Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac: The Autobiography

by Mick Fleetwood

  AND AWAY WE GO

  After Peter Green had decided to start a band with John McVie and me as his rhythm section, the new band was dubbed Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac by the agent who started to book us gigs. Peter never wanted his name up front and centre like that, so he dropped it as soon as we’d developed a following and fans knew that Peter was in the group. Peter had never thought he would sing or be a frontman either, but he changed his mind about that as well after seeing how Eric Clapton did it in Cream. Still, Peter wasn’t crazy about being out there leading things, which is why he had named the band after the guys in the back line.

  There was just one problem–John McVie had yet to sign on as a member. I signed up in a split second, but John was still playing bass with the Bluesbreakers and had been earning a good living that way for nearly five years. McVie is a pragmatic fellow; he wasn’t going to leave a comfortable paid situation to follow Peter on a reverie, no matter how much he loved playing with us. John turned the two of us down so squarely that we were forced to hold auditions, even though Peter had no intention of changing the name of the band; we figured that would show John how serious we were about wanting him. We hired a great guy named Bob Brunning to play bass and told him from the start that once the band got off the ground, John McVie would be replacing him.

  The original line-up of Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac was Bob Brunning, Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer and myself. Jeremy, a diminutive eighteen-year-old was a devotee of Elmore James, the great American bluesman who was known as ‘King of the Slide Guitar’ and who had died a few years earlier in 1963. Peter had seen Jeremy play with his old group, the Levi Set Blues Band, when they opened up for the Bluesbreakers once or twice, and it was Mike Vernon who had the idea of putting Jeremy and Peter in the same band. Jeremy was something to see, a tiny chap, pretty quiet off-stage, who became a whirlwind of raw power once he plugged in. He was a white, British incarnation of Elmore James–it was uncanny. He had the same stirring voice and the same lightning-bolt tone coming from his overpowered guitar. Jeremy was a dynamo on stage, impossible to ignore, and Peter just loved him. Elmore was his go-to style, but Jeremy was an incredible mimic and could serve up pitch-perfect renditions of Elvis, Cliff Richard, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and every other 1950s rock-and-roll great.

  Our fledgling band developed a handful of instrumentals anchored by Jeremy’s slide playing and highlighted by Peter soloing in the Chicago electric-blues style he loved and tossed off effortlessly. Our first vocal numbers were sung by Jeremy. We made our first live appearance at the three-day Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival on 13 August 1967, among an amazing line-up for the day: Cream, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Ten Years After, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Jeff Beck and Donovan. Pink Floyd were supposed to headline as well but they were forced to cancel due to Syd Barrett being unable to perform. There were about fifteen thousand people there and we played for an hour, turning in a great set, as far as I remember.

  John McVie was also there on that day, because the Bluesbreakers were on the bill, and he spent our entire set watching us from the side of the stage. We knew he was there, in fact to me it felt like we were auditioning for him. Some written accounts have claimed he found us ‘boring’, but that’s not true at all. McVie wished he were out there playing, because what we were doing was exciting and he knew it.

  The Windsor Festival was a landmark moment in the history of Fleetwood Mac. It was the band’s live debut, and the moment that John more or less decided to join us, but that wasn’t all. In a tent playing on another stage was a band called Chicken Shack, featuring a singer and pianist named Christine Perfect. Christine would go on to join our band in 1970 after she married John McVie. In the meantime, she and her bandmate Andy Sylvester, the bass player, became huge fans of Fleetwood Mac; they came to see us play all over the UK and even did a few tours with us. Andy and I shared a flat for years and he is still one of my very best friends, despite the fact that he later had a brief affair with my wife, Jenny Boyd.

  By December 1967 John McVie had left the Bluesbreakers and officially joined Fleetwood Mac, at which point we evolved from a skilful, purist blues band into something else altogether. Many times I’ve thought about how best to convey what John and I are when we play together but the words still escape me. He makes my form of expression effortless and I do the same for him. If you can imagine doing whatever you feel comes most naturally to you and then finding a partner that accompanies you so perfectly that neither of you need to even talk about it, then you’re close. Imagine doing that together year after year; the only constant in a life that has shown you all manner of ups and downs. If you can get a sense of that, you’ve caught my drift.

  Once we had John McVie we were a tight musical juggernaut, off and running. We’d record late-night sessions in studios after playing for hours in seedy blues clubs and in doing so we quickly became a well-oiled machine. I can’t say it enough–John taught me everything, his playing freed me up, and he made me a better drummer. With such a strong backbone, Peter and Jeremy were able to get out there and lay it down like they never had before.

  We released our first album, Fleetwood Mac, early in 1968 on Blue Horizon Records and recorded it at CBS Studios in London. It is a collection of blues covers and originals, written by Jeremy and Peter, who split the vocal duties, and it was recorded in just three days. That album includes a song of Peter’s called ‘The World Keeps on Turning’, which we later truncated to ‘World Turning’, that is still played by today’s Fleetwood Mac. To me that song is important; it’s the intersection of both eras of the band. It became a Christine McVie number, although today Lindsey and Stevie handle it, and it’s the bluesiest song we do. It allows Lindsey Buckingham to cut loose with some blues picking and he just kills it. That moment in our set is a link from past to present and I love it.

  Much as it did in 1975 when a very different band released an album called Fleetwood Mac, the 1968 version gave the band unexpected and immediate success. The album spent nearly forty weeks in the UK charts and hit number 4, though in the US it didn’t make a dent. We were overrun with positive reviews from the British music press and I suppose I had always wanted that, but I never thought it would happen to any of my bands. I also didn’t care, as long as whatever band I was in fulfilled me and allowed me to play music for a living. So a bit of ‘Macmania’ occurred for us straight away. Our smaller gigs, which were always well attended, became complete mob scenes overnight. Suddenly, for a time, we were given the same degree of coverage in the music press as the Beatles and the Stones.

  Peter’s response was to record and release a single that was the furthest thing from a chart hit, ‘Black Magic Woman’, the alluring bit of blues that Santana made famous a couple of years later. It was Peter’s first ‘fuck you’, I suppose; a four-minute collage of solos that no edit could fit into the radio format of the day. The record reached only number 37 in the UK singles chart, though it was added to regular rotation on rock-and-roll radio stations around the world.

  Our first album was almost entirely Jeremy Spencer doing his thing and it was amazing to see it played live. Peter loved having a new undiscovered talent with him and Jeremy did not disappoint. He was beholden to the blues and rock and roll and owned it so well that if you closed your eyes, you heard Elmore James. Jeremy was the focal point on stage, which was great for Peter because it allowed him to do his own thing, playing evocative, soulful leads and rhythm lines there in his corner of the stage.

  Jeremy had a long-time girlfriend and by the time he joined the band they’d had their first child, even though they were still teenagers. He was quite religious and used to carry a Bible at all times and pray, but on stage he was a complete wild man. I loved it because the juxtaposition of the real Jeremy and the stage Jeremy was astounding. Humble Bible reader by day, possessed bluesman by night–it doesn’t get any better than that. At our shows, Jeremy would really carry on, cursing and making bawdy comments, all of which m
ade the proceedings so extreme that it was a bit tongue-in-cheek. It came from the heart, but it had the effect of keeping us from being too earnest and precious as a blues act. We played plenty of cover versions but we weren’t a tribute group, we were something else and we had a sense of humour about it.

  Jeremy and I were the unelected court jesters of the band and the fact that we roomed together on tour made it that much more fun for us, though quite often a nuisance for the others. As room-mates we had plenty of time to think of new pranks and other ways of stirring up mischief. Jeremy is massively funny and as I’ve mentioned, an incredible mimic, which made him even more adept at comedy. He could imitate each of us in the band so well, down to our facial expressions and turns of phrase, that it felt as if you were sitting in front of a mirror. There were times when this lost its charm, of course; after hours and weeks together in a van, Jeremy’s antics were more annoying than a fly you can’t shoo away. No one hated him for it, but sometimes we’d beg him to stop. Usually he wouldn’t.

  Like Jeremy’s on-stage persona, our live act was also lewd and rowdy by design. Jeremy would fill condoms with beer or milk and hang them from his guitar, with a reserve pile at the side of the stage. At the end of the night, we’d throw however many were left at the audience, by way of thanks. Jeremy also liked to change the lyrics to a song, making them as bawdy as could be, and we’d all join him in the choruses putting extra emphasis on the dirty bits. We were lads goading each other on, which is how Harold came to join the band.

  I don’t know whose idea it was, but Harold became our new member and we introduced him as such, complete with a properly grand entrance. Harold, you see, was a pink, sixteen-inch dildo that our road manager, dressed as a butler, would bring onto the stage on a silver tray, surrounded by glasses of cognac for the rest of us. We would toast Harold as our road manager affixed him to the top of my bass drum, where he would spend the rest of the show undulating to the vibrations. His real moment in the sun came when Jeremy poked Harold through the fly of his gold lamé trousers, while he sang a few Elvis songs.

  We were so entrenched in what we were doing that we never gave much thought to context, until we realised the hard way that there were places in the world where our little stage routine would not go over well. One such location was the Marquee, the venerated jazz and blues club in Soho, where we were pulled off stage mere moments after Harold made his appearance. It was just too nice a venue for that and we were banned from playing there for a while afterwards. We got into even more trouble in America, the land of the free. The audiences we encountered on the coasts loved our raucous rock-and-roll revue, Harold and all, but the rest of the country was hit or miss–mostly miss. The worst reception came at a Christian college in Texas, where we didn’t censor ourselves at all and found ourselves surrounded by local law enforcement officers before we could even get off the stage. They intended to haul us in for disorderly conduct and public indecency; the same rap that befell Jim Morrison with the Doors quite often in those days. I have no idea how our manager got us out of it, but he did, probably by promising we’d leave and never return.

  We were definitely different. We had a dancing phallus, plus the wooden balls hanging from my belt–what more could you want in a rock-and-roll band? As silly as it all sounds, we were serious about it. I still have that same pair of wooden balls and I still strap them to my belt every night before I play with Fleetwood Mac. They are a part of my performance persona. Have a look at the cover of Rumours, you’ll see them.

  God bless Jeremy Spencer for inspiring that irreverence, because it allowed us the liberty to be ourselves. Looking back, I think what Jeremy was trying to do was subvert things from the inside. As a performer he paid tribute to the past in a very pure way, honouring his idols and the music by channelling it with a perfectionist’s attention to detail. Yet by taking the piss out of things the way he did, he made it all new and very much his own. He challenged accepted norms and pushed the envelope, which brought it full circle because, of course, that is what rock and roll is all about. It was punk rock behaviour, well before punk existed, and we wouldn’t have been able to cut loose that way if it hadn’t been for Jeremy leading the charge.

  Fleetwood Mac did their first American tour in 1968. We played one gig at the Wollman Rink in New York, before heading west to California. We were on a bill at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles with the Who, Arthur Brown, and Pacific Gas and Electric and that was one hell of a gig. I remember Arthur Brown being way out there, doing his Screamin’ Jay Hawkins thing, while Pacific Gas and Electric delivered true acid-rock American music and the Who–well, at that time they were simply unstoppable. They had their amps turned up to the point of combustion and really meant it; they were just a powerhouse. Then there we were. We got up and turned out beautifully rendered blues followed by very straight-ahead rock and roll.

  Since the other bands were quite bombastic, I worried that we’d be lost in the shuffle, but that wasn’t the case. It’s a testament to Peter’s talent, because you could have heard a pin drop when he stepped up to sing a slow and pretty blues tune. I had even suggested that we change our set and do only the loudest material we knew.

  ‘No, Mick,’ Peter said. ‘We’re gonna do what we do.’

  He was right. We did a lot of slow, poignant blues and the crowd was right there with us. They weren’t bored, they weren’t distracted, they were in the palm of Peter’s hand. His control of his instrument was sublime.

  That short venture was the first of our many forays into the drug-heavy West Coast rock scene. There were drugs back in England but the degree of acid, pot and other hallucinogens going around in the US were on another level altogether. It was ingrained in the music, in the experience, in the fashion, and everything else. We caught a glimpse of the centre of it all when we went to San Francisco to play a few gigs with Grateful Dead. Phil Lesh and Jerry Garcia, who became great friends of ours, met us at the airport and had us stay at their house. We also met their friend and then-manager Owsley Stanley.

  The London sixties scene was nothing like the American hippie scene and there’s a clear reason for this: Britain was not at war. The US was entrenched in a losing battle in Vietnam, as thousands of young men continued to return home in body bags. The Civil Rights Movement had turned society upside down as well and more than a few student protests had turned violent. America was a tumultuous place.

  Walking into that other world on the West Coast at the height of the ‘Summer of Love’ was an education. We saw it all first-hand–the Hells Angels, the acid-tests, the free love, the communal crash pads. The Grateful Dead were our tour guides and I really adored Jerry Garcia from the start. He was such a warm, amazing guy. They played all the time, so even though our first visit was short, we played a handful of gigs. We loved it because the Dead had a proper PA system that was leagues beyond the crap we were used to playing through in the pubs and clubs back home. The band and their fans already knew and loved Peter Green, so we were accepted everywhere, and I think the Dead’s noodling, inventive approach to improvisation really inspired Peter to new musical heights.

  On that first trip, despite Owsley’s best efforts, none of us indulged in the LSD he was constantly pushing on us. Owsley was still their sound man–the one responsible for that grand PA–and he’d alchemised his own mix of acid, called LSD-25. Frankly, there was enough to take in without hallucinogens. We were used to hash and fashion and music, so we declined at first.

  When we got back home, we recorded Mr Wonderful, an album influenced by our trip out west and the first one to feature Christine Perfect. We knew she was a great pianist, but even so she blew us away. She had Otis Span’s style down pat, along with all the greats. She was the blues babe and she was immediately part of the rhythm section, which was an amazing addition to our sound in my opinion. Chris never got up there with something to prove, she just instantly became the glue. That is what makes Chris so great; she’s a band player, not a solo act.
She loved playing with us because she’d been such a fan of ours while she and Andy were in Chicken Shack, and since we knew her so well, she was one of the boys. All of the guys in Fleetwood Mac took a shine to Chris immediately because she is irresistible, but Peter and John really liked her. At first Chris fancied Peter, but as we all know, she and John ended up falling in love and getting married.

  Peter had a vision for the band and our time among the more improvisational acid-rock bands in America inspired him to move things forward. To do so he needed a new musical collaborator, someone other than Jeremy Spencer. Jeremy was devoted to pure blues, he didn’t have any interest in experimenting with something that he already found perfectly satisfying. There was never any question about Jeremy leaving the band, because Peter and the rest of us loved what he brought to us musically. In a similar way to John Mayall, Jeremy knew who he was as a musician and was happy to stay that way.

  Peter Green was an entirely different animal; he was the type of creative person that needed to evolve. His nature was to mutate, once he became comfortable doing a chosen form. The truly talented players in our scene did that and did it well. Led Zeppelin were the greatest at it; they evolved from covering Willie Dixon’s ‘I Can’t Quit You’ to ‘Ramble On’ in a short period of time. Peter had the same drive to push his own boundaries, which is how Danny Kirwan came into our lives. Danny was a nineteen-year-old guitar player in a very average band who was a huge fan of Peter’s. Danny would see us every chance he got, usually watching Peter in awe, from the front row. He was such a sweet guy and such a true fan that we became friendly, chatting after gigs. Peter and John and I went to see Danny’s band a few times and it was clear to us that he needed to be with better players. They were holding him back and we told him as much, and did our best to think of who we could hook him up with, until in the end we just invited him to join us. It was one of those ah-ha moments when you realise that the answer is right there in front of you; Danny’s style of playing complemented Peter’s perfectly because he was already a disciple of the Green God. We added him to the line-up and so became two bands in one.