Producer helped turn Fleetwood Mac from blues has-beens into soft-rock stars

On the last day of 1974, Keith Olsen received a phone call that was destined to change the face of popular music. On the line was Mick Fleetwood, the drummer with Fleetwood Mac, calling from a pay phone at Los Angeles airport. Olsen, who has died of a heart attack aged 74, was booked to produce the struggling English band’s next album in the new year but Fleetwood had some bad news to impart. His services would no longer be required because Bob Welch, the group’s guitarist, singer and main songwriter, had quit and Fleetwood Mac were facing extinction.

The two put their heads together in search of a rescue plan.

Olsen had recently discovered a talented young guitarist named

Lindsey

Buckingham and his girlfriend Stevie Nicks. They wrote songs together and Olsen had produced an album for them. The record had flopped and ‘‘sold bupkis’’, as he put it: at the time of Fleetwood’s phone call, the duo were without a recording contract and Nicks was working as Olsen’s house cleaner.

However, Fleetwood had heard their record and was one of the few to be impressed. Perhaps, he suggested, Buckingham might be persuaded to join Fleetwood Mac? Olsen told him that he thought it was unlikely and, in any case, they wouldn’t be split up and he came as a pair with Nicks.

‘‘Well, maybe that will work. Can you see if you can convince them to join my band?’’ Fleetwood asked. Abandoning his New Year plans, Olsen drove to the couple’s apartment, taking with him ‘‘the obligatory bottle of bad champagne’’.

‘‘I said, ‘Hey, happy New Year’ and spent the whole night trying to convince the two of them to give up their own band and join Fleetwood Mac,’’ he recalled. ‘‘Neither one of them really wanted to join but they eventually agreed to give it a six-week trial.’’

When Buckingham and Nicks began rehearsing with the group’s three surviving English members – Fleetwood, bassist John Mcvie and keyboardist Christine Mcvie – it was immediately evident there was a chemistry between them. With Olsen producing, by the end of February, they had recorded an album with Nicks and Buckingham writing or co-writing seven of the 11 songs.

Titled simply Fleetwood Mac to signify they were in effect a new band making a fresh start, Olsen helped the group to create a melodic and radio-friendly sound that came to define 1970s American soft rock.

The album went to No 1, sold 7 million copies in the US alone and turned Fleetwood Mac from has-beens into global superstars. Not that Olsen got much thanks for it and an unseemly wrangle followed over his royalty payments. ‘‘There was a nasty lawsuit. I just wanted to get paid my percentage,’’ he said.

As a result he was not invited back to produce the even more successful follow-up, Rumours, and was replaced by Richard Dashut, who had been Olsen’s assistant engineer. There were other issues, too, not least that Olsen banned drugs in his studio and, by the time of Rumours, Fleetwood Mac were living in a blizzard of cocaine. ‘‘I don’t think drugs ever did a great recording,’’ Olsen noted sternly.

He was wrong, for there is no denying that the drug-fuelled Rumours was ‘‘a great recording’’. However, you could see his point. The album Olsen recorded with the band in 1975 took six weeks and was made on a tight budget. Without him, it took Fleetwood Mac six months to record Rumours, during which time they blew US$1.5 million. At the time it was reported to be the most expensive album ever made.

Olsen was also a ‘‘hands-on’’ producer who thought that even superstars needed his expert guidance. He refused to tiptoe around oversized egos and regarded rock star selfindulgence with a mixture of frustration and wry amusement.

‘‘They’re on stage in front of millions of people all screaming, ‘You are the greatest’,’’ he recounted. ‘‘Then you get back to the studio to cut your next record and they write some song about this old rotten apple core. You suggest that maybe they rewrite it and they look at me and say, ‘No, because I am the greatest. How could all those people be wrong?’ ’’

Asked if he was talking about Fleetwood Mac, he replied, ‘‘I think every single act I came across said that at one time or another.’’

The sound Olsen fashioned with Fleetwood Mac on hit songs such as Rhiannon and Say You Love Me was a landmark in creating the smooth ‘‘adult-oriented rock’’ style that dominated the airwaves in the 1970s and 1980s and came to be known as AOR.

It also made him one of the most in-demand producers of the era. Over the next two decades Olsen produced slick AOR albums for Foreigner, Journey, Santana, Whitesnake, Pat Benatar and Heart among others.

Keith Alan Olsen was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.. He enrolled as a music student at the University of Minnesota ‘‘but got drawn by the road’’, first touring with a folk trio and by the early 1970s he had started his own production company.

Olsen finally called time on life in the studio in the mid-1990s after a bad experience with Emerson, Lake & Palmer. ‘‘It was the most uninspired record I had ever been on and it totally burnt me out.’’ – The Times