Fact #92746

THE MAKING OF FLEETWOOD MAC's RUMOURS
An Eyewitness feature researched and compiled by Johnny Black

Richard Dashut (co-producer) : I’d worked with Lindsey and Stevie since their debut album, Buckingham-Nicks. After they joined Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey invited me to do their live sound.

Stevie Nicks (Fleetwood Mac) : Lindsey and I had lived with our producer for two years. He supported us, made it possible for us to write, and go from Buckingham-Nicks to Fleetwood Mac.

Richard Dashut : They started recording Rumours in Sausalito, across the Bay from San Francisco, 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 round my shoulder and says ‘Guess what? You’re producing the album’. The funny thing was, I never really wanted to be a producer.

Lindsey Buckingham (Fleetwood Mac) : Because he’s not a musician, Richard is great with the big picture. I can get lost in details sometimes, and he’ll walk in and cut through that. Also, he can sit down with a guitar and come up with a great seed for a song. He just has a general good sensibility about things. He’s also my best friend, and that helps a lot.

Richard Dashut : I brought in a friend from Wally Heider’s studio in L.A., Ken Caillat, to help me, and we started co-producing. Mick gave me and Ken each an old Chinese I-Ching coin and said ‘Good luck’.”

Stevie Nicks : The Record Plant in Sausalito was a great studio. We were really only there for like two and a half months. It was as romantic as you could possibly imagine. It was gorgeous up there in Sausalito in 1976, right by the ocean, with San Francisco nearby.

The Record Plant was this amazing hippy place. We like to say we were all hippies but, in the beginning, we really weren’t. But we went up to this incredible studio, which was all decorated with Indian saris and beautiful colours, there were little hippy girls everywhere making cookies … it was such a beautiful thing. You walked in and you were like, ‘Aaaaah! I love this place.”

There was a massive kitchen and they made dinner every night for twenty people, everybody round this huge table, and then we’d go back and do some more recording. There were several other rooms as well that you could go to hang out in.

And we really did, in that two and a half months, cut all the basic tracks for Rumours.

Cris Moris (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 that 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 : 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.

Cris Morris : Because Record Plant had three studios, a lot of other musicians dropped by. Van Morrison hung out a lot. Rufus and Chaka Khan, Rick James. Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon came down because Jackson wanted Lindsey and Stevie to do backing vocals on his album.

Stevie Nicks : The first album had taken us three months, and Rumours was started in the same frame of mind but we had started to make money off the first album, we were famous, and we became indulgent and took more time. That vibe sometimes really messes with things because you can do really great work very quickly if you set your mind to it.

Herbie Worthington (photographer) : I’d been working with them since 1974 so, when they started Rumours I was brought in to document it for the inner sleeve. The girls were kind of kept apart, in a hotel, while I lived with the guys in a house that belonged to Record Plant, about five minutes away.

Stevie Nicks : Christine and I had two fabulous little one room studio apartments about ten minutes from the Record Plant.

At first we were all in the Record Plant house, but Christine and I only lasted one night there. It was like party central. We got up the next morning and said, ‘OK, we’re leaving.’ Christine and I found that kind of scene most uninteresting. Everybody was staying up very late and, you know, you need serious maid service when you have a bunch of rock’n’rollers partying all night. So Chris and I were like, “No!”

Especially Christine, because she’s so English and she wanted a little cottage, so we found ourselves two apartments next door to each other.

Lindsey Buckingham : You had John and Christine McVie and Stevie and myself in the process of breaking up during the making of the album, so you had all this cross-dialogue going on in the songs.

Stevie Nicks : At that point Lindsey and I weren’t completely broken up. We had been breaking up when we joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975 but we didn’t break up, because we’d just joined this really amazing band and we both felt we couldn’t handle both things – breaking up and starting in a new band. So we kind of put our relationship on hold and stayed where we were.

Then, when we got to Sausalito, it was such a beautiful place, so romantic and gorgeous, that Lindsey and I fell back into our old relationship. So, when I look back on it, that period of making the album had some really sweet moments.

Christine McVie : We had two alternatives - go our own ways and see the band collapse, or grit our teeth and carry on playing with each other. Normally, when couples split they don’t have to see each other again. We were forced to get over those differences.

Lindsey Buckingham : It was very difficult all through the making of Rumours, with such a unique situation - you know, with two different couples comprising four-fifths of the band going through the process of breaking up while the album was being made. Only later did it become common knowledge. Back then, we had to go through this elaborate exercise of denial, keeping our personal feelings in one corner of the room while trying to be professional in the other.

Mick Fleetwood : 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.'

Herbie Worthington : Mick was like the father hen, always overseeing everything, although his marriage to Jenny Boyd was breaking up too. He wanted everybody to be happy so the atmosphere would be creative. For example, he would take the clocks out of the studio so people were less aware of time passing.

Cris Morris (recording assistant) : Mick also co-owned Fleetwood Mac with John. Lindsey and Stevie were just hired to play with the band. Now, John’s ideas were rooted in blues and that didn’t gel with Lindsey who was more pop and experimental, which caused extra friction and Mick, being the boss, sided with John.

Richard Dashut : It took two months for everyone to adjust to one another. Defences were wearing thin and they were quick to open up their feelings. Instead of going to friends to talk it out, their feelings were vented through their music … the album was about the only thing we had left.

Lindsey Buckingham : There was nothing specifically worked out when we went in the studio. We didn’t have demo takes. The whole thing just happened.

John McVie : It was very clumsy sometimes. I’d be sitting there in the studio while they were mixing Don’t Stop, and I’d listen to the words, which were mostly about me, and I’d get a lump in my throat. I’d turn around and the writer’s sitting right there.

Christine McVie : I think I wrote that in the condos that Stevie and I shared.

Lindsey Buckingham : Don’t Stop was really Christine’s song. It’s in the tradition of her roots… and John and Mick’s 12 bar blues roots and shuffles.

Christine McVie : I’ve written a few shuffles before. This one being my most famous. I
think I was very happy when I wrote it.

Lindsey Buckingham : The fact that we shared verses, and mine was first, it kind of muddied the lines of whose song it was. But it really was kind of a great collaboration
in the sense that some of hers and mine musical senses overlap… and I think it
worked very well to the advantage of that song.

Cris Morris : For that one, I sat between Mick and Christine because her piano was set up so that she was at an angle to his drums and they couldn’t see each other, but they could both see me. I had to stand there for six hours co-ordinating the time.

Lindsey Buckingham : I think we had a working title of Strummer (for Second Hand News). I think because it did start off as a kind of a strummy, acoustic feel. But I think the intent for that song was to be kind of a dance beat. I know Richard Dashut and I had been driving around from town to town during those days and had heard Jive Talking by the Bee Gees. And we really liked the feel of that, and they had a rolling kind of thing behind it. That was always my intention for the feel that it should have. And I think eventually we got there. We did accomplish that.

Mick’s first inclination of the drum feel was to go more folky. He had kind of a press role, a loose pattern, an Irish approach, which was a more literal approach of what the song really was and what it was giving off in its initial stages. It had quite a few interesting textures on it. A lot of people remarked on the snare sound, which was kind of ringy and thin. It wasn’t exactly what was considered state of the art and it was kind of retro... and that was cool. We also had a percussive roll that was from the seat of a naugahide chair that was sitting around in the studio.

Christine McVie : When we went in, I thought I was drying up. I was practically panicking because every time I sat down at a piano, nothing came out. Then, one day in Sausalito, I just sat down and wrote in the studio, and the four and a half songs of mine on the album are a result of that.

Stevie Nicks : We cut the tracks live, totally live, everybody’s out there and they put me in a booth and I sing. So you’d have the five of us doing our parts live, everybody together at once. We could have put those tracks out just as they were.

Mick Fleetwood : We started trying to put down basic backing tracks and all feeling so desperately unhappy with life. We spoke to each other in clipped, civil tones, while sitting in small airless studios listening to each other’s songs about our shattered relationships.

Herbie Worthington : One night in the control room, John came in with a bottle of wine. I was photographing the girls, but he grabbed some cord and stuck it into the neck of the bottle. Then he turned it upside down, taped it onto the top of a guitar stand and lay down on the floor with the other end of the cord taped onto his arm, so it looked like he was getting an intravenous drip of alcohol. We were cracking up, but it was very symbolic of everything that was going on.

Cris Morris : Meanwhile, we were trying to get unique sounds on every instrument. We spent ten solid hours on a kick drum sound in Studio B. Eventually we moved into Studio A and built a special platform for the drums, which got them sounding the way we wanted.

Stevie Nicks : There was one day when I wasn’t required in the main studio, so 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.

I had been listening to a lot of The Spinners, and something in one of their tracks gave an inspiration, it was making me groove around and dance around all alone in this room, thinking what a lucky girl I was to have all these things at my disposal so I could get on with writing my songs, and all my friends were just down the hall.

I sat down on the bed, Indian style, with the Fender Rhodes in front of me, and I found a drum pattern and I switched my little cassette player on and I 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.

Basically, it’s a very simple song, just one set of three chords, and all I did was twist it around a little. Even when it goes into, “Thunder only happens when it’s raining…” it stays on the same chords, doesn’t change, except that what I’m singing over it has changed.

It was almost a mistake. I think I started a little bit too early, and it went down on the tape, and I just left it like that. I don’t think I even tried to record it again. I knew I’d got something.

I packed up the Fender Rhodes, walked down the hallway into the studio and said, ‘I have a song!’ That takes a lot of confidence, to walk into the middle of someone else’s recording session like that and tell them to stop the presses. I said, ‘I think it’s magnificent. Can I play it for you?’

Everybody loved it right away, and I think we recorded it the next day. It’s a very simple song, so it didn’t take a lot of recording.

Christine McVie : Dreams developed in a bizarre way. When Stevie first played it for me on the piano, it was just three chords and one note in the left hand.

Stevie Nicks : I remember Christine sat and watched me play it, because I have a sense of timing that most people don’t have. I must have Brazilian ancestors, because it’s almost a samba thing. And Christine could emulate that, which was great because without that timing the song wouldn’t sound so good.

Christine McVie : 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.

Stevie Nicks : When it was done, everybody loved it. It was one of those songs that didn’t bring out any resentment. Nobody was asking who it was about. They were just into the song.

Cris Morris : In Dreams all we kept was the drum track and live vocal from Stevie – the guitars and bass were added later in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Mick Fleetwood : It was the craziest period of our lives. We went four or five weeks without sleep, doing a lot of drugs. I’m talking about cocaine in such quantities that, at one point I thought I was really going insane.

John McVie : It was a very self-indulgent time; there was no limit, and no one knew when to say, "That's enough!" For example, there was a week-long period when we were convinced the pianos were out of tune, so we went through nine pianos and seven piano tuners and ended up with one guy we called the Lunar Tuner! We never took a day off, unless someone was sick. We'd work all night, and at ten o'clock in the morning, we'd be standing outside a pub waiting for it to open so we could have a nightcap, which would end at two in the afternoon. This went on for two months! It's surprising no one got seriously injured. But we did what was necessary to get through it, and if we had to do it over again, I think we'd do exactly the same thing.

Stevie Nicks : So, when we left Sausalito, we had piano, bass and guitar tracks, and except for the keyboards, that’s like a power trio.

Then, when we got home to LA, Mick brought in a lot of African percussion to add to the tracks, Christine was adding counterpart piano lines, I was putting in extra vocal harmonies, and Lindsay gets to work on his wall of guitars. He’ll start with one additional guitar part and then two months later he’s still putting on, you know, harmonies from Tibet. That’s what happened in LA.

Lindsey crafts and builds an incredible wall of sound.

We got back in the middle of January and I remember a lot of driving from studio to studio. I think we rented every studio in Los Angeles, California, USA. Record Plant, Sunset Sound, Amigo…

I remember every detail of Sausalito because it was very focused but in L.A., we were all over the place and it’s impossible to remember what got done where. We were also huge rock stars by that point. We were in shock, and that was already starting to twist everything.

Cris Morris : Never Going Back Again, which we did in Sound City in LA, took forever. It was Lindsey’s pet project, just two guitar tracks but he did it over and over again. In the end his vocal didn’t quite match the guitar tracks so we had to slow them down a little.

Lindsey Buckingham : I remember writing that when we got off the road. It was written about a girl that I had met in New England and spent a very short amount of time with.

Someone who really, initially, didn’t want to spend time with me, and I talked her into it. And of course, “been down one time, been down two times, never going back again” is really a sweet sentiment. It’s a naïve sentiment. Because every time you are happy, you create this illusion for yourself that you’re never gonna be unhappy again. Life doesn’t really work that way, and you have to learn to accept that you’ll have ups and downs your entire life. So that was really the sentiment of the song for me.

We weren’t clear initially how clear on how we wanted to approach it. I think Mick had put some brushes on it and therefore we had the working title of Brushes. Eventually it got paired down to just two guitars, a left and right guitar. It did go through it’s own evolution of trying other things. I think the initial attempt was going to be a more orchestral approach, a more layered approach. But I think eventually we came back to a simple approach with was suited to the sentiment of the song.

Christine McVie : The Chain started as the tail end of a jam and we did it all the wrong way round. We kept the end bit and added a new beginning. We used Stevie’s lyrics, I created the chorus, Lindsey did the verses. I really don’t know how it all came together.

Lindsey Buckingham : I think it was a really an interesting collaboration of forces. It started off as a song of Christine’s called Keep Me There and much of that did not end up being the song. We had the tag ending to the song.

Mick Fleetwood : Lindsey ran with whatever Chris had formulated and then basically ended up hitting a brick wall. And it felt like the whole thing was just never gonna work. They all got this revelation, and suddenly it just made sense, like a jigsaw puzzle.

Lindsey Buckingham : I came in one day, and said why don’t we just remove the verses? And we can do some sort of measurement of what the tape is, and do a reverse count back from there to create a metronome to play to, and once we have the blank tape in we can figure out what we want to put in there! Mick or I laid down the kick drum that gave us a start point. Eventually I started fooling with the dobro and that became the foundation for what was written over that. The three part harmony of ‘listen to the wind blow’ was a collaboration of the three writers.

Christine McVie : I remember Stevie, Lindsey and myself sitting in my den and doing the three parts. Lindsey with his guitar and trying to figure out the chords things to go underneath the vocals.

Stevie Nicks : I had written another song. The whole ‘running in the shadows’ thing. And Lindsey said can we use this? So of course I said yes…so it was funny that I had that melody and those words or it never would’ve happened.

Mick Fleetwood : Lindsey is more prone to see different pieces of things. Not only in his own songwriting, but in the girls’ songwriting and picking parts out.

Lindsey Buckingham : We were able to think of tape as a very plastic, cinematic and abstract way. Just to come up with pieces of music we could treat as pieces of film, and we came up with something that was truly a communal effort.

Stevie Nicks : I remember that great (bass) solo of John’s … and it was like the monsters are coming! And we all loved that.

John McVie : That was an Olympic fretless bass on a stainless fretboard with a pick. And I was just messin’ about in the studio and I just played the riff. Chris said ‘Oh! I like that!’ So we kept it in. If I had my way, I would’ve brought the band in a little earlier on the ending… it tends to stand out and look a little lonely out there, but it seems to work.

Christine McVie : I guess we must’ve just loved that bass part so much to do something with it. And Lindsey raved and put that guitar solo on it.

Mick Fleetwood : It’s one of the best examples of how things can work from a different point of view. The collaboration of the band brought it back to the shape it’s now in. It’s one of those songs that could’ve ended up in the dustbin, and it didn’t.

Richard Dashut : The only two instruments that were actually played together on that entire album was the guitar solo and drum track on The Chain. It wasn’t necessary or even expedient for them all to be in the studio at once. Virtually every track is either an overdub, or lifted from a separate take of that particular song. What you hear is the best pieces assembled, a true aural collage.

Lindsey and I did most of the production. That’s not to take anything away from Ken or the others in the band - they were all very involved. But Lindsey and myself really produced that record and he should’ve gotten the individual credit for it.

Cris Morris : Somebody, one of Lindsey’s girl friends I think it was, came in one night with some marijuana cookies, we called them the $1000 cookies. They turned out to be incredibly powerful and everybody got very zoned out for the next twelve hours. We lost the rest of that day and most of the one after.

Lindsey Buckingham : I think it (I Don’t Want To Know) was slightly inspired by Buddy Holly, after the Buckingham-Nicks era certainly. But when we tried to get things going, and we were dealing with indifference from management and label and people trying to get us on the circuit.

Stevie Nicks : It was on the demo we came to LA with.

Lindsey Buckingham : That would’ve been back in 1974 when she wrote that. And we did perform that live on several occasions.

Mick Fleetwood : That song often gets forgotten about in terms of it being part of Rumours. I think it’s really unique. You get those voices together. And that was their style. That’s says what it was that we heard that they brought into this thing called Fleetwood Mac. Everything else grew from around that and all the exchanges with Chris and Lindsey and Stevie as writers and me and John playing. It became a unique thing.

Lindsey Buckingham : We had to make a call on what the album needed. Kind of the group will would edit in and out what was working and what wasn’t. And that was great. At the eleventh hour to cut in something and have it be so straight ahead, and it didn’t require any pondering at all. That’s the atypical song on Rumours for sure.

Stevie Nicks : Looking back at it from 56 years old, all I can think is ‘Thank god it wasn’t worse’. Thank god we didn’t get into heroin. We were lucky that we were always able to get ourselves together to make the music. Maybe it was the music that saved all of us.

Mick Fleetwood : Things got so tense that I remember sleeping under the sound board one night because I felt it was the only safe place to be. Eventually the amount of cocaine began to do damage. You’d do what you thought was your best work, and then come back next day; it would sound terrible, so you’d rip it all apart and start again.

Stevie Nicks : I would sit down and play Lindsay Gold Dust Woman on the guitar, my simple little version, and two days later it would be recorded, and it would be recorded really well. He could take my songs and do what I would do if I had his musical talent. When he wasn’t angry with me, that is. That’s why there’s seven or eight great songs, and there’s 50 more where he wasn’t happy with me and didn’t help me.

Cris Morris : Recording Gold Dust Woman was one of the great moments because Stevie was very passionate about getting that vocal right. It seemed like it was directed straight at Lindsey and she was letting it all out.

Stevie Nicks : I’m sure the gold dust woman was me. It was kind of written about LA and how heavy it was here. The whole Los Angeles and ‘Hollywood thing’ you know.

Lindsey Buckingham : It’s probably the loosest thing on the whole record, in the best possible way. It’s kind of jazzy and moves into an area of non-structure. I think that’s where everything was going. It was really a no-holds-barred approach that started off in a structured place, and there were 3 part harmonies that were relative to everything else on the album.

Mick Fleetwood : It was a candidate to unleash a cacophony of sounds and things that you could hear…trailing off over the mountains.

Mick Fleetwood : Stevie did her first take of Gold Dust Woman in a fully lit studio and, as take followed take, she began withdrawing into herself. So we dimmed the lights, brought her a chair, a supply of tissues, a Vicks inhaler, a box of lozenges for her sore throat and a bottle of mineral water. And, on the eighth take, at four in the morning, she sang the lyric straight through to perfection.

Cris Morris : She worked right through the night on it, and finally did it after loads of takes. The wailing, the animal sounds and the breaking glass were all added later.

Stevie Nicks : The gold dust refers to cocaine, but it’s not completely about that, because there wasn’t that much cocaine around then. Everybody was doing a little bit - you know, we never bought it or anything, it was just around - and I think I had a real serious flash of what this stuff could be, of what it could do to you. The whole thing about how we all love the ritual of it, the little bottle, the little diamond-studded spoons, the fabulous velvet bags. For me, it fit right into the incense and candles and that stuff. And I really imagined that it could overtake everything, never thinking a million years that it would overtake me. I must have met a couple of people that I thought did too much coke, and I must have been impressed by that. Because I made it into a whole story.

Lindsey Buckingham : It’s a great piece. The whole tag of that song… Mick was doing some transcendent keyboard parts and it was really an evolving song.

Mick Fleetwood : Transcension was a word made back in the 70s. Truly from fatigue or various abuses, you found yourself doing things that were off the wall. Some worked and some didn’t. It was truly an example of that because Stevie thought she was a cat!

Cris Morris : Five or six months into it, once John had got his parts down, Lindsey spent weeks in the studio adding guitar parts which really gave the album its texture.

Richard Dashut : We wore out our original 24 track master. We figured we had 3,000 hours on it and we were losing high end, transients and much of the clarity. The drums were valid and maybe a couple of guitar parts. We ended up transferring all the overdubs on the master to a safety master. We had no sync pulse to lock the two machines together so we had to manually sync the two machines, ten tracks, by ear, using headphones in twelve hour sessions. People thought we were crazy but it turned out really good.

Lindsey Buckingham : It's very difficult having a love relationship with somebody you're working with. On the other side, one of the great pivot points of Fleetwood Mac was that you had two couples that were breaking up simultaneously. The kind of tension created by that also helped us keep our priorities in order. There was pain, there was confusion, and it all added up to make Rumours a soap opera on vinyl.

Stevie Nicks : When we were writing and recording these songs, I don’t think we really thought about what the lyrics were saying. It was only later down the line that Lindsey did come to question the lyrics of things like Dreams, and my answer was that it was my counterpart to Go Your Own Way.

Lindsey Buckingham : The spark for the song (Go Your Own Way) was that Stevie and I were crumbling, and I'm sure I was at a Holiday Inn somewhere, sitting in the room with the guitar, addressing what was going on. It was totally autobiographical.

After we got to Sausalito to begin recording, I was listening to a Stones song called Street Fighting Man which had a drum beat similar to what Mick played. It wasn’t the kind of thing Mick did, and he did his own version.

Mick Fleetwood : I don't write songs in Fleetwood Mac, but I have to say I have a lot to do with how they end up. Most of my best ideas are glorious accidents, but there's a great knack in learning to be objective about your accidents.

Go Your Own Way's rhythm was a tom tom structure that Lindsey demoed by hitting Kleenex boxes or something to indicate what was going on. I never quite got to grips with what he wanted, so the end result was a mutated interpretation of what he was trying to get at. It's completely back to front, and I've seen really brilliant drummers totally stumped by it. When Lindsey went out on his own, he took three drummers onstage and they did 'Go Your Own Way', but they couldn't get it right. It's a major part of that song, a back to front approach that came, I'm ashamed to say, from capitalising on my ineptness. (Source : interview with Johnny Black, 1995)

Lindsey Buckingham : I remember very clearly that when Stevie first heard the lyric she objected quite vehemently to the brutal honesty of it, or what she thought was exaggeration, but to my mind it wasn't.

Mick Fleetwood : There was some conflict about the ‘crackin’ up, shackin’ up,” line which Stevie felt was unfair but Lindsey felt strongly about. It was basically ‘on your bike, girl!’.

Lindsey Buckingham : The solo at the end was certainly a template for things that happened after that. I really think Ken Caillat did a great job of getting the sound that solo needed. It defined an approach for years to come.

Stevie Nicks : Maybe we would have killed each other if we hadn’t have been able to write those songs, you know? If we hadn’t have been able to put that energy into the music and rise above it in that way, then maybe we would have just gone totally freaked out on each other.

I said to him, “In my heart, Dreams was open and hopeful, but in Go Your Own Way, your 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. It was kind of like that Indian thing, where the big rain comes and washes everything away. I think Lindsey would have preferred our lives to have not gone that way. Go Your Own Way was more resentful but Dreams was like, ‘You know what, we have to get through this and remain friends.’

I guess it was written to make me feel better. There’s an element of therapy in writing these songs. And I think that if people hear a song like Dreams, and they’re going through a break-up, then they know that it is real, and that it is possible to get past the break-up and remain friends. It’s not the end of your life.

Lindsey Buckingham : What made us attractive to people was the feeling that you can hear those songs knowing we had these relationship problems in our personal life. You don't see a lot of that within one group in a rock situation, and I think that's part of what made us unique.

Christine McVie : I definitely wrote Songbird in my room in half an hour. I remember coming in and all the guys were in the control room. They were completely oblivious to the fact that I was shaking in my boots cause I’d written this song and I didn’t know where it came from. And I was playing it and all of sudden the whole studio went quiet and everyone diverted their attention to me and, when the song stopped, I remember everyone saying, ‘That was bloody fantastic. Thank God you put it on a two track’.

Lindsey Buckingham : To place it right after Go Your Own Way was just so great. I actually
remember when the album was done… and one of the local radio stations had played the whole album and took a break between sides. And Richard Dashut and I were in our car when we still lived on Putney, and listened to this. I can remember when Go Your Own Way came in and we were so aggressive at the end and it was a great thing. That song came off, and then Songbird came on. And the masculinity and aggressiveness that was the end of Go Your Own Way transformed into that intimate female, introspective side of Songbird which followed. I honestly remember that the DJ that addressed the listeners before playing Side Two, you could tell she’d been crying! And that was the combination of Go Your Own Way into Songbird.

Mick Fleetwood : Songbird is always Chris alone with the audience. And we always saw it like that. And it survives like that to this day. It hits people…it’s amazing. It’s like a little prayer, or a Fleetwood Mac prayer. It has a tremendous power.

Christine: It wasn’t about anyone in particular at all. It was for everybody.

Stevie Nicks : Oh Daddy is my very favourite Chris song. And it always, always was. I really came from a folk-singer guitar and song thing. With Chris, being an accomplished pianist, she came from a different place. So it’s like we all have our strengths.

Christine McVie : Mick’s the big daddy for sure. And we always call him big daddy. I was being a little sarcastic on the chorus. You know, how can you think you’re always so right? And I could never get the last line. Stevie gave me the last line, “and I can’t walk away from you if I tried” and I just knew I was going to say it.

Lindsey Buckingham : It’s funny how certain little things that happen by accident in any creative process and get left in, because somehow they are happy accidents. You kind of have to be on the lookout for those things. Sometimes something very small can create an ambiance and magic and something that would be less if it didn’t exist. There is a keyboard blip on the end, which was not something she was playing interpretively. You know…it wasn’t jazz! It was just her saying, ‘Hey what are you doing in there?’ And it got left in there…just one of things you wait for.

Lindsey Buckingham : You Make Loving Fun might be my favourite song of Christine’s. It seems to cover so much ground on so many levels. She’s got this clavinet part which is very “her”, but the approaches were a little bit different from what we did on other songs.

Christine McVie : I felt it needed something dark underneath it. And it was… it was a clavinet with a wah-wah pedal. And Mick was on the floor doing it manually.

Lindsey Buckingham : I thought on a production level that song turned out really well and just in terms of reeling out Christine’s normal tendencies. The feel of it is just so great. It’s got a real nice R&B feel to it. It actually took a turn for the ethereal and sweet that you wouldn’t expect from where it was going in the beginning. I remember being up at Wally Heider’s and just trying to make that “never did believe” section go somewhere else and then make it snap back into place.

Christine McVie : I’ve got the luxury of building this on my own. I built up this rocking riff with the bass and drums. The whole thing was all keyboards.

Mick Fleetwood : All keyboard players seem to be detached sometimes. And Chris has always been in that thing right there with me and John.

Christine McVie : I had learned playing with Mick and John. I’ve never considered myself a lead keyboard player…but part of the rhythm section.

Lindsey Buckingham : That album is just rife with great tags. And that song was one of the best. Where you have a little bit at the end, where it is a little masterpiece unto itself.

Mick Fleetwood : We were so engrossed in what we were doing, realizing that we’d been given an opportunity, as individuals and as a band, that may only come once in a lifetime, and to throw it away would have been a sin. That’s how we looked at it. That’s how we got round all the other stuff, the bedroom stuff.

Stevie Nicks : When Lindsey and I broke up during Rumours, I started going out with Don Henley. And you know, I was like the biggest Eagles fan … And we went out, off and on, for about two years. He was really cute, and he was elegant. Don taught me to spend money.

Mick Fleetwood : We went through our collective traumas head-on and it was then that we all revealed our true colours. If anything, the weird circumstances in which we recorded Rumours helped to make the group stronger than before.

Lindsey Buckingham : Rumours was out of control in terms of the phenomenon. The music was good, but it got to the point where I thought much of our success was based on us being this living musical soap opera, where our lives were just there for everyone to examine. It brought out the voyeur in everyone.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
SILVER SPRINGS (recorded for Rumours but left off)

Stevie Nicks : I got the idea from a freeway sign as we drove under the sign that said Silver Springs, Maryland. And… that’s the kind of writer that I am. If I hear a name I really like, I can maybe write a story about it.

Lindsey Buckingham : It’s an interesting song in what it seems to be saying. Very bittersweet… because she’s talking about being MY Silver Spring, and what we could have been as lovers. A beautifully put together song on a musical level. It has some of the best guitar work on the album, speaking for what I was able to contribute to it. A lot of layering and volume pedals, textures across the top, and acoustic picking.

Mick Fleetwood : The subtlety of what we got into as players… you really hear a lot of these delicate things that went on during the recording. Most of it was amazingly natural.

Lindsey Buckingham : I know Stevie was disappointed that it didn’t make it at the time. We were worried a bit about the flow of the album and what the album needed. It was a shame that it didn’t make it. It was certainly warranted.

Mick Fleetwood : The reason why it didn’t make it was because vinyl was good quality up to 22 minutes per side. So we had to cut a song unfortunately.
(Eyewitness feature, researched and compiled by Johnny Black)


---------------------------------------------------------------
INTERVIEW WITH STEVIE NICKS
Stevie Nicks (singer/songwriter, Fleetwood Mac) : The Record Plant was a great studio. We were really only there for like two and a half months, say November, December and half of January. And we really did, in that two and a half months, cut all the basic tracks for Rumours.

It was when we went back to Los Angeles that the time started to build up. It was that process of adding stuff to the basic tracks, which had been done very simply and they were great. It’s like making a dress, where you have a lovely fabric and it’s cut beautifully but then you spend forever putting trim on it.

The first album had taken us three months, and Rumours was started in the same frame of mind but we had started to make money off the first album, we were famous, and we became indulgent and took more time. That vibe sometimes really messes with things because you can do really great work very quickly if you set your mind to it.

The same thing happened in my solo career. My first album, Bella Donna, took three and a half months to make, but it had been well rehearsed, as was the case with our first Fleetwood Mac album. When we walked into the studio with that album, we knew what we were going to do, we knew our singing parts, so it was pretty easy to do it and have a great time.

But with Rumours, we’d had some success and it was like, let’s party, and it doesn’t matter. We can take as long as we need.

So were the songs for Rumours being written during the recording process?
Yes, some of them were. Dreams was definitely written in the studio. We had been on tour for several months with the first album, and everybody had done some writing on the road.
(Source : interview on Feb 2, 2005, with Johnny Black for Blender magazine)