Fact #121368
When:
Short story:
Fleetwood Mac release a new single, Dreams, in the USA.Full article:
THE MAKING OF FLEETWOOD MAC'S DREAMS by Johnny Black.
Fleetwood Mac’s first No1 single was born on a black velvet bed overlooking Sly Stone’s cocaine pit.
“One day when I wasn’t required in the main studio,” remembers Stevie Nicks, “I took a Fender Rhodes piano and I went into another studio that was said to belong to Sly of Sly and the Family Stone. It was a black and red room, with a sunken pit in the middle where there was a piano, and a big black velvet bed with Victorian drapes.”
That room, in the Record Plant, Sausalito, is also etched into the memory of Mick Fleetwood because, “It was usually occupied by people we didn’t know, tapping razors on mirrors.”
This was the beginning of 1976, and Fleetwood Mac were in Sausalito making the album Rumours, which would rollercoaster them to formerly undreamed of heights of success and equal depths of despair.
Founded in swinging sixties London by drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, Fleetwood Mac had already tasted massive success in their homeland, only to have it swept away when their brilliant lead guitarist and songwriter, Peter Green, became one of rock’s first high profile acid casualties.
Re-locating to America, the Mac spent years treading water until January 1975, when they took on two new members, the young Californian duo of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. This pair’s prodigious gifts as songwriters revitalised the band, but they came with a certain amount of baggage.
“Lindsey and I were lovers,” points out Stevie, “ but we were on the point of breaking up when we joined Fleetwood Mac. For the greater good of the band, though, we decided to put our break-up on hold.”
By the end of 1975, the first album by the re-constituted Mac had gone gold, and they had their first hit single with Over My Head. “We were beginning to become rock stars,” recalls Nicks, “and we had to get another album together. Sausalito was as romantic as you could possibly imagine. It was gorgeous up there, right by the ocean, in this fabulous studio with Indian drapes, little hippy girls making hash cookies, and everybody having dinner round a big kitchen table.”
It should have been paradise but Nicks and Buckingham’s relationship was now coming apart at the seams. “We had to go through this elaborate exercise of denial,” explains Buckingham, “keeping our personal feelings in one corner of the room while trying to be professional in the other.” Inevitably, their true feelings surfaced in the songs they were writing, with Dreams being one of the most obvious examples.
“I sat down on the bed, Indian style, with my keyboard in front of me,” says Nicks. “I found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on and wrote Dreams in about ten minutes. Right away I liked the fact that I was doing something with a dance beat, because that made it a little unusual for me.”
Delighted with her ten-minute tune, she took it to the band who recorded the next day with, she insists, no open acknowledgement from Buckingham that the lyric – a dire warning that a man can be driven mad by loneliness in the wake of a broken love affair - was directed straight at his heart. The recriminations would come later.
Meanwhile, although a basic track for Dreams was completed in Sausalito, recording assistant Cris Morris remembers that, “all we kept was the drum track and live vocal from Stevie – the guitars and bass were added later in Los Angeles, California, USA.”
The Mac’s other female songwriter, Christine McVie, wasn’t immediately bowled over by Dreams. “When Stevie first played it for me on the piano,” she says, “it was just three chords and one note in the left hand. I thought ‘This is really boring’, but the Lindsey genius came into play and he fashioned three sections out of identical chords, making each section sound completely different. He created the impression that there’s a thread running through the whole thing.”
Mick Fleetwood has revealed that Buckingham found this process agonising. “It was most difficult for Lindsey because Stevie was the one who pulled away emotionally. He would say, 'I'm doing this for her and making her music, but I can't have closure.'”
Well aware that Nicks was already romancing Don Henley of The Eagles, Buckingham responded with songs like Second Hand News, declaring, ”One thing I think you should know, I ain’t gonna miss you when you go.”
Nicks insists, however, that Dreams was her counterpart to another of his songs, Go Your own Way. “I told him that in my heart, Dreams was open and hopeful, but in Go Your Own Way, his heart was closed. That’s how I felt. That line, “When the rain washes you clean”, to me that was like being able to start again, and that’s what I wanted for Lindsey. I wanted him to be happy.”
The Rumours sessions, especially the Los Angeles portion, have become notorious as one of the most drug-fuelled and decadent episodes in rock history but Nicks point out, “Dreams was written before it got really bad. As our success grew during the making of the album, we had more money, and we started dabbling more with drugs, but the cocaine didn’t really start having its effect on us until later. 1980 was probably the worst. Those first four years of Fleetwood Mac were nowhere near as bad as everybody likes to imagine.”
By the time Dreams was released, Rumours was already a platinum album, and Nicks’ song soared to No1 on June 18, 1977, establishing itself as her signature track. “Sometimes you can get tired of singing a certain song over and over again,” she says, “but I have never gone on stage either with Fleetwood Mac or in my solo shows, without singing Dreams. I don’t think I could.”
(Source : feature by Johnny Black in Blender magazine, April 2005)
Tweet this Fact
Fleetwood Mac’s first No1 single was born on a black velvet bed overlooking Sly Stone’s cocaine pit.
“One day when I wasn’t required in the main studio,” remembers Stevie Nicks, “I took a Fender Rhodes piano and I went into another studio that was said to belong to Sly of Sly and the Family Stone. It was a black and red room, with a sunken pit in the middle where there was a piano, and a big black velvet bed with Victorian drapes.”
That room, in the Record Plant, Sausalito, is also etched into the memory of Mick Fleetwood because, “It was usually occupied by people we didn’t know, tapping razors on mirrors.”
This was the beginning of 1976, and Fleetwood Mac were in Sausalito making the album Rumours, which would rollercoaster them to formerly undreamed of heights of success and equal depths of despair.
Founded in swinging sixties London by drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, Fleetwood Mac had already tasted massive success in their homeland, only to have it swept away when their brilliant lead guitarist and songwriter, Peter Green, became one of rock’s first high profile acid casualties.
Re-locating to America, the Mac spent years treading water until January 1975, when they took on two new members, the young Californian duo of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. This pair’s prodigious gifts as songwriters revitalised the band, but they came with a certain amount of baggage.
“Lindsey and I were lovers,” points out Stevie, “ but we were on the point of breaking up when we joined Fleetwood Mac. For the greater good of the band, though, we decided to put our break-up on hold.”
By the end of 1975, the first album by the re-constituted Mac had gone gold, and they had their first hit single with Over My Head. “We were beginning to become rock stars,” recalls Nicks, “and we had to get another album together. Sausalito was as romantic as you could possibly imagine. It was gorgeous up there, right by the ocean, in this fabulous studio with Indian drapes, little hippy girls making hash cookies, and everybody having dinner round a big kitchen table.”
It should have been paradise but Nicks and Buckingham’s relationship was now coming apart at the seams. “We had to go through this elaborate exercise of denial,” explains Buckingham, “keeping our personal feelings in one corner of the room while trying to be professional in the other.” Inevitably, their true feelings surfaced in the songs they were writing, with Dreams being one of the most obvious examples.
“I sat down on the bed, Indian style, with my keyboard in front of me,” says Nicks. “I found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on and wrote Dreams in about ten minutes. Right away I liked the fact that I was doing something with a dance beat, because that made it a little unusual for me.”
Delighted with her ten-minute tune, she took it to the band who recorded the next day with, she insists, no open acknowledgement from Buckingham that the lyric – a dire warning that a man can be driven mad by loneliness in the wake of a broken love affair - was directed straight at his heart. The recriminations would come later.
Meanwhile, although a basic track for Dreams was completed in Sausalito, recording assistant Cris Morris remembers that, “all we kept was the drum track and live vocal from Stevie – the guitars and bass were added later in Los Angeles, California, USA.”
The Mac’s other female songwriter, Christine McVie, wasn’t immediately bowled over by Dreams. “When Stevie first played it for me on the piano,” she says, “it was just three chords and one note in the left hand. I thought ‘This is really boring’, but the Lindsey genius came into play and he fashioned three sections out of identical chords, making each section sound completely different. He created the impression that there’s a thread running through the whole thing.”
Mick Fleetwood has revealed that Buckingham found this process agonising. “It was most difficult for Lindsey because Stevie was the one who pulled away emotionally. He would say, 'I'm doing this for her and making her music, but I can't have closure.'”
Well aware that Nicks was already romancing Don Henley of The Eagles, Buckingham responded with songs like Second Hand News, declaring, ”One thing I think you should know, I ain’t gonna miss you when you go.”
Nicks insists, however, that Dreams was her counterpart to another of his songs, Go Your own Way. “I told him that in my heart, Dreams was open and hopeful, but in Go Your Own Way, his heart was closed. That’s how I felt. That line, “When the rain washes you clean”, to me that was like being able to start again, and that’s what I wanted for Lindsey. I wanted him to be happy.”
The Rumours sessions, especially the Los Angeles portion, have become notorious as one of the most drug-fuelled and decadent episodes in rock history but Nicks point out, “Dreams was written before it got really bad. As our success grew during the making of the album, we had more money, and we started dabbling more with drugs, but the cocaine didn’t really start having its effect on us until later. 1980 was probably the worst. Those first four years of Fleetwood Mac were nowhere near as bad as everybody likes to imagine.”
By the time Dreams was released, Rumours was already a platinum album, and Nicks’ song soared to No1 on June 18, 1977, establishing itself as her signature track. “Sometimes you can get tired of singing a certain song over and over again,” she says, “but I have never gone on stage either with Fleetwood Mac or in my solo shows, without singing Dreams. I don’t think I could.”
(Source : feature by Johnny Black in Blender magazine, April 2005)