Fact #92752
When:
Short story:
Rumours by Fleetwood Mac reaches No1 in the Billboard albums chart in the USA. Much of the album was recorded at The Record Plant in Sausalito, California, USA.Full article:
THE STORY OF FLEETWOOD MAC’S RUMOURS
by Johnny Black
Rumours was the eleventh album by Anglo-American rock giants Fleetwood Mac, one of an elite cadre of bands which not only survived the loss of their main creative member, but actually achieved greater success without him. You want details? OK, but I’ll keep it short.
F. Mac started out as a superior and internationally successful late-60s Brit-blues outfit but were derailed when their leader, Peter Green, went a bit doo-lally because of his fondness for what we now quaintly refer to as ‘substances’. Relocating to California, the rest of the band spent several years milking the vast wilderness of America’s touring circuit, before hooking up with the boy-girl songwriting duo of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
This romantically-involved pair swiftly became the creative engine for a band that also boasted a peerless rhythm section in the Mac’s original drummer and bassist (Mick Fleetwood and John McVie), plus John’s songwriting wife, Christine McVie.
Their first album together, Fleetwood Mac (1975), did well, but Rumours made everything that went before look like rehearsals for greatness. It spent a record-breaking 29 weeks at No1 in the USA, won a Best Album Grammy, sold upwards of 30m copies, and still regularly crops up in all-time best album lists.
So how was it done? If they really were, as Fleetwood Mac mythology insists, totally zonked-out on God’s dandruff and swapping sex partners the whole time, how did they ever get anything recorded?
Work (hah!) started on 15 February 1976 at the Record Plant, Sausalito, California, USA. At first glance it was just one in a row of drab industrial buildings, but no-one ever booked into the Record Plant for the way it looked. They went for the sound, the friendly atmosphere and for its unique ambience.
“It was this incredible studio,” Stevie Nicks told me in 2005, “all decorated with Indian saris and beautiful colours. There were little hippy girls everywhere making cookies … it was such a beautiful thing … 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.”
“Everyone was delving in substances,” Lindsey Buckingham has admitted. “It was kind of funny - when we met John, Mick and Christine, I don't think they'd ever even done cocaine. But it was the norm in the subculture, and certainly Sausalito was a shining example of that. We stayed up late a lot of nights."
Luckily, there was another kind of chemistry – the creative kind - going on as the sessions got underway.
Buckingham and Nicks brought along with them a young engineer called Richard Dashut, who knew exactly how they liked to work. “Because he’s not a musician,” explains Buckingham, “Richard is great with the big picture. I can get lost in details sometimes, and he’ll walk in and cut through that … He’s also my best friend, and that helps a lot.”
Dashut, in turn, roped in another good buddy, the more experienced producer Ken Caillat from Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco, and the pair made a formidable team.
Further invaluable know-how came from recording assistant Cris Morris. “I’d helped build the Record Plant,” he explains. “I knew every nail, because I’d driven most of them in. 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.”
This was the bubbling, effervescent musical stew in which Rumours was birthed. Adding some piquancy to the laid-back vibes, however, was the fact that the personal relationships in Fleetwood Mac were falling apart. “You had John and Christine McVie and Stevie and myself in the process of breaking up during the making of the album,” explains Buckingham, “so you had all this cross-dialogue going on in the songs.”
“We had two alternatives,” is how Christine McVie put it. “Go our own ways and see the band collapse, or grit our teeth and carry on.”
Teeth firmly gritted, they set to work. To tell the story of every track on Rumours isn’t possible in the space available here, so I’ll focus on some of the most interesting tales.
Mick Fleetwood told me, for example, that one of the album’s signature songs, the appropriately-titled Go Your Own Way, benefited from a happy accident. “The 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. 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.”
Several songs went through dramatic changes as the weeks rolled by. Second Hand News, for example, was originally titled Strummer because of its strummy, acoustic feel but then, says Buckingham, “Richard Dashut and I had heard Jive Talking by the Bee Gees. We really liked the feel of that, 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.”
Stevie Nicks remembers, “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.”
Christine McVie admits to not finding Dreams particularly interesting when Nicks first played it to her, but then, “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.”
When the band left Sausalito, they had completed the basic piano, bass and guitar tracks, and then resumed work in Los Angeles in January 1977. As Nicks remembers it, this was a much less focused time. “I think we rented every studio in Los Angeles, California, USA. Record Plant, Sunset Sound, Amigo…”
“Never Going Back Again, which we did in Sound City in LA, took forever,” reveals Cris Morris. “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.”
They found themselves struggling to get to grips with one of Christine’s songs, Keep Me There, until Buckingham had another radical brainwave. “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!’” Simple, really, when you know how, and the end result appeared on Rumours as The Chain.
A sonic quantum leap from previous Mac offerings, Rumours firmly established the high-production level that would become a staple of all their later releases. In particular, the shimmering harmonies of Nicks, Buckingham and Christine McVie are represented with crystal clarity, as opposed to the somewhat muddy mixes on the previous album, 1975’s Fleetwood Mac.
Released on February 4, 1977, Rumours scooped its first platinum award a month later and reached No1 in the USA on April 2 but, with punk in the ascendant, Rumours had to wait another year before it could top the UK albums chart.
“Looking back at it from 56 years old,” Stevie Nicks told me, “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.”
Production Notes
Sausalito was the third Record Plant location opened by visionary producer Gary Kellgren, following his two successful studios in New York and Los Angeles, California, USA. Famed not just for their state of the art recording systems, Record Plant studios provided a home from home where musicians’ creativity could flourish. Earlier studios were drab, purely functional spaces with minimal facilities. Kellgren designed living-room style environments, supplied good food and, as funk superstar Rick James noted, "You didn't have to leave to get drugs or get high.”
The studio’s reputation for sonic excellence perfectly suited Lindsey Buckingham, a self-confessed hi-fi obsessive from the age of 21. “I remember at that age going down to Eber Hi-Fi and asking, "Do you have 4-track tape recorders?' And they're looking at me like, ‘What? Are you, kidding?’ Because at that time something like that didn't exist.” It wasn’t until an aunt died that the sale of her house enabled Buckingham to purchase his first 4-track machine, a $4,000 Ampex AG440 using 1/2" tape.
Buckingham’s insistence on sonic perfection drove the Rumours team to unprecedented lengths. “We were trying to get unique sounds on every instrument,” recalls Cris Morris. “We spent ten 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.”
As the sessions progressed, however, they realised they were paying a price for operating on the technological borderline. “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,” remembers co-producer Richard Dashut. “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.”
ALTERNATIVE FORMAT DISCOGRAPHY
LP
Originally issued on 4th February 1977, Rumours (K456344) was a classic example of a mid-70s multiple-format release, going into the shops as a standard 12” LP, a limited edition white vinyl LP, a cassette and an 8-track cartridge.
The album quickly became recognised as an ideal test disc for any hi-fi system, and
produced four US Top 10 hits in Go Your Own Way, Dreams, Don’t Stop (which Bill Clinton chose as the theme song for his successful 1992 US presidential campaign) and You Make Loving Fun.
The album’s baroque cover image, curiously, featured only two of the band’s members, Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks. Set against a cream background, it was an evocative black and white Herbie Worthington photograph, showing the pair in a strikingly artificial pose, like dance partners frozen into immobility. “That picture was somewhat prophetic of us being together, doing that, sort of intertwined as we were,” said Mick Fleetwood some years later. “We, me and Stevie, fell in love many years later; not huge amounts of people realize that.”
CD RE
The first CD version (K256344) appeared in December 1983. It wasn’t re-mastered, included no extra material and attracted criticisism for muddy bass and messy treble but, according to Award-winning mastering and restoration engineer Steve Hoffman, “I'd heard the master tape, and that old CD matched exactly. Not a great sound (needed a little "breath of life" work), but pretty accurate.”
TRIBUTE CD
The 90s saw no significant Rumours activity beyond an interim LP + cassette re-issue (June 1988); a second one on CD, LP + cassette (February 1993); and the inevitable 20th Anniversary re-promotion (September 1997) which returned the album to the US charts at No18. On 17 March 1998, however, came the intriguing CD curiosity, Legacy: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. Produced by Mick Fleetwood, this featured new versions of every Rumours track performed by artists including The Corrs, Matchbox 20, Elton John, Shawn Colvin, Jewel, The Goo Goo Dolls and Sister Hazel.
DVD-AUDIO DISC
The next significant step forward came when a 2001 DVD-Audio disc (9 48083-9) issue delivered a spectacular multi-channel remix.
Helming this upgrade was Ken Caillat of the justly acclaimed West Los Angeles company 5.1 Entertainment. Caillat, having been one of the original engineers during the 1976 sessions that produced the first vinyl version, knew the tracks inside out and created a version fit for the new millennium
Caillat oversaw the Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound and stereo mixes. “It was mixed in six channels at 96k and 24 bit,” he has explained, “much higher than the CD and you can hear things you have never heard before. Listen to each speaker, all the parts have been separated into each speaker.”
The DVD also adds the bonus feature, The Making of 'Rumours', a 37-minute set of behind-the-scenes audio interviews detailing the writing and recording of each song in order. Members of the band are interviewed, (often recorded by Rumours’ original co-producer Richard Dashut) while, behind their voices, instrumental surround mixes of the songs under discussion can be heard. There are also original scribbled lyric sheets and track sheets plus photographs from the original sessions and, as they say, much more.
The major musical bonus, however, was the addition of Stevie Nicks’ heart-breaking love song, Silver Springs, which had been recorded at the original sessions but only previously appeared as the b-side of the Go Your Own Way single. “The reason why it didn’t make it was because vinyl was good quality up to 22 minutes per side,” Mick Fleetwood has explained, “so we had to cut a song, unfortunately.”
Silver Springs, however, seized its chance to stand on its own two feet in 1997 when, promoted to being an a-side, it provided a Top 5 Billboard Adult Contemporary chart hit for the band. It made perfect sense, therefore, to add it into the DVD-Audio release. Nevertheless, it came as a shock to devotees to find the familiar running order disrupted when Silver Springs appeared as track 6 after Go Your Own Way, thereby usurping Songbird which dropped back to the end of the album.
CD, EXPANDED and REMASTERED
On March 23, 2004, Rhino Records delivered their 2 CD Expanded and Remastered edition (Rhino 8122738822) which boasted a bonus disc of rough mixes, outtakes and early demos.
On this version, Songbird has been re-instated to its original place (Track 6) with Silver Springs inserted immediately after. This is still a disruption to what millions think of as the ‘real’ running order of Rumours, but an improvement on the previous running order.
Among several impressive bonus disc treats, there’s Planets of the Universe which didn’t make it to Rumours but did appear on a Stevie Nicks album decades later, plus a stripped down take of Dreams featuring Nicks in particularly impressive vocal form.
Although Steve Hoffman felt it suffered from the, “most flagrant top-end boost I'd ever heard!” this Rhino release is widely regarded as the best version yet in terms of sound quality.
(Feature first appeared in Hi Fi News, September 2009)
Tweet this Fact
by Johnny Black
Rumours was the eleventh album by Anglo-American rock giants Fleetwood Mac, one of an elite cadre of bands which not only survived the loss of their main creative member, but actually achieved greater success without him. You want details? OK, but I’ll keep it short.
F. Mac started out as a superior and internationally successful late-60s Brit-blues outfit but were derailed when their leader, Peter Green, went a bit doo-lally because of his fondness for what we now quaintly refer to as ‘substances’. Relocating to California, the rest of the band spent several years milking the vast wilderness of America’s touring circuit, before hooking up with the boy-girl songwriting duo of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
This romantically-involved pair swiftly became the creative engine for a band that also boasted a peerless rhythm section in the Mac’s original drummer and bassist (Mick Fleetwood and John McVie), plus John’s songwriting wife, Christine McVie.
Their first album together, Fleetwood Mac (1975), did well, but Rumours made everything that went before look like rehearsals for greatness. It spent a record-breaking 29 weeks at No1 in the USA, won a Best Album Grammy, sold upwards of 30m copies, and still regularly crops up in all-time best album lists.
So how was it done? If they really were, as Fleetwood Mac mythology insists, totally zonked-out on God’s dandruff and swapping sex partners the whole time, how did they ever get anything recorded?
Work (hah!) started on 15 February 1976 at the Record Plant, Sausalito, California, USA. At first glance it was just one in a row of drab industrial buildings, but no-one ever booked into the Record Plant for the way it looked. They went for the sound, the friendly atmosphere and for its unique ambience.
“It was this incredible studio,” Stevie Nicks told me in 2005, “all decorated with Indian saris and beautiful colours. There were little hippy girls everywhere making cookies … it was such a beautiful thing … 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.”
“Everyone was delving in substances,” Lindsey Buckingham has admitted. “It was kind of funny - when we met John, Mick and Christine, I don't think they'd ever even done cocaine. But it was the norm in the subculture, and certainly Sausalito was a shining example of that. We stayed up late a lot of nights."
Luckily, there was another kind of chemistry – the creative kind - going on as the sessions got underway.
Buckingham and Nicks brought along with them a young engineer called Richard Dashut, who knew exactly how they liked to work. “Because he’s not a musician,” explains Buckingham, “Richard is great with the big picture. I can get lost in details sometimes, and he’ll walk in and cut through that … He’s also my best friend, and that helps a lot.”
Dashut, in turn, roped in another good buddy, the more experienced producer Ken Caillat from Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco, and the pair made a formidable team.
Further invaluable know-how came from recording assistant Cris Morris. “I’d helped build the Record Plant,” he explains. “I knew every nail, because I’d driven most of them in. 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.”
This was the bubbling, effervescent musical stew in which Rumours was birthed. Adding some piquancy to the laid-back vibes, however, was the fact that the personal relationships in Fleetwood Mac were falling apart. “You had John and Christine McVie and Stevie and myself in the process of breaking up during the making of the album,” explains Buckingham, “so you had all this cross-dialogue going on in the songs.”
“We had two alternatives,” is how Christine McVie put it. “Go our own ways and see the band collapse, or grit our teeth and carry on.”
Teeth firmly gritted, they set to work. To tell the story of every track on Rumours isn’t possible in the space available here, so I’ll focus on some of the most interesting tales.
Mick Fleetwood told me, for example, that one of the album’s signature songs, the appropriately-titled Go Your Own Way, benefited from a happy accident. “The 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. 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.”
Several songs went through dramatic changes as the weeks rolled by. Second Hand News, for example, was originally titled Strummer because of its strummy, acoustic feel but then, says Buckingham, “Richard Dashut and I had heard Jive Talking by the Bee Gees. We really liked the feel of that, 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.”
Stevie Nicks remembers, “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.”
Christine McVie admits to not finding Dreams particularly interesting when Nicks first played it to her, but then, “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.”
When the band left Sausalito, they had completed the basic piano, bass and guitar tracks, and then resumed work in Los Angeles in January 1977. As Nicks remembers it, this was a much less focused time. “I think we rented every studio in Los Angeles, California, USA. Record Plant, Sunset Sound, Amigo…”
“Never Going Back Again, which we did in Sound City in LA, took forever,” reveals Cris Morris. “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.”
They found themselves struggling to get to grips with one of Christine’s songs, Keep Me There, until Buckingham had another radical brainwave. “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!’” Simple, really, when you know how, and the end result appeared on Rumours as The Chain.
A sonic quantum leap from previous Mac offerings, Rumours firmly established the high-production level that would become a staple of all their later releases. In particular, the shimmering harmonies of Nicks, Buckingham and Christine McVie are represented with crystal clarity, as opposed to the somewhat muddy mixes on the previous album, 1975’s Fleetwood Mac.
Released on February 4, 1977, Rumours scooped its first platinum award a month later and reached No1 in the USA on April 2 but, with punk in the ascendant, Rumours had to wait another year before it could top the UK albums chart.
“Looking back at it from 56 years old,” Stevie Nicks told me, “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.”
Production Notes
Sausalito was the third Record Plant location opened by visionary producer Gary Kellgren, following his two successful studios in New York and Los Angeles, California, USA. Famed not just for their state of the art recording systems, Record Plant studios provided a home from home where musicians’ creativity could flourish. Earlier studios were drab, purely functional spaces with minimal facilities. Kellgren designed living-room style environments, supplied good food and, as funk superstar Rick James noted, "You didn't have to leave to get drugs or get high.”
The studio’s reputation for sonic excellence perfectly suited Lindsey Buckingham, a self-confessed hi-fi obsessive from the age of 21. “I remember at that age going down to Eber Hi-Fi and asking, "Do you have 4-track tape recorders?' And they're looking at me like, ‘What? Are you, kidding?’ Because at that time something like that didn't exist.” It wasn’t until an aunt died that the sale of her house enabled Buckingham to purchase his first 4-track machine, a $4,000 Ampex AG440 using 1/2" tape.
Buckingham’s insistence on sonic perfection drove the Rumours team to unprecedented lengths. “We were trying to get unique sounds on every instrument,” recalls Cris Morris. “We spent ten 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.”
As the sessions progressed, however, they realised they were paying a price for operating on the technological borderline. “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,” remembers co-producer Richard Dashut. “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.”
ALTERNATIVE FORMAT DISCOGRAPHY
LP
Originally issued on 4th February 1977, Rumours (K456344) was a classic example of a mid-70s multiple-format release, going into the shops as a standard 12” LP, a limited edition white vinyl LP, a cassette and an 8-track cartridge.
The album quickly became recognised as an ideal test disc for any hi-fi system, and
produced four US Top 10 hits in Go Your Own Way, Dreams, Don’t Stop (which Bill Clinton chose as the theme song for his successful 1992 US presidential campaign) and You Make Loving Fun.
The album’s baroque cover image, curiously, featured only two of the band’s members, Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks. Set against a cream background, it was an evocative black and white Herbie Worthington photograph, showing the pair in a strikingly artificial pose, like dance partners frozen into immobility. “That picture was somewhat prophetic of us being together, doing that, sort of intertwined as we were,” said Mick Fleetwood some years later. “We, me and Stevie, fell in love many years later; not huge amounts of people realize that.”
CD RE
The first CD version (K256344) appeared in December 1983. It wasn’t re-mastered, included no extra material and attracted criticisism for muddy bass and messy treble but, according to Award-winning mastering and restoration engineer Steve Hoffman, “I'd heard the master tape, and that old CD matched exactly. Not a great sound (needed a little "breath of life" work), but pretty accurate.”
TRIBUTE CD
The 90s saw no significant Rumours activity beyond an interim LP + cassette re-issue (June 1988); a second one on CD, LP + cassette (February 1993); and the inevitable 20th Anniversary re-promotion (September 1997) which returned the album to the US charts at No18. On 17 March 1998, however, came the intriguing CD curiosity, Legacy: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. Produced by Mick Fleetwood, this featured new versions of every Rumours track performed by artists including The Corrs, Matchbox 20, Elton John, Shawn Colvin, Jewel, The Goo Goo Dolls and Sister Hazel.
DVD-AUDIO DISC
The next significant step forward came when a 2001 DVD-Audio disc (9 48083-9) issue delivered a spectacular multi-channel remix.
Helming this upgrade was Ken Caillat of the justly acclaimed West Los Angeles company 5.1 Entertainment. Caillat, having been one of the original engineers during the 1976 sessions that produced the first vinyl version, knew the tracks inside out and created a version fit for the new millennium
Caillat oversaw the Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound and stereo mixes. “It was mixed in six channels at 96k and 24 bit,” he has explained, “much higher than the CD and you can hear things you have never heard before. Listen to each speaker, all the parts have been separated into each speaker.”
The DVD also adds the bonus feature, The Making of 'Rumours', a 37-minute set of behind-the-scenes audio interviews detailing the writing and recording of each song in order. Members of the band are interviewed, (often recorded by Rumours’ original co-producer Richard Dashut) while, behind their voices, instrumental surround mixes of the songs under discussion can be heard. There are also original scribbled lyric sheets and track sheets plus photographs from the original sessions and, as they say, much more.
The major musical bonus, however, was the addition of Stevie Nicks’ heart-breaking love song, Silver Springs, which had been recorded at the original sessions but only previously appeared as the b-side of the Go Your Own Way single. “The reason why it didn’t make it was because vinyl was good quality up to 22 minutes per side,” Mick Fleetwood has explained, “so we had to cut a song, unfortunately.”
Silver Springs, however, seized its chance to stand on its own two feet in 1997 when, promoted to being an a-side, it provided a Top 5 Billboard Adult Contemporary chart hit for the band. It made perfect sense, therefore, to add it into the DVD-Audio release. Nevertheless, it came as a shock to devotees to find the familiar running order disrupted when Silver Springs appeared as track 6 after Go Your Own Way, thereby usurping Songbird which dropped back to the end of the album.
CD, EXPANDED and REMASTERED
On March 23, 2004, Rhino Records delivered their 2 CD Expanded and Remastered edition (Rhino 8122738822) which boasted a bonus disc of rough mixes, outtakes and early demos.
On this version, Songbird has been re-instated to its original place (Track 6) with Silver Springs inserted immediately after. This is still a disruption to what millions think of as the ‘real’ running order of Rumours, but an improvement on the previous running order.
Among several impressive bonus disc treats, there’s Planets of the Universe which didn’t make it to Rumours but did appear on a Stevie Nicks album decades later, plus a stripped down take of Dreams featuring Nicks in particularly impressive vocal form.
Although Steve Hoffman felt it suffered from the, “most flagrant top-end boost I'd ever heard!” this Rhino release is widely regarded as the best version yet in terms of sound quality.
(Feature first appeared in Hi Fi News, September 2009)