we could always just say, look, I mean, we can go back home
and write about The Commodores and make more money
than we can doing this stuff.
But we're giving you guys a platform.
And of course, within two or three years,
we started hearing reggae on TV commercials.
So--
And Wings was incorporating it and everybody was--
Everyone, yeah.
Everyone had to have reggae.
Even Led Zeppelin had a crack at it, you know?
At this point, you know, you've written Reggae Bloodlines.
And while you're down there, are you realizing, this is my career,
and I can do this as a living?
Yes.
Yeah?
Yeah, because I had an assignment for the Times Magazine,
and they published my interview with the prime minister.
So I thought to myself, well, I can always
go back to writing about current events or something
if this reggae thing doesn't work out.
But it did.
And after that, I did a book called Reggae International.
After that, I started working with Bob Marley on his memoirs,
interviewing him, and then he died.
Right.
And I finished the book by myself.
And around this time--
so this is in the early '80s.
And when Bob Marley died, I had a really good literary agent.
And he called me up and he said, look.
Bob Marley just died.
I can get you this much money for a biography.
I said, listen, that's incredible.
That's great.
And he said, not only that, but--
at this time, there was only one rock book out there, and it was called,
no one here gets out alive.
And it was a terrible biography of Jim Morrison.
What's that guy's name?
Sugarman?
Danny Sugarman and someone else.
And the operating premise of this book was that Jim was still alive somewhere,
waiting to return like Osiris or the Imam or whoever.
So my agent said, look, all these rock bands are going to have legends,
and you're perfectly positioned to be the guy who writes these legends.
I mean, for the rest of your career, you can write stories
about these rock bands.
And I go, OK, that's fine with me.
Let's start with Bob Marley.
And so I went back to Jamaica and started interviewing people,
and the book came out here and in England, and then in Japan, and then
in France, and then all over the world.
And that was it.
That was my course-- write the legends of these guys.
The next one was--
I went on tour with Led Zeppelin for a while.
And out of that came Hammer of the Gods, still in print, 32 years later.
Yeah.
And then, I started getting calls from--
my agent started getting calls from people
like Levon Helm, Mick Fleetwood, and Michael Jackson,
to do as-told-to or ghostwritten books.
So I did that for 10 years, and then went back to writing about bands.
You know, I did a biography of Jim Morrison and the Levon Helm book,
which was called, This Wheel's on Fire.
The Michael Jackson book was called Moonwalk,
number one best-seller in the world.
You did that with him, too.
Yeah, yeah, it was a ghost.
I was the ghost writer.
And a lot of fun.
Mikey-- you know.
You did have a good time?
I had a really good time, and he was real nice to my family, too.
I took my daughter there, and at one point, I had met--
I'd been interviewing Michael Jackson.
And every now and then, the trader brought in his monkey.
He had this chimp monkey called Bubbles, who's still alive, by the way.
Wow.
He's retired in Florida, but he is still alive.
And so my daughter came.
One day, I said, can I bring Lily?
She's seven years old.
She'd love to meet you, et cetera.
(IN A HIGH VOICE) Oh, yes, [INAUDIBLE].
OK, Steve.
Yeah, bring Lily.
So the next day, I show up with my wife and daughter, and we have lunch,
and we watch his favorite movie in his private screening
room, which was To Kill a Mockingbird.
OK.
And Lily was sitting next to Michael.
She looks over at him, and halfway through, tears
are streaming down his cheeks.
At the end of it, I said, Michael, you're so emotional about this movie.
Haven't you seen it--
He said, (IN A HIGH VOICE) l watch it almost every day, Steve!
[CHUCKLE] So emboldened, I said, listen, Michael,
is there any way that we could meet Bubbles?
(HIGH VOICE) OK, Steve.
And he pushes a bell.
And about 10 minutes later, the trader comes in with a chimpanzee.
The chimpanzee didn't see many children.
And so the chimpanzee grabs Lily by the wrist
and starts to drag her out of the room.
Oh, man!
And Michael grabs her other wrist, and so Lily is the rope in this tug-of-war
between--
Olive Oil.
[CHUCKLE]
--and Michael Jackson.
And I look over at Lily, and I notice her hand is turning blue
because the monkey has his death grip around her wrists.
I go, Michael, this thing with the monkey is getting a little old now.
And Michael nods at the trainer.
The trainer pulls out some kind of joy buzzer,
puts it on the back of a monkey, and goes, boom!
And the chimp goes like--
[CHUCKLE]
And Bubbles is still alive.
Yeah, Bubbles is-- the last time I checked, which was maybe 18 months ago,
Bubbles is alive and retired in Florida.
Oh, man.
So spending all this time, having done both the unauthorized
and the authorized, did you ever do any authorized ones where
you approached the artist?
No.
No?
No.
I tried-- when the book I did with Levon Helm, This Wheel's On Fire came out,
we set the galley proofs to Bob Dylan.
And he wrote this incredible blurb-- the first and only time he's ever
blurbed for anything, I think.
And it took up half a page.
That book's still in print, and we still use the blurb.
And so I was casting around what to do next,
and I wrote a letter to his manager or whoever.
And I said, listen, you know, I know Bob really liked this book.
And there's a rumor that he was considering doing something like this,
and I just wanted to put my candidacy in-- blah, blah.
I never heard back.
But then, a few years later, he wrote this book called Chronicles--
Right.
--which was pretty much the same register
that I used for Levon Helm's voice, but from Minnesota rather than
from Arkansas.
So I've never approached anybody, you know.
And when I do get approached now, it's more for celebrities
other than musicians--
famous photographers, famous actors, and stuff like that.
And I turn them down.
Me and Peter Simon turned down Lady Gaga a couple years ago,
because we just figured we were too old.
We didn't want to go on the road with her.
It was a nice offer, you know.
[CHUCKLE] Yeah.
But it was--
Well, yeah.
That brings up the next question, which is, is it always a prerequisite
that you're a fan of these musicians?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Sure.
That you're going to have to be able to tolerate doing a year to three years?
I could have learned to love Gaga, I suppose, you know.
But I didn't want to--
the only time that I took on an assignment like that
was when I was approached by Durant Duran's management.
And I didn't have much respect for Durant Duran at the time.
This is, like, maybe 10 years ago, long after their heyday.
But they were getting back together, and they wanted to write a book.
And then, I started listening to Duran Duran,
and I realized that this was a pretty amazing product.
And it was product, too, you know.
It was music, but it was product.
Then I went to England and did a little tour with them.
And I realized that I had never known what a great band they were, live--
an incredible band, live.
Yeah.
And so I wrote a proposal.
We got over a million dollars' advance.
And when it was time to sign the contract--
and I had explained to them that the way I worked with bands like Aerosmith
was, I get half the advance, and the musicians
split the rest, because someone's got to write the book.
And it worked out pretty good with Aerosmith.
I made a lot of money.
That book was called, Walk This Way.
And so the Duran Duran book was going to be my next band book.
And when it was time to sign the contract,
they said, well, we're not splitting this.
You can't have half the money.
There's five of us, and there's one of you.
You can have--
And so I just walked away from it.
They, kind of, fired me.
They just said, we're not giving you what we said we were going to give you.
You're out.
And that book never came out.
That would be a pretty good read.
I could still do it.
It would be a good read.
It's on my list of what to do next, maybe.
I've published 19 books now, and there should be at least one more, you know.
It's funny, though--
Did you notice that you're in--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
I did.
Thank you so much for that.
[CHUCKLE]
No.
Thank you for going to all those shows with us.
It was a blast.
It was great, because you know, I was--
You were very [INAUDIBLE] you know.
Thank you.
(LAUGHING) Whatever that means.
(LAUGHING) I know!
History will know that you're indelibly immortalized until you
start writing your own books.
But it's funny, though, because around that time,
all my friends were having kids.
And you know, my job at the paper was a glamorous one,
whereas-- hey, Pat Healy he's got a plus-one for me!
You know?
And then, all my friends started having kids.
Then we met, and it was like, hey, let's go to shows.
We saw Wu Tang.
Who else did we see?
Lindsey.
Lindsey solo, which was very interesting.
We saw Stevie at The Pavilion.
And then, I saw the Mac reunion with Christine.
We went to that--
I didn't see that.
No, yeah, we went to that together.
No, I went by myself and reviewed it for The Metro.
You went by yourself right after the marathon bombing.
Yes, Boston Strong.
Right, OK.
So that was 2013.
Oh, no, you're right.
And then, we went-- because I was there until 2014,
and I think we went in, like, the fall of 2014.
That's exactly right.
So yeah, there were more things than even I remembered.
So thank you.
No problem.
Yeah.
Part of the research, you know?
Well, yeah, with it being such a long process--
because that was four years ago.
That was the last time we saw them.
I don't even know when we saw Stevie or Lindsey.
I saw Stevie a year ago at TD Bank, North Garden.
And they were the worst seats in the house, but I liked it.
Because it was then that I understood that there
were four parts of her audience.
There were the old ladies her age, their daughters
in their '30s and '40s, their daughters between 12 and 16 or so, and then
the gay guys who were actually dressed like Stevie--
a lot of them.
Right.
Did you ever go to the Land of a Thousand Stevies
or whatever it's called?
No, I liked the Highline Ballroom, though.
I like that-- Night of a Thousand Stevies.
I don't know if the Night of a Thousand Stevies--
I haven't heard about it in some time.
I think it may be over.
I wouldn't be surprised.
Yeah.
It's one of those things that, as I've come to live a certain amount of time
to watch audiences dissipate on age and availability--
I'm guessing that the group who was doing it aged out of it,
and the torch was never passed or something.
Right.
Exactly.
And it is a funny thing to realize, because you know,
when you're first going to shows, you don't really take stock of that.
You're just there with a bunch of people.
Mostly your age--
Yeah.
--or younger.
Not much older.
Yeah.
So when you're writing these books, like I was starting to say--
I don't even know what year it was when we first saw Stevie
or first saw Lindsey, but it was like 2011 maybe?
2012?
I don't know.
But you spend-- what's the longest you've spent on any of these books?
The Gold Dust Woman in five years.
It was five years?
Yeah.
But my wife died in the middle of it.
Right, right.
But I kept doing all the research while she was ill.
And that was, like, two years.
And after she passed, the people around me said, don't write the book now.
Let it marinate like whiskey.
Think about it for a year, and don't try to write.
So I took a year off and lived on credit cards, with a lot of support
from my neighbors and family.
Your agents, too?
Were they understanding?
Yeah, we tried to buy the book back from St. Martin's Press.
I just said, we're not going to make the deadline.
Here's the advance back--
hefty advance, too.
They said, no, no, no.
The timing worked out real good, actually,
because I wrote the thing last year, and it's just been published,
and it's selling real well.
You know?
We'll know on Wednesday whether or not it hits the bestseller list.
That would be nice, but if not, then on to the next thing,
whatever that may be.
Well, what is the next thing?
I don't know.
Maybe Boston.
More than a feeling-- great story.
The funny thing about Boston is that everyone who even approaches it gets
sued.
The principal of Boston is currently in court
with the guitar player over some remark that the guitar player
passed that apparently caused a gig to get canceled or something like that.
And this was written about in The Boston Globe a couple of weeks ago.
They did a thing about the "Gold Dust Woman" in The Boston Globe.
And they said, what are you thinking about next?
And I said, well, maybe about Boston, you know.
I'll probably get sued.
But on the other hand, I've never been sued before.
At least it would be a new experience.
So The Globe hits the front door at about 6:00 in the morning.
At 11:00 in the morning, I got an email from a libel lawyer.
Wow.
(CHUCKLING) It took five hours for a libel lawyer to-- now,
fortunately, the libel lawyer was saying,
I'm the libel lawyer who represented The Boston Herald when the guy from Boston
sued them.
And not only did we win, but we got $170,000 in costs off of him.
But here's my card, basically.
Good luck, son.
But he also said that he'd deposed everybody,
if I was interested in the depositions.
So I'm going, yes, I'm interested in the depositions.
That's interesting.
But on the other hand, maybe there are other ideas.
Maybe the Duran Duran book would work.
Right.
A book about the '80s.
People like reading about--
then maybe there's another Led Zeppelin book.
Robert Plant since Led Zeppelin--
I mean, that's a whole story.
He left Led Zeppelin in 1980, so that's most of his life.
He puts out an album every couple of years.
Yeah.
With all these books and spending all this time either
with these people physically or immersing yourself in their music,
which artists do you find yourself still going back to?
Well, I wish Bob Marley was still alive.
He had a great laugh, you know.
Anyone I worked with, I enjoyed spending time with.
Some more than others.
Obviously, Levon Helm was a guest.
He took me down to Arkansas on the bus, and we went to his hometown turkey
scratch near Helena, Arkansas.
Mick Fleetwood-- snorting cocaine in Malibu for a year,
hanging out with Michael Jackson and his monkey.
You know, if I could see any of them tomorrow for lunch, I'd be thrilled--
not so much Duran Duran, but then I didn't really do that book, you know?
Aerosmith-- I went around the world with Aerosmith.
You know?
It was liked embedded--
private jets, five-star hotels.
And they were doing it sober.
It's a great story, you know?
You get to Tokyo, and instead of where are
the hookers, where are the drugs, where's the booze,
it was, where's the meeting?
The AA meeting, you know?
The first thing you do after you check into a hotel
was, you'd be in some church basement in Roppongi
with the five guys in Aerosmith and a bunch of Western alcoholics
from embassies and stuff like that.
And you know?
Hi, I'm Stephen.
Hi, Stephen.
Frankfurt, Germany-- I went to AA meetings just all over the world,
because that was a book about The Toxic Twins getting their lives back
and making records again.
And it's the only redemption story that I've written.
Although Stevie Nicks-- "The Gold Dust Woman" in a way is--
she's been through rehab twice.
She was a trainwreck that got her train back on track.
Yeah.
Which is-- thank god, because it would have been a very dark story otherwise.
A lot of these stories do have darker sides.
And do you feel that as you've gotten older
and had more experience dealing with people
and writing these people's stories, you've gotten kinder at all?
Or is it just that the subject material isn't as dark?
I mean, there's no--
That's a good question.
The last two books have both been about woman artists--
Carly Simon and Stevie Nicks.
And some people get more compassionate as they get older.
I don't know if that's me or not.
When your wife dies in your kitchen, you probably
get to be a little bit more compassionate like me.
But you know, it just depends on the material.
It really does, you know?
And also it's commercial.
You're just not going to want to write a trashy book about Stevie Nicks,
'cause her fans won't buy them.
You know?
And there's no point.
But you know, I'd happily write a trashy book about Duran Duran
or Blackberry Smoke or whatever band today.
If it's a trashy story, you owe it to the reader
to marshal the acknowledged facts into a decent narrative.
And you don't have to go sleazy.
You just have to tell what happened.
You don't have to tart it up.
Really, just the facts tell the story.
Yeah.
Well, throughout all the books that I've read,
you do put a little bit of yourself in there.
Sometimes, yeah.
Whether it's your opinion of Kenny G in Stevie's book.
Then there's the LZ-'75 book where you've got a whole narrative--
Yeah, that was about me.
Right.
So that was your most autobiographical work.
The only one, yeah.
The only one.
And there was just a little bit about me,
but it was mostly about being on tour with Led Zeppelin.
It was how I got that story, which can be a fun thing to read.
You know-- process.
Yeah.
It's like Guildenstern and Rosenkranz are Dead or whatever.
Exactly.
Same kind of thing.
Just another look at it.
Other than that, I try to--
like the Aerosmith book, Walk This Way.
I kept out of it completely.
I'm not in Hammer of the Gods.
I'm not in Bob Marley.
There's a section in the middle of the Stevie Nicks book called "The Writer."
Yes, I love that.
And that's where I break the narrative.
And I get the reader up close so you can smell the hairspray
and see the thick glasses that she wears,
and just sort of up close and almost making contact with the subject.
But it's not generally a good idea unless you have the material.
And you want to try to avoid the suppositional stuff like,
he must have felt or she might have thought.
That's like the kiss of death in these books.
You just want to stick to what you know and not try to--
you can do it if it's an authorized book and they're telling you.
But in an unauthorized book, it's a very bad way to make transitions.
If somebody were to write your story, if not you,
would you want it authorized or unauthorized?
Doesn't matter.
I wouldn't get in the writer's way unless I
knew it was a hatchet job, in which case I would try
to have the author killed or maimed.
[LAUGHTER]
Or I'd get out the cricket bat and do the cars.
That's right.
No, I'd cooperate with anyone.
Because I mean, all of these books-- these 19 books-- each one is a chapter.
Some of the material is quite lurid.
Right.
I could write a book about the stuff that I
had to leave out for legal reasons, on all these books--
not Stevie and Carly Simon, but the bad books.
I mean, these guys weren't kidding around.
They came to play.
Right.
And play they did.
Say you were an artiste.
You know when the Beatles do The White Album or you do your experimental thing
and you know you're on top of the world and everybody's
going to buy what you do even if you're out there on a limb?
What would be the book you'd write if you
knew that people are going to buy this and you don't
have to have any commercial concern?
A music book?
Yeah, or any book.
Oh, any book?
If you knew people were going to buy it.
Because as you mentioned earlier--
a commercial concern.
You want to know how to approach a Steve Nicks book because the fans are
going to review it.
I think I might do a book about my--
my great-grandfather was a Confederate rifleman,
10th Arkansas, general Sterling Price.
He fought in the battles of Pea Ridge, Wilson's Creek and Helena.
And he joined the Confederate army but his brother, George,
joined the Union Army.
I've always thought there'd be a really good book about Missouri in the Civil
War, using this as a framing device.
Basically, the two sides just started to kill each other.
And then, they killed the wives and the kids, too, and burned down the farm.
It was this horrible guerrilla war in Missouri.
And I have-- my father is from Missouri, and I
have a lot of cousins who live there.
And it would be, kind of, fun to go down to Missouri
and follow the footsteps of old great-granddad
who got his heel shot off at the Battle of Helena.
And Levon Helm and I walked up that hill,
overlooking the-- there was a Confederate--
Union battery keeping river traffic under control.
And my great-grandfather went up the hill and got his heel shot off.
And Levon Helm and I walked up that same hill--
Wow.
--100 years later.
Did you feel any echoes of--
No, not really, but there were some graves and stuff like that.
And you know-- I mean, sure, echoes, yeah.
But there were also a lot of black kids drinking and smoking crack
amongst the Confederate tombstones, so--
That's poetic.
Yeah, and they were looking at us funny.
It's, kind of, violent down there, in that part of Arkansas.
But Missouri is different.
So that's the answer to that question.
I feel like that could have a commercial appeal, though, you know?
Maybe.
It would be interesting.
Yeah, it'd be sort of what they now call creative nonfiction, which
means you could make stuff up.
Was the Howdy Doody you book the only non-music book?
The Howdy Doody book was a book about-- my father
was the writer-director of the Howdy Doody Show.
So that was, kind of, the history of early TV.
And after Hammer of the Gods, I was sort of
blown out about writing about the band, and I wanted to do something else
and write about my--
basically, my father was sort of a writer who didn't
write after he stopped writing for TV.
So I basically got him to write the story of his time
with the Howdy Doody Show, then I just retyped it with some of my own stuff.
And you know, then I went and interviewed the people he wrote about.
And so it was, kind of, a little collaboration there.
He didn't want his name on it, but I dedicated it to him, which he liked.
And so that's the only--
He only passed a few years ago.
No, he's alive.
He's 100 years old.
He's alive?
Oh, my god.
He's 100?
My mother's 98, and my father's 100.
Wow.
Oh, it was your uncle a few years ago.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Yeah.
That's when we first talked.
I was working on his estate in London and doing other things.
So thinking about Hammer of the Gods-- that
was your first huge success, right?
First New York Times bestseller.
Yeah.
The first of five.
Yeah.
The Guns and Roses one was there, right?
Fleetwood was even longer.
Yeah.
Walk This Way was also.
Moonwalk was number one.
And this has a pretty good shot.
We'll know on Wednesday.
Fingers crossed.
If it doesn't hit the list, it's still selling real good.
And kind of onto the next thing, you know?
Is that a nerve-racking time period when you are working on these books
and you never can know for sure what they're going to do?
You never know.
Sometimes the book becomes an orphan.
You're halfway through and your editor gets
quits or gets fired, because only the editor who signs you up
is going to see this book to press.
For any other editor, it's just a burden.
Right, unless it just sings, right?
Unless the president of the company is on your side, which has happened to me.
But sometimes, the marketing director leaves a month before publication,
and then the new person doesn't have time to--
it's just a crapshoot.
It really is.
The timing is everything, but there's nothing
the author can do about it, really.
If the Stevie Nicks book had come out two years ago like it was supposed to,
I don't know if it would have passed the who-cares test.
She's a bigger star now than she was when we--
I mean, she's like the fairy godmother of rock,
so it's a good time to do this still, and it's just fate.
It feels a lot like your career parallels
the music industry in a sense.
Yeah, rock is dead, and so am I.
[LAUGHTER]
Me, too!
I was talking more about the album cycle and the book cycle, and the way
that people are still reading.
People are still listening to rock and roll, but it's just--
They're just not buying records.
Yeah.
They're not going to shows as much as they did.
I came of age when the music business was bigger than Hollywood.
It was the biggest money component of American culture.
It was bigger than publishing, bigger than the theater, bigger than radio,
bigger than anything.
Individual bands were selling 30, 40 million records.
It's a culture that doesn't exist anymore now.
Even vinyl made a comeback, you know?
It's all, kind of, cultic now.
The fans are divided into niches.
The rock world was the largest audience of anything
in the history of the planet.
Fleetwood Mac has sold 120 million records.
There are some religions out there that aren't that big.
So I've been privileged from my early 20s
to be narrow-casting into what is still the largest audience for anything
in history, and that's the rock audience.
Well, it's interesting that you passed up the Gaga opportunity,
because that almost feels like it could have
been the most contemporary person who is still attracting an audience based
on a career.
True.
But if we had gone on that tour, we would have been disappointed,
because she collapsed halfway through.
She had hip surgery or something like that.
Right, right.
And also, she's too young to have a story.
You know?
You need a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you know,
she has a beginning just coasting into the middle.
But you know, if I'm going to write a book, I want it to be an epic.
You know, I want it to have a sweep.
And she doesn't have that sweep yet.
And again, Stevie Nicks may be the last rock star-- certainly,
the last female rock star.
I mean, Taylor Swift is not a rock star.
She is a pop star-- and same with all of her contemporaries.
Will we see another Debbie Harry, another Janis Joplin,
a woman fronting a band and nailing it?
You know?
Don't know.
Where are they?
Do you read other rock books?
I do blurbs for them.
I pretend to read them, and I write these outrageous-- definitive!
The real story!
You know?
I just do this as favors for editors.
Yeah, there was a book last year called Meet Me in the Bathroom.
It's all about--
CBGB or something like that?
No, it was New York Post-CBGB's, at the turn of the century, kind of.
Yeah, yeah.
Did you read it?
Yeah, it's pretty good.
The one I'd like to read is Jimmy Webb's memoir, which I hear is great.
Yeah.
I hear that's really, really, really, really good.
You know?
I have started several rock books, but a lot of them
are written by academics now, or people with PhDs and stuff like that.
There's a new book about Joni Mitchell--
I'm, sort of, competing with now-- written by a guy.
And I'm quoted in it, writing about Led Zeppelin's reaction
to Joni Mitchell from Hammer of the Gods.
It's sort of a funny feeling, you know?
Like, I'm part of this?
No, I've never read an--
I can't think of another rock book that I read,
or at least that I read all the way through.
There are some I'd like to read that haven't been written yet, you know?
I'd like to read a book about the real story of Debbie Harry and Blondie.
Take a book like Hammer of the Gods.
How much work do you do on that still when you have to do a new edition?
Oh, I clip everything.
All my books have, like--
Hammer of the Gods-- the fifth English edition is coming out.
I'm going to London, actually, to put this thing to bed with MacMillan
and update stuff.
Interesting.
The other thing about Hammer of the Gods is
that it was supposed to be a mass market paperback in 1985.
And at the last moment, the editor said this should be a hardback.
Cut 10,000 words.
So there are 10,000 words cut out of Hammer
of the Gods that could be put back some day, because it's
real back-story stuff about Jimmy Page.
But none of that was cut out for content.
It was all just obsessive fan stuff, but--
just cut this out.
And so it came out as a hardback at the last minute
and hit The New York Times bestseller list.
The rest is my history.
But on the other hand, you could write a whole book about Robert Plant
after he left Led Zeppelin.
But what do you do with somebody like Richard Cole who had since said,
oh, I was in a bad place.
I shouldn't have told him all those things.
Nothing.
You can't do anything about it.
You just-- hey, you told it to me.
We paid him a lot of money to spill his guts.
It was the only time I ever paid a source.
Really?
Yeah.
We paid him $5,000, which was good money in 1985.
And we couldn't even use everything that he gave us, because some of the stuff
was really outre, you know?
Yeah.
And some of the stuff he said was-- listen,
you know, the band got blamed for a lot of this stuff,
but it was really The Who.
Really?
Yeah, and Richard Cole was one of the tour managers,
so he just put Led Zeppelin through their pace.
And remember, these guys were 19 years old.
Robert and the drummer couldn't drink.
They couldn't go into the bars after the shows.
They'd never seen a policeman with a gun.
They'd never seen a California groupie coming onto them,
literally grabbing them.
[LAUGHTER]
The first time I was in one of those hotels suites--
I didn't put this LZ-'75--
damn me!
But when I went to that hotel suite I had with this William Burroughs
interview that Jimmy really wanted--
And Richard Cole opened the door and he had a pair of girls' underpants
on his head.
[LAUGHTER]
He was walking around the hotel with these lacy undies on his head.
That was a book I wrote while I was researching the Carly Simon book.
I've written some books just because I like to write everyday.
And while researching in the morning, if you have a couple of hours
in the afternoon, I just retype my lost notebooks from LZ-'75.
The same thing happened with the book about Morocco, about [INAUDIBLE]..
I did that while I was hanging out with Levon Helm in Woodstock
doing the research.
It's, kind of, like-- there's one scene where--
I forget where it's from.
It's Linda Ronstadt talking about Brian Wilson.
They're working on some composition, and he's trying to write this song,
and then, to clear his mind, he plays some Rachmaninoff suite or something.
And he's like, OK, now I got it!
And he goes back to the simple chords.
It's just, kind of--
what is that Picasso quote?
Inspiration will find you working.
That's Picasso, right?
I don't know.
I've never heard that one.
Yeah.
It's like if you're doing something, inspiration will come.
You know?
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
So what kind of things are you busying yourself with writing now?
Right now, I'm just trying to get Gold Dust Woman, the Stevie Nicks biography,
out into the world.
And then, I'll forget about it and try to do something else.
I did hear a good Brian Wilson story the other day, apropos of nothing, about--
there was this guy called from Boston area called Andy Paley.
I'll tell you this one, actually-- no, it's all right.
I can tell it.
I can take it out, too.
No, it's all right.
Long story short-- Andy Paley is a local guy,
but he lives out in California now.
And about five or six years ago, Brian Wilson
put out a different version of his Smile album, the old Beach Boys album.
And Andy Paley was hired to play keyboards on tour.
And the last day of the tour was at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles.
And Brian Wilson-- after the show, he was backstage in his dressing room,
and the door was guarded.
And there were people trying to get in to see Brian, you know,
because it's a hometown thing and he didn't want to see anybody.
And so Andy comes in, and he notices that one
of the people who are trying to get in to see Brian Jones his Don
Henley, the drummer from The Eagles.
And so he goes in the dressing room and he goes, Brian--
who's, kind of, dazed--
he's medicated or whatever.
Brian, Don Henley for The Eagles is out there and he'd like to meet you.
And-- (IN BRIAN WILSON'S VOICE) who is that?
Brian?
Don?
Don?
Don?
(IN NORMAL VOICE) Henley.
He's from The Eagles. (IN BRIAN WILSON'S VOICE) All right.
Send him in.
And so Don Henley--
That's a good Brian Wilson.
[LAUGHTER]
Don Henley and his date come in.
And Don Henley's got a greatest hits album, the yellow gatefold Beach Boys.
Endless Summer, it's called.
Yeah, I love that one.
Don Henley goes into this devotional five-minute rap
about how his influence-- the reason he came to California from Texas
was to follow the vibe of the Beach Boys and make it
in the music business, the call of the surf and, you know,
Brian's big influence, et cetera.
Brian's nodding off and he's getting bored.
He's like, (IN BRIAN WILSON'S VOICE) all right, fellow.
Give me the album!
(IN NORMAL VOICE) Andy hands him a Sharpie and he writes,
(IN BRIAN WILSON'S VOICE) what's your name again?
Don?
To Don, thanks for all the great music.
Love, Brian Wilson.
(IN NORMAL VOICE) And he hands that thing back, and so Don--
other people start coming in, and Don and his date
go over and stand against the wall, just to be
in the presence of the great master.
After about 10 minutes, Brian Wilson notices
that the people in the dressing room seem much more
interested in Don Henley, like, in awe.
He calls Andy over. (IN BRIAN WILSON'S VOICE) What's that guy's name again?
(IN NORMAL VOICE) Don, that's Don Henley from The Eagles!
(IN BRIAN WILSON'S VOICE) Oh, what are The Eagles.
(IN NORMAL VOICE) Come on, Brian, you know,
like "Witchy Woman" and "One of These Nights" and "Hotel California"?
Brian Wilson thinks for a minute and he goes, (IN NORMAL VOICE)
tell him to come back over here.
(IN NORMAL VOICE) So Don Henley comes over.
Brian's like, (IN BRIAN WILSON'S VOICE) give me that record.
Where's that Sharpie?
(IN NORMAL VOICE) And Don Henley goes, oh, you're gonna write something else?
Brian takes a Sharpie, and he crosses out great.
[LAUGHTER]
And he hands the record back to Don Henley.
Oh, wow.
That is amazing.
I love, though, that watching you tell that story--
the way you light up telling it--
I can tell that it still gives you that something to take convey these things.
We're storytellers, man, you and me.
It's what we're doing.
It's great.
It's great.
The best stories are the ones that you can't print, though.
Yeah.
You know?
That's weird.
Like, there'd be no context for that.
It's not even a story that would work on the page.
Do a Mark Twain then.
Have it published a hundreds years after your death.
Oh, yeah, the posthumous book.
Sell it now but publish it later.
So we began the interview talking about you as a musician.
And you became a musician again after Morocco,
and I see a guitar leaning against the television set.
So are you still finding something in listening and playing?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I play a lot of the music I learned in Morocco on the flute, just by myself.
And the cats like it, too.
Cats are like cobras.
If you start playing these, sort of, shepherd's tunes
on the flutes-- these are old, old tunes, man.
They Go back to the caveman stuff.
And the cats come and they look at you.
It's almost like the cats are going, hey, you know,
this cave isn't so bad after all.
There's a fire, and the guy's playing music, you know?
And--
(LAUGHING) The guy-- they don't know your name.
Yeah.
The can-opener is playing music.
And there's, you know, plenty of mice and rats
around-- and chipmunks, you know?
So it's a way to get back to the very, very primal things.
Here.
I'll play you a tune.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, the master musicians-- the flute maker made me a bunch of flutes.
[PLAYING FLUTE MUSIC]
Well, I can't think of a better way to close out the last episode of 2017
than author Stephen Davis playing ancient tunes on hand-carved Moroccan
flutes.
Gold Dust Woman, the biography of Stevie Nicks, is out now.
And I will talk to you next month.
Thanks so much for listening.
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