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

by Mick Fleetwood

  One of the problems we had with completing anything during the writing of Rumours was that our songwriters weren’t bringing us words. I imagine that had to do with the subjects of the songs quite often being in the room, not to mention that they were working out their feelings on a day-to-day basis. Lindsey, by nature, always holds back on his songs until he feels he’s perfected them on his end. Writing this record he was even more private; he crafted his contributions until the very last minute, requiring the rest of us to revise our parts accordingly. My basic drum tracks were usually the only thing that would remain the same. When Lindsey reworked a song, everything from the vocal backing parts to the melody would change, so there was no chance of keeping Chris’s original, basic vocal take, for example. The entire arrangement was different so it all had to be redone.

  We didn’t get that as much from Chris or Stevie, because Stevie knows how she wants to deliver her words, so when she makes adjustments, they’re less drastic in terms of the overlying structure of the song. Chris is a blues player and says what she wants to say very directly; she knows the melody she wants and it’s all right there, or evolved enough that we can usually get there together pretty fast. But even Chris wasn’t doing that this time. Making Rumours, all three of them held back on their lyrics to the point that John and I, as blues players who were used to going right to an idea, were on the verge of ripping their sheets of lyrics out of their hands and saying, ‘Just give me the shit now!’

  But as blues players we also knew how to support our bandmates properly, so we went through as many permutations of an idea as necessary. That was our training; whether it’s in increments or wild leaps, if you must go all over the place to get where you need to be, that’s what you do.

  Even if we’d been on a roll, we had to take a break at that point to do a bit of touring since we’d cancelled a series of spring dates to continue work on the album. There was a great demand because a full year later, Fleetwood Mac was still climbing the charts, and when we released ‘Say You Love Me’ with the B-side ‘Monday Morning’, we scored another high-charting single. We hadn’t played a gig in nearly six months, so when we hit the road, we were like a bat out of hell; all that inward focus, frustration and introspection fuelled us.

  We toured through June and into July on bills with bands including Jeff Beck, Jefferson Starship, Ted Nugent, and the Eagles, who had released One of These Nights and were riding high.

  On this tour, Stevie Nicks really came into her own and I saw what she had begun to represent to our female fans. Stevie was the mysterious mystic, the seductive songstress, the ethereal being who could not be possessed. Her style, as unique as her voice, was catching on everywhere. I will never forget playing on 4 July 1976, on the American bicentennial, with the Eagles in Tampa, Florida. I looked out at the crowd and saw a field of Stevie Nicks devotees; wispy, witchy black dresses, top hats, just everything Stevie incorporated into her stage attire. When we launched into ‘Rhiannon’ and Stevie said, ‘This is a song about a Welsh witch,’ the place erupted. Stevie delivered and she gave herself up to the music just the way her fans were beginning to do to her, all of them swaying, dancing with their eyes closed. Stevie had found something within herself that she’d poured into performing that number, something that came from deep inside her, something as real and magical as the Welsh witch she sang about.

  During this tour, I reconnected with Jenny. Living in London with my sister Sally’s family had been a relatively sane and soothing existence for her and just what she needed. It had given her time and stability to think about her future, and to build a firm determination to commit totally to her life with the children and me. She felt that she’d broken the bond between us, so she had to be the one to mend it. The environment and lifestyle had changed us both, and even though we’d legally divorced by then she believed there was hope for us. She was closer to my parents than her own, we had two gorgeous daughters, and she knew we both loved each other, even though in her eyes I didn’t show it properly, which caused her a lot of suffering.

  She’d thought it through and was ready, so she flew out to Chicago to join me on tour. This was a test, and if all went well, we’d reunite with the girls together at the end of the tour. Jenny says that the moment she got into the black limo I’d sent to fetch her from the airport, she was seized with anxiety. She was back in the life of luxury, as she called it, in the lion’s den where the nuggets of gold resided.

  I met her backstage, happy to see her. She looked rested, great, and beautiful as ever.

  I held her hand and led her down the hall. ‘I’ve just spoken to the girls,’ I said, ‘and they know you’re arriving today.’

  ‘How are they?’ she asked tentatively.

  ‘They’re good. I told them you’d be with me on the road and they’re very excited.’

  ‘How long are we on the road?’

  ‘Another two weeks,’ I said.

  She stopped walking. ‘Mick,’ she said. ‘I feel nervous.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I’m here. You’ll be fine.’

  ‘I’m nervous about what the band will think of me. All of this being together and then breaking up. It makes me feel so silly.’

  I hugged her and held her close. ‘Don’t you worry about that,’ I said. ‘They don’t care–believe me. Come on, let’s go find JC and get you some coke. You must be tired. It’ll help you stay awake for the show.’

  Jenny sat at the side of the stage that night and I remember staring at her throughout the set and feeling like my wife was back. She felt the same. She told me that she felt home once again, on familiar territory. The lights dimmed after every song and she watched our road manager bring a silver tray full of bottle caps of cocaine for the band members who wanted them. She then helped herself to the allocation reserved for wives and girlfriends in the backstage dressing rooms. She got tipsy on vodka and orange juice and thoroughly enjoyed herself. There was always a party after the show in those days and it went on late and rowdy. Jenny remembers the party on that particular evening after the show, because back then we’d developed a habit of pouring glasses of wine over each other, which we did that evening with gusto. We carried on until the early morning, until, at the end of it all, exhausted, she and I walked to our room in silence.

  Jenny fell back into our life on the road very well and I remember thinking that we had a chance. She’s told me that on that tour she realised that touring provided the type of cocoon she’d been after; she and I were isolated from the outside world. She liked that part, but the problem was that the world we were in was far from normal. She thought a lot about Peter Green saying that we should all have lived our lives as travelling gypsies. For the first time she saw the wisdom in his vision and wondered if we would always have been together if we’d gone that route.

  At the end of the two weeks, I thought it best for Jenny and me to have some time together before seeing our daughters again, so I sent my parents and the girls to Hawaii for two weeks. We arrived at the Topanga house, just the two of us. It was lovely to be home with her, because I’d always hoped that house would be our home. Jenny remembers the excitement she felt walking through the house and seeing signs of the children everywhere, all the familiar toys, books and drawings and the sepia photograph taken of us all by Herbie Worthington that hung in their bedroom. To her it was an idyllic family portrait, me in a chair with Amelia in front of me and Jenny at my side holding baby Lucy, and she saw it as both a good token and a reminder of the work that needed to be done to bridge image with reality.

  I’d hung a map in the girls’ room and placed pins in all the cities I’d travelled to while on tour, so they’d have an idea of where Daddy was, and that warmed Jenny’s heart. She had returned renewed and determined to create a home for our children and to commit to our marriage, no matter how crazy things got. The house she came home to was still partially under construction, so with workers there all day, and nothing but a tarp for a front door, Jenny busied he
rself during the afternoons, usually by coming down to the Seedy Management offices.

  We weren’t home for long before the pressure to complete our album started coming from Warner Brothers. We blocked out a week off in Miami to continue work at Criteria Studios, where Bob Marley had just finished recording Rastaman Vibration. We could tell, because the place smelled strongly and pleasantly of ganja. I flew my parents out there straight from Hawaii, thinking that it would be a more suitable location for Jenny to reconnect with our daughters, which it was. It seemed like we were back together for good.

  The first Fleetwood Mac album continued to rise through the ranks, hitting number 1 on the US charts on 4 September 1976, fourteen months after its release, thereby ending the unstoppable ten-week run of Frampton Comes Alive! It was great to feel that our work on that record had ‘arrived’ but it was hard to celebrate with so much unfinished work to do. Our chart success did nothing but increase the pressure from without and within.

  To their credit, Warner Brothers were patient, they really were. By that time we’d spent a small fortune, we weren’t done yet and we refused to play them so much as a note. This was the advantage of not having a manager, or having an artist as manager. I sided with the band; we weren’t going to play them anything until it was finished, no questions asked. A manager who wasn’t an artist would have had his mind solely on business. We’d have been urged to finish sooner, to cut corners and to get the product to market so it could start earning. Instead we got to do it our way, and thank God we did. We chose the art director for our albums, we chose the photographer, our crazy friend Herbie. All of these decisions were organic and holistically art-driven. We’d choose to work with our friends, not someone the record company or an outside manager would invariably have chosen for us. We were horribly unpackaged by design at a time when rock and roll was commodified, planned and marketed more than it had ever been in the past.

  If we had been attuned and concerned with trying to capitalise on ourselves in that way I don’t think we would have survived. Yet in remaining ‘unpackaged’ we developed an aesthetic, which essentially became our ‘brand’. We made money out of just being who we are. We dressed the way we did because that’s the way we dressed. If we’d had a manager, I guarantee that we’d have been squashed into a box, or even worse, become a version of the Beatles when they had their mop-tops. That happened to Peter Frampton after the success of Frampton Comes Alive! He’d managed to shed his pop star roots in England and legitimised himself by playing with George Harrison and releasing a monster of a rock album, only to allow himself to be packaged once again as a teen idol in America. Things such as that awful film version of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ruined him and I think he never recovered. By managing ourselves, we escaped that fate.

  At the same time we were trying to finish Rumours we had to keep promoting our first album, which had also finally broken overseas. The band took ten days in October 1976 to go to London to meet the European press and it was the first time we’d done so in years. We stayed at the Montcalm Hotel, near Marble Arch, and were met with overwhelming enthusiasm, the likes of which we hadn’t seen since 1969. We were also met with a sobering surprise when Peter Green showed up at our hotel and stayed in our rooms for a few nights. Peter had let himself go; he was unkempt, his hair long and straggly, and he’d put on a good deal of weight. It depressed all of us to see him that way, but John in particular took it very hard. I tried to find the old Peter in there but it was tough; John was too upset to even try. Peter would stare long, hard, and unsettlingly at whomever he was talking to, when he wasn’t gazing vacantly at the nearest wall. There was an aggression in his manner that we’d never seen before and it was disturbing. It didn’t bode well and the next time we returned to England, in April 1977, we learned that Peter had been committed to a mental institution for threatening our former manager, Clifford Davis, at gunpoint over sending him royalty cheques that Peter didn’t want to cash.

  Danny Kirwan paid us a visit, too, and it was equally sad to see that time had not been kind to him either. Alcoholism had taken its toll, and after his short lived solo career, he’d more or less left music behind. He’d spent time doing odd jobs and had been homeless and itinerant for some time. He kept scratching himself and told us that he was living in a shelter and had contracted ‘worms’. I’ve not seen Danny since.

  It was great to be in London with my family, to ride double-decker buses with Amelia and Lucy, who by then had become so used to travelling by limo that the buses were a novelty. After going by private plane to a few select European cities, the press tour was over and it was time to go back home.

  Another rude awakening awaited us there when we landed. American immigration realised that John, Chris, John Courage and I were British citizens still working with tourist visas from years back. Tourist visas don’t exactly allow you to work for American corporations and earn money the way we’d been doing. We had never got around to getting our US permanent resident visas, known as Green Cards, but we were going to have to find a way quickly if we stood a chance of fulfilling our touring obligations. Getting it handled quickly and efficiently proved to be a huge hassle. Some of us had misdemeanour marijuana possession arrests on record back in England, which complicated everything, and since Jenny and I were no longer married, if we didn’t take care of it, she and my daughters would be deported along with me.

  We did everything we could think of to speed things up, and though we’ll never know if this had any effect, we even played a fundraiser for Senator Birch Bayh, the Democratic committee chairman from Indiana. The only catch was that Jenny and I had to be married in order for us, and our children, to be granted Green Cards, so we had a solemn ceremony in the offices of our lawyer, Mickey Shapiro, with Lindsey acting as my best man and our two daughters as our witnesses.

  The house in Topanga, which was going to include a recording studio and all the bells and whistles, still wasn’t finished, so in November 1976, Jenny and I rented a house in Malibu at the Colony, the famed gated community on the beach. Jenny loved it there, because it was more social than the quiet sprawl of Topanga. In the row of thirty or so houses backed up to the beach, she’d run into Diana Ross, whose children played with our children every day on the Rosses’ big trampoline. Diana’s husband managed Ronnie Wood, who lived a few doors down with his wife Krissy and their new baby. Neil Diamond lived close by, too, and could usually be found on his front door step, pencil and paper in hand, writing songs.

  We wrapped up the work on our second album as 1976 drew to a close and that’s when John McVie came up with the title–Rumours. John hit the nail on the head as always. By then, given the success of Fleetwood Mac, all eyes in the music business in LA were on us and everyone involved in that business pretended to have the inside scoop on the inner workings of our band. We’d been hearing stories about ourselves for months, most of them so outlandish that we had to laugh. According to this grapevine, every combination of male–female intimate relations were on-going, violent fights were common, Stevie was leaving the band, Christine and Lindsey were running off to start a band together, we were all too addicted to drugs to even play, and Stevie’s devotion to black magic had cursed us all. It was ridiculous, as rumours always are, yet they still hurt when they come back to the source, which they inevitably did. There were multiple times when we called one another to confirm that what we were hearing wasn’t true, such was the tenacity of these stories. John’s title handled all that bullshit with a dose of irony and intrigue. It was perfect.

  The first single from Rumours was ‘Go Your Own Way’, its B-side a beautiful song by Stevie called ‘Silver Springs’, and it was released just before Christmas 1976. It became an instant radio hit, going straight to the Top 10. Record stores around the country ordered 800,000 copies of the album for its release in February, based on the popularity of the single, which at the time was the largest order for an album that Warner Brothers had ever received. Our first alb
um had sold four million copies, which was then the company’s best-selling album of all time. Conservative bets had Rumours doubling that figure before long.

  With the excitement of Rumours heading up the charts came the endless publicity photographs and press articles. These sessions took place at various photographers’ studios, and one of these–for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine–continued, as so often, through the night. I remember arriving home early the next morning, just before the children got up. Jenny could tell it had been a night of drink and coke, and I was elated. I described the idea we’d had of being photographed in bed together; me and Stevie cuddled up at one end, with Lindsey and Christine together at the other, and John alone reading the paper. The intention was a spoof on the rumours about our private lives, and yet, symbolically, the picture showed us exactly as we were. All married to each other.

  But in the course of the session, as I told Jenny in all seriousness, I had realised something vital. ‘Stevie and I have definitely known each other in previous lives,’ I said, before going off to sleep. That image of the two of us cuddling, a large satisfied smile on my face and Stevie giggling beside me would later haunt Jenny for years to come.

  As the album sped up the charts we hit the road in March, playing a powerhouse set that consisted of hits from both albums, selling out arenas that held from ten to fifteen thousand. Rumours went platinum by the end of March and everywhere we went crowds of girls dressed like Stevie sang along with her on every song, hanging on her every word. This was just the start, because the album hadn’t even begun to reach its maximum heights. What that album went on to achieve is common knowledge but what is not is the efforts of the sonic masterminds behind it all. Without the patience, dedication and zealous belief in us that Ken Calliat and Richard Dashut shared, Rumours would not have come to be. They were the sixth and seventh members of our band, they made the sound that the world knows as ours come to life in the recorded medium. Along with Lindsey Buckingham and to some degree myself, those two changed the way albums were recorded and they deserve more kudos than these mere words can convey.