May 1977
Hit Parader
by Jim Girard
Speak about Fleetwood Mac these days and you are liable to set off a series of long-winded, laudatory extrapolations about how diverse, fussy, complex and inspiring the five members really are. All that from people who have probably never even seen the band play live. This is especially true in the music business (within these very pages over the last several issues, thousands of words have been written about the band). This is a time when rock writers and music business people are cramming for finals — just trying to brush up on their Fleetwood Mac history. It is, you see, quite unhip to NOT be aware of the band that rose to unparalleled heights this past year, after knocking around the minor leagues (so to speak) in various. aggregations for the past nine years. Rock writers especially get insecure about not being aware of the varied past this band led by Mick Fleetwood and John McVie has had.
Currently, Christine McVie (a member of the band for the past four and a half years), Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are the other members of the band. It is this lineup that produced last year’s monster album, entitled FLEETWOOD MAC, and has recently released their second album RUMOURS. Mick Fleetwood has considered using his gold records for doorstops, as the continued success of the band is inevitable.
In the following interview, leader and drummer Mick Fleetwood tells HIT PARADER about his band, his longtime relationship with bassist. John McVie (the “Mac” in Fleetwood Mac) and the various things that make Fleetwood Mac an entity in and of itself:
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HP: Now that the band has finished RUMOURS, could we talk about the how and why of the album taking so long to finish?
Mick: Well, when we started the album RUMOURS there were a lot of things going on in the band — for everybody involved. Needless to say, it was a very strange time. Things weren’t all that bad with all the personal problems, but needless to say, things just took a lot longer than expected as a result. Lindsey and Stevie broke up, John and Christine had broken up and I was going through some changes too. Then, after two months of laying down basic tracks, we went back on tour for a white. Luckily, sometimes when you overwork at something and don’t get away from it, you get to a point where you lose it. That didn’t happen with us this time; everything we did just kept getting better and better. Since all of the original tracks were done in the first two months, the initial vibe of the album is still there. The energy isn’t gone. It hasn’t been tampered with. Mainly, there were a lot of strong feelings going on in the band, and then on the album. Unwittingly, the songs and moods on RUMOURS are connected to what various people in the band were going through. From that point of view, this is a very emotional album; more than the last one.
HP: RUMOURS was amazingly expensive to record I hear.
Mick: We worked on the album for over six months physically, but we worked on it for over ten months in total. We spent a lot of time on the album and it cost us a lot of money, yeah. However, we didn’t compromise anything on the album. We got past the point of worrying whether or not things cost too much. We didn’t want to quit until everything was as right as it could possibly be. One reason we were able to work on RUMOURS as long as we did was because the FLEETWOOD MAC album was selling so sensationally and it allowed us to keep working on the new one. If we would have put out the new album when we were supposed to, we would have killed the sales of the FLEETWOOD MAC album and there was no point in doing that. It is still selling a lot, although it is starting to drop off now.
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