Rolling Stone
September 20, 1990

In an excerpt from his upcoming book, Mick Fleetwood tells how ‘Rumours’ got started.

IN 1969, the English blues band Fleetwood Mac was one of the top groups in the world, outselling the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in Europe. But within two years, guitarist and chief songwriter Peter Green would leave the band after an LSD-induced religious conversion; second guitarist Jeremy Spencer would disappear into a California hippie cult; and third guitarist Danny Kirwan would suffer a breakdown while the band was touring.

That left drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie and singer-key-boardist Christine McVie to somehow carry on. In 1975, after relocating to Los Angeles, they hired a pair of starving American musicians, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.

Defying all expectations, the first album by the new lineup, Fleetwood Mac, became a huge hit, outselling all of the band’s previous albums. In this excerpt from Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac (which was written with Stephen Davis and will be published in October by William Morrow), Mick Fleetwood describes the volatile emotional climate that led to the artistic and commercial breakthrough of the follow-up album, Rumours.

AH, CRUEL FATE! Bitter destiny!

As Fleetwood Mac crawled and clawed our way back to the top, the gods were laughing at us and having sport. As Fleetwood Mac inched its way to the summit of the charts, our lives were snarled by disharmony and pain. In the year it took us to make our second album with the new lineup, the record that would change all our lives forever, we all got divorced.

Continue reading Fleetwood Mac by Mick Fleetwood with Stephen Davis →