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Fleetwood Mac by Mick Fleetwood with Stephen Davis

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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.

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Rumours reaches the magic million in Canada | RPM

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RPM MAGAZINE – May 20, 1978
by J.J. Linden

Warner Bros. album Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, this year’s Juno Award winner as top selling international album, has become the first album in history to ever sell one million units in Canada. The milestone was announced recently by WEA Music of Canada, who noted, “This unprecedented accomplishment of 1,000,000 units not only reflects the unparalleled artistry of Fleetwood Mac, but also reflects the enormous potential of the Canadian market to those who can fully tap it.”

The album was released in February of 1977. At that time, WEA Music quickly implemented a full-scale marketing program, with promotion and sales teams throughout the country working full-force to national exposure gain and visibility for the album. The sales force concentrated on obtaining prominent displays from tiny independents to the largest chain stores. The promotion and publicity team embarked on a virtually unequaled media campaign to break the album in Canada.

The company’s marketing efforts began to pay off almost immediately. Go Your Own Way, the first single released from the album, became a major hit across the coun try. It was followed quickly by three more hit singles, Dreams, Don’t Stop and You Make Lovin’ Fun. As each subsequent hit showed the commercial value of the album, sales began to increase rapidly. WEA’s national promotion manager Larry Green notes, “We were very conscious of the possibility of the album going five or six times platinum by the second single. The Eagles do it and Queen does it – we really saw this thing flying bỳ the second single. By the third single, it was a pretty tremendous growth situation, and by the fourth single…

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Big Mac……..Over 8 million sold | Rolling Stone

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Rolling Stone Magazine (issue 256)
January 12, 1978
By Dave Marsh

There is nothing mysterious about Fleetwood Mac sweeping Rolling Stone’s 1977 Readers’ Poll. Rumours, the album that topped the charts for six months, has sold almost 8 million copies and still sells over 200,000 copies weekly. Released in February, Rumours sold enough copies at its peak to go gold twice a month, platinum every thirty days. (They’ve also got a platinum eight-track and gold cassette.) Four of the album’s eleven songs have become hit singles: “Go Your Own Way,” “Dreams,” “Don’t Stop” and most recently, “You Make Loving Fun.” Over in Burbank, the biggest problem the band has created for its record company, Warner Bros., is deciding whether to release a fifth single. Should it be “The Chain” or “Second Hand News,” or should they forget about it altogether to avoid saturating the market?

Multimillion monsters have become commonplace in the record business. Consider the history of the gold and platinum awards the industry (through the Recording Industry Association of America) makes for LPs that move heavy tonnage. Prior to 1969, only gold records (for $1 million in sales, about 450,000 copies) were awarded. That year, Atlantic gave Cream’s Wheels of Fire the first unofficial platinum record (for sales of one million units or more). Unsanctioned platinum awards appeared sporadically for the next several years despite RIAA protests. But in 1975 the RIAA raised the gold standard to 500,000 units to compensate for increases in wholesale record prices, and because of the increasingly large market was forced to officially sanction platinum. Platinum has replaced gold as confirmation of star status, and record companies advertise LPs as double, triple and soon (who knows?) octuple platinum.  

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Article Archive Pages, Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac, John McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Richard Dashut

The Making of Rumours

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The Recording of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours

Memories of the Making of Rumours

Richard Dashut (co-producer)
I’d worked with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks since their debut album, Buckingham-Nicks. After they joined Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey invited me to do their live sound. They started recording Rumours in Sausalito, across the bay from San Fransico, with the Record Plant’s engineer, but they fired him after four days for being too into astrology. I was really just around keeping Lindsey company, then Mick takes me into the parking lot, puts his arm around my shoulder and says, Guess what? You’re producing the album. The funny thing was, I never really wanted to be a producer. I brought in a friend from wally Heider’s studio in Los Angeles, Ken Caillat, to help me, and we started co-producing. Mick gave me and Ken an old Chinese I-Ching coin and said, Good luck.

Cris Morris (recording assistant):
I’d helped build the Record Plant. I knew every nail, because I’d driven most of them in. I’d helped make what became known as Sly Stone’s Pit, a control booth sunk into the floor, so the musicians could sit and play around it. When we recorded Sly there, he had his own personal tank of nitrous oxide installed, and that was still there.

Mick Fleetwood (Fleetwood Mac):
It was a bizarre place to work, but we didn’t really use Sly Stone’s pit. It was usually occupied by people we didn’t know, tapping razors on mirrors.

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Fleetwood Mac Goes Back To Where They Once Began | Circus Magazine

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Circus Magazine
July 21, 1977
Mick Houghton

LONDON: Their current world concert tour has taken Fleetwood Mac to Great Britain and Europe for the first time in five years, and will bring them to Japan and Australia for the first concert tour before this year is out. In their adopted homeland, American fans have been swarming to Fleetwood Mac shows. The June 29 and 30 gigs in New York’s Madison Square Garden were sold out more than a month in advance. While the current U.S. touring is an expected success, their return to the continent is to reintroduce the group to a home country that had largely forgotten that Fleetwood Mac ever existed.

Promotional visits often seem to achieve little, for Fleetwood Mac the trip home paid big dividends. The year-old ‘Fleetwood Mac’ album which had till their return sold less than 10,000 copies, crept into the album charts. A few months later, the follow up album, ‘Rumours’, leapt straight into the top ten. The single “Go Your Own Way” even gave the group their first chart entry since “Green Manalishi” in 1970, when Peter Green was still with the group. And, a major hit single seems likely before the year is out if the critical and popular reaction to their sell-out tour is anything to judge by.

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Best Fleetwood Mac Ever – An Interview With Mick Fleetwood | Hit Parader

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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:

* * * * *

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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Fleetwood Mac mentions in Rolling Stone, April 21st, 1977

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pg. 6 & 9 ~ Correspondence, Love Letters, and Advice

On behalf of my ancestors, the ancient Celts, I am compelled to set the record straight concerning an unfortunate though understandable injustice to the heritage: Rhiannon was hardly a Welsh witch. On the contrary, she was a beautiful, shrewdly intelligent, brave and popular British goddess. I dare say, the early Christianizers of Britain certainly did their job well. Just as Arthur and Merlin, the greatest and most powerful of all British gods, were mistakenly characterized as king and magician respectively, so now Rhiannon is revived from the shadow-filled past as a mere witch. I refer Stevie Nicks (and all others interested) to a book by Charles Squire, recently republished under the title, Celtic Myth and Legend (Newcastle Publishing Company). Miss Nicks has an innate sense for the highly mystic Celtic Spirit and I am sue she doesn’t want to risk the wrath of the old powers.

Robert Slorby

Minot, North Dakota

—

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Go Your Own Way  to Californ-i-ay | Rolling Stone

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Fleetwood Mac blooms in the sun

Rumours – Fleetwood Mac
Warner Bros. BSK 3010

By John Swenson
Rolling Stone Magazine
21 April 1977

Rock & Roll has this bad habit of being unpredictable. You never can tell when a band will undergo that alchemic transmigration from lead to gold. The medium of transformation is almost always a hit single, but such turnarounds often swamp a band in notoriety it can’t live up to.

But in Fleetwood Mac’s case the departure of guitarist Bob Welch who’d reduced the band to recutting pointless and pretentious versions of old standards amounted to the biggest break they ever had. With that and the addition of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac suddenly became a California pop group; instead of laborious blues/rock jams they started turning out bright little three-minute singles with a hook in every chorus.

Christine McVie now leads a classic vocal group working out of the oldest popular tradition, love songs. Vocal harmonies are the meat and potatoes of California’s pop identity, and Fleetwood Mac is now one of the genre’s main proponents, with three lead singers of comparable range and tone. Taken individually, only McVie’s voice has much character, but she anchors their vocal arrangements, since Nicks’ low range and Buckingham’s high range approximate her dulcet, evenhanded timbre.

Despite the interminable delay in finishing the record, Rumours proves that the success of Fleetwood Mac was no fluke. Christine McVie sounds particularly vital, on ‘You Making Loving Fun,’ which works for the same reason ‘Over My Head’ was a smash. The formula is vintage Byrds: Christine sings the verse simply, with sparse instrumental background, and the chorus comes on like an angelic choir high harmonies soaring behind her with 12-string electric guitar counterpoint ringing against the vocals.

This Byrds touch is Lindsey Buckingham’s province, and it’s used most successfully on the single, ‘Go Your Own Way,’ which employs acoustic guitar backing throughout, with best effect on choruses. Mick Fleetwood’s drumming adds a new dimension to this style. Fleetwood is swinging away, but not in the fluid roll pattern most rock drummers use. Instead of pushing the rhythm (Buckingham’s acoustic guitar and John McVie’s bass playing take care of that) he’s punctuating it, playing against the grain. A touch like that can turn a good song into a classic.

Buckingham’s contribution is the major surprise, since it appeared at first that Nicks was the stronger half of the team. But Nicks has nothing on Rumours to compare with ‘Rhiannon,’ her smash from the last album. ‘Dreams’ is a nice but fairly lightweight tune, and her nasal singing is the only weak vocal on the record. ‘I Don’t Want to Know,’ which is pure post-Buffalo Springfield country-rock formula, could easily be confused with any number of Richie Furay songs.

Buckingham’s other two songs here are almost as good as ‘Go Your Own Way.’ ‘Second Hand News,’ ostensibly about the breakup of his relationship with Nicks, is anything but morose, and completely outdoes the Eagles in the kiss-off genre. Again the chunking acoustic guitar rhythm carries the song to a joyful chorus that turns average voices into timeless pop harmony. It may be gloss, but it’s the best gloss to come along in a long time. ‘Never Going Back Again,’ the prettiest thing on the album, is just acoustic picking against a delightful vocal that once again belies the bad-news subject matter.

Fleetwood Mac’s change from British blue to California folk-rock is not as outlandish as some might think. The early Sixties blues scene in England had as much to do with rural American folk music as the urban blues sound, which was predominantly a guitarist’s passion anyway. Christine McVie is much closer to a singer like Fairport Convention’s Sandy Denny than to any of England’s blues shouters. Without altering her basic sensibility McVie moves easily into the thematic trappings of the California rock myth. She’s always written love songs, and sings her ballads with halting emotion. ‘Songbird,’ her solo keyboard spot on Rumours, is elevated by its context from what would once have been referred to as a devotional blues into a pantheistic celebration of love and nature.

So Fleetwood Mac has finally realized the apotheosis of that early Sixties blues crusade to get back to the roots. It’s just that it took a couple of Californians and a few lessons from the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and the Eagles to get there.

(article sent to me by Dark Angel, with thanks)

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Ouija Still Love Me Tomorrow? | Circus Magazine

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Circus Magazine
April 14, 1977

Fleetwood’s Future Is Just Unfolding, Their Potential Barely

It is what it is at the time. Whatever comes out is what Fleetwood Mac is,” says John MeVie, that’s always been the way.”

And, probably, it always will be the way. Fleetwood Mac has traveled the roads of rock and roll a for almost a decade — spanning a musical range from electric blues to soft rock, surviving various personnel changes and a management burn that booked a bogus Fleetwood Mac on tour, and, finally, rising to “success-dom” in midst of some very heavy emotional difficulties last year. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975 after Bob Welch left the band to form his own group. The Buckingham/Nicks combination seemingly provided a refreshing impetus to Fleetwood Mac’s ongoing longevity. A few short weeks later, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks went into the studio to record.

The result was Fleetwood Mac (WB), the album that took the temperately successful Mac and catapulted them to the top of the charts, an album that was still on Billboard’s charts after 90 weeks. But, there’s a paradox in being successful in rock and roll. Once a rock band does meet with success, everytime they pass “GO” on rock’s Monopoly board, they’re attacked by critics for being commercial. “No one ever sits down and says “This seems to be popular, so let’s do this.’ It’s just whatever it is, which is really healthy and which, I think, has a lot to do with the longevity.”

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