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

by Mick Fleetwood

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Yes, Peter. Come with us, it won’t take long.’

  With much coaxing, we succeeded in getting him out of there and back to our hotel. We tried to convince him to finish the tour, but were unsuccessful because Peter was in a panic like we’d never seen before. He’d start talking about the money we were making, then just mumble, repeating himself endlessly. He’d get worked up, upset and inconsolable, and then go into a paranoid, feeble panic. He kept saying that he was simple, he was working-class, and that the money we made was too extravagant.

  ‘The money, I don’t want it,’ he’d say. ‘The money. It’s an anchor around my heart. It drags me into darkness.’

  Once he’d come down somewhat, Peter didn’t change his mind about leaving the band, but he did decide that he wanted to play the rest of the shows on our tour. He felt that he owed us that and wanted to do right by the band. We had gigs booked through May, so it was a real commitment on his part.

  A few of the German hippies who’d got a hold of him followed Peter back to London and moved in with him, where they continued to trip on acid together. Peter grew more erratic and started talking about his ‘unclean money’, with the same zeal with which he once spoke about Christ. He was coming undone and every bit of it can be heard in Peter’s last single with Fleetwood Mac. His swan song was a pulsating slab of blues rhythm chords topped with howling solos that he called ‘The Green Manalishi’. The tune is about the devil, the darkness within, and the alluring temptation of descending into madness. He wrote it one night after waking from a nightmare. Gripped with terror and paralysed by dread, Peter was unable to breathe. When he was finally capable, he grabbed his guitar and a pen and paper and wrote out the chords and lyrics. The song came out of him in a feverish sweat and we recorded it just as it was written, changing nothing.

  Peter’s final gig was at the Lyceum Theatre in London with Grateful Dead and he was once again sky-high on acid. Some claim that he tried to set his amps on fire backstage. I didn’t see that, but he was so high that I don’t doubt it. ‘The Green Manalishi’ went on to become our fourth straight hit single; it rose to the Top 10 on the British charts after Peter had left the band. That was a bittersweet victory and one we’d not enjoy again for a long while; it took Fleetwood Mac six more years to crack the Top 30 in the UK.

  Losing Peter was like taking the rudder out of a sailing boat. As a band we were still afloat, but we were drifting, with no map and no land in sight. We had some growing pains ahead of us. They weren’t the first and they wouldn’t be the last. Just like the ones I suffered as a boy, they would be abysmal, yet they were the only path to greater heights.

  CHAPTER 7

  A HOUSE BECOMES A HOME

  Our leader Peter Green was gone; the reason we’d all come together. That would have spelled the end for most bands and everyone in the scene expected the same fate to befall us. But that wasn’t an option as far as John McVie and I were concerned. The band had been named after us and we didn’t want to look like quitters. I still believe, and time has convinced me that I’m absolutely right, this was Peter Green’s plan all along. John and I weren’t going to let it all dissolve, particularly when we’d finally got a taste of success. Then again, we didn’t have to front the band, write lyrics or sing. Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan were charged with those duties and understandably they had their doubts about doing it all without Peter. They were such different players, united only by Peter, who could glide effortlessly between their two styles. He’d play sideman to Jeremy, laying down incredible rhythm guitar and harmonica, and with Danny he’d come to the fore and sing, or support his numbers by playing lead. Peter could do all of those things without a thought. He also had the charm and vision to lead us.

  But he was gone and we needed a new leader, so out of necessity, I stepped into those shoes. I didn’t see any other way for it to happen and I thought it would be a temporary role until Danny, Jeremy, or perhaps a new frontman picked up the reins. Forty years later, I’m still at it, but hopefully with more wisdom and grace than I had back then. I had no experience in making decisions for a group, nor did I have a distinct musical direction in mind. I did have all the passion in the world and that is what won the day, as it has continued to do over the years. I wanted nothing more than to keep the band together, by whatever means necessary.

  John has always been my confidant and co-pilot, so he and I decided that we had to get our guitar players some assistance in fronting the proceedings. Luckily we knew the finest blues-woman and piano player in all of England, Christine Perfect.

  Chris was born in Birmingham into a musical and intellectual family. Her father, a professor, played organ and her mother sang and played several instruments as well. The house was full of music, which inspired Chris at a very young age to pursue it professionally. She went to art college in Birmingham and during that time met a young man who would become known as ‘The Professor’ and also played music, named Spencer Davis. The pair dated for a short time, fronted the university jazz band for a bit, and used to busk together around town. While doing so, they met a fifteen-year-old schoolboy named Steve Winwood who would spend his lunch hour playing blues piano at a local pub before going back for his afternoon classes. Spencer immediately snapped Winwood up and formed the Spencer Davis Group, at which point they were off and running. Steve Winwood, even at that age, already possessed the clear, wispy voice that has blown people’s minds ever since.

  Chris went on to join a local band called Sounds of Blue, playing keyboards and singing, with Andy Sylvester on bass and Stan Webb on guitar. They gigged together for about a year, playing songs by Mose Allison, Ray Charles and Amos Milburn. By then Chris had graduated from college with a degree in sculpture and went off to London, where she got a job as a window dresser and looked around for a new band. When Andy asked her to join his new project with Stan Webb she jumped at the chance, because she hated working in fashion.

  That band was Chicken Shack and Chris had to learn a great deal more about playing blues piano very quickly. She did it the right way, by picking up a stack of Freddie King records and studying the moves of Freddie’s legendary piano player Sonny Thompson. Chris’s style became an offshoot of Sonny’s, which in turn informed her singing. Her style evolved and although Chicken Shack was celebrated for their guitarist’s heavy presence, Christine Perfect’s plaintive blues interpretations set the band apart from their contemporaries. It didn’t hurt that women performers were very few in the English blues scene and Chris was hands-down the best of them.

  Mike Vernon discovered Chicken Shack and immediately signed them to his Blue Horizon label, which is how we caught wind of them. He told us that Stan Webb and the rest were great, but that we should pay close attention to Chris.

  ‘Don’t miss them at Windsor Fest,’ he said. ‘Chris Perfect is going to take your breath away.’

  Mike was right, she certainly did.

  Chicken Shack, like every band starting out, put in months of touring in pubs and concert halls around the country, so we shared the bill with them often, especially as we were both on Blue Horizon. We all became great friends, which is how Chris came down in 1968 and played piano on our second album, Mr Wonderful. As I’ve said already, Peter and John both fancied Chris, but John made the move. He asked Chris out for a drink when she came round to one of our gigs. He might have been dating a girl at the time, but that was long gone the moment John and Chris got together. They had both met their match and it was lovely to watch.

  They were a serious item, but much like the moment Jenny and I got together, Fleetwood Mac took off on a tour immediately afterwards. We went to America, while Chicken Shack departed for a tour of Germany. Chris was, and still is, such an irresistible, special woman that while she was away, I believe a German disc jockey asked her to marry him. Honestly, it was constant; there was always some man asking Chris to marry him. From what I understand, after she refused her German suitor, she wrote John a lo
ng letter telling him how she felt for him and when we returned, John proposed and Chris said yes. They were married ten days later, in August 1968, and we had quite the party.

  Afterwards though, it was back to being apart from each other, because if we weren’t on the road, Chicken Shack was. They couldn’t go on like that, so Chris left her band to be with John full time, joining us on tour at the beginning of 1969. Mike Vernon understood her decision but he wouldn’t let Christine sit on her laurels. He got her into the studio to record a few sessions, which became the album Christine Perfect, a debut that went on to win her all manner of awards. She was voted best female vocalist for the second year running in Melody Maker as well as being celebrated in every other piece of the English music press. Though Chris was glad for the compliments, she wanted none of the attention that came with it. She announced publicly that she was retiring from the music business, which was met with tremendous disappointment.

  That lasted all of two months.

  This period of transition taught me what it means to be a band. A true band is a family and, like any family in crisis, a band must gather together privately, devoid of outside influence when under duress. It is the only way to re-establish the bonds that exist, for that family to remember who they are, and to decide their next steps together. To do that well, a refuge is required, which is why I insisted we go to Kiln House.

  The fragmentation caused by losing Peter was amplified by the fact that none of us lived close to each other. Getting everyone together to rehearse and discuss what would come next was a project and a drag. London was full of so many other distractions that I knew we wouldn’t survive that. The only thing that made sense to me was a move to the country. Fresh air, a change of scene, and a bit of communal living was what we needed. Once again, my sister Sally came to the rescue and via a friend of hers, I arranged for us to rent a quirky old oast house near the old market town of Alton in Hampshire, that had been converted for domestic living. Oast houses are common in regions where hops and barley are grown for brewing beer; they are two- to three-storey structures where those grains are spread out to be dried by hot air rising from a large wood- or charcoal-fired kiln situated below. The house we lived in had once been two oast houses; it had a long narrow room upstairs, a simple kitchen at one end, and a long thin table in the middle of the room where we’d gather together at meal times. There were bedrooms leading off both ends of the great common room and at the very top, on the third floor, there was an attic that became our rehearsal room.

  The band, our wives, children, and roadies all moved into Kiln House. They included me and Jenny (she was pregnant with our first daughter Amelia by then), John and Chris, Jeremy and Fiona and their son Dicken, Danny and his girlfriend, and the others, and we lived there for six wonderful months. I still look back on that time as some of the most creative and overall positive times of my life. It was summer in the country and we eventually turned one of the wide kiln rooms into our recording studio. We brought lots of hash–great big blocks of it–that we had lying about for all to share if they chose to.

  Jenny and I got married there on 20 June 1970; I’d allowed the band’s schedule to come first for far too long. It was time. We set off at noon in my old Austin, which Jenny had nicknamed Lettuce Leaf, even though it was blue. I still have that car, by the way, it’s on my farm in Maui and when I had it restored, I had it painted green in honour of the name she gave it. That very hot day we drove down the country lanes to the public registry office where we met the rest of the band, our parents, our friends and families. Everybody filed in, but I took a moment and remained outside, soaking in the enormity of it. It was happening. I was going to marry my first love, my Jenny!

  Lost in a reverie, I had no idea that everyone else had been waiting inside for over five minutes. Jenny told me recently that the registrar threatened to kick everybody out because he had more marriages to do that afternoon. She went to the window, bouquet in hand, and saw me there in my beige corduroy trousers, pink shirt, and fitted brown-checked waistcoat wandering in the garden, with my hands behind my back looking at the flowers, the trees, and up at the sky like I had not a care in the world. She was wearing a long custom-made dress in Liberty Print floral cotton with a rust-coloured background. It took a rap on the window and a stern glare from the registrar to snap me back to reality.

  I’d asked Peter Green to be my best man and he’d agreed to, but in the end he showed up too late and when he did arrive he made a point of telling Jenny and me that he didn’t believe in marriage. I would have asked John McVie but he’s rather shy; doing something like that all on his own wouldn’t be fun for him. Instead, our long-time road manager and friend Dennis Keane stood in and did a wonderful job. Peter was there but he was distant; he was still hanging out with the German hippies and taking acid regularly and was on his own plane, further away with each passing day. It wasn’t easy to see him, but I’m glad he was there. Our wedding reception was bucolic and gorgeous; the sun was out and we all sat on the grass at the foot of a wooden stepladder that led up to Kiln House. We ate sandwiches, drank wine and passed joints all afternoon, into the evening and then into the night (except for Jenny, who was pregnant), sitting there around the table in our country home. Jenny’s pregnancy made her feel nauseous and combined with her necessary chemical abstinence, it made her feel out of place.

  That was a beautiful day, but it wasn’t always like that; there were many nights when the pressure got to everyone. We had to follow up Then Play On, we had to prove we were something without Peter Green, and all of us knew it. At one point or another every single member aside from me, McVie included, wanted to quit. John used to have a go at us all the time, saying he’d like to be a roadie for a while instead of a member. I was the one to step in and convince them, some nights one after the other, not to leave. I became the torchbearer, the zealot, the one urging everyone to play on, by hook or by crook. Somehow it worked. Little did I know how often I’d find myself in that position in the years to come.

  It took a full six months for us to find the answer and reconfigure ourselves. We didn’t plan to bring Christine in as a songwriter and member, but we leaned on her a lot because we didn’t know what else to do. Jeremy was terrified of being the frontman on his own and the pressure on Danny’s sensitive temperament was tremendous. We’d jam for hours and days and work out some great musical ideas, with Danny humming ‘la-la-la’ into the mike. It seemed he was scared to write, to sing or to fill Peter’s shoes. We knew what we could do, but there was a terrible vacuum there without Peter. We needed it all to sound better and Chris was safe, familiar, and more than capable of elevating us. Her piano playing fitted in perfectly with our blues numbers and she filled the harmonic space that Peter had vacated. She found herself, sang a few songs that she knew well, and eventually began to write new ones. The lyrics to one of them, ‘Jewel Eyed Judy’, emerged from words she wrote with my wife Jenny while the pair sat together at the communal table, when Jenny was about four months pregnant.

  The band’s new formula remained true to our roots, showcasing Jeremy’s skills, while allowing Danny to do more melodic rock. In the end Christine became the glue; she not only drew the cover art for the resulting album, Kiln House, but filled out our sound beautifully. When we set out on a three-month tour of America in August 1970, Chris did so as an official member of our band and was from then on known professionally as Christine McVie.

  The lease for Kiln House ended when we left for the tour but I didn’t want to let the vibe of the place go, so I suggested pooling our money together to buy a country house of our own. I didn’t want us to lose our momentum and I worried that if we separated again we might splinter for good. Everyone agreed, so we bought a place jointly for £23,000, most of which came from the advance on our next record. It was a secluded Victorian mansion up on a hill and it was called Benifold. This place was also in Hampshire, just a few miles from Kiln House, but it wasn’t rustic at all; it had been buil
t in 1899, had twenty rooms and was truly gorgeous. At the time it was owned by an ecumenical society that took in devotees of any religious denomination seeking a spiritual retreat. It sat on seven beautiful acres of forest and had a dilapidated tennis court surrounded by lush trees. To us it was paradise. We had a billiard room and set up a music room so we could rehearse any time of day or night. There were bedrooms for everyone and plenty of extra space for guests and relatives to visit when we weren’t on tour.

  I’d found the house while Jenny and I were searching for a place of our own, and as was the way in much of our relationship, I substituted our needs for the band’s when I saw Benifold. It didn’t register with me at the time, in fact I’ve only just learned this through talking to Jenny, but that decision truly hurt her. She had a dream of starting a family with me in a country cottage and she craved a haven of normality in our lives. That dream and her needs went out the window the instant I laid eyes on Benifold and it made her very sad. She had wanted to start our marriage in a home, not in a commune. If I had been more in tune, more considerate, I would have seen it. But there was no time; shortly after we bought the house, the band was off to America. Since we’d done nothing to make the interior of Benifold hospitable, Jenny went to live with her mother for the next three months.

  That three-month tour was very tough on our families. I’d wanted Jenny to come on the road with me, but she was pregnant and I understood how hard that would be on her. On that tour we focused primarily on our new material in the first set, followed by a second set where Jeremy played blues and oldies the way we’d always done. It was well-received by our fans, although in England it didn’t touch the commercial success of our work with Peter Green.