Fact #121370

STEVIE NICKS OF FLEETWOOD MAC

Telephone interview from Hawaii with Johnny Black, 2 FEBRUARY 2005, for Blender magazine.

I gather you’re in Hawaii.
Yes, we came here on the first of December and we’re going home tomorrow, actually. We’re all kind of a little fretting because we don’t want the holiday to end.

The basic tracks for Rumours were done at the Record Plant in Sausalito. What was that studio like?
That 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.

So how did Dreams come to be written?
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.

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.

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.

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.

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. It was the same thing with Sara.

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. It was only later down the line that Lindsey did come to question the lyric, and my answer was that dreams was my counterpart to Go Your Own Way.

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 breakup, then they know that it is real, and that it is possible to get past the breakup and remain friends. It’s not the end of your life.

You seem to remember it all very clearly.
We had started dabbling with drugs, but the cocaine didn’t really start having its effect on us until 1978-79. I think 1980 was probably the worst. Those first four years of Fleetwood Mac were nowhere near as bad as everybody likes to think it was.

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.

Lindsey has spoken about the two songs being kind of a pair, but that you weren’t deliberately writing them to hurt each other, that it was almost an unconscious thing…
No matter how sad or miserable we were about our relationship we were always able to recognize when either of us had written a good song.

To this day, even though we don’t always agree with each other, we have terrible arguments, but we always remember that we have this great love for each other and if anything were to happen, like a close friend of mine dying or something, Lindsey would be one of the first people I’d call, and ask him if he could come over. In the long run, when we are a little old man and a little old lady, we will always love each other.

Did you know when you’d finished recording Dreams that you had a hit single?
Yes, I did think it was a hit. You know, since that song came out, I have never gone on stage, either with Fleetwood Mac or in my solo career, and not sung Dreams. It’s the one song that shines above everything else.

Putting a live set together for Fleetwood Mac is almost impossible. You probably play about 23 songs in a concert, and you have to do Rhiannon, you have to do a lot of them, but there a so many great songs to choose from that you can’t possibly do them all every time, but Dreams is always in the set.

Do you never get tired of singing it?
You do get tired of singing certain songs and if you start to feel that way then you have to drop that song. Sometimes, even in my solo shows, I don’t do Landslide, or Rhiannon, but I have always done Dreams.

So having recorded the basic tracks in Sausalito, what was added in Los Angeles?
You’ve got your piano, bass and guitar, and except for the keyboards, that’s like a power trio. We cut 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.

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. 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.

Did the band choose Dreams as a single, or was that the record company?
In those days the record company people really had ears. We were happy to leave that job to the company, that was their job. We had no idea what should be a single. We made the records to the best of our ability and after that it was up to the company.

When they decided to release Rhiannon as a single, I was not happy with it. I didn’t see it as a single. I thought it was just this strange Welsh song. I loved it so much I didn’t want to put it out and have it fail, but in the end they all said to me that they believed it was a hit single so in the end I said, “OK, but if it fails it’s your fault.” That was the strangest song of all to put out.

That was their job though, and they were good at it. It’s not the same now. I feel really sorry for the record companies now, and I think of all the great men that would go on to be even greater men if it wasn’t for the fucking internet which, in my opinion, has destroyed everything.

The record companies don’t have the money now to do what they used to do. Nobody is nurtured any more. We were nurtured by the record company. We 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. That doesn’t happen now.

I never had any fear that somebody was gonna come along and replace me if I didn’t immediately have a hit record, but somebody like Britney, well, her cuter little sister is already waiting in the wings.

I see lots of young artists that I think are really good, but I know that they’re gonna get dropped.

If Lindsey and I moved to Los Angeles today, exactly as we were back then, I don’t think we’d get a deal. People would say, ‘Well, what are you guys? This duet, country-rock … who’s gonna go for that?” And we were really, really good.

We were, fortunately, also gorgeous, but I knew back then that nobody would remember us just for being good-looking. I knew that I had to write great songs as well, because that’s what gets you remembered.

That even went through into what I’ve worn over the years. I still wear basically the same kind of things I wore in 1975. I designed a little outfit back then, and everything I’ve worn since then is kind of a variation on that outfit, so I’m kind of a fashion comfort to people. I get older but my style doesn’t change. I’m maybe a little more elegant, but basically in the same style that I had back in 1975.