Saturday 5 October 2019
The Independent.ie
John Meagher

It was 1978 and Stevie Nicks was having to get used to the business of being extremely famous. She had appeared on the cover of the previous year’s biggest selling album, Rumours, and her vocals were adorning some of the most played songs of the era. She had gone from relative obscurity to the big time on joining Fleetwood Mac with then boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham just a few years before and now, at the age of 30, she had the world at her feet.

But life was far from rosy for the Arizona-raised, California-adopted singer and her complicated love life would prove inspiring when it came to writing a song that would be the centrepiece of Fleetwood Mac’s next album as well as perhaps being the most emblematic of her entire career.

That song was ‘Sara’ and Nicks spent more time fashioning it than on any other – before or since. Months before the band reconvened for the marathon recording sessions of what would become the double-album, Tusk, Nicks had a nine-verse, 16-minute song on her hands. It would eventually be whittled down to just over six minutes on the original vinyl version of the album and trimmed further to four-odd minutes when released as a single.

‘Sara’ was inspired by a large number of things that were taking Stevie Nicks’ headspace at the end of the 1970s. It was, ostensibly, written about her friend Sara Recor and her relationship with Mick Fleetwood, one of band’s founding members and with whom Nicks had an intimate relationship after she and Buckingham had finished. And it’s a hirsute Fleetwood who appears on the Rumours cover, of course.

Despite the pair having broken up, and Nicks being in what would turn out to be a short-lived relationship with the Eagles’ Don Henley, she admitted to have been upset by her friend’s new romance with her former paramour. Fleetwood, she later said, had been a steadying influence during the acrimonious Rumours sessions and she immortalised him in the line, “And he was just like a great dark wing/ Within the wings of a storm”.

But years later, Henley offered his own appraisal of what the song was about. He suggested that Nicks had got pregnant while they were together, but had opted for an abortion. Had it been a girl, her mother would have named her Sara. Finally, in 2014, Nicks gave her version of events. “Had I married Don and had that baby,” she said, “I would have named her Sara.” But she insisted the song was primarily about her friendship with Recor.

Forty years on from its release and the song hasn’t lost a sliver of its lustre. LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy – as great a student of pop history as you can get – once called it his favourite-ever song, and there are likely to be many readers who would give it a lofty placing on their all-time best-of list.

‘Sara’ was released as a single in December 1979, but most Fleetwood Mac fans would hear it in early October when Tusk was released. To say the album was eagerly awaited is a gross understatement. Rumours and its numerous singles had enjoyed ubiquitous appeal since appearing in February 1977 and millions of fans and the band’s record label, Warner Bros, were eagerly awaiting a Rumours #2. 

But that’s not what they were given. Sure, ‘Sara’ wouldn’t have been out of place on Rumours, but it was an anomaly on an album that seemed hell-bent on shedding as many Johnny-come-lately fans as it could.

It was Buckingham who pushed the band away from delivering a neat follow-up. “We really were poised to make Rumours 2, and that could’ve been the beginning of kind of painting yourself into a corner in terms of living up to the labels that were being placed on you as a band,” he told Billboard magazine in 2015. “You know, there have been several occasions during the course of Fleetwood Mac over the years where we’ve had to undermine whatever the business axioms might be to sort of keep aspiring as an artist in the long term, and the Tusk album was one of those times.

“I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall when Warner Bros first put that album on in the boardroom,” he added, “because they really didn’t hear it until it was done and we gave it to them. From a marketing point of view it was not what they wanted or what they expected. It was a ballsy thing to do.”

It was also the most expensive album ever made up to that point, around $1m (roughly $4m in today’s money) in production costs. With Rumours selling 10 million copies in its first 24 months of existence (and as many as 40 million up to the present day) money was no object and the resulting album is every bit as self-indulgent as one might expect.

There were flights of fancy for each member of the group and several of its 20 songs fail to connect in a way they had managed since the beginning of the so-called classic line-up – Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham – with the self-titled album in 1975.

It’s worth remembering that various incarnations of the band had existed long before the arrival of Buckingham-Nicks and Tusk was the 12th studio album to bear the Fleetwood Mac name, but none of the earlier, bluesy albums from the Peter Green era are as sprawling or as experiential or as wilfully left-field as this.

And it was Buckingham who relentlessly pushed his bandmates to throw off all shackles – and he did that himself in spectacular fashion with the impossible-to-categorise title track.

Ken Caillat, who worked as an engineer on the album, later recalled his approach. “He was a maniac,” he said. “The first day, I set the studio up as usual. Then he said, ‘Turn every knob 180 degrees from where it is now and see what happens’. He’d tape microphones to the studio floor and get into a sort of push-up position to sing. Early on, he came in and he’d freaked out in the shower and cut off all his hair with nail scissors. He was stressed.”

It didn’t help that there was hostility between former married couple John and Christine McVie and between Nicks and Buckingham. And yet, as with ABBA on the other side of the Atlantic, they were taking inspiration from their personal lives and pouring them into the best songs, even if bitterness and recrimination is just below the surface. That was certainly the case on ‘Save Me a Place’, in which Buckingham seemed not to be over Nicks, while also being resentful of the stranglehold she had on his heart.

Warner Bros boss Mo Ostin was apoplectic when the finished product was delivered. “You’re insane doing a double album at this time. The business is fucked, we’re dying the death, we can’t sell records, and this will have to retail at twice the normal price. It’s suicide.” It wasn’t, though – and Ostin, now 92, has lived long enough to experience the turmoil the industry has been in this century.

Tusk, occasionally dubbed Buckingham’s Folly, is sometimes seen as a commercial flop – and while it couldn’t shift the sort of units that Rumours did, it still sold a healthy nine million copies. And with many of them priced at around $50 in today’s money, Warner’s had little trouble making their money back.

In the 1980s, a single album version was released, with some tracks deemed extraneous left off. It confirmed what many thought then and now: there’s a great regular length album buried within Tusk.

And yet it’s the original 20-tracker that is truly worth reinvestigating once more. Buckingham and the band may have parted in acrimonious circumstances in recent years – his place was taken by Crowded House’s Neil Finn on their latest world tour which called to Dublin’s RDS during the summer – but his importance to Fleetwood Mac’s legacy and to their strangest, most out-there album can never be doubted.