An excellent story about the adventurous life of Stevie Nicks, Rock and Roll Star. Here is a tidbit:
The psychiatrist, she says, put her on a tranquilliser called Klonopin - 'he said to calm my nerves a little. I didn't want to do it. He said, "You're nervous." And I was nervous; I'm a nervous person. So I finally just said, all right.' Klonopin, Nicks says, is a member of the Valium family. 'It's a tranquilliser, right? And you think, what does tranquilliser mean? It tranquillises you!' Particularly when, as Nicks claims, the drug is radically oversubscribed.
After a year, she realised she was beginning to put on weight and lose interest in her work. 'And the saddest thing, I did an interview in England, and somebody had sent the article to my mother and she read it to me over the phone. And it said, you could see Stevie Nicks in there, but she was very sad and very quiet and she was just a shadow of her former self. And that article broke my heart.
And after that, it got worse, because he kept upping my dose. 1988 into '89, I'm now not even writing songs any more. I was living in a beautiful rented house in the Valley, and just pretty much staying home. Ordering take-in and watching TV. And I've gained 30lb and I'm 5ft 1in tall, and I'm so miserable. And I started to notice that I was shaking all the time, and I'm noticing that everybody else is noticing it too. And then I'm starting to think, do I have some kind of neurological disease and I'm dying?'
So 1993 comes rolling round, and Stevie Nicks is finally convinced that the protracted high dosage of Klonopin might be killing her. So she does exactly what you or I might do. She instructs her personal assistant, Glenn, to take her daily dose - just to see what effect it has.
'I said, it won't kill you, because it hasn't killed me, but I just want to see what you think. Because Glenn was terribly worried about me - everybody was. So I was taking two in the morning, two in the afternoon and two more at night. At that point if I could find a Percoset, because I'm so miserable, I'd take that, or I'd take a Fiorocet - anything.
'So Glenn proceeds to take all my medicine. He was setting up a stereo in the living-room. Well, after half an hour he was just sitting there. And he said, "I can't fix the stereo and I don't think I can drive home." And I said, "Well, good - just stay there, because I'm studying you." And he was almost hallucinating. It was bad. And I called up my psychiatrist, and I said, "I gave Glenn every-thing you've prescribed for me." And the first words out of his mouth were, "Are you trying to kill him?" And the next words out of my mouth were, "Are you trying to kill me?" '
Nicks admitted herself to the Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Venice Beach. It took her 47 days to detox. 'Dallas Taylor, the drummer for Crosby, Stills and Nash, was there the whole time. I nearly died. I moulted. My hair turned grey. My skin started to completely peel off. I was in terrible pain.' She shivers at the memory. 'I think it's very good to talk about this to get the message out into the world about addiction to this particular drug. That was the worst period of my life. They stole my forties. It was eight completely wasted years of my life.'
Here's the irony, she says: the 'powers that be' had sent her to the psychiatrist in order to keep her working, but the 'treatment' he gave her made work almost impossible. 'It's very Shakespearean. It's very much a tragedy.'
But what happened to Glenn?
Nicks throws back her hair. 'Glenn was OK, because it was just for one day.'
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