A FLEETWOOD MAC ATTACK
Stevie Nicks still leading way 36 years after Rumours’ release
FLEETWOOD MAC Scotiabank Place April 23 at 8 p.m. Tickets: $149.50 $79.50 $49.50, capitaltickets.ca
It is 36 years since Rumours, the softrock masterpiece by Fleetwood Mac, became the soundtrack to separation. Songs such as Go Your Own Way, The Chain and You Make Loving Fun articulated the new rules of relationships for the baby boom, capturing the reality of affairs, tensions, betrayals and breakups and selling more than 40 million copies in the process. For much of the 1980s, arguing over who got the copy of Rumours was as much a part of divorce as lawyer’s fees and pretending to like each other in front of the kids.
Rumours hit a nerve because it came from a place of truth. Fleetwood Mac’s keyboardist Christine McVie was divorcing bassist John McVie. The singer Stevie Nicks was splitting with her childhood sweetheart, the band’s guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. Somewhere in the middle was the drummer Mick Fleetwood, who was recently divorced from his wife. Everyone dealt with the situation in the only way rock stars in the 1970s knew how: by taking huge amounts of cocaine.
It should have ended there, but as Fleetwood says, “Rumours is the thing that would not go away.”
Four of the band members have put aside the pain of the past and, in one of the biggest breakup and makeup stories of all time, are on the road again for a world tour. They play Ottawa April 23.
Only Christine McVie, who left the band in 1998, is staying away. She’s led a reclusive life in a Kent farmhouse ever since, having no involvement with Fleetwood Mac and never giving interviews — until now.
“We were very hedonistic,” says Christine McVie, recalling the band’s reputation for excess in the fond manner of someone remembering hijinks at school.
“But it was always fun because we never got into heroin or anything like that. If you got too high you had a drink, and if you got too drunk you had another line of coke. We did that every night until three or four in the morning. It was different back then. Once you made it you were completely nurtured in this little world.”
Why did she leave the band? “After I took my 95,000th flight something snapped. I became terrified of flying and I couldn’t face living out of a suitcase anymore.”
So it comes as a further surprise to hear that, two days after our interview, she flew to Fleetwood’s house in Maui, Hawaii, before travelling to Los Angeles to meet the rest of the band as they rehearsed for the tour.
“No, no, no,” says Mick Fleetwood, the band’s genial, ponytailed giant of a drummer, when I ask him if Christine McVie will ever return to complete Rumour’s two-warring-couples dynamic that, in Buckingham’s words, “brought out the voyeur in everyone. We love her, we miss her, but no. She’s left. Still, she’s a huge part of our story, and I certainly hope that when we tour in September and October she makes one little excursion to a gig.”
The Fleetwood Mac of Rumours began in 1974, when, having been hugely successful figures in the late Sixties British blues boom, the band was in trouble. Founder Peter Green, briefly mooted as the greatest guitarist of his generation, developed schizophrenia and left in 1970 after saying he wanted to give all the band’s money to charity. The following year the Mac’s second guitarist, Jeremy Spencer, popped out before a gig in Los Angeles to buy a magazine and never came back. His band members later discovered he had joined the Children Of God cult. There was even a fake Fleetwood Mac out on the road, put together by the band’s manager. Fleetwood suggested to the McVies that they take a drastic step to cure their ills: move to California.
“We had been successful and now we weren’t,” Fleetwood says. “Nothing was happening. But Peter Green had an incredibly generous principle, which was that you could bring new people into the band and allow them to be themselves rather than tell them what to do. That saved Fleetwood Mac.”
Fleetwood was in the Laurel Canyon Country Store in the Hollywood Hills, doing his weekly shopping, when he bumped into an L.A. scenester he vaguely knew. “This guy had a job hustling people to work in a studio called Sound City, so I put the groceries in the back of my beat-up old Cadillac and drove down there with him. The producer Keith Olsen played me two tracks from an album he had recorded by a duo called Buckingham Nicks, just to demonstrate the (studio’s recording quality). Next day I called Keith and said: ‘You know that tape you played?’”
Buckingham was a broodingly handsome, intensely creative guitarist and songwriter from Palo Alto, Calif. Nicks, his girlfriend since high school, was a strikingly beautiful singer with a Gypsy glamour and a drawled, girlish vocal style. Together they captured a very Californian take on the hippie dream: narcissistic, slightly cosmic, but sophisticated. The album, Buckingham Nicks, bombed, making Fleetwood’s offer of joining Fleetwood Mac for about $600 a week particularly appealing for Nicks, who was working as a waitress and cleaner.
“Lindsey didn’t actually want to join,” Fleetwood says. “He was on his own creative quest with Buckingham Nicks, he’s never been commercially minded, and while Stevie has always been a great band member, Lindsey struggles with it. She convinced him that they should dump what they were doing and put all their ideas into Fleetwood Mac, that it was a way to make a bit of money, and if they didn’t like it they could always leave. I didn’t know that at the time.”
“Mick was wise,” Christine McVie says. “He told me that if I didn’t like Stevie we wouldn’t get them in the band because he knew that having two women that didn’t get along would be a nightmare. We all met at Mick’s flat, and Stevie and I were so completely different from each other that we got along fine. I was intimidated by the quality of the songs on Buckingham Nicks. It made me get my skates on.”
What followed was the beginning of the most compelling soap opera in the history of pop. The new lineup had a major hit in 1975, but by the following year, when Fleetwood Mac went into the studio to record what would become Rumours, the couples in the band were in trouble. Nicks addressed her situation in the reflective, affectionate Dreams, which suggests that Buckingham will come back to her when loneliness hits. Buckingham responded with the dismissive Go Your Own Way.
“The atmosphere in the studio was ... charged,” says Fleetwood, an understatement that speaks volumes. “Here were people who loved each other but couldn’t be together, and it translated into a mutant form of fear and loathing. It was awkward, because you don’t normally spend time with someone at the beginning of a breakup. Recording the album was like divorced parents trying to do the right thing for their children, and our child was Fleetwood Mac. We put in a heroic effort to keep it together.”
“All of these great songs were coming out of a very trying period and none of us wanted to ruin that,” says Christine McVie, who wrote You Make Loving Fun, Songbird and Don’t Stop during the turmoil. “John and I would create an icy silence that everyone was aware of, Stevie and Lindsey would be screaming at each other on the other side of the room. Even when the nightmarish hell of the two couples was at its absolute worst, we knew we were capturing what we were all thinking about. It’s why the truth of the emotions on Rumours jumps out of the grooves.”
Then there was the cocaine. “I didn’t even know what cocaine was until I went to Los Angeles,” says Fleetwood who, according to other band members, made up for lost time with astonishing enthusiasm. “Yes, we were wild and crazy, but we worked incredibly hard, which is always the case with the bands that have survived. We were never too stoned to play.”
Fleetwood Mac survived in spite of all the things — success, excess, money, broken romances, affairs — usually guaranteed to pull a band apart. Fleetwood puts it down to the fact that they made their biggest album without a manager. “A manager would have taken one look at Stevie and said: ‘ What are you doing with these guys?’ You’re the star.”
Now the band has recorded eight new Buckingham songs — there are suggestions of an album release for 2014 — and are gearing up for their world tour. This is in spite of the fact Buckingham is still reticent about giving up his solo career for the band, almost 40 years after Nicks first convinced him to do it. “When I spoke to Lindsey about getting the band together last year, he said: ‘Don’t give me that Mick push, that guilt thing you do,’” Fleetwood says. “Stevie was off on her never-ending solo tour, and I was coming to terms with the fact that it might be time to let go. Then Lindsey called up. Now concerts are selling, people are excited and something is happening.”