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.

The whole band. Chris and John’s seven-year marriage was already over by then. Stevie and Lindsey’s relationship, four years old, dissolved when Stevie walked out And my wife, Jenny, and I… Well, the story follows shortly.

In the past, events like these would have killed Fleetwood Mac. But not now. We all knew it was too late to stop. So we kept the band together, continued to work and proceeded to make the best music of our career in the form of a record that would become one of the big-gest-selling albums in history.

But the hell we went through, in that year of 1976, really cannot be adequately described.

Yesterday’s gone. Thank God.

I BLAME MYSELF FOR THE SITUATION THAT LED UP TO Jenny and me ending our marriage.

It all began in 1975, when I became so immersed in managing Fleetwood Mac and seeing it succeed that I began to neglect Jenny again. I wasn’t seeing anyone else, but I was either in the studio or on the road, and she felt ignored. In frustration she had a fling or two. I didn’t know much about it, but I said, okay, let’s get through it and carry on.

Jenny is better at this sort of thing than I, so I’ll ask her to continue:

“The children and I never saw Mick, and we felt abandoned. Yet Mick and I couldn’t verbalize to each other. Our feelings were pent-up. “I had something of a breakdown then. It happened at a barbecue at our house in Topanga Canyon. I was feeling a bit crazy. John Courage, the band’s road manager, was teasing me about something, and I just snapped. I began to punch and pummel Mick in front of everybody. I was screaming and hysterical. I looked up and saw that Mick had a helpless look on his face. He didn’t know what was wrong because he didn’t know how unhappy I was. They put me to bed, and I started having convulsions. It was a major-league breakdown. “When I felt a little better, I told Mick that if we didn’t separate I might do myself in. Once again, there was almost no reaction. So I moved out into a little flat, and we had almost no communication. Then I had a car crash, and Mick was furious with me. Eventually, Mick said he wanted a divorce. So I took the girls and went back to England. And as soon as my feet touched British soil, I felt better. It was so wonderful to be away from the crazy world I had been living in.”

THE DIVORCE DIDN’T REALLY HIT ME TOO HARD AT first, because I just kept working. It finally got to me when I had to ask Jenny to return my balls, the ones my sister Sally had given to me on my twenty-first birthday, little silver balls to match the wooden balls I wore on stage, which I’d taken from the pull chains of old-fashioned pub toilets. I put them on my key chain, and soon they became dented from being thrown out the window so visitors to our flat on Kensington Church Street could get into the house without our having to trek down the stairs. When we got divorced, Jenny took the car and with it the keys. So when I had to ask for my balls back, that was the point it hit me that we weren’t together anymore and it was my own stupid fault. It was a terrible feeling.

John and Chris were only nominally married at that point. She’d been seeing our lighting director Curry Grant in secret while we were on the road. John suspected something was going on. He’d say to me, “He’s doing her, you know.’

“No, no, no, John, it’s all in your mind.” Soon Curry started having trouble with the rest of the crew; they saw what was happening and didn’t like it. It got so Curry couldn’t ride in the van with the rest of them. So John Courage and I confronted Chris, and she told us it was true. John was very upset, and we fired Curry because it was disrupting the band. Chris was told it had to be that way, and she understood.

That was our attitude. No matter how awful things became, the band had to come first. It was do-or-die. But it made touring very, very hard. Christine moved out of the house that she and John had bought in Topanga. After Chris left, John lived there for a while with another lady, but it didn’t work out. By then, John didn’t really fancy the idea of living in a house anyway. He went down to Marina del Rey, bought a fiberglass ketch that he named Adelie (after his favorite family of penguins) and lived on it for a year.

STEVIE AND LINDSEY BROKE UP AS WELL TO THIS DAY, I don’t know how it happened. I remember that Stevie went into the sessions for the new album as a single lady. At the time, she said something in a joking way about Lindsey’s being more interested in his guitar than he was in her. There was some conflict about the “crackin’ up, shackin’ up” line in “Go Your Own Way,” which Stevie felt was unfair and Lindsey felt strongly about. Much later, Stevie made her perspective clear to me:

“Suppose Lindsey wasn’t playing well on a particular song,” she said. “As his girlfriend, I should be a comfort to him, right? You know: Who cares about it? You’re great anyway!’ But I couldn’t, because I was also frustrated and saying, Look, if you could just get your guitar part tight, we could put the vocal on There was no way we could get any comfort from each other about wha went on in the band. There was no love, because every body was too nervous. And while we were traveling al the time, none of us had other friends to talk to.” Stevie has also said that the relationship between her and Lindsey was already a bit rocky when they joined the band. As Stevie started to express herself more, as she became a star, things didn’t get any better.

WE CAME OFF THE ROAD IN JANUARY 1976, JUST AFTER “Rhiannon” had been released as a single and had started to climb the charts. My next task was to find a studio where we could record the follow-up to Fleetwood Mac, which was about to be awarded a platinum album. I wasn’t sure where we were going to work, but I knew we should get out of town and not do it in L.A. I’ve always been in favor of throwing people into new situations; it’s healthy for any artist to change scene during a time of enforced creativity.

I’d heard good things about a studio called the Record Plant, near San Francisco in Sausalito, so I decided to take a look at the place. At the time I was seeing a very young blonde named Ginny, whom I had met on the road in Texas. Actually, Richard Dashut, our sound engineer, had met her first, but I’d taken a shine to her because she had freckles and reminded me of Jenny. So John Courage told Richard to hand her over – orders from the colonel – and I flew her in to L.A. from her hometown (on which occasion our crew played a nasty trick on me; someone called and threatened to have me jailed and deported for transporting an underage girl across a state line for immoral purposes!). We stayed at John’s house in Topanga for a few days; then I borrowed Chris’s Datsun, and we drove up to Sausalito to look a the studio. It seemed like a good place to work and came with a house we could live in, up in the Berkeley Hills, while we were recording. So I booked the studio for nine weeks and returned with the whole band, plus assorted friends and helpers, early in February to begin work.

Sausalito – that’s where the real Fleetwood Mac craziness started. Fleetwood Mac had been recorded in a quick three months. This new album would take us almost a year, during which we spoke to each other in clipped, civil tones while sitting in small, airless studios listening to each other’s songs about our shattered relationships. I mean, it was heavy. We all felt so fragmented and fragile.

While we were at the Record Plant, Stevie and Christine lived in a rented apartment in the nearby marina; we lads were in the Plant’s house in the hills. Immediately rumors began to fly about who was seeing whom after hours. And the studio itself proved to be a bizarre place to work. The centerpiece of the place was what was referred to as Sly Stone’s Pit. This was a sunken lounge, heavily carpeted in revolting, bordellolike burgundy shag, in which Mr. Stone would seclude himself when he was using the facility. The pit was acoustically dead and boasted its own nitrous oxide tank. We didn’t really use this room (it was usually occupied by people we didn’t know, tapping razors on mirrors), but some of us did go in there to pray from time to time.

These sessions were almost indescribably difficult from the beginning. Let’s let Richard Dashut set the tone:

“They started out recording with the Record Plant’s own engineer, but then they fired him after four days for being too into astrology. I was there, basically keeping Lindsey company, and Mick takes me into the parking lot. ‘Guess what?’ he says with a smile. ‘You’re doing it’ You can imagine how I was both excited and scared. I hadn’t even worked on their last record. Since Fleetwood Mac had always produced their own records with an engineer, here I was being asked to coproduce this crucial second album. At that point I wasn’t sure I could handle it, so I brought in a friend from L.A., Ken Caillat, to help me, and we started coproducing. Mick gave me and Ken each an old Chinese I Ching coin and said good luck.

“All I can say is that it was trial by ordeal, and the craziest period of our lives. We went four or five weeks without sleep, doing a lot of drugs. I’m talking about cocaine in such quantities that at one point I thought I was really going insane. The whole atmosphere was really tense, with arguments all the time and people storming in and out. To relieve the tension, we’d look for sexual release, but even that didn’t help much. The only refuge was in the music.

“Ar one point, things got so tense between us all the I remember sleeping under the sound board one night because I felt it was the only safe place to be. The work days would drag on for eighteen to twenty hours, and eventually the amount of cocaine began to do damage. You’d do what you thought was your best work, and then come back next day; it would sound terrible, so you’d rip it all apart and start again.

“And yet, I turn on the radio today, and they’re sil playing that album. Our system worked for us. Our attitude is, If that’s what it took, so be it.”

The work itself was difficult enough. Trying to pulit all together in the midst of an emotional holocaust was really outrageous. John and Chris were only barely peaking to each other. Stevie was upset and confused cause she was the one who had walked out on Lindsey, who in turn was pretty down until he decided he didn’t’ want to be unhappy and alone and started getting some girlfriends together. This upset Stevie even more. There were many ill-concealed arguments and floods of tears. Then John took up with Sandra Ellsdon, who had been Peter Green’s girlfriend, which bothered Chris, who still had feelings for John. Oh, God, it was a real bloody soap opera And I was piggy-in-the-middle, the grand mediator between the warring parties and the father figure whose job it was to urge on the troops. “We must carry on,” I could hear myself saying “C’mon, let’s be mature about this. Let’s sort it out. We’ve got work to do.” Yet Piggy had raw feelings of his own, because Jenny had come back to Los Angeles and taken up with our friend Andy Sylvester, who had been the bass player in Christine’s old band, Chicken Shack, my flatmate back in Ealing and then our roommate in Kensington Church Street. Later Andy had migrated to Los Angeles, and when Jenny returned, she and the kids moved in with him near Fairfax. Oh, the pain I felt. He was one of my best friends. It was as if she had left me for my younger brother. I remember talking to Andy on the telephone from Sly Scone’s Pit: “Andy, whatever you do, take good care of them.” The same old lines that people always say in these situations.

And the atmosphere kept getting nuttier. The studio was full of weirdos we’d never seen before, partying with each other while we tried to work. And we were certainly doing our fair share of the old powder. There was one coke dealer who kept us supplied with high-grade Peruvian flake, and we were so grateful to him that I considered (in my state of dementia) giving him some kind of credit on the album jacket. Unfortunately he got snuffed – executed! – before the thing came out.

Then there was the Thousand-Dollar Cookie Session. Stevie’s girlfriend Robin had prepared some fresh hashish brown-ies. Be careful, she said, these things are really strong But the band ignored the advertised potency and gobbled freely. We spent the night in such a bent condition that not a note was played and the engineers went home. John and Stevie spent hours huddled in a corner, giggling like mad over a copy of Playboy.

We spent two months in the studio, completely obsessed with getting it right. At one point, we wasted four expensive days trying to tune a piano. It seemed that the piano in Studio B wouldn’t stay in tune, and Fleetwood Mac had always been picky about tuning. So we called in a guy we dubbed the Looner Tuner, a man with all these tattoos who somehow couldn’t manage to get the thing the way we wanted it. We got even more obsessive and brought in a blind guy to tune the thing, and it still didn’t sound right. Then we went through about nine different pianos, and then we ended up not using any of those tracks anyway. Another time we spent days working on the drum sound, at one point gaffer-taping two bass drums together into one long tube in an attempt to capture the tone we were searching for. Then there was Jaws. This was the nickname that we gave to a tape machine that acquired an appetite for eating (and destroying) fresh takes.

And yet there were some triumphs in all this. I vividly remember the night Stevie cut “Gold Dust Woman.’ We’d been in Sausalito for a month, and were beginning to get urgent phone calls from Warner Bros., which was wondering how we were doing. We didn’t want to admit that we were beset by romantic turmoil and that the only thing holding us together was a thread of Mac family cohesion. For me it was Stevie, physically the most fragile of us all, who exemplified the drive to create and prevail.

I recall she did her first vocal track of “Gold Dust Woman” in a fully lit studio. The song needed both a mysterious power and a lot of emotionality. As take followed take, Stevie began to withdraw into herself, reaching inside for the magic. The lights were dimmed; a chair was brought in so she could sit, saving her strength at three in the morning; and she wrapped herself in a big cardigan to ward off the predawn chill. An hour later, she was almost invisible in the shad-ows, elfin under big head-phones, hunched over ir er chair, alternatel) choosing from her supply of tissues, a Vicks inhaler, lozenges for her throat and a bottle of mineral wa-ter. Gradually she gained total command of her song. On the eighth take, exhausted but exalted, she sang the lyric straight through to perfection.

THERE WAS ONE INCIDENT above all that convinced me our time in Sausalito had to end. We used to get up at eight o’clock at night and make our way to the studio. One night I arrived and found John there on his own, trying to get a bass part right. I could not believe what I saw. There was tough, brutally cynical John McVie staring at this picture of the notorious teenage “perfect master,” Maharaj Ji. John was kneeling down in front of the console, concentrating on this guru and trying to nail his bass part. I took this as a signal. We’d been in Sausalito long enough.

Just before we left, I had a strange premonition. We were sitting around the studio, playing the rough cassette mixes of the work we’d done. Fleetwood Mac had gone platinum, and there was the usual concern and fear about whether this follow-up would do as well. When the tape ran out, I said that this new album was going to do much better, that it could even sell as many as 8 or 9 million copies if our momentum held. The others laughed, and someone touched wood.

The strange thing is that this turned out to be a very conservative guess.

WHEN WE GATHERED AGAIN IN LOS ANGELES TO LISTEN to the tapes of the work we’d done in Sausalito, we were – aghast at how awful they sounded. The tapes sounded strange. We tried switching speakers and then switched studios, but they still sounded bad to us. It was suggested that the cursed Jaws had somehow ruined them, and deep depression set in. For a while it looked like we were going to have to start all over again.

Then someone found a mixing room on the Holly. wood Boulevard porno strip where the tapes sounded… well, good enough to work with. It was there, between sleazy theaters playing films like Dick City and Squin, that the new album was molded. All the Sausalito tracks were stripped down to the drum tracks, and we started to dub new instrumental parts and vocals. Once again, the inaudible sounds of breaking hearts filled the psychic air. The three writers – Chris, Stevie and Lindsey – continued to communicate with each other via their new songs “It was very clumsy sometimes” John Mc Vie said later. “I’d be sitting there in the studio while they were mixing ‘Don’t Stop, and I’d listen to the words, which were mostly about me, and I’d get a lump in my throat. Id turn around, and the writer’s sitting right there.”

At that point, we had to leave off recording for a while and go out on the road for most of the summer. A bunch of big outdoor shows supporting the red-hot Eagles began on July 2nd at the Greensboro Coliseum. On the American Bicentennial – July 4th, 1976 – we played Tampa Stadium with the Eagles; this was truly a gig I’ll never forget. As I looked out into the crowd that packed the massive field and stands, I beheld hundreds – no, thousands – of girls dressed exactly like Stevie in black chiffon dresses and top hats. At the point in our set when Lindsey began to play the guitar intro to “Rhiannon” and Stevie walked out and intoned, “This is a song about a Welsh witch,” these girls went mad, swaying and singing and giving themselves to the music, to Stevie and to the spirit of the ancient Celtic goddess. By now, “Rhiannon” had become one of the focal points of the set. Graceful and mysterious in her diaphanous chiffon, Stevie sent us into a dimension that can only be described as mystic. I would look at her, dancing with her eyes closed, and I could see she was in heen. By our reviews I could see that a lot of people were jumping in and reading all sorts of stuff into this performance. Only nine months earlier, Stevie’s reviews had been so bad she thought abour leaving the band. But now the critics were calling her the most compelling wornan in rock music. And I felt the same way. Onstage she was like a goddess, or a high priestess of music and poetry. I began to develop a rap port and friendship with Stevie and did all I could to spend as much time with her as possible.

The tension between Stevie and Lindsey was very real Stevie was still quite dependent on Lindsey to provide musical direction and settings for her songs, and she resented this dependence. Lindsey was still feeling sorrow that Sevie had left him, while Stevie feared that her music would lose its appeal without Lindsey’s guiding hand.

In addition, Lindsey felt jealous, since new men were being drawn to the now-single Stevie like honeybees to a gorgeous, pollen-laden blossom. And the fact thar Stevie was being courted by the Eagles’ Don Henley didn’t really help matters. He had called earlier, asking to meet her. They talked on the phone a few times but hadn’t met when we played our first show with Henley’s band. So we get to our dressing room. Stevie, who is quite shy, wasn’t at all the type to go over and introduce herself. So when she enters the dressing room, she sees a huge bouquet of roses and a card, which read, “The best of my love… Tonight? Love, Don.”

Stevie was furious. She thought it was the least cool approach anyone had ever made in the history of romance. They hadn’t even met! She didn’t notice me and McVie, collapsed in the corner with hysterical laughter. Finally, Christine had to take Stevie aside. Don didn’t send that note, Chris said. Mick and John did. It was a while before Stevie felt like talking to either of us again.

FINALLY, ON SEPTEMBER 4TH, 1976, ‘FLEETWOOD MAC’ inched ahead of Frampton Comes Alive and emerged as the Number One album on the Billboard chart. At last! After some fifty-six weeks on the chart, the last few at Number Two. We stayed on top for one week, but it was all we needed to feel like we were the greatest. It gave us immeasurable confidence and provided all the more reason to finish our new album, which we had decided to call Yesterday’s Gone, after a line in “Don’t Stop.” Like everything else on the face of the planet, this too would change.

IN OCTOBER, WE SPENT TEN DAYS IN LONDON TO TALK to the European press. When we landed back in Los Angeles, they almost deported us. John, Chris, Colonel Courage and I were still British subjects who had arrived on tourist visas years earlier.

So Mickey Shapiro, our lawyer, had to embark on the process of getting us our green cards, which would confer immigrant status on us and allow us to work legally in the land of the free and the home of the brave. This proved to be a substantial problem: There had been juvenile marijuana arrests back in England So a tremendous paper shuffle occurred. First Jenny and I had to get married again, so she and our daughters, Amy and Lucy, would be legal as well. We dutifully were re-wed, six months after our divorce, with Lindsey Buckingham serving, as best man. Although we followed this course only as a legal formality, I was happy to be reunited with my family. We bought a lovely house high up over To panga Canyon – my first real plunge into the Fleetwood Mar boory – that featured a stunning view and plenty of privacy. To this we added a couple of new rooms, a litle recording studio and a miniature house for the girk. We were starting to make some real money now. It was nice to bring in a top decorator and tell her, quite breezily, to do this and please bill my business manager.

AS 1976 DREW TO A CLOSE AND WE WERE WRAPPING up our new album, John McVie came up with a new title for it: Rumours.

It was brilliantly ape. It seemed at the time that every one in the music business in L.A. had the exclusive inside scoop about the secret lives of Fleetwood Mac, and no one hesitated to circulate the most scurrilous tales. They said that Stevie was sleeping with me, that Christine had run off with Lindsey, that Stevie was seeing both John and me on alternate Wednesdays; that violent fistfights were commonplace in the studio; that Stevie was definitely leaving the band next Friday, that Stevie had left us months ago and this was the reason the new album had been delayed; then we were all crippled by mass quantities of alcohol and cocaine; that Stevie practised black magic and led a coven of witches in the Hollywood Hills.

So rampant were the rumors that sometimes we heard them fifth-hand, got worried and had to call each other up to make sure we were still sane and in touch. So we thought to call the album Rumours would have a nice touch of allure, interlaced with a healthy dose of irony.

We shipped 800,000 copies of Rumours to record dealers in February 1977. At the time, it was the largest advance order in the history of Warner Bros. Records. The cover depicted me and Stevie in our stage clothes, she in black chiffon and ballet shoes, me with my wooden balls hanging, In my left hand I’m holding the same crystal ball juggled by McVie on the cover of Fleetwood Mac.

Within a month, helped by massive airplay on the new soft-rock FM radio stations that were springing up around America, Rumours began to climb the charts, and the press began to spotlight some of the traumas and travails that we’d been undergoing, ROLLING STONE put us on its cover in bed with one another: Chris and Lindsey snuggled together under a sheet. Stevie and I cuddled in the middle. John kept his jeans on and is seen perusing a nudie magzine. Even though we all felt so much hearbreak at the time, we still somehow managed to laugh at ourselves.

WE HAD BEEN PLANNING OUR CONQUEST OF THE PLANET on behalf of Rumours for some time. To that end Fleetwood Mac convened at a rehearsal hall on Cahuenga Boulevard on February 4th and rehearsed every day for a month. Despite emotional hardships, psychic jujitsu and not having played regularly in months, the band sounded great. Stevie’s voice was a little raw; she had shredded her vocal cords singing the shit out of “Rhiannon” during the previous year, and the fragility of her throat caused us to cancel several weeks’ worth of gigs

We spent the month of March playing around America, mostly in big halls that seated from 10,000 to 15,000. Every-where, we encountered Stevie’s adoring fans, lovely girls in chiffon and witchy hats, who swayed and waved and sang along with Stevie on all her songs. By the end of March, Rumours was a platinum record, having sold a million copies in its first month of release.

As we hopped from Arena to Coliseum to Bowl to Dome to Stadium to Garden to Civic Center, we devised all sorts of ways to lighten the heavy psychic load of maximum performance on little rest. Each band member had his or her own limo. Our contracts with promoters carried an exhaustive refreshment rider, specifying in minute detail what kind of food and drink we required backstage. It was on this tour that Fleetwood Mac acquired its image of being a de luxe organi-zation; yet it was a reputation we cultivated without apology.

The high hopes and countless hours we had poured into Rumours were completely validated when the album slipped into the Number One chart position on May 21st, 1977, displacing Hotel California, by our colleagues and friendly rivals the Eagles. Rumours stayed at Number One on the Billboard and Cashbox charts for the next eight months, a total of thir-ty-one straight weeks. It would eventually sell over 20 million copies, more than any other album by a group; the only albums that have sold more are Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the Saturday Night Fever and Grease soundtracks.

That summer we played a month of massive outdoor shows with the Eagles, Boz Scaggs and others. I loved this part of the tour, because my parents came along and their enthusiasm cheered us all up. My father was aghast at the extravagance we lavished on the tour. He was quite amused by our spending thousands on a giant inflatable penguin, zeppelin-sized, which was supposed to float over the band at these big outdoor events. It would have been a full seventy feet tall, had it ever worked. Actually it did work once in Florida, but that was the end of it. Later Dad sent me a postcard that simply stated the obvious: “Penguins don’t fly”

Not everything was totally fabulous, as I recall. There were dark moments when the tremendous tensions and the inability to separate personal and business lives erupted into fierce battles, but the band never once let it affect the live shows. Perhaps as a result, our cocaine intake skyrocketed. The drug was rationed, according to our system, with people getting their supply at show time in Heineken bottle caps. Lives were put on hold by the topsy-turvy of the Road. The peak of our working day came after the shows, between midnight and one, when the rest of the world slumbered in their own beds. We were students of dislocation. All we wanted to know was, “How’s the coffee shop in the next hotel? And how late does room service serve?”

There were also concerns for Stevie’s instrument. Singing with her throat rather than her diaphragm, she began to have roblems, and her voice changed into a lower register. Was this caused by over-work? I don’t know, but we took her friend Robin Anderson, a voice therapist, on the road with us to try to train Stevie to use her voice differently. But it was like trying to tame a wild thing. Every night, at the climactic end of “Rhiannon,” Stevie would rip her voice to shreds. It was a sacrifice she chose to make for her art.

IN SEPTEMBER WE WENT UP TO THE Pacific Northwest, and from there to western Canada. It was there the old Veal Viper got me into trouble.

My basic premise has always been that I’m not a pig on the road. I’ve never chased girls in my life. Of course, I’ve had one or two, but they were supplied or seduced by their own dreams rather than by me. My usual after-show posture was a position I call Trancension: prone on bed with bottles) of beer and good sounds on the box, friends in the room, TV on, sound off.

Every time I ever tried to pull some girl, I got caught. Some rock star! Every fucking time! The lads would poke me and say “Go on Mick, she fancies you.” Every time, Caught red-handed. I think we were playing the Calgary Stampede, and we got drunk and wanted some women. We were too tired to go to a club, so we thought, “Let’s get some call girls!” No sooner said than done. Blind drunk, back to the hotel – which is in the process of undergoing some kind of riot. The memory fades in and out … Nice black girl … real nice… Im undoing the old fly buttons, preparing to launch the one-eyed trouser snake … and the phone rings!

The blood in my veins ceased to flow for a trice, and then froze. I shot to the phone, pants flapping around my ankles … but couldn’t… quite … get there in time. On some insane impulse, the girl picks up the phone. “Hello?”

It was Jenny.

I’m dying. Oh, my God!

“Who’s that?” Jenny asks.

“Oh, a few people in the room after the gig.” But Jenny knew, of course. I was caught fair and square. Jenny was disappointed and angry. So I’ve learned it’s just not worth it. I always suffer for it.

We continued on an exhausting pace through the autumn of that year. After twenty-three shows with only a day off here and there, traveling the length and breadth of the land, we were almost spent. Lindsey was so exhausted from fronting the band that he passed out in the shower in his Philadelphia hotel suite; it was later discovered he had a mild form of epilepsy.

We took a few days off in October, during which time Jenny moved us from rustic-but-removed Topanga to a Néw England colonial white clapboard home on Bellagio Drive in Bel Air. It was a lovely place that Jenny had found, on a quintessentially suburban street with a pool for the girls and multiple garages for my growing collection of automobiles. My parents came to stay with us. My dad had been diagnosed as having cancer, and the prognosis was not good. He was declining conventional chemotherapy treatment, preferring to use other, more holistic ways to fight the disease. Jenny tried to find a therapist who could help my father with his illness.

I was a complete wreck.

Later that month, we released “You Make Loving Fun,” which immediately sold another 2 million copies of Rumours. After only ten days at home with the family, Fleetwood Mac took wing for a late-fall turn around the Pacific – Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Hawaii. It was on this tour that some of the accumulated effects of the romance and passion that accrues to life on the road caught up with me. It was in Australia that I fell for Stevie Nicks.

Our affair really began in Los Angeles even before we left for the Pacific. I’d sneak away from home to spend most of my time with Stevie, picking her up in one of my cars and driving along Mullholland. She was seeing a record executive, and I was married, and my parents were living with me, so everything was very secret, imbuing subsequent events with a kind of supercharged aura of romance. In Australia this blossomed into a full-on love affair.

It started up in New Zealand. Late one night, after the concert, a Samoan limo driver took me and Stevie for a long cruise along the mountains and ridge backs at dawn. At one point we got out and walked a bit in silence, waiting for the sun to rise. There was a mist that turned to gentle rain, soaking us to our skin.

We were driven back to our hotel in a ferocious downpour, clinging to each other in the car. Up in her suite, I said, “I think I’d like to stay here tonight.”

—

TALES OF EXCESS

The atmosphere kept getting nuttier. The studio was full of weirdos we’d never seen before, partying while we tried to work. And we were certainly doing our fair share of the old powder. There was one coke dealer who kept us supplied with high-grade Peruvian flake, and we were so grateful to him that I considered (in my state of dementia) giving him some kind of credit on the album jacket. Unfortunately he got snuffed -executed! – before the thing came out.