Tuesday March 17 2020
The Times

Producer who turned Fleetwood Mac into superstars only to have a falling out when he banned them from taking drugs in the studio

On the last day of 1974, Keith Olsen received a phone call that was destined to change the face of popular music.

On the line was Mick Fleetwood, the drummer with Fleetwood Mac, calling from a payphone at Los Angeles airport. Olsen was booked to produce the struggling English band’s next album in the new year but Fleetwood had some bad news to impart. His services would no longer be required because Bob Welch, the group’s guitarist, singer and main songwriter, had quit and Fleetwood Mac were facing extinction.

The two put their heads together in search of a rescue plan. Olsen had recently discovered a talented young guitarist named Lindsey Buckingham and his girlfriend Stevie Nicks. They wrote songs together and Olsen had produced an album for them. The record had flopped and “sold bupkis”, as he put it: at the time of Fleetwood’s phone call the duo were without a recording contract and Nicks was working as Olsen’s house cleaner for $250 a month.

However, Fleetwood had heard their record and was one of the few to be impressed. Perhaps, he suggested, Buckingham might be persuaded to join Fleetwood Mac? Olsen told him that he thought it was unlikely and, in any case, they wouldn’t be split up and he came as a pair with Nicks.

“Well, maybe that will work. Can you see if you can convince them to join my band?” Fleetwood asked. Abandoning his new year plans, Olsen drove to the couple’s apartment, taking with him “the obligatory bottle of bad champagne”.

“I said, ‘Hey, happy new year’ and spent the whole night trying to convince the two of them to give up their own band and join Fleetwood Mac,” he recalled. “Neither one of them really wanted to join but they eventually agreed to give it a six-week trial.”

For Fleetwood Mac it was the last throw of the dice, but when Buckingham and Nicks began rehearsing with the group’s three surviving English members — Fleetwood, the bassist John McVie and the keyboardist Christine McVie — it was immediately evident that there was a chemistry between them. With Olsen producing, by the end of February they had recorded an album with Nicks and Buckingham writing or co-writing seven of the 11 songs.

Titled simply Fleetwood Mac to signify they were in effect a new band making a fresh start, Olsen helped the group to create a melodic and radio-friendly sound that came to define 1970s American soft rock.

At one point during the recording sessions, John McVie approached Olsen and told him, “Keith, you know we used to be a blues band?”

“Yeah, I know, John,” Olsen replied. “But it’s a lot shorter drive to this bank.”

The album went to No 1, sold seven million copies in the US alone and turned Fleetwood Mac from has-beens into global superstars. Not that Olsen got much thanks for it and an unseemly wrangle followed over his royalty payments. “There was a nasty lawsuit. I just wanted to get paid my percentage,” he said.

As a result he was not invited back to produce the even more successful follow-up Rumours and was replaced by Richard Dashut, who had been Olsen’s assistant engineer.

There were other issues, too, not least that Olsen banned drugs in his studio and by the time of Rumours Fleetwood Mac were living in a blizzard of cocaine. “I don’t think drugs ever did a great recording,” Olsen noted sternly.

He was wrong, for there is no denying that the drug-fuelled Rumours was “a great recording”. However, you could see his point. The album Olsen recorded with the band in 1975 took six weeks and was made on a tight budget. Without him, it took Fleetwood Mac six months to record Rumours, during which time they blew a million and a half dollars. At the time it was reported to be the most expensive album ever made.

By his own admission Olsen was also a “hands-on” producer who thought that even superstars needed his expert guidance. He refused to tiptoe around oversized egos and regarded rock star self-indulgence with a mixture of frustration and wry amusement.

“They’re on stage in front of millions of people all screaming, ‘You are the greatest’,” he recounted. “Then you get back to the studio to cut your next record and they write some song about this old rotten apple core. You suggest that maybe they rewrite it and they look at me and say, ‘No, because I am the greatest. How could all those people be wrong?’ ”

Asked if he was talking about Fleetwood Mac, he replied, “I think every single act I came across said that at one time or another.”

The sound Olsen fashioned with Fleetwood Mac on hit songs such as Rhiannonand Say You Love Me was a landmark in creating the smooth “adult-oriented rock” style that dominated the airwaves in the 1970s and 1980s and came to be known as AOR.

It also made him one of the most in-demand producers of the era. Over the next two decades Olsen produced slick AOR albums for Foreigner, Journey, Santana, Whitesnake, Pat Benatar and Heart among others.

He even braved and survived working with Ozzy Osbourne and was tasked by the record label boss Clive Davis with the improbable mission of giving the Grateful Dead’s freewheeling jams a soft-rock makeover on their 1977 album Terrapin Station. “I had no idea what I was getting myself into but you don’t say no to Clive,” he said. He was particularly exasperated by the communal entourage of “Deadheads” that accompanied the band and included their own cook and nutritionist. “When we are in the studio, we do too many drugs and we don’t take care of ourselves,” they told him. “She can present at least one healthy meal a day so we can survive the ordeal.”

To keep the band in and the cast of hippy extras out, Olsen took to having the studio door boarded up from the inside during recording sessions. “I did everything I could to make the Grateful Dead semi-commercial,” he noted. This included adding an orchestra and choir to the band’s acid rock, a sweetener that neither the Dead nor their hardcore fans appreciated. “He put the Grateful Dead in a dress,” the guitarist Jerry Garcia complained.

Olsen’s eventual tally as a producer ran to more than 200 albums, totalling sales in excess of 110 million. It was a schedule that made a stable family life difficult. His marriage to Wendy Bergdoll ended in divorce. He is survived by his daughters Kelly Castady and Kristen Olsen, son Nick Hormel and his partner, Janice Godshalk.

“It was non-stop producing records, and I just never saw the light of day,” he said. “Even holidays were not really holidays, sitting at a beach and writing out charts for my next act. After 25 years it got so much control over my life I had to stop.”

Keith Alan Olsen was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1945, the son of Lillian (née Aune) and Kenneth Olsen. His father worked for Firestone Tire and Rubber, and his mother was a housewife. When he was 12 the family moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota and he enjoyed what he called “a very mid-western cultural education founded in reality” in which his parents made him study hard.

He took piano and cello lessons and in his teens played in the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra under Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. It was his “first experience of hearing how you get musicians to play tight and to play together”, a youthful lesson that he later applied as a producer.

He enrolled as a music student at the University of Minnesota “but got drawn by the road”, first touring with a folk trio and then with the band Music Machine, who had a Top 20 hit in 1966 with Talk Talk.

After forming the Millennium and producing the band’s debut album with his university friend Curt Boettcher, the pair were taken on as producers by Clive Davis, the label boss at Columbia.

By the early 1970s Olsen had started his own production company. The first act he signed was Buckingham Nicks, who he discovered playing with a band named Fritz in a club in San Jose. “Their booking agent called all the A-list producers, and none of them wanted to go,” Olsen remembered. “He called the B-list producers. He called the C-list guys. Then he called the D-list guys, which was me and I said, ‘A free trip to San Jose? Sure! I’ll go up and see them’.”

The group were “terrible” but Olsen recognised the talent of Buckingham and Nicks and persuaded them to ditch Fritz and form a duo. They moved in with him as house guests, he got them a record deal, and the rest became rock’n’roll folklore.

Olsen finally called time on life in the studio in the mid-1990s after a bad experience with Emerson, Lake & Palmer. “I signed on the dotted line and I had to deliver. Six months later I was ready to kill myself,” he said. “It was the most uninspired record I had ever been on and it totally burnt me out.”

He worked for a while for a company designing state-of-the-art digital recording equipment before retiring to the Hawaiian island of Kauai. “For a quarter of a century I never left the studio,” he said. “I wanted to calm down and live a normal life.”

Keith Olsen, record producer, was born on May 12, 1945. He died of a heart attack on March 9, 2020, aged 74