Everybody Loves You

His Dream For Her Was Just Not Possible (Mick's Story)

Malibu, California
Monday, January 9, 2023
(3:00 pm)
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The radio in the car that picked me up at the airport the morning of the memorial service was playing "Blue Denim".

Stevie and I were estranged when she made that song, the lead single from Street Angel. We were fighting all through the early part of the 1990s, in fact, and the argument was over another song of hers that was much older, but still another song about Lindsey, "Silver Springs".

If I'm being honest, holding onto "Silver Springs" as a Fleetwood Mac signature song was a total cop-out. If that were true, if "Silver Springs" were a Fleetwood Mac song, it would have been on Rumors instead of "I Don't Want To Know", and not merely the B-side of "Go Your Own Way". I told Stevie as much years later, sitting in a hotel room in New York City over an authentic New York pizza, which was a little tradition of ours - taking the limo to Brooklyn for a pizza whenever we were in New York together - and she hit me across the arm and hid in the bathroom for awhile. When she finally came out she just looked at me from the doorway and said, "Michael John Kells Fleetwood, you apologize to my mother."

You see, "Silver Springs" was Barbara Nicks' song. Stevie registered it in her name so she'd get the money from it because Barbara flat out refused to take a dime from Stevie organically until the day she died. It was 2013 then and we were on tour and staying at the St. Regis, and so to make Stevie forgive me I dropped my slice of pizza into the box on the bed, crumpled my napkin, guzzled Pepsi out of the can, and then strode to the window and looked up at the late afternoon sky and called out, "I'm sorry, Barbara. 'Silver Springs' never belonged to me. It is your song, not only because it's in your name but because you made this beautiful artist standing next to me, which means you created a work of art yourself. Please accept my humble apology, and say hello to Jess and Robin. We miss them."

Stevie had tears in her eyes as she crossed the room and pulled me into a hug. In her socks at five-foot-one she only came up to my breastbone and I leaned over and hugged her back. She was still crying. I missed the top of her head and said, "Drugs make people do ridiculous things, Stevie. For what it's worth, 'Silver Springs' is only of many things I'd take back from those years if I could."

"Same here, Mick," she said. "Drugs took away my entire forties." She sighed then and added something I still think about to this day. "I could have had a baby or something."

It was the "or something" that got to me. It was almost like she'd added that part to disqualify the first half of the sentence because it was too painful to leave out there by itself. The eight years Stevie spent on klonopin were dark for all of us, and scarily enough, the bitch of it all was that for her, they felt just fine. The haze was so great she hadn't realized anything was wrong. She had been oblivious to people leaving her band, to gaining fifty pounds in three years, to letting Lindsey drift even further away until they barely knew each other anymore.

"Blue Denim", she'd told me years ago while we were on the road for Say You Will, was about that.

We were having another one of our Brooklyn pizza dates in New York City. Fleetwood Mac - minus Christine - had appeared on the Today Show that morning "live on the Plaza" as they called it, and we'd sung two new songs and two old songs. Two were Stevie's songs, two were Lindsey's. It was a perfect even split. It was also freezing even though it was April in New York, which, I guess, we can say now was because of climate change. Anyway, Stevie got onto the subject of Street Angel turning ten soon as she'd devoured a slice of pizza with mushrooms and green peppers, and I'd told her I was sorry I never paid the album more attention.

"There's no need to," she said, trying hard to chew and swallow to speak. She put the back of her hand to her mouth until she was done. "I had little control over the sound of the final product because I was in rehab, fooling around with Dallas Taylor."

She giggled with that statement and here's the thing:

Stevie has a few different laughs. All of them are precious. But the giggle one...it does something to you that you can't describe. It's so pure and little and adorable you just want to put her in your pocket. The first time I ever heard Stevie giggle was on New Years Eve 1974, and she was dressed like a flapper because it was her work uniform and she was holding a margarita in her hand and if Lindsey weren't around I would have leaned across the table and kissed her.

I guess that's the thing about Stevie and Lindsey and why I was a seventy-five-year-old man in a car on my way to my friend's funeral and daydreaming about the love of my life as we road along the Pacific Coast Highway towards Malibu...

Lindsey was always around. If they were together, he was around. If they were broken up, he was around. If they were trying to be friends, he was around. It was in the song she was singing just then on the radio...

"So I'm going away for a little while to remember how to feel...And if I find the answer, I promise you
I'll come back and get you..."

She was singing her promise to Lindsey to get the help she needed and become the woman he'd fallen in love with again, and once she did, it was on.

I don't know what had possessed me to kiss her on New Years Eve on the beach outside my house, but I think it had something to do with the champagne she'd suggested we drink in my den that night to toast Christine and a lot more to do with Christine's passing lighting and fire under me to live every moment like it was my last. Christine McVie was seventy-nine years old when she died, the oldest of the "five fireflies", as Stevie called us. John was next in line at seventy-seven, then me, then Stevie, then Lindsey. But none of us were getting any younger, I thought, and all I know was I couldn't die without giving it one last chance, without taking that tiny, beautiful woman with the adorable giggle into my arms and telling her I loved her.

My phone buzzed in my pocket just as Stevie was getting to the end of the song and hitting the high notes. I pulled it out of my pocket and there were two text messages. One was from John. The other was from Lindsey.

Johnny M.
I'll be in the back of the place so swing around and get me to walk in. I'm not walking into her memorial service alone, ok, I'm just not.

I immediately replied.

Of course not. See you there. I know.

John had been a shell of a person for a month now. I quickly wondered if by "alone" he meant without his best friend, or if "alone" meant literally alone, like Julie and Molly weren't going to be there. I didn't pry. I read Lindsey's text instead.

Lindsey B.
I'm not going to get mad if you sit next to her or anything, but you do have to give us a minute. It's been five years.

I almost laughed at his message as the song on the radio changed to Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me A River". Stevie loved that song. I typed my response, feeling like I was in school again and arguing about a pretty girl at the lunch table.

I know that. Don't worry. Space is my middle name.

Lindsey had called to wish me a Merry Christmas a few weeks before, and after a conversation about our kids and grandkids - well, my grandkids - we had begun to lament about Christine and the upcoming service for her California loved ones, as her English loved ones back home had already said goodbye. I made the mistake of telling him Stevie was going to be at my house for New Years, and he'd gone off on a whole rant about how this shouldn't be awkward and how Christine would be admonishing us both for acting like boys who liked a girl in their math class.

I took a breath and tried to think of the actual issue of the day - I was in California to say goodbye to a woman who had been like a sister to me for over fifty years, the woman who was the glue who'd held us all together even at our darkest times.

I took my speech out of my pocket and read it over twice as Justin Timberlake sang about how the girl he loved "must have him confused with some other guy," trying not to think of how appropriate the lyrics were to me.

I was about to sit in a room beside the woman I loved and the man she loved...and something told me Christine was reaching out from the beyond to mother us one last time, to tell us errant children to settle this thing once and for all.

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