EXCLUSIVE: Fleetwood Mac drummer tells Salon new “Rumours” stories, reflects on Stevie Nicks affair, shares regrets
The Mick Fleetwood pictured on the back of his new memoir, “Play On: Now, Then and Fleetwood Mac,” looks fabulously content. This is the rock star as elegant dandy, stylish in tails, draped in an accent of gold jewelry, a trim white beard. It’s an advertisement for the good life, if not living right.
Crazy, isn’t it? Because the Fleetwood on the cover has a wicked gleam in his eye, as he peers out from under a rakish hat, hair down around his shoulders. This is the Fleetwood of the mid-t0-late ’70s, the drummer whose band was re-energized by the arrival of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, who recorded 1975′s “Fleetwood Mac” with “white powder peeling off the walls of every room” in the studio.
But the madness was only beginning: The relationships of Buckingham and Nicks, along with John and Christine McVie, were unraveling amidst angst, affairs and mountains of cocaine. “Rumours” chronicled the dissolution of it all, selling tens of millions of albums worldwide. They were among the biggest bands in the world, and they lived every moment of it to the extreme. “The drugs of course were plentiful,” Fleetwood writes, “and we partook of the finest Peruvian flake quite a bit, both to numb the pain and to find the energy to persevere.” Continue reading Mick Fleetwood on “Rumours”-era excess: “I’m damn lucky I never killed anyone!” | Salon
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