{"id":5192,"date":"2021-02-04T13:14:21","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T13:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/?p=5192"},"modified":"2021-02-04T13:14:24","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T13:14:24","slug":"sex-drugs-n-rock-n-roll-the-story-of-fleetwood-macs-rumours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/2021\/02\/sex-drugs-n-rock-n-roll-the-story-of-fleetwood-macs-rumours\/","title":{"rendered":"Sex, Drugs, n\u2019 Rock n\u2019 Roll: The Story of Fleetwood Mac\u2019s \u201cRumours\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Though Adam and Eve may have invented the concepts of romance and betrayal, almost 6,000 years later, three English blues artists and two California hippies owned the concept of heartbreak.  The story of how the Fleetwood Mac five recorded the album Rumours <\/em>sounds a lot like Spinal Tap<\/em>, minus the spontaneous combustion. But make no mistake, this one also goes to eleven. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christine and John McVie had just been divorced, Mick Fleetwood had been recently cuckolded by his best friend, and Lindsey Buckingham had just called it quits with Stevie Nicks. Coming off their eponymous 1975 hit, the stakes were higher than ever to produce something great. In addition to taking it out on each other, each band member fueled their stress, mania, and artistry into their music. Rumours<\/em> was not a masterpiece in spite of the drama, it was a masterpiece because of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before Fleetwood Mac defined the west coast sound of the seventies, it was a popular English blues band. In the mid-1960s, all that mattered to the world were the Beatles, ushering in a period of classic rock dominated by the British. American music, and specifically, the blues, as practiced by Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Sonnyboy Williamson, Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy, elevated an otherwise weak British music scene. Enter John Mayall\u2019s Bluesbreakers, featuring a star-studded cast including Mick Taylor, Eric Clapton, and Peter Green, that would later form parts of the Rolling Stones, Cream, and Fleetwood Mac, respectively.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Eric Clapton who was then a little-known \u201cslowhand\u201d guitarist left the band to form Cream, he was replaced by Peter Green. Thought by many to be better than Clapton, Green was a virtuosic guitarist with a strong voice. He left the Bluesbreakers in 1967 to found a new band. He named his band Fleetwood Mac, as a combination of their drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie\u2019s last names. Green then recruited a strange, introverted guitarist, Jeremy Spencer, to counteract his lugubrious guitar playing. Little did they know that only two of them would last.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The group immediately rose to fame in England, but a strange combination of psychedelics, lunacy, and religious cults took out many of their key players. Peter Green was becoming increasingly unhappy as the band\u2019s leader, and in a blues scene dominated by Eric Clapton, he hired eighteen-year-old Danny Kirwan to be his third guitarist and the band\u2019s teenage heartthrob. However, LSD eventually drove Green over the edge. He began to dress like Christ and act erratically until he suddenly left the band and was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1970.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Besides two solo albums in the seventies, his career fell with Fleetwood Mac. He passed away this July and is now known as one of psychedelic rock and the blues\u2019 greatest lost potentials. Green\u2019s absence caused a power vacuum in the blues and a tremor in The Mac. He was replaced by singer, songwriter, and keyboardist Christine Perfect, whose marriage to John McVie officially secured her contract.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jeremy Spencer, who rarely interacted with the others, spearheaded their first record without Green, 1970\u2019s Kiln House. On the American tour for this album, he disappeared from their hotel in Los Angeles. When they found him, he went by the name Joshua and had joined a religious cult, the Children of God. In a time where they were trying to redefine their sound, the loss of Spencer was a huge blow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Danny Kirwan and Christine McVie emerged as leaders, pushing them towards mainstream rock. However, he too collapsed under pressure and turned to alcoholism and addiction. After smashing his guitar and refusing to play at a concert, guitarist Bob Welch replaced him, and the era of the Mac that followed, though largely forgotten, was crucial in developing the band\u2019s characteristic west coast sound. He, too, became an alcoholic and started his own band, Paris. This left Mick and the McVie\u2019s desperately searching for a seventh guitarist in seven years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is when steamy, pot-smokin\u2019 California lovers Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham entered the picture. However, no one joined Fleetwood Mac without surrendering their sanity at the door. Fleetwood and McVie first heard the soft rock duo\u2019s album Buckingham-Nicks<\/em> when they were auditioning engineers for their next album. Fleetwood, who was the de-facto leader, wanted Buckingham on the guitar, but he claimed he and Stevie were a package deal. Legend has it that when Fleetwood was looking for a studio, he pressed a random button and along came the angelic voice of Stevie Nicks. After listening to all of their records, he hired them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only did Stevie and Lindsey bring back the screaming girls and sold out shows that The Mac had experienced in the sixties, but they gave the band a new face and sound. Lindsey was a beast on the guitar and had a Cali pop vision that gave them a distinct yet catchy sound. \u201cHe can sing the rainbow,\u201d said Tess McGarvey (Form IV). Stevie, a hippie gypsy with a sexy voice and wild curly hair, had a powerful stage presence and a mystical witch persona that made her the face of the band. The two of them could both write music, but their real talents emerged on stage: their sexual tension and pure musicianship soon turned them into rock\u2019s favorite couple.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their first chapter with the band, 1975\u2019s eponymous album, was the Mac\u2019s first true west coast record, which combined the folk and pop backgrounds of Stevie and Lindsey with the blues of the original Fleetwood Mac. Riding on the success of singles such as \u201cOver My Head,\u201d \u201cRhiannon,\u201d and\u00a0 \u201cSay You Love Me,\u201d the album gradually became a number one hit, selling over five million copies in the US alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though business was booming, the band was as fragile as ever going into the production of Rumours. On top of the pressure to produce another hit, each of their personal lives was crumbling behind the scenes. John, a struggling alcoholic, and Christine McVie divorced in 1976 after around six years of marriage.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, Stevie and Lindsey broke up. Their relationship, which was on and off since she joined him singing \u201cCalifornia Dreamin\u2019\u201d at a karaoke party in 1966, was practically a marriage. While John and Christine took the English approach of silence, Lindsey and Stevie had frequent screaming matches during production. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as if that wasn\u2019t enough, Mick Fleetwood left his wife, Jenny Boyd, when he learned she was having an affair with his best friend and former colleague Bob Weston. To spice things up even more, Mick fell for Stevie, and Christine fell for the lighting director. As John McVie said, \u201cabout the only people in the band who haven\u2019t had an affair are me and Lindsey,\u201d and, knowing Fleetwood Mac, it wouldn\u2019t have been surprising if they had. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With all the drama and artistic clashes, and the pressure to succeed hanging over it all, the studio felt more like Guantanamo Bay than the Golden State. Confined to a windowless wood madhouse on the outskirts of San Francisco, the band spent every waking moment together until the end of time (when Mick removed all the clocks). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To endure the long hours of psychological torture, the band resorted to alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine. Ken Caillat, Rumours<\/em> producer and engineer, describes a continental divide in the drug scene: \u201cThere were the blues Fleetwood Mac from England \u2013 they were the boozers and that was pretty much what they did. And there was the California Fleetwood Mac \u2013 they were the pot-smoking hippies with Lindsey and Stevie. Then the cocaine entered the picture. So it was booze versus pot really, with a little cocaine cocktail.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amidst their purple haze came a range of wild tales, from the brilliant idea of crediting their drug dealer on the album cover to the report that Stevie preferred ingesting cocaine up her\u2026 But this was just a symptom of the rock n\u2019 roll lifestyle to them. At the time, there was a sense that anything was possible in the music industry. Being isolated, with hours of darkness in the studio, there was talk of a rebellion brewing against the establishment and a rivalry between the life of rock n\u2019 roll and authority. Whether this reflection was sincere or just a psychedelic trip, to Fleetwood Mac, it was the perfect excuse to do drugs.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sheer volume of emotion in that studio combined with substances, sex, and the sting of betrayal, gave the artists so much to write about. Thus, Rumours<\/em> essentially became a collection of each of their individual stories, as opposed to a conventional record. Each song was a shot at another member of the band, but they were all forced to play. Unlike other great breakup albums, this is the only example where you can hear the couples singing and playing alongside each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The band was not confident that this approach would work. Sarah Abenante (Form IV) describes it as taking \u201ctwo steps forward and two steps back,\u201d referring to the offbeat yet masterful flow of one song to the next. With the thematic similarities and musical genius, they were able to tie together these seemingly disparate memoirs into one cohesive album.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lindsey Buckingham fires three shots at Stevie Nicks with \u201cSecond Hand News,\u201d \u201cNever Going Back Again,\u201d and \u201cGo Your Own Way\u201d in Rumours<\/em>. He kicks off the album with a groovy yet grim bop in, \u2018Second Hand News\u2019. Temporarily titled \u201cStrummer,\u201d the song was intended as an instrumental to spare Nicks\u2019 feelings. Though it takes on a playful California flavor, in reality, it is a call to Nicks, to the band, and to all broken hearts, to take it easy and move on. The first words of the album,  \u201cI know there\u2019s nothin\u2019 to say, someone has taken my place,\u201d show just how quickly he thinks he can get over Stevie. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNever Going Back Again\u201d might just be Lindsey\u2019s most beautiful and arrogant song. It is his pledge to leave Stevie in the dust after meeting a woman who meant nothing to him, and even Lindsey himself has called this naive. However, once again, he masquerades his true motives behind a breezy acoustic. Finally, he unleashes the fury and pulls the plug in \u201cGo Your Own Way.\u201d Instead of another catchy soft-rock tune, he channels his angst into fierce drums and guitar, ripping Stevie to shreds and calling game over.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lindsey\u2019s music would mean nothing without Stevie to shove it right back in his face. One day during production, she plopped into someone else\u2019s bed, and wrote \u201cDreams\u201d in ten minutes. \u201c[In \u2018Go Your Own Way\u2019] Lindsey is saying go ahead and date other men and go live your crappy life, and [I\u2019m] singing about the rain washing you clean. We were coming at it from opposite angles, but we were really saying the same exact thing,\u201d said Nicks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her dark and husky vocals, with a powerful message and an unforgettable beat, turned this simple doodle into the band\u2019s only number one hit. However, what she thought would be her greatest moment on the record, \u201cSilver Springs,\u201d was too long to make the cut. A somber reflection on what she and Lindsey could have been, it was replaced by \u201cI Don\u2019t Want to Know,\u201d a cheery love song from the days of Buckingham-Nicks. The final song on the album, \u201cGold Dust Woman,\u201d might just be her masterpiece. An ode to her own struggles, it is a tale of surviving the life of sex and drug addiction. Before she leaves, she asks the listener, \u201cIs it over now? Do you know how to pick up the pieces and go home?\u201d When she poses this question, she asks whether moving on is possible, or if she has already sold her soul to drugs and rock n\u2019 roll. Like the band itself, Stevie was made of gold dust, shiny and successful on the outside but broken on the inside. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though Stevie and Lindsey may have been the crowd favorites, Christine McVie was at the heart of Rumours. The positive attitude she poured into her songs, even though she had just been divorced, made Lindsey and Stevie seem like twisted ghouls. Instead of roasting her ex-husband, John McVie, she wishes him the best in \u201cDon\u2019t Stop.\u201d Her wishes for him mirror her dream of a future where her divorce is merely an afterthought. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Bill Clinton selected this as his official campaign song, he reunited the band to perform at his inauguration in 1993. Her genius as a pianist, singer, and songwriter truly shines through in Songbird, a love song about nobody that resonates with everybody. Her ex-husband said, \u201cWhen Christine played \u2018Songbird,\u2019 grown men would weep.\u201d Far from a tear-jerker, Christine sings about how great is to have sex with the lighting director in \u201cYou Make Loving Fun.\u201d Not to be confused with a stupid love story, this is a woman claiming her rugged rockstar sexuality, and making a hell of a song out of it in the process. \u201cOh Daddy\u201d might be the darkest song of Chris\u2019 career. Though it may have been hinting at Mick Fleetwood, the band\u2019s only father, it tells the story of a woman in a degrading and loveless relationship, likely in reference to her fling with the lighting director.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though Rumours<\/em> is known for its breakups, the one thing that never broke was \u201cThe Chain.\u201d In an album characterized by three strong solo voices, it’s impossible to tell who\u2019s who and what\u2019s what in \u201cThe Chain.\u201d The only song in their history to be written by all five members of the band, it consisted of many parts jumbled together into one powerful piece. Each member had their heart broken that year, and for the first time, they came together to make one joint epic of betrayal. Though angsty and intense, brimming with energy in its screaming solos and dramatic harmonies, it is a beautiful song with a beautiful message at the end of the day. Despite the hell that Rumours <\/em>put them through, they were not planning on breaking up any time soon or so they thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rumours <\/em>is both Fleetwood Mac at its greatest and at its worst. Fleetwood Mac was never, by any means, a stable band. With the revolving door of drug addicts, lunatics, and cult members, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood were the only artists to appear on all of their albums.  Yet, by the time the five had settled in for Rumours<\/em>, the damage was irreversible. Though the album was the second biggest success in US history, and the tour was a hit, it was all downhill from there. Despite the release of big hits through the eighties, they never returned to the glory of Rumours<\/em>. However, at the same time, Rumours <\/em>would not have existed without the drama. And though it may have led to their downfall, it was definitely worth it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast forward to today, and Fleetwood Mac has clawed its way back to popularity. McGarvey describes \u201ctote bag wearing, Kombucha drinking, flower crown people,\u201d referring to the older generation of hippies that keep the old school and blues Fleetwood Mac alive. Of course, due to its historic success, Fleetwood Mac is no secret and maintains its reputation as one of classic rock\u2019s greatest bands.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abenante describes Fieldston students as students with a general love for the arts and that appreciate classic rock, although they may only know the songs as background music on the radio. Though the majority of Gen Z brands classic rock as \u201cold dad music\u201d and throws it aside, Rumours<\/em> recently found its way back into the top ten. Thanks to a TikTok trend of a man drinking Ocean Spray cranberry juice on a skateboard while listening to \u201cDreams,\u201d classic rock has finally infiltrated Gen Z. Honestly, Fleetwood Mac has seen a lot weirder stuff in their day. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Though Adam and Eve may have invented the concepts of romance and betrayal, almost 6,000 years later, three English blues artists and two California hippies owned the concept of heartbreak.  The story of how the Fleetwood Mac five recorded the album Rumours sounds a lot like Spinal Tap, minus the spontaneous combustion. But make no mistake, this one also goes to eleven.  Christine and John McVie had just been divorced, Mick Fleetwood had been recently<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":288,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[319,318],"tags":[],"coauthors":[410],"class_list":["post-5192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/288"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5192"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5193,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5192\/revisions\/5193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5192"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}