All this, Mick went on, put Fleetwood Mac out of action for almost a year. Mick went to southern Africa to put himself back together, and eventually Jenny told him to come home to her. Bob Welch convinced them to move the band to California, and they basically knew the rest of the story.
Lindsey then asked Mick about how he thought the fans would react to having two couples in the band. Mick said he wasn’t sure, and pointed out that John and Chris’s marriage was strained after she’d tired of his heavy drinking and then had an affair with their English sound guy the previous year. Mick said that Keith Olsen had told him that Stevie and Lindsey weren’t living together, either, and they replied that they were back together and in it for the long run. Relieved, Mick said that he hoped this lineup could hold together and show the doubters—and there were not a few—that Fleetwood Mac could keep calm, carry on, and be a great band again.
Later, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway on their way home, Stevie and Lindsey talked things over. Neither of them had realized, they agreed, how much was at stake for Fleetwood Mac. These guys were trying to keep their band from failing, and now Mick, Chris, and John were depending on them to help make it happen.
2.5 Buckingham Nicks, Slight Return
And just then, late January 1975, came an urgent message from the South, asking Buckingham Nicks to headline some shows in Alabama.
Lindsey had been right, almost.
More than a year after the release of Buckingham Nicks, a rock station in Birmingham, Alabama, was playing tracks from the album alongside their usual Southern rock heroes: the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Black Oak Arkansas, Wet Willie. Fans were jamming the station’s phones, asking for more. Viral radio miracles sometimes happened this way, with bigger stations adding the band to their playlists, going from Birmingham to Atlanta to St. Louis to Memphis to Chicago and then the coasts, until a band broke out nationally, dreams fulfilled.
Now a promoter was offering Buckingham Nicks headlining slots at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, and then two shows in Birmingham. Lindsey decided to take the gig. Waddy Wachtel signed on first. Tom Moncrieff would handle the bass. Since the biggest Southern rock band—the Allmans—featured a two-drummer attack, Lindsey decided Buckingham Nicks needed a double battery as well. Hoppy Hodges had played on the album. He was joined, at Lindsey’s urgent request, by Bob Aguirre, who’d been playing in Dr. Hook’s Medicine Show in the Bay Area. They rehearsed the old Buckingham Nicks set, including album tracks and “Lady from the Mountains.” Needing another fast number, they added “Rhiannon,” which no one had ever heard yet.
They flew to Alabama and discovered they’d sold out a bunch of six-thousand-seat auditoriums. Unknown in LA, unable even to get a cheap gig, they were local heroes in Alabama. The fans went crazy when Stevie came onstage, and they went over great, with cheering and calls for more. This really shook Lindsey. He’d had a feeling this would happen, and it did.
At breakfast the next morning, along with the coffee, grits, and hotcakes, came multiple requests for autographs from fans who had tracked down the band at their motel.
At the sound check in Birmingham the next day, Stevie complained that they were taking “Rhiannon” too fast, that she couldn’t keep up. That evening, at the second public performance of the piece, Stevie announced, “This is a song about an old Welsh witch.” Then she turned to the band and admonished, “And remember: not too fast.”
At evening’s end, Lindsey announced that this was the last show of Buckingham Nicks’s Farewell Tour, because he and Stevie were joining Fleetwood Mac. This was met with almost dead silence; the English band hadn’t ever made much impact in the deep South. Back at the motel, Lindsey wondered, What have we gotten ourselves into?
He and Stevie sat for an interview with a local paper before flying back to LA.
The major reason behind the breakup [of Buckingham Nicks] is the lack of recognition. Buckingham Nicks all feel that they have been overlooked by their recording label, Polydor. “Hopefully we can get our name known, instead of being buried within the name Fleetwood Mac. People will hear the difference in the music and take notice,” hopes Lindsey. “It would take us years to build up the reputation they have. And Warner Brothers are really into Fleetwood Mac. They’re not a monster or a giant act, but they consistently sell more albums than they did the last time.”
“They’re going to put us on a fine, major tour where we’ll be playing to everyone,” says Stevie. “And they are super nice people, so we figure it will be a tremendous learning experience. They can help us, and we can help them, so it will be a give-and-take thing.”
*
The new Fleetwood Mac began to record at Sound City in February 1975, starting with work on Christine’s new songs. Keith Olsen saw “Say That You Love Me” as a potential single, and so they started there. Stevie attended every session even when she wasn’t needed to sing. She curled up on the couch with her notebooks and sketchpads to doodle or write snatches of verse. She’d chat with assistant engineer Richard Dashut. She was observing the new chemistry between Lindsey and these veteran English pros. He was certain how he wanted his new band to sound and not shy about giving direction. He’d sit down at the drums and say, “Mick, why don’t you try something like this?” Mick didn’t mind, but after a few days Lindsey’s personality began to grate on John McVie. John was a drinker and Lindsey a stoner, and sometimes this didn’t work. “I’m not sitting here,” John would murmur, “being told what to do by someone who’s just joined the fucking band.” John also seemed to be irritated by some of Lindsey’s nervous tics in the studio, like rubbing his hands together when he was happy, or anxious, or both. Lindsey would suggest something to John, who would just attack him. “Hang on, my son, hold on a sec—you’re talkin’ to McVie here.”
Mick would take Lindsey aside and explain that, whereas Buckingham Nicks had been his exclusive thing, now he was in a band, and that from day one Fleetwood Mac had always been a democracy.
Stevie also noticed that Lindsey behaved himself better around Christine, who could kill you with a look. He was careful and polite to her. “She was the only one who could buffer Lindsey,” Stevie recalled. “She could totally soothe him and calm him down, and that was great because I wasn’t very good at that.” In fact, it usually went the other way, ending in hurt feelings and long silences.
Stevie was being watched, too, by Mick Fleetwood, and not just because he found her attractive. Mick had staked the band’s future on these two American kids, and while he displayed an air of semibefuddled detachment in most things, he was sharply observant of the Sound City sessions. The most obvious thing he took notice of was the control Lindsey maintained over Stevie. It wasn’t a Svengali-like brainwash, but she deferred to him in all matters, and he would either ignore her rare suggestions or speak to her more sharply than one wanted to hear. He was also, in Mick’s experience, unusually protective of her. If he saw someone trying to get her attention or get friendly with her, he would intervene and just vibe the person out. Stevie seemed oblivious to this and would keep on coloring in the drawings of angelic spirits she liked to work on in the studio (when she wasn’t crocheting a blanket for someone’s baby).
John McVie was observing her as well. One evening, John and Keith Olsen were watching Stevie twirl to a playback of “Rhiannon,” leaping about the big, boxy studio wearing a gauzy dress and ballet slippers. McVie muttered to Olsen, “You know, mate, we’re a fucking blues band.” Olsen replied, “Yeah, man, but this is the shortest road to the bank.”
*
After a few weeks the late California winter was turning into spring, with the hillsides dressed in fiery reds of bougainvillea and royal purple jacaranda. There was a new dryness in the atmosphere, and Stevie often had a sore throat, worried about her voice.
During the studio routine, Stevie was getting to know the band’s longtime crew. In addition to Judy Wong, who handled logistics for Mick, there was a studly lighting directo
r called Curry Grant, lots of hair and big eye contact, who was also working on concert production. (Dangerous, thought Stevie.) Fleetwood Mac road manager John Courage, known as JC, was the key man in the organization, responsible for almost everything outside the studio and much inside as well. He was twenty-five, blond and handsome, the son of a British army officer, and a member of England’s famous Courage brewing family. JC had come up through the ranks of the English touring bands, and he knew how to give orders to burly roadies with names like Rhyno and Earthquake. Fleetwood Mac’s production schedule demanded dependable deliveries of fresh marijuana, vintage wine, and premium English ale; acquisitions were a crucial part of JC’s portfolio, in addition to seeing that the recording sessions ran somewhat on schedule. (Fleetwood Mac would later become famous—notorious—for cocaine consumption, but these were early days. Cocaine was then scarce and very expensive, and musicians at Fleetwood Mac’s then-current level couldn’t generally afford the energizing medicament that had captivated Sherlock Holmes, Sigmund Freud, Aleister Crowley, and the Rolling Stones. Still, friends of the band would bring coke by the studio, and Stevie was usually up for a bump in the night, or early morning. She often took a puff on one of Lindsey’s tightly wrapped joints when it was passed around the studio.)
And so work continued on the new album, in a general atmosphere of expectant tension, with everyone in Fleetwood Mac being hyperaware that their careers were on the line this time.
2.6 Fleetwood Mac
Work progressed on the new Fleetwood Mac album through June 1975. These were the days of Led Zeppelin’s masterpiece Physical Graffiti and the Eagles’ radio dominance with “Lyin’ Eyes.” Linda Ronstadt’s “You’re No Good” was #1 for several weeks. But even by April of that year Fleetwood Mac felt they had something special going on. Sound City’s customized twenty-four-track Neve console enabled the musicians and engineers to produce the clearest, most mellow, and most sophisticated sound then commercially available, anywhere in the world. They were astonished at the sonic miracles they were hearing on the playbacks, especially in the triple harmonies they were singing. It was a sweet, caramelized sound, with bell tones and high-end timbres the Mac veterans had never experienced in the studio before.
That the studio could produce this sound was amazing, considering what a chaotic scene it was. Sound City worked on the apprentice system, which meant there were always young runners, tape operators, and assistant engineers in and out. Despite the efforts of glam receptionist Suzanne Salvatore, the studio was famously dirty, littered with empty bottles and cans, ashtrays always full. Every time she came in, Stevie reflexively wanted to vacuum the grubby shag carpeting. Even smoking a joint outside in the hazy San Fernando Valley smog meant enduring the manure-like smell of baking hops wafting from the vents of the nearby Budweiser brewery.
By May, though, they had enough tracks to begin sequencing the album. Lindsey’s hard-rocking “Monday Morning” would open the LP’s first side, as it would have on Buckingham Nicks II. Christine’s gentle ballad “Warm Ways” was next, a lush, vaguely tropical ballad, one of her trademark pleas for the love she needs as a woman.
Next was “Blue Letter,” borrowed from the Curtis Brothers, who had recorded it at Sound City as a demo with Stevie and Lindsey while they were all signed to Polydor. It was a faux-Eagles radio rocker that owed a debt to its mellow prototype, Jackson Browne’s “Take It Easy.” But “Blue Letter” swung harder than the Eagles, was a great vehicle for the three singers, and would become a fan favorite in concert.
Then came “Rhiannon,” Stevie’s mythic paean to the old Welsh witch: four minutes and twelve seconds of goddess evocation for singer and rock band. Her lyrics are almost whispered at first, with verses repeated, a tasty solo guitar, and then the chorus, the first time the new band’s soaring, harmonic vocal prowess comes forward on the album. There’s some more Clapton-inspired guitar, the cat in the night and the fine sky lark, and then, after “taken by the sky,” the song fades to “dreams unwind, love’s a state of mind,” with no hint of the demonic possession dance that Stevie was already choreographing in her mind for when “Rhiannon” would be presented in concert performance as the climax of the new band’s new show.
Christine’s powerful love song “Over My Head” came next, with Lindsey’s deft finger-picking acoustic guitar over the seductive drone from Chris’s electric organ and her brilliant keyboard arrangement. In her early thirties now, and childless by choice, Christine’s voice was maturing into a mesmeric English alto that still conveyed maternal affection and spiritual comfort, perfect for love ballads and lullabies.
The album’s first side ended with a remake of Stevie’s “Crystal,” again sung by Lindsey, but played in 4/4 instead of the 6/8 time that appeared on Buckingham Nicks. The song’s message—“special knowledge holds true”—implied a metaphysical utility and a female intuition that love is driven by a magnet, and that for a rock & roll woman like Stevie, love is more powerful than reason, and then beyond reason, and for that reason it is a holy thing, something to be cherished if not worshipped.
Christine’s “Say You Love Me” would open the album’s second side, and then would go on to launch and cement the soft rock radio format in the United States when the song was released as a single later in the year. Lindsey’s guitar echoed the sound pioneered by Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, the first of the California folk rock bands. The “fallin’ fallin’ fallin’” tag—repeated six times by the singers—was hypnotically seductive. (Who were Christine’s new love songs about? Stevie had, of course, noticed Chris exchanging private glances with the band’s sexy lighting guy, Curry Grant, whenever he was around, and surely the superheated passion expressed in “Say That You Love Me” and “Over My Head” couldn’t be inspired by her bleary, taciturn old man, John McVie.)
“Landslide” followed, the new band’s first breakup song, inspired by Stevie’s lonely sojourn in Colorado. The guitar sounds far away from the fragile young singer as she reveals her heartbroken prophesy of the impending end of a long relationship, and that there might never be another one like it for her. The song was a recollection of emotional torment that still promised a hope of recovery and renewal.
The album wound down with “World Turning,” a jam by Chris and Lindsey that would become Mick’s drumming star-turn in future concerts, and Chris’s “Sugar Daddy,” a lyric by a woman who is yearning for someone while unsure of her passion. (Waddy Wachtel would be credited on rhythm guitar.) The finale would be Lindsey’s cod-monumental “I’m So Afraid,” with its multiplanar electric guitars and expressions of existential angst. The song and the album would end with chilling banshee wails provided by Stevie Nicks, in rare form.
The first time the band listened to the album, everyone seemed satisfied, but Mick was enthused. This record could be a fucking monster, he kept repeating. A week or so later they got first pressings of the album, white labeled acetates in plain sleeves. Stevie recalled, “I took it home when I got my first disc, to my apartment. And I laid on the couch, and I closed all the doors, and put all the shades down, and lit a candle, and listened to it all by myself. And I said, ‘This is a really nice album. I really like it. It’s really … pretty. It’s got some really pretty songs on it. And the voices sound beautiful. And yes, in fact we have added something. We have enhanced Fleetwod Mac.’”
Stevie had hoped she would be on the cover of the album, which they were calling Fleetwood Mac for continuity’s sake. Similarly, the jacket would feature only Mick and John and a crystal ball, in a distorted black-and-white photograph by Herbie Worthington, who had worked with the band before. For the back cover the whole band would later be photographed backstage at a Texas concert, with Stevie in her current performing outfit of dark curly hair worn long, a floral top, and bell-bottom jeans.
*
Even before the album was pressed, Mick Fleetwood was pressing Warner Bros. for attention, begging them to think of Fleetwood Mac as a new band, not the old one
with predictable sales figures. Mick: “They thought of us as a solid opening act who broke up and changed personnel with every new album and tour. This typecasting drove us mad.” They took the album to Warner executive Joe Smith, who was enthusiastic. “Hey, this is a good record,” he said. “Maybe we could do 400,000” instead of their usual 350,000. “He wasn’t being flippant,” Mick said later. “He thought that was our limit!” No one ever thought of selling millions of Fleetwood Mac records except the band, and record execs were used to the inflated fantasies of musicians. “Maybe,” Smith had said, “we could move an extra 50,000 albums if we had a hit single.” Fleetwood Mac had never had a hit single in America, and the last one in England had been in 1970, five years earlier. The band hadn’t even chosen their album’s first single at that point.
Mick also wanted to take the new band on tour, even before the album came out. He was determined to take the new music to their loyal audience, and the new band had never played onstage as a working unit before. Mick: “I said, ‘We’ve got to risk it, and go out and play—as a band. No one has ever seen Stevie and Lindsey before, outside of Alabama. It’ll be a great training ground for when the record comes out.’”
Warner Bros. told Mick he was crazy. They told him they didn’t want Fleetwood Mac to tour prior to the record’s release date, and they wouldn’t advance the band any touring money because they’d seen too many Fleetwood Mac disintegrations on the road. They said the band was suicidal if they thought they could tour without their new music to sell. They said it was crazy to tour without a manager. Mick told them that the band had had nothing but trouble from managers, and that Mickey Shapiro would be looking after their interests.
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