FLEETWOOD MAC’S records have always been better than its live shows. On records, the band has achieved a lovable blend of lyrical effervescence and studio polish. In concert, subtleties have been coarsened and Stevie Nicks in particular has undercut her impact with raw singing and loopy stage behavior.
But the band’s only New York area show on its current Mirage tour, Tuesday night at the Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, N.J., was the best Fleetwood Mac show in this writer’s experience. Miss Nicks has found a persuasive way of capitalizing on her assets, and the band as a whole performed with tightness and intensity.
”Pleasing” is the operative word, however. Even with as tight and powerful a rhythm section as rock can offer, in Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, Fleetwood “hit” Mac is not a band to build to overwhelming concert climaxes. Quirky, buoyant pop, soulful lyricism and mysterious witcheries are more its game. The set meandered over its two-hour length, bursting out at the beginning with some of the group’s most impassioned songs but then settling down to more commonplace ups and downs.
Miss Nicks provided several of the ups. She has lost the reedy fragility of her mid-1970’s voice. But she compensates with a hoarser, rougher rock contralto, and her stage demeanor blends glamour and a kind of dangerous charm. Lindsey Buckingham still has an underlying streak of bizarreness that seems more unsettling than stimulating, and his rave-up guitar solo — as well as Mr. Fleetwood’s drum solo — lacked the communicative artistry that such solos can entail; it was mostly note-ridden bedazzlement, and as such elicited the predictable ovation. But Mr. Buckingham is also responsible for some of the group’s best songs, and his clear, effortlessly produced tenor is now the highest voice in the band.
Christine McVie, the keyboard player and third singer — there was also an anonymous guitarist on stage for some songs — was disappointing. Or, more properly, the uses to which she was put were disappointing. Her songs have always served as calm, cool contrast to the rest, but Tuesday they were slighted or arranged in an overly forceful manner.
The set as a whole proved valuable beyond its function as tightly crafted entertainment. Never before has the band’s post-Buckingham Nicks material seemed so much of a piece. The Fleetwood Mac album established this configuration, with Rumours as a venturesome yet commercially potent follow-up. Tusk is generally considered a deviation, however, and Mirage a calculated return to form.
But Tuesday’s performance stressed the disquieting oddities of the supposedly “safe” material and the accessibility of much of Tusk. It’s all one band, a perilous but potent mixture of unstable ingredients. And while it may not aspire to the heights of rock passion, it still makes honorable, even moving music lower down on the slopes.
John Rockwell / New York Times / September 16, 1982
Pop music’s worst business summer in recent years is drawing to a close, and some insiders in the music industry are saying that an era appears to be ending.
Summer concert revenues are down drastically from previous years, pop record sales are a fraction of what they were in the 1970’s, and music industry executives are increasingly concerned that young people are taping albums rather than buying them and spending their money on video games rather than on records and concert tickets.
CBS Records announced yesterday that it was discharging 300 employees — 15 percent of its professional staff -including several vice presidents, and reducing its regional branch offices from 20 to 10.
Robert Altschuler, the company’s vice president of press and public affairs, attributed the dismissals and branch reorganization to “current and projected market conditions.”
‘Real Bottoming-Out’
Another insider in the record business said that there had been “an almost complete lack of business, a real bottoming-out.” The CBS action is the latest and most severe cutback in a wave that has swept the industry and is expected to continue at other companies.
Ironically, many of rock’s top artists and most rock critics feel that artistically the music is stronger and fresher than it has been in a long time. A number of established artists have just made their best albums in years, and the big-city rock-club circuit has been launching a succession of new bands. But these bands have been spectacularly unsuccessful in attracting audiences.
Ever since the beginning of the 1970’s, when pop music surpassed motion pictures as America’s biggest-grossing entertainment medium, summer has meant big outdoor concerts, big cross-country tours by rock’s most popular bands and a full schedule at such rock concert halls as the Asbury Park (N.J.) Convention Hall and the Palladium in New York.
The biggest groups used to time their album releases to the beginning of summer vacation, hoping to come up with one of those magical summer hits that blasts from every radio and sells like hotcakes from June through September. As soon as those summer albums hit the stores, the groups would hit the road, where the immense seating capacity of outdoor stadiums and summer rock festivals virtually guaranteed that they would “clean up.”
But those days are over. “Of 14 shows at the Asbury Park Convention Hall this summer, only four made money,” John Scher, New Jersey’s major rock-concert promoter, said. “Five years ago we would have called it a bad summer if we’d had three or four unprofitable shows. We also used to put on two or three big outdoor shows every year in Giants Stadium; now we’re doing one or two of those shows every one or two years.
“The only groups that can fill a Giants Stadium now are a small handful of very, very big acts — the Rolling Stones, the Who and Bruce Springsteen.”
Dropoff in Sales
“It’s the 1980’s, and the cream is definitely off the top of the business,” said Irving Azoff, manager of some of the biggest rock stars. Back in the 70’s, five of Mr. Azoff’s clients, the Eagles, sold 15 million copies of their “Hotel California” album and broke attendance records across the country. He also manages members of Fleetwood Mac, whose Rumours album almost matched the Eagles’ sales.
Now the Eagles have disbanded, and the band’s members are pursuing solo careers, with varying degrees of success. Fleetwood Mac has another No. 1 album, Mirage, but sales are in such a slump that it is unlikely to achieve more than a fraction of the sales of Rumours. While the group is going on the road this month, it will not be raking in the money at stadium concerts and outdoor festivals.
“Fleetwood Mac only had offers to do two outdoor shows in the whole country,” according to Mr. Azoff. “One was in a town that doesn’t have a large indoor arena; the other was the Us Festival, which is scheduled to take place Labor Day weekend in San Bernardino County in California and is going to be the summer’s only really big festival. There’s a very good reason why groups like Fleetwood Mac aren’t doing more stadium shows — the kids aren’t buying tickets.”
Charts Are Not a Guarantee
The kids are not buying records, either. As recently as the mid-70’s, the record industry was still enjoying the phenomenal spiraling growth that had carried it through the previous 15 years, when record sales doubled six times. Income from sales last year came to $3.6 billion, but the handwriting was on the wall; the industry shipped 55 million fewer albums and singles than in 1980.
Performance on the best-seller charts no longer means huge sales. CBS undertook its cutback in spite of the fact that 24 of its albums are in the top 100.
“Most of the executive-level record-company employees I know are being optimistic in public,” a CBS employee said recently, “talking about weathering a temporary downswing and learning to live with more modest expectations. But in private they’re talking Doomsday.”
The popular-music industry has singled out several villains to blame for its present ills. The record industry’s No. 1 villain is home-taping – the youngster with the cassette recorder who tapes a friend’s album or tapes the album’s best songs off the radio rather than buy the album.
Lobbying for Royalties
Stan Gortikov, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, charges that “last year our industry sold the equivalent of about 475 million albums.” “But at the same time,” he added, “about 455 million albums were home-taped.”
His figures, he said, were based on an elaborate survey financed and conducted by Warner Bros. Records in 1980. Record-industry leaders are lobbying for national legislation that would require manufacturers and importers of blank cassettes and cassette recorders to pay royalties to the record companies and artists who are ostensibly losing income because of taping. If the legislation were enacted, the cassette manufacturers and importers could probably be expected to pass their increased costs on to consumers.
Another likely villain is the sweeping popularity of video games. “I go down to the Asbury Park boardwalk now and see all these kids putting $5 or $10 worth of quarters into a video game,” Mr. Scher said. “There are hundreds and hundreds of those games along the boardwalk now, and there’s no doubt in my mind that an awful lot of kids who would have spent that money on records or concert tickets a couple of years ago are now spending it in the game arcades.
“Add to that the unprecedented number of popular youth-oriented movies that are showing this summer, and it adds up to a lot of competition for pop music.”
Lack of Promotion
No clear-cut connection can be proved, but most youngsters have limited allowances, and as revenues from video games continue to soar, revenues from record and concert sales plummet.
Then there is radio. CBS, Warner’s and the other major record companies have not been falling over one another to record and promote fresh young performers who might capture the imagination of record buyers and help reverse the slump. The new groups that do manage to win recording contracts get very little air play. Album-oriented rock stations, called AOR, have become entrenched and conservative, resistant to new sounds and new faces.
“Half the groups you hear on AOR these days are dead,” said Rick Carroll, program director at Los Angeles’s KROQ, one of the few successful FM rock stations that consistently play new bands and new music.
“Radio stinks,” Mr. Azoff said. “The stations are making a lot of money, but they just aren’t taking chances.” The song that gets the most air play and the most requests at FM rock stations nowadays is “Stairway to Heaven,” a track from a 1971 album by the defunct Led Zeppelin.
Rampant Standardization
In recent months, some of the leading AOR stations — WMET-FM in Chicago, WCOZ-FM in Boston and WLLZ-FM in Detroit — have seen their audience-popularity ratings tumble by as much as two-thirds. These and most other AOR stations maintain strict and very limited lists of what records disk jockeys are allowed to play, and in many cases the contents of the playlists are determined by successful programming consultants.
Even Lee Abrams, the most successful consultant — his Superstars format is heard on 80 AOR stations — concedes that the standardization has gotten out of hand. “Consultants have taken away the spontaneity and magic of AOR,” he added.
The ratings success in Los Angeles of KROQ, which is rapidly closing in on the city’s entrenched AOR heavyweights, KMET-FM and KLOS-FM, has given supporters of new rock some cause for optimism. Most new-wavers are convinced that their music would inject enough freshness and sparkle into radio to reverse the listener desertions that are plaguing more and more of the conservative, rigidly formatted AOR giants.
New-Wave Arena Fare
The way things are going in the rock-concert business suggests that this could be true. The promoters of an Aug. 21 concert at the John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, one of the summer’s handful of big outdoor shows, beefed up a bill topped by the venerable British progressive band Genesis with two new-wave favorites, Elvis Costello and Blondie, rather than with standard arena-rock fare.
The country’s leading rock promoter, Bill Graham, is leaning heavily toward new-wave groups in booking for the Us Festival, which is scheduled to include an elaborate computer and video fair and is the only really ambitious outdoor festival of the season.
Groups that have agreed to perform include the Police, the Talking Heads, the English Beat and the B-52’s as well as the more established and conservative Fleetwood Mac, Santana and Jackson Browne.
Many insiders feel that the record industry’s ills boil down to a simple lack of consumer interest and that most of the music that CBS, Warner’s and the other big labels have been recording and releasing in recent years has not been engaging.
Problem of Boredom
Rock critics tend to agree; albums made by young groups with strong local followings and released by small independent labels have placed at or near the top of most critics’ annual 10-best-albums lists. Some of the small labels that have been releasing consistently vital music are Sugarhill of Englewood, N.J., which has popularized rap records, a black, inner-city phenomenon, and the punk-oriented Slash label, which built the popular Los Angeles club bands X and the Blasters into nationally known acts.
The critics feel that many of the rock fans who seem bored with the latest superstar product would take to the music of the younger performers if the fans were exposed to it. But AOR stations do not play the new material, and only record stores that sell imports and independent releases to a relatively small and discriminating audience stock it.
Some established artists whose records do get played on radio and sold in the major chain stores feel threatened by the new wave of youngsters. But a surprising number of stars agree with the newwavers and critics that AOR radio is boring and that the major record companies are not signing enough younger performers.
In recent conversations, Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones and Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band criticized radio and the major labels for playing it safe and praised a number of younger bands and independent record companies for taking chances.
‘Hard to Keep Up With Them’
“Anybody who thinks this is a lousy period for music just isn’t listening,” Mr. Wolf said. “Every city has good bands playing original songs and clubs where they can play, which is something you didn’t see back in the early and middle 1970’s. There are so many new bands coming up with fresh ideas and playing with the kind of fire that rock-and-roll is supposed to have that it’s hard to keep up with them.
“We all listen to all the new music we can get our hands on, and we pay particularly close attention to college radio stations, which are the only stations consistently playing the new, adventurous stuff. Fortunately, we live in Boston, where there’s great college radio. People out there in Middle America don’t get a chance to hear much new stuff, if any. No wonder they’re not listening to the radio or going to as many concerts or buying as many records as they used to.”
If so many insiders agree on the causes and dimensions of the crisis, why is not more being done to combat it? “Our business just isn’t reacting,” Mr. Azoff said. “Actually, the big companies have reacted by cutting back, trimming their staffs and their budgets. I think there’s going to be more of that.
“And, of course, that means it will take even longer for the industry to get healthy again, because what’s going to be cut first? Who’s going to suffer?
FLEETWOOD MAC’S Mirage (Warner Bros.) has already climbed to the top of the album best-seller charts, just a few weeks after its release. It sounds as if it could repeat the phenomenal commercial success of Rumours, which made the present Fleetwood Mac lineup into a supergroup several years ago and went on to become one of the best-selling pop-rock albums of all time.
It also sounds a lot like a tinkly, trebly musical wind-up toy. The group’s experienced rhythm section and founders, Mick Fleetwood (drums) and John McVie (bass), lock into step so perfectly that they seem to go puttering along on their own momentum. And the dabs of glockenspiel, vibraphone and chiming guitars and stacks of sighing vocal harmonies float so ethereally that one has to remind oneself that there originally was a human agency behind them.
Yet human agencies are precisely what separates Fleetwood Mac from its competition. Lindsey Buckingham, one of the group’s three singer-songwriters and the album’s chief producer, has always had a quirky voice (high-pitched, like so much of the rest of Mirage), and a quirkier knack for worshiping and subverting pop conventions at the same time. Stevie Nicks, whose voice is so trebly it can sound positively adenoidal, has a penchant for soft-focus, quasi-mystical hippie-airhead imagery that’s certainly individual, if not very deep, and Christine McVie, the most mature and consistently satisfying of the band’s frontpersons, brings a simple, bluesy elegance to everything she writes and sings.
That puttering rhythm section has personality, too; closer listening reveals its tick-tock patterns to be the fruits of a seasoned, tersely eloquent ensemble style that recalls, if only distantly, Fleetwood Mac’s roots in the British blues revival of the 1960’s.
Couple of Former Couples
The ostensible subject of most Fleetwood Mac songs is the romantic entanglements and disentanglements of the group’s five members. The bassist John and singer-keyboard player Christine McVie used to be married but aren’t anymore, and Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were a couple whose romance hit the skids after they joined Fleetwood Mac and hit the big-time. Most of the 12 new songs on Mirage relate to these romantic ups and downs in one way or another, but increasingly the band’s real subject seems to be pop music itself, and particularly the way pop music sounds.
Mr. Buckingham’s corny lyrics for his “Book of Love” take a back seat to his ravishing vocal harmonies, which constitute an overt homage to the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. There are so many Stevie Nicks vocals overdubbed on her “That’s Alright” that the somewhat unfocused words seem to evaporate like smoke; the song’s feeling of loss is communicated more by the singer’s inflections than by anything she says. Only in Christine McVie’s “Love in Store” and “Hold Me” do the simple emotions expressed in the words and the artful arching simplicity of the melodies and arrangements successfully complement each other.
But these are quibbles. The wind-up-toy sound of Mirage clearly has seduced the nation’s pop listeners. Like this summer’s most successful movies, the album is pure escapist entertainment. But the music has been so cleverly crafted, and polished to such a mesmerizing high-gloss sheen, that by the time one notices that nothing much is being said, it’s too late.
Robert Palmer / New York Times (Late Edition) / August 11, 1982
This long-awaited studio follow-up to Tusk doesn’t harken back to that somewhat disappointing 1979 album, nor does it bear much semblance to the band’s earlier, more successful releases, such as Fleetwood Mac and Rumours. It is unique — pleasant enough — but hardly destined for the multi-platinum status of its predecessors.
The over-all feel is one of understatement. Nothing stands out in particular, and the group seems more interested in creating a pleasant little summertime groove than in grabbing listeners by the shoulders and shaking them up. It is an album of fair-to-mediocre songs that somehow add up to more than the sum of their parts.
The writing credits are divided fairly equally among Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, whose five numbers are all fairly banal. He writes silly, lightweight pop songs in the Paul McCartney vein, and none of the band’s remaining four members seem very interested in adding anything inspiring. As a result, “Empire State” and “Book of Love” have that same thin, unexciting feel as the numbers on Buckingham’s recent solo release, Law and Order.
However, the material by McVie and Nicks is strong enough to save the album. McVie’s songs are unassuming, but pleasant. “Only Over You” is dedicated to Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, and utilizes some nice little Beach Boys harmonies. As for Nicks, although her “Gypsy” is a song in search of a melody, “Straight Back” is the best thing on the album. Nicks’ vocals soar over a simple and pervasive backbeat, raising the song almost to the status enjoyed by such Fleetwood classics as “Rhiannon.”
Over all, though, Mirage seems a touch uninspired. In the rhythm section, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie appear to be going through the motions, straining themselves as little as possible. In fact, there’s more meat to one side of Nicks’ recent solo effort, “Dreams,” than Mirage can boast in total.
Pop
Mirage Fleetwood Mac
Saturday, July 17, 1982
Warner Brothers 92 36071
Alan Niester / Globe and Mail (Canada) / July 17, 1982
OF COURSE, Fleetwood Mac is the American Dream. The band’s success story is the stuff of which the mythology of modern day America is made: Mick Fleetwood, John and Christine McVie, down on their luck in the Oulde Country, make the decision to move to the Promised Land. Traveling as far west as possible, these humble immigrants settle on the most advanced technological frontier in the world, Los Angeles.
Operating within rock ‘n’ roll’s picaresque tradition, a surprise encounter teams up the three Britishers with two down-and-out American natives, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Within a year, following closely the WASP work ethic, their fortunes change for the better.
Within three years of moving to America they have become part of the aristocracy to which you are granted entry in the United States by virtue of your material rather than your blood. In Washington Fleetwood Mac is invited to the White House for social chit chat with President Jimmy Carter.
By now they are so rich that Mick Fleetwood tells a friend he knows he need never work again in his life.
It’s like a good made-for-TV movie!
Rumours was a musical soap opera detailing the emotional chaos within the group following the breakthrough Fleetwood Mac album. The romantic traumas it dealt with, though, were those of wealthy, Beautifully Tanned People. A very glamorous record really, a sort of musical Dallas.
Incorporating as many emotional buzz-words and buzz-areas as possible. Rumours rather simply discussed the romantic problems of many people in their late twenties or early thirties. By doing so, it established once and for all the viability of what now has become known as AOR-Adult Oriented Rock.
Appropriately enough for Me Generation mid-’70s California-the state with the highest divorce rate in the world-Fleetwood Mac’s position became something like the group-as-group-therapy. Easier than est, safer than Synanon, Rumours seemed as Californian as the new quasi-religious texts like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or the collected works of L. Ron Hubbard.
That was not the sole factor, of course, behind Rumours selling close to 20 million copies. That was just the in-depth back-up team, really. The real reason Rumours sold so many copies-that it became bigger than life itself-was because, in the words of Warner Brothers’ Derek Taylor, “It’s just a very, very good double-sided pop record.”
Fleetwood Mac’s music is rock ‘n’ roll-the rhythm section alone would insure that-but it’s very poppy rock ‘n’ roll, closer to Abba than Elmore James (the inspiration of the band’s original guitarist).
But can you imagine what the vibes must’ve been like in the studio during the making of Rumours? Fleetwood Mac probably shouldn’t be begrudged a single cent of their wealth.
Even now – perhaps more than ever – there is something indefinably sad about Fleetwood Mac, especially about the three English expatriates. So it appears in San Francisco, where they are playing two dates at the Cow Palace to end their American tour.
Mick Fleetwood, for example, besides apparently still in love with Jenny (sister of Patti) Boyd, his ex-wife of two divorces, suffers from both diabetes and a related condition the exact opposite of diabetes; Fleetwood mustn’t eat sugar and must eat a lot of sugar. One wonders at the possible cause of such an imbalance within his body. Meanwhile, remarried John McVie (the band’s “Penguin” logo stems from the bassist’s fascination for the bird – he even has one tattooed on his forearm), for many the definition of a Good Bloke, continues to seem happiest with a glass in his hand. Christine McVie, who has taken up with recently fired Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, seems to epitomize the paradoxes scattered throughout all aspects of the group: a Cancer, with all its mother (Earth) implications, she had herself sterilized, a very Californian thing to do.
Regally named Lindsey Buckingham, the youngest group member at just 30, is the one F. Mac person very much in sympathy with newer ways of thinking. There’s obviously a link between this and the fact he has nine songs on the new album, as opposed to Christine McVie’s six or Stevie Nicks’s five.
When we meet for a formal interview session Buckingham quizzes me about the English music scene, and reveals a fair knowledge of Talking Heads and the Gang of Four. By contrast, the tapes playing in Stevie Nicks’s suite are Derek and the Dominoes and Steve Miller. Her tastes, though, are probably more representative of what the band listens to than Buckingham’s. Fleetwood Mac is essentially conservative in their outlook and not just as regards music, either: John McVie has a hard time relating to my pink socks.
At a time when most younger bands are trying to destroy the once assumed divinity of the massive studio bill, it’s hardly surprising that the production costs of Tusk, the Rumours follow-up, should make it the first million-dollar album. Tusk seems closer to a Hollywood movie production than good ol’ funky rock ‘n’ roll. With their homes in Bel Air, Beverly Hills and Malibu, Fleetwood Mac is part of the new Hollywood.
No one will admit it, but part of Tusk‘s expense must have been (unconsciously, perhaps) justified within the band as fighting uncertainty and insecurity about following as huge a success as Rumours.
According to Buckingham, the record’s cost has become a little overstated. Basically, Tusk cost so much because someone cocked up. Partially as an investment, no doubt, F. Mac was going to have its own studio built; they were strongly advised against it by people at Warner Brothers, who told them costs would be prohibitive. If they’d listened to their own advice-a rare slip for this self managed outfit-they’d have something more to show for all that money spent.
“In the context of the whole,” Buckingham’s high metallic voice tells me, “Rumours took longer to make than Tusk. One of the reasons why Tusk cost so much is that we happened to be at a studio that was charging a fuck of a lot of money.
“During the making of Tusk we were in the studio for about 10 months and we got 20 songs out of it. Rumours took the same amount of time. It didn’t cost so much because we were in a cheaper studio.
“There’s no denying what it cost, but I think it’s been taken out of context.”
In addition, the much touted digital recording hardly affected the band at all. Its real use was to preserve the quality of the master tape and the records that are pressed from it.
Tusk is a fine traditional pop/rock record. It’s only when Fleetwood Mac plays it onstage that you become aware of it’s deficiencies; the band did spend too long in the studio. Live, Tusk songs have a freshness and vital spirit which was muted during all that studio time. “You’ve got to play it a lot,” says John McVie. “It keeps getting better.” Yeah, unless you reach saturation point (as happened with Rumours, an inferior record to the preceding Fleetwood Mac).
Warner Brothers was anxious that the delay between Rumours and its successor was too great. For a while they wanted to release the first record of the two-LP set as soon as it was completed. That was nixed. So was a heavy advertising campaign the company had a New York agency present to the band. Mick Fleetwood: “The record company let this agency try something and when we saw it, it was…just nothing…It was scrapped immediately.
“I said I didn’t think they’d be able to do it, because for pretty obvious reasons we’re pretty preoccupied with not overselling ourselves. I think it’s very unfortunate that someone like Peter Frampton let his music be cheapened by doing things like putting adverts for Peter Frampton watches in his albums. That just shouldn’t happen. I think it’s real crass. A record’s supposed to be there to listen to.”
All this balance sheet stuff aside, it may interest fans of the original Fleetwood Mac to learn that none other than Peter Green himself plays on the album. “That’s right,” confirms Fleetwood, “he plays literally about eight notes at the end of one of Chris’s songs – ‘Brown Eyes’, I think it is. He just wandered into the studio while the track was being done.
“But,” Fleetwood continues with sudden despondency, “I’ve given up with Peter. I’ve totally given up. He’s just given up where anything to do with money is concerned. After a while it just wears me down.” The drummer confirms that on the recently released Peter Green solo album the guitar hero actually handles very little of the work on his chosen instrument: “A lot of the guitar is done by a friend of his. He told me that he’d handed over the guitar duties to someone else. Ridiculous.”
It was Mick Fleetwood – a good-natured fellow who presumably wanted to hand some of his new fortune to Green the same way he’s assisted former Mac guitarist Bob Welch – who set Green up with a Warners contract worth nearly a million dollars. “The day he was supposed to sign it he freaked out. I looked a bit stupid. After all, who would believe that he didn’t want to sign a contract because he thought it was with the Devil?” (Well, quite a few chaps, actually…)
Fleetwood Mac may be part of the New Hollywood but they’re not taken in by all the LA bullshit – three of them are British, after all, and all old lags in this rock ‘n’ roll circus; they’ve seen it all before.
Buckingham, meanwhile, would rather live in his native San Francisco than Los Angeles. Nicks would probably favor living on a flying carpet.
“America is my home,” Fleetwood says, “but I don’t plan to live in Los Angeles much longer; none of us do, in fact. There is definitely going to be an earthquake. LA will be flattened. I’ll have no regrets at all about moving.”
He claims that Hollywood’s flakiness hardly affects him. “We work a helluva lot so we don’t get much chance to think about it.”
Fleetwood Mac tours a lot for a band of its status (and age). “Out of the next 13 months,” Fleetwood adds, “we’re spending nearly nine months on the road. That is the sort of commitment to what we do. It’s not that we just want to throw out an album and say, ‘Oh, it’ll do alright!’”
As the new royalty, of course, it’s necessary for the band to occasionally hold court to meet local media dignitaries. These press conferences are fairly appalling affairs; in San Francisco the local press, TV and radio field their questions with strained, reverential smiles. Held in a bland conference room at the San Francisco hotel in Union Square, the event was strictly showbiz Presidential. The band – except Buckingham, who’d gone to visit his mother – sat at a dais at one end of the room as questions like “Who is Sara?” and “Mick, do you ever sneak out at night and go to clubs?” were put to the tolerant Mac. The killer was when some mutant got up and asked Nicks what she was doing for dinner that night.
In the middle of 80 minutes of this nonsense Mick Fleetwood’s whole body appears to go into spasms. Christine McVie, sitting next to him, massages his shoulders and arms with thoughtful concern. Fleetwood’s having one of his diabetes attacks. He’d been late arriving at the press conference because he’d felt so lousy he thought he might have to blow it out altogether.
At times like this one wonders: Is it worth it?
Onstage Fleetwood Mac is a great rock band.
Whatever Mick Fleetwood may say about Tusk attempting stepping away from the LA soft-rock sound, the band hasn’t gone far enough-or maybe they just stuck around too long in that overpriced studio blowing their Rumours bread on overdubs. Onstage, though, they really burn. Newly shorn Buckingham-the somewhat camp shots of him on the Tusk sleeve were only stage one of a metamorphosis into Beverly Hills new waver-spurs the band on from center stage. By the third number sweat’s running down his face and neck like a waterfall.
John McVie, who with Mick Fleetwood makes one of rock’s hardest, most inventive rhythm sections, adopts a most unusual stance for a bassist by moving about a lot and entering into duelling partnerships with Buckingham, himself a feisty rather than academic or soulful guitarist.
On stage right Christine McVie provides the Mother Earth image she is so keen to renounce, an anchor behind her keyboards.
Stevie Nicks has, as you might expect, six or seven dress changes. Her real strength is a superb deep voice – maybe deeper than Buckingham’s, even-resonant and clear, as though she’d been gargling with redwood sap. Mick Fleetwood looks very late-’60s and Jethro Tull-like in boots and waistcoat.
Each individual’s instrumental and vocal accomplishments aside, what really makes this show work is the number of great songs in the set, since the release of Tusk. Fleetwood Mac has effectively doubled the songs at their disposal.
Backstage at the Cow Palace (a mere 12 or 13,000-seater) there is a very good vibe. There is an undeniable elegance about the benchwood furniture and potted palms that fill the dressing rooms. John McVie is very happy. He is slumping around in an old army fatigue jacket, looking to put something in his empty glass. “This is a great band,” he nods to himself, and picks up a bottle of vodka.
Christine McVie and Dennis Wilson sit on a couch, spooning like teenagers at a drive-in movie. Dennis seems pretty drunk; at least that’s my interpretation of the near-total failure in communication we experience when we try to talk to each other. Maybe it’s just a bad case of culture gap. What seems like the entire Buckingham family tree is also present.
Mick Fleetwood and myself end up sitting around a tape recorder in the middle of the dressing room, the one that has urinals and toilets. It also has the F. Mac oxygen cylinder and mask. If all you breathe is conditioned air from hotels and limos, you probably need a drop of the bottled stuff now and then.
Mick Fleetwood was the original founder of Fleetwood Mac, in July, 1967. He had been kicked out of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers after only a couple of months for drinking too much. Other Bluesbreakers were John McVie, who’d played with Mayall since the beginning of 1963, and Peter Green. Green followed Fleetwood shortly afterwards and an initially reluctant McVie joined in September of that year.
Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours
Prior to the Bluesbreakers, Fleetwood had been working as a decorator for a few weeks following the break-up of white soul roadshow the Shotgun Express (also featuring Rod Stewart). He is a man with an absurd sense of humor rarely revealed in interviews. He seems keenest to play political spokesman, a role presumably due to his also managing the band; he took over after former manager Clifford Davis, claiming to own the name “Fleetwood Mac” and the right to use it as he saw fit, sent a bogus F. Mac on the road in America in January, 1974.
Fleetwood loathes the idea of managers now, and thinks no band or artist should need one: “A good accountant and lawyer and a good tour manager – an old roadie can do that – are all you need.”
Along with John McVie, Fleetwood’s the real backbone of Fleetwood Mac. He’s a formidable drummer, which is why it’s so puzzling that his actual drum solo – with handheld “talking” drum – should be so duff.
“We’ve never stayed one way for very long,” he says in not too practiced a manner, “and I don’t think we ever will. We’ve always changed a lot whether or not players have changed. We’re actually afraid to, I think, of getting into a rut, which can be very easy to do, and very awful, too –especially when it’s just so you can make a lot of money. Doing a double album didn’t make any business sense at all. But it meant a lot to us, artistically – whether we could still feel challenged. We really, really are pleased with it. We’ve also, I think, got enough discretion to know if the songs aren’t up to standard, in which case we’d have just put out a single album.
“We’ve got a great advantage, though, in having three songwriters. We’re very lucky. When Danny, Peter and Jeremy were in the band they all wrote and played very different stuff. So in a way we’re back to that sort of situation; again we have the advantage of three very different styles. So it’s come something like a full circle.”
Were you aware of just how strong the punk/new wave had become in England?
“No-o-o-o,” Mick Fleetwood shakes his head, perhaps with no great passion. He shrugs his shoulders, continuing in the slightly slurred, drawn-out Home Countries accent first popularized by near-contemporaries like Mick Jagger. “We’re not physically there…But I know there’s a whole social thing going on.
“The good musical things,” he continues, more confidently, “will stay behind. Most bands that I know of didn’t really have any great master-plan. They just started off listening to the blues and the Rolling Stones and Chuck Berry records, played the school dance or whatever and went on from there. Just went off and did it – and developed.
“It’s not that evident over here. England’s such a tiny place; all those great bands always come out of it. England brings out some kind of hardcore staying power. I don’t think this country has that, because it genuinely isn’t as hard here. I’m not saying people don’t have a hard time here. Stevie and Lindsey certainly did.”
With Jungian synchronicity, or maybe just good timing, Stevie Nicks sticks her rather shattered-looking head round the door with all the experience of someone who’s done a lot of waitressing. “Cheeseburger, fries, kidney pie, potatoes and starch…Well, anyway, I’m sorry I broke in your little tea party.”
She disappears. The door closes. Mick Fleetwood scratches his head, as though bewildered at this display of rock star looning. “Gosh,” he says, just like that.
Enough of this frivolity. On with the questions. One of the reasons Fleetwood left England in 1974 was his dissatisfaction with living there.
“We were just pissed off with the whole thing, because basically Fleetwood Mac didn’t mean a shit then in Europe. The band had changed, whatever we played wasn’t appealing-the balls of the band, namely Peter, had gone. At that point, anyway, we were playing more over here.
“Also, I thought England was very grey and full of depressed people. All those kids were just reacting to that. I know that. We just got out. But it can never have that same effect here, simply because of the size of the country. You can go through the whole Midwest and it’s just not there.”
There’s a colossal sense of history in the band’s songs.
“Yeah,” agrees Fleetwood, pleased. “Before I went on tonight I shouted out, ‘You know what this is? This is the last three gigs of the decade.’ Then while I was playing I was trying to count the years I’d been with John. I thought, ‘God! Not so long now and it’ll be something like 20 years!’ There’s a lt of feeling up there, of people that have developed together.
“There’s a lot of waste of talent that starts up and just fizzles out. You just see the spark of something and then they all start throwing TVs out of windows and showing they’re a load of bastards.”
You had the Youth Success thing…
“Yeah. But we held it together as a band. We were lucky; because of the people in the band we became involved in the thinking process of what we were trying to do. For ourselves. Selfishly, if you like. And were stilling doing that. It’s not just a ‘crank it out and let it roll in until it stops rolling in’ number. ‘Oh, I’ll just do it for a few years and clean up.’ This is a career. This is what we do.
“It’s just a question of having some integrity about what you do, and we definitely try to have that. I suppose when we stop having that feeling it will be time to stop altogether, rather than just ‘Oh, we’ll do a quick tour and rake it in.’”
After Rumours came out it was assumed the next F. Mac record would be a live album, after which the band would retire.
“We’ve recorded some gigs on this tour. We do it every tour and they just get put away. They might be used some time. Who knows?”
At one stage, though, wasn’t there talk of this double album being half live and half studio?
“I don’t remember that. We thought of the possibility of going into a concert hall and cutting these songs literally live. Live, these songs are very different. Without all the overdubs they really kick ass.
“I think it’d be interesting to go in an empty hall and develop the number the same way you have to play it onstage. We don’t do a lot of the stuff onstage. You can’t get all those little tinkles and cymbals and tom-tom overdubs. You play the gut of the number. To approach new tunes in that way could well be an interesting thing to try.
“A good live album can be great, but it’s often treading water a bit, and a very easy thing to do. People say we must be crazy that a band as big as we are haven’t put out a live record or a “Greatest Hits” in between Rumours and Tusk. But it takes the freshness away of what we’re trying to do. Of course, there’ll be a “Greatest Hits” sometime. One day. As a final curtain, perhaps.
“Certainly now the intention is to keep on recording new stuff. The next album should be out quicker than people think. I think we’ll just go for a quick one.”
Did Rumours do your heads in?
“Just the colossal success? We were working a lot of the time on the road. Again, I just think we’re lucky.” Fleetwood is very matter-of-fact. Didn’t he feel the band was becoming a commodity?
“No. Because we don’t let that sort of thing happen. If we wanted to utilize all the marketing resources we could make a lot more money, a lot more cash-in stuff. But” –derisively – “that’s going for a real cheap one. You shoot your integrity out the window. We’re internally very – well , we look after our own affairs for a start, so we don’t have anyone feeding us a load of bullshit on how great we are. We’re constantly having to make our minds up ourselves, which keeps us open-and relatively sane.
“Of course, there is pressure. You just have to hang on to the same thing you’ve hung on to for the last however many years it is. You just don’t presume that you’re anything special, ever. As soon as you do that, then forget it.
“There’s a lot of natural energy in this group. Without it it wouldn’t work. It’s apparent to me that onstage there’s genuine rapport. We know what numbers we’re going to play nest, but in point of fact it is relatively different every night. We need the subtleties that go on between us onstage. We need to look at each other and know you’re looking at someone and it feels good. I enjoy myself as much now as I ever have. It has nothing to do with how much money you’ve made or how well you’re doing.
“I really don’t think we’d be doing it if we weren’t enjoying it. And equally I know there are lots of people that make the choice to continue doing it, presumably because they’re making a lot of money.
“This band,” he adopts a Mancunian accent, “has got guts in it!”
Warners presumably wanted to do a huge ad campaign on Tusk to equal Rumours.
“I think with any record company you have to acknowledge that they want to make the record successful. And their measure of success is money. It would be naïve of me to say we’re totally oblivious to how much money you can make. But the music comes first, every time. Then maybe you can make some money. A lot of people approach it with, ‘This is the sort of music we’re going to do to make money.’ Shit on that! Because then the point of the music is lost. Gone. Totally.
“To me an artist with a huge amount of integrity is Neil Young. He’s doing exactly what he wants to do, he’s always done that, and-you know what? – he’s still bloody successful, too. People acknowledge that he has artistic integrity, period. I remember talking to him and he was absolutely intrigued – he’d even been to England – by all the punk rock things. You should be open to all influences. In turn you can then put out something which is really yourself-because everyone has influences: it doesn’t just come from out of the sky. There are always reasons for everything.
“Music is a development of a whole load of things. As soon as you stop developing, then forget it. I mean, all our recent success has been very, very gratifying. It’s also really nice to know you’re not just jacking yourself off-that other people really enjoy it, too, for however long they enjoy it. It means a lot to all of us.”
An hour or so later I’m sitting in the living room of Stevie Nicks’s mock Regency suite.
Stevie is drinking large Remy Martins and appears to have something of a bad head cold. I ought to tell you what she’s wearing but I can’t remember; I can’t keep up with all these clothes changes. Certainly the loopiest member of the band, she suffers from having lived for too long on the West Coast. Her patriotism and belief in America is quite absurd, though I’m sure she’ll never see that, and wouldn’t think of it in those terms anyway. She’ll be good on TV chat shows in a few years’ time.
On the Buckingham-Nicks album, released by Polydor in 1973 to no great success, there is a dedication to “A.J. Nicks, the grandfather of country music.” A.J. Nicks was also Stevie’s grandfather.
“He was a country singer and songwriter,” she explains, “very into it. He wanted to take me on the road when I was four. But my parents wouldn’t let him and he wouldn’t speak to them for years. We actually sang together when I was that tiny. He was definitely the one who got me interested in music.”
With her penchant for writing numbers like ‘Rhiannon’ and Isadora Duncan-like stage moves, Stevie Nicks is always (often not without irony) referred to as “the mystical member of Fleetwood Mac.” No doubt this is why-before we begin the interview-she drapes all the lamps with antique shawls or scarves.
“There’s always been a very mystical thing about Fleetwood Mac.” She responds. “When I first joined Fleetwood Mac I went out and bought all the albums – actually, I think I had asked Mick for them because I couldn’t possibly afford to buy them – and I sat in my room and listened to all of them to try to figure out if I could capture any theme or anything. What I came up with was the word ‘mystical’. There is something mystical that went all the way from Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac straight through Jeremy, through all of them: Bob Welch, Christine, Mick and John. It didn’t matter who was in the band; it was always just there. Since I have a deep love of the mystical, this appealed to me. I thought this might really be the band for me because they are mystical, they play wonderful rock ‘n’ roll and there’s another lady so I’ll have a pal.
“I am mystical, with or without Fleetwood Mac or Lindsey, and that’s just me. I’m a Gemini; a Gemini has two very opposite personalities. I have the moving furniture, cleaning-up-the-room-quickly side and the cream-colored chiffon personality. I majored in speech communication and psychology at college. I am a communicator. When I stop doing this I want to be a writer. I’m writing a book. A whole album and all the last tour are typed up.”
There has been talk for some time about the possibility of Nicks quitting Fleetwood Mac to make a solo album and film based on Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rhiannon’; she is said to have been made a number of highly lucrative offers. Mick Fleetwood dismissed such reports as nonsense. “Both Stevie and Christine definitely are going to make solo albums. I want to make one as well-in Africa. But if we can’t do that without having to split the band up, then it’s a bit of a pity.”
Nicks is equally scathing, claiming not to know where such reports come from. “I don’t talk about it. If someone’s saying these things, they’re not coming from me.”
She is very caught up in the legend of Rhiannon, though-the goddess of steeds and maker of birds. “‘Rhiannon’ is as much mine as I want. There are many connections. The last woman that wrote about her is Evangeline Walton, who lives in Arizona and must be about a hundred years old-or at least 80 or 90. She started her work on Rhiannon in 1934 and finished in 1974. I wrote ‘Rhiannon’ in October 1974 when she’d finished. Walton is a tiny old lady with intense grey hair.” Nicks likes the word “intense,” often using it at inappropriate moments. “She never married. She lives in a tiny little house in Arizona which is all pink satin-very much like me. She’s very intelligent.”
If there were any of it around I’d suggest Nicks had been smoking too much dope. As it is, though, Stevie’s (un) enlightenment seems very much a product of the Guru of the Month Club.
I attempt to relate all this to possibilities of apocalypse and F. Mac’s living in Los Angeles. Before I can formulate what I’m saying, though, Nicks is glugging the old brandy down and into a serious bit of communicating.
“With all that’s been going on in the world of late,” she free-associates, “I have to admit to myself that for the first time in my life I have felt a little bit of fear about the world. And my world has always been wonderful.
“I joined the band on New Year’s Eve, 1974,” Nicks reminisces. “We started the Fleetwood Mac album in February of 1975; that took three months. We went out for a few gigs in the summer, which was no big deal. Then we did a tour starting September 9 and coming back December 22. Four gigs in a row, one day off. No limousines. We didn’t exactly play teen clubs but we might as well have.
“We sold Fleetwood Mac. We kicked that album in the ass. Christine slept on amps in the backs of trucks. I hadn’t a clue! But I decided I was going to make it alright. There was no one going to say, ‘She can’t cope. She should give it up.’”
No one can accuse Nicks and Buckingham of not paying dues. “In 1971 I was cleaning the house of our producer Keith Olsen for $50 a week. I come walking in with my big Hoover vacuum cleaner, my Ajax, my toilet brush, my cleaning shoes on. And Lindsey has managed to have some idiot send him eleven ounces of opiated hash. He and all his friends – Warren Zevon, right? – are in a circle. They smoked hash for a month, and I don’t like smoke because of my voice. When you don’t smoke there’s something about that makes you really dislike other people smoking. I’d come in every day and have to step over these bodies. I’m tired; I’m pickin’ up their legs and cleaning under them and emptying out ashtrays. A month later all these guys are going, ‘I don’t know why I don’t feel very good.’ I said, ‘You wanna know why you don’t feel very good? I’ll tell you why-because you’ve done nothing else for weeks but lie on the floor and smoke and take my money.
“Lindsey and his friend Tom used to go into every coffee shop in Hollywood, write hot checks and never go back again. The Copper Penny, Big Boy’s…We fell into the American Dream out of nowhere. We were just nowhere.”
The night after the show I again find myself in the middle dressing room with urinals, toilet bowls and Lindsey Buckingham.
Brought up in Palo Alto, 30 miles to the south of San Francisco, Buckingham was turned onto rock ‘n’ roll-Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran – by his elder brother. He started playing guitar when he was seven.
Pausing frequently for breath-obviously the oxygen tank doesn’t work for him –he talks about the new, stronger role he has on Tusk.
“When we started the album we had a meeting at Mick’s house. I said I had to get some sort of machine into my house as an alternative to the studio. The trappings and technology of the studio are so great – the blocks between the inception of an idea and the final thing you get on tape are so many – that it just becomes very frustrating.
“That was why my songs turned out the way they did: the belief in a different approach. For me it wasn’t really a question of changing tastes, but of following through on something I’d believed in for a long time and hadn’t had a means of manifesting. For a number of years it’s been a process of being in the back without – I mean, making the choice of joining Fleetwood Mac was a very strange decision. It’s been a very human sort of journey.”
The rumors about all those Fleetwood Mac splits were true, and now their comment is Tusk, Tusk
It’s not because saving the elephant is one of their causes or that they identify with the magnificent if extinct mammoth that Fleetwood Mac called their current double LP Tusk. Explains the group’s drummer/manager, Mick Fleetwood: “The title itself has no bearing on anything. We just liked the sound of the word, in the abstract.”
But financially, Mick and Co. might as well have titled it Risk. Along with Led Zeppelin and the Eagles, Mac was the fall’s Great Vinyl Hope to resurrect the lagging music industry. Yet Tusk defiantly lists at $15.98 when, as Mick admits, “record sales are taking a complete dump.” Further, the group invested more than $1 million to create a jarring, audacious new sound. So why depart from the hit-cranking pop-rock formula responsible for some 20 million sales of their last two LPs? As lead guitarist Lindsey Buckingham points out invidiously, the Eagles’ new work “is just more of the same of the last five years. I mean, why bother?” “Our ideas and lives progressed, moved on,” seconds keyboardist Christine McVie. “Tusk is years more mature. If you’re complacent, you stagnate.”
Complacency has never been a vice of Fleetwood Mac since the group settled into its present composition in 1974 with Mick and two other Britons, bassist John McVie and his then wife Christine, plus two Californians, Buckingham and his then lover, singer Stevie Nicks. In the two years since their provocatively autobiographical last LP, Rumours, three of them have changed partners. John has found a new wife. Christine is riding the perfect wave with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. Fleetwood, after remarrying his divorced wife, split again and lives with a model. Nicks is now unattached since busting up with a record executive. Buckingham is still with his model.
Under those circumstances, much of Tusk was put together piecemeal on what Christine says was a “noncommunal rotation system”; the five members were often not in the studio together. The involvement this time was less emotional than aesthetic and, to hear Lindsey, not even commercial. “If Tusk becomes an influential work over the next decade,” says Buckingham (who dominates the LP with nine of the 20 tunes), “then that’s the measure of success. Whether it sells three million or five million,” he adds ever-so-blithely, “is neither here nor there.” “People may not have expected Tusk,” says Mick, “and noses may be slightly out of joint. But we did this for us. It was a healthy challenge to pull it off.”
Now, obviously, they have. The Tusk LP and single are both Top Ten, and as Mick reports from the road, where they are on the 22-city first leg of a nine-month worldwide tour, “the energy is really poppin’.”
For Fleetwood, 31, it hasn’t been easy. His second split from his wife of 12 years, Jenny Boyd, now “seems permanent. But, luckily,” he adds, “we get on well.” She has custody of their two children and has taken them back to England. Mick, like the rest of the group, lives in the L.A. area and sees the kids during vacations. “I quite miss the fact that I can’t be a father,” he admits. “I happen to be one of those men who adores that thing of `alright, kids, let’s go.’”
Then, if his marital breakup weren’t trouble enough, last year while working on Tusk Mick discovered he was suffering from diabetes. “I had been feeling burned-out,” he recalls. “My eyes were going wild, I started drinking like a fish, I’d hyperventilate while talking.” One doctor suggested he see a shrink. “My ego couldn’t accept the fact that I was going around the twist. Manic-depressive one minute, eating a bowl of ice cream, quite happy, the next. I thought it was a brain tumor. I was afraid I was going to die. It was 18 months of hell.” But once the ailment was diagnosed (it’s a mild case), Mick adjusted his habits. “Bless her,” he says of Sara Recor, his companion of the past year. “She was there to hold my hand and look after me.” Though he concedes, “I have overworked and overplayed,” Mick says he now “feels like I did 10 years ago.”
Perhaps the least changed Mac member of all, says Fleetwood, is his co-founder John McVie, 34. McVie and second wife Julie Rubens live both in Beverly Hills and on his 63-foot sloop. The casual “rotation” recording system allowed McVie to leave his bass tracks behind and sail out to Maui while the group did the last month of polishing Tusk. And no less an expert than his first wife, Christine, finds John has “mellowed since marrying Julie. He’s become a gentle person.”
The Mac member who has changed most, according to Fleetwood, is Buckingham, 30. “He was volatile and intense in the beginning,” says Mick, “and afraid he was trapped into doing things a certain way.” But with almost half of Tusk under his name, he’s been freed. “My contribution was not that visible before,” says Lindsey. “Things that had been swimming around in my head for years finally got exorcised on Tusk.”
Doing some of his own cuts on his 24-track in Hancock Park, Buckingham bravely usurped some drumming parts from Mick. “We’ve broken down barriers that existed for five years,” says Lindsey.
The liberated Lindsey has even forsaken the furry curls, scraggy beard and skintight satins of his old lead guitar sex-idol image. He now displays a clean look and casually modish Gentlemen’s Quarterly couture. His retreat from classic rock macho has come home too. His girlfriend of three years, Carol Harris, will be along for only half the tour dates. “I want to give Carol the chance to express herself in her modeling without tearing too much from our relationship.” Meanwhile, Lindsey reports that without her on the road, “Getting crazy on a few drinks at the bar means nothing to me. I’m happier having time to myself in my room, doing my tunes, than looking for action.”
But if Lindsey ever needs some post-concert commiserating, he can probably call on Christine McVie. Her squeeze, Beach Boy enfant terrible Dennis Wilson, 34, will not be steady during the tour either. “It doesn’t suit Dennis’ personality,” says Christine, “to be a guest, to have to say, `Oh, I’m with the piano player.’” On her own, Christine is clearly less shy and more self-assured since they met a year ago. “He is a multifaceted jewel,” she exults. “Dennis has awakened things in me I’d have been scared to experience and made me feel the extremes of every emotion.” Specifically, says Christine, he has turned her onto speedboating and water-skiing. “Dennis has thrown me into the deep end, literally and figuratively.”
They commute between Dennis’ 68-foot ketch in Marina del Rey and her “very English” home in Coldwater Canyon. They “definitely” plan to marry in February, but Christine has ruled out kids. “I’m 36,” she says, “and my life-style is pretty much settled as far as sacrificing and accommodating myself to children.”
“She used to call me the Mad Songwriter,” says Stevie Nicks, 31, nothing that in Tusk Christine composed six tracks to her five. “Chris sits up all night and writes, she’s so inspired,” says Nicks. Stevie is prolific herself, in love or out, but for two years she has been mostly out. One problem: Male rockers, she finds, are “pretty chauvinistic. I strive to be taken seriously as a writer, and be as good as they are. So they resent my success. I see it in their eyes: `How did this dingbat manage to get everything she wants?’”
Another problem is her immersion in Mac’s work ethic. “How many men, even the nicest, most patient, can understand that for months you will come home at 7 a.m., dead tired and in a bad mood?” For now, she says resignedly, “the band is all there is room for in my life.” Just as well. On the road, she says, security is so tight that “no man can get within 10 feet. I hardly ever meet any new men.”
Nicks’ large Tudor home above Sunset Boulevard is now on the market because it attracted hangers-on who overstayed their welcome. “Any man I ever went out with called the place Fantasyland. I’m 31. I won’t always be in a rock band, and I don’t want to come out of this absolutely helpless.” So she is moving into a modest beachfront condo. “Some people thrive on being a rock star. I hate it. I don’t like being waited on all the time, people following me around saying, `Let me do this, let me do that.’”
Stevie has signed on with former boyfriend Paul Fishkin’s Modern Records to act in and do the solo sound track LP of Rhiannon, an upcoming movie based on her 1976 Mac hit. She has also written a children’s story and hopes to turn it into an animated film. “It’s a love story about a goldfish and a ladybug. A friend told me it would be the Doctor Zhivago of children’s cartoons.”
Though she is still the band’s sexily whirling, wailing focus onstage, Stevie claims, “The last thing the world needs is another sex symbol.” And what does Stevie need? “I don’t need doctors, nurses and babysitters. I need love.”
But even Nicks, who seems bent on going her own way, knows that this “is still the best rock band in the world.”
And one of the most durable. “The band’s been breaking up for five years,” says Fleetwood, sardonically, of all the reports. The group has two more years left on its record contract and the road stretches ahead until August. “If the members really felt suffocated,” Mick says, “then there’d be an obvious danger. Things do get a little crazy at all times. But this doesn’t feel like a band that’s breaking up.”
Jim Jerome / People (Vol. 12 Issue 22, p91. 3p.) / November 26, 1979
Abstract: The article focuses on the event at Club La Serre in celebration with the appearance of the rock band Fleetwood Mac in Washington, D.C. The event was attended by about 200 guests which include Chip Carter, John Brademas, and Senators Dick Clark and Alan Cranston, as well as political aspirants like Yvonne Burke and Bill Bradley. Also, Hamilton Jordan, a White House aide, was in the event and was thrown with a bowl of chocolate mousse by an unidentified guest.
FLEETWOOD Mac (Performer)
CARTER, Chip
BRADEMAS, John, 1927-2016
CLARK, Dick, 1929-2012
CRANSTON, Alan MacGregor, 1914-2000
JORDAN, Hamilton
WASHINGTON (D.C.)
TIME Magazine (Vol. 112 Issue 7, p15-15. 1/6p.) / August 14, 1978
The Long Hard Drive from British Blues to California Gold
By Cameron Crowe Rolling Stone
Thursday, March 24, 1977 (RS 235)
Fuck it…
Peter Green didn’t want his 30,000 [pounds] a year. The money was royalties from his work with his old blues band, Fleetwood Mac. He’d quit the band in 1970, saying he wanted to live a Christian life. He gave his money away and eventually took various menial jobs, including one as a gravedigger.
But now, as more and more people acquaint themselves with Fleetwood Mac and dig back to old reissues, this money keeps arriving. He tries to get rid of it, but it’s all just a bother. “I want to lead a new life,” he would say. “I don’t want to be followed around by the past”.
When Green could tolerate it no longer, he paid his accountant a visit, brandishing a pump-action 22 shotgun. He wanted the money stopped. Soon Green was standing in Marlebone Court in London, listening calmly as the judge read this verdict. Peter Green, blues-guitar-star-turned-ascetic, was ordered committed to a mental institution.
After ten years and a particularly lean time just before the group’s 1975 smash, Fleetwood Mac, broke loose, everybody loves this quiet little British-American band that could. Fleetwood Mac’s music has evolved into a sophisticated pop and rock sound that’s just right for the Seventies, thanks primarily to two women, old-timer Christine McVie and newcomer Stevie Nicks. The group’s latest album is being shipped out in greater quantities than any other record in the history of Warner Bros. There are, of course, reasons for Warner’s optimism: Fleetwood Mac produced three hit singles (“Over my head” and “Say you love me” by McVie; “Rhiannon” by Nicks), sold 4 million units, has danced around the top half of the album charts for over 80 weeks and is Warner’s all-time best seller.
And adding to everyone’s enthusiasm were shows like the one at LA’s Universal Amphitheater last fall. There, in front of an adorning crowd that included Elton John and two princesses of Iran, FM looked like they were feeling good. New energy was being supplied by Stevie Nicks and the other most recent addition Lindsey Buckingham. What with Buckingham prowling around the stage, dropping feisty lead runs into all the right places, and singer Nicks playing the whirling dervish Welsh witch Rhiannon, the group’s dignified reserve was clearly a thing of the past.
Even drummer Mick Fleetwood finally ventured out from behind his drum kit to play the African talking drum on “World Turning”. And Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac’s brandy-voiced keyboardist of six years, recently overcoming a phobia against talking to the audience. Only John McVie, perhaps in the grand tradition of bassists, remains impassive and faultlessly proficient.
But one would soon learn that their minds were elsewhere – namely, in the tiny studio across town from the Amphitheater, where they were still struggling to finish their very latefollow LP, a trouble child, called Rumours.
Work on the album began in February ’76, immediately after the group had introduced their new lineup on a marathon six-month cross-country tour. Traveling to the Record Plant Studios in Sausalito, just north of San Francisco, FM had walked straight into an emotional holocaust. Christine and John McVie, married for almost 8 years, had recently split up and weren’t talking to each other. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were about to do likewise. And Mick Fleetwood certainly wasn’t talking to anybody. The father of two children, he and his wife Jenny were in the midst of divorce proceedings.
“Everybody was pretty weirded out”, Christine McVie explained. “Somehow Mick was there, the figurehead: “We must carry on… let’s be mature about this, sort it out. – Somehow we waded through it.”
They returned to LA, but the tapes from their nine weeks in the Sausalito studio – many of them mangled by a “recording machine” that earned the nickname “Jaws” – sounded strange wherever they played them. They were almost resigned to starting all over when one of their crew found a cramped dubbing room in the porno district of Hollywood Boulevard, a studio that perfectly accommodated what they had recorded. A fully booked fall tour was canceled, and there, while films like Squirm and Dick City played next door, Fleetwood Mac started the mixing process. As the songs took shape, the album began to sound like True Confessions: the band’s three writers – Christine McVie, Nicks, and Buckingham – were all writing about their crumbled relationships.
As they added finishing touches to an album more intimate than they had ever anticipated, the band firmly closed their studio doors. “It was clumsy sometimes,” said John McVie. “I’m sitting there in the studio and I get a little lump in my throat especially when you turn around and the writer’s sitting right there.” So they asked that interviews be done separately.
I always did have a kind of candle shining for Peter Green. I mean, he was my god. I thought, “Give me one chance at him…” Christine McVie, who looks considerably younger than her 33 years, grew up alongside Fleetwood Mac on the British blues circuit. Mick Fleetwood and John McVie are loath to dwell on FM’s many past lives, but sitting in this cluttered office adjoining the studio where she has just finished mixing Rumours, Christine is happy to play the keeper of the FM legacy.
She pours a tall glass of white wine and surprises even herself with a fan’s diary that is by turns, melancholy and passionate. “I dearly remember the old days… FM had this one-of-a-kind charm. They were gregarious, charming and cheeky on-stage. Very cheeky. They’d have a good time. Peter Green just made the audience laugh at this funny little cocky Jewboy. Jeremy Spencer was really dirty on-stage. At the Marquee one night he put a dildo in his trousers, came out and did an impersonation of Cliff Richard. Half the women left, escorted by their boyfriends.” Green had also created a dark, mystical aura about the band. “He had this tremendous, subtle power,” says Christine.
By the time she made friends with the group, Christine Perfect was already a journeywoman blues-circuit rocker herself. As a “real tubby” teenager – she weighed 160 pounds at 16 – Christine and a girlfriend/singing partner snuck away from their strict parents in Birmingham and visited every talent agency they could find in London. Their act consisted of strumming guitars and warbling Everly Brothers hits. Their career, which was highlighted by a obe-song pub appearance backed by the Shadows, was cut short when their parents found them out. Christine was sent to art college in Birmingham where she joined a folk club. “We’d meet every Tuesday night, above a pub somewhere, and drink cheap beer. Whoever could, would play a folk song or violin, whatever they could do. Anyway, one night in strolls this devastatingly handsome man, who was from Birmingham University. It was Spencer Davis. I just fell in love with Spence. I swore I would get thin and go out with him.
“And I did.”
Christine and Spencer began singing together, fronting the university’s jazz band, but, she says, their relationship proved more musical than illicit. “Stevie Winwood was about 14, still in school and playing at a jazz club called the ChappelPub at lunchtime,” Christine says. “He met Spencer Davis Group.”
“I used to trail around religiously. Boy, they were so hot. Nothing was like that. Stevie Winwood played like I’d never heard anybody play before. It just gave me goose bumps. They were just a blues band, but a really, really great blues band. He [Winwood] could yell the blues. A 15-year-old boy. No one could believe it. The 19-20-year-old girls would have the hots for him.”
Christine joined another blues band called Chicken Shack. The gruesome cover photo, showing severed fingers in a can, won as art award for their first album. Forty Blue Fingers Packed and Ready to Serve. “We had an underground following,” Christine deadpans.
Chicken Shack did occasional gigs with Fleetwood Mac, and Christine, now, playing piano, was invited to guest on some of Fleetwood Mac’s early sessions because she “played the blues the way Peter liked.” She never had designs on any of the band, she says. Besides, both Green and McVie already had girlfriends.
Christine stops and slaps her forehead. “I’m forgetting a whole two-year episode with a Swedish guy I was engaged to. Ended up totally traumatizing my kitten who hated me evermore ’cause I just ran around the house screaming when he left me. I scared the shit out of it.”
Caught up in her story-telling, Christine in not the same woman Stevie Nicks has characterized as “very private, very much to herself.” She shakes her head, as if she’s been talking too much. “I can’t believe I’m remembering all these things.” But, she continues, “I went to see Fleetwood Mac one night. John didn’t have his girlfriend… He asked me if I wanted to have a drink and we sat down, had a few laughs, then they had to go on-stage. All the time I was kind of eyeballing ol’ Greenie. After the concert was over, John came over and said, ‘Shall I take you out to dinner sometime? I went, ‘Whoa… I thought you were engaged or something.’ He said, ‘Nah, ‘sall over.’ I thought he was devastatingly attractive but it never occurred to me to look at him.”
They went out for a time, then John McVie disappeared overseas for Fleetwood Mac’s first American tour. “By this time I was really crazy about him,” Christine recalls, “but I didn’t know what was happening with him. Chicken Shack did a ten-day stint at the Blow-Up Club in Munich and I had this strange relationship with a crazy German DJ who wanted to whisk me off and marry me. I turned him down… and wrote John a big letter.”
Fleetwood Mac returned from America and McVie proposed. They were married ten days later, mostly to please Christine’s dying mother. But John and Christine didn’t see much of each other. Both bands toured often and when she left Chicken Shack, she tried a disastrously unprepared solo tour and LP. Christine gladly retired to be John McVie’s old lady.
“I thought it was extremely romantic,” she says. “Obviously a little bit of the glamour of what Fleetwood Mac was in those days rubbed off. It was almost like someone marrying a Beatle. You married one of the locks in the chain and you were part of them.
“We were very very happy. Very happy for probably three years and then the strain of me being in the same band as him started to take its toll. When you’re in the same band as somebody, you’re seeing them almost more than 24 hours a day. you start to see an awful lot of the bad side ’cause touring is no easy thing. There’s a lot of drinking… John is not the most pleasant of people when he’s drunk. Very belligerent. I was seeing more Hyde than Jekyll.”
Peter Green, in a sudden plea for Christ, left the band in late ’70, and Christine McVie came out of her retirement, adding keyboards to the band. Green’s departure, says Christine, “was an out-of-the-blue shock to everybody. Peter had been quite happy and was starting to write this really incredible music like “Green Manalishi.” It was like he was being lifted. He’d wrung the blues dry and already played 50 times better than most of the black guitarists.”
In the midst of a German tour the group’s first peak of popularity, Green fell in with some people Christine remembers as “jet-setters.” The band had recorded a Green composition, “Black Magic Woman,” and, ironically, the group he ran into were reportedly into black magic and the occult. They turned him on to acid. He left Fleetwood Mac on that same tour.
“Something snapped in him,” Christine says, looking saddened. “He dropped this fatal tab of acid and withdrew. He still has this amazing power, but it’s negative. You don’t want him around. We’ve all cried a lot of tears over Peter. We’ve all spent so much energy talking him into more positive channels. He’ll just sit there and laugh. “Fuck it…”
Not long ago, exasperated at being asked the perennial reunion question, Mick Fleetwood told an interviewer that sure, someday, maybe on an English tour, the original Fleetwood Mac might get on-stage one night.
Later, when the band arrived in London, Peter Green was waiting for them in the lobby of their hotel. Unannounced, Christine didn’t recognize the flabby, slept-in figure carrying a disco-droning cassette machine. “I heard this voice say, Hello Chris, I turned around and see this rotund little guy with a big beer gut and pint in his hand. I couldn’t believe it. I said, Aren’t you embarrassed?, Nah, he says, fuck it, what the hell.” We gave him a room at the hotel for a few nights. He’d knock on your door, come in and just sit there on your bed. He wouldn’t volunteer anything.”
Jeremy Spencer left Fleetwood Mac a year after Peter Green, under vaguely similar circumstances. He stepped onto a Children of God bus in Hollywood and never returned. The writer met Spencer recently on a London Street, blank-eyed and selling Children of God books. His pitch: “I used to be in a group called Fleetwood Mac until I found…”
Christine meticulously recollects the details of all the ensuing clock-in/clock-out personnel changes during Fleetwood Mac’s lean years between their Future Games and Fleetwood Mac LPs. But she places particular emphasis only on Bob Welch. “I have so much love for Bob,” she says, “He is such a big part of the band. I don’t really get off on what he’s doing in Paris [Welch’s current band]. When he quit, he was getting into a real feel of the kind of guitar playing that Peter used to have and Lindsey definitely has got a lot of. It’s very nebulous quality, very difficult to explain. It’s a question of what note not to play.”
Welch’s last LP with the groups was Heroes are Hard to Find, their first as a transplanted LA band. After breaking up with their manager they had moved to LA to start all over. The McVies lived in a small three-room in Malibu. It was there, on a portable Hohner piano in the bedroom that she wrote “Over my Head” and “Say you Love me.”
“I don’t struggle over my songs,” she offers. “I write them quickly and I’ve never written a lot. I write what is required of me. For me, people like Joni Mitchell are making too much of a statement. I don’t really write about myself, which puts me in a safe little cocoon… I’m a pretty basic love song writer.”
Christine shrugs off the suddenly massive acceptance of Fleetwood Mac as “a lot of rewards for a lot of hard work.” And it wasn’t the flush of super-stardom, she stresses, that caused her to split with John McVie. She explains compassionately: “I broke up with John in the middle of a tour. I was aware of it being irresponsible. I had to do it for my sanity. It was either that or me ending up in a lunatic asylum. I still worry for him more than I would ever dare tell him. I still have a lot of love for John. Let’s face it, as far as I’m concerned, it was him that stopped me loving him. He constantly tested what limits of endurance I would go to. He just went one step too far. If he knew that I cared and worried so much about him, I think he’d play on it.”
“There’s no doubt about the fact that he hasn’t really been a happy man since I left him. I know that. Sure, I could make him happy tomorrow and say, yeah John, I’ll come back to you. Then I would be miserable. I’m not that unselfish.”
Then there were the Sausalito sessions. “Trauma,” Christine groans. “Trau-ma.” The sessions were like a cocktail party every night – people everywhere. We ended up staying in these weird hospital rooms… and of course John and me were not exactly the best of friends. Stevie and I spent a lot of time together. She was going through a bit of a hard time too because she was the one that axed it. Lindsey was pretty down about it for a while, then he just woke up one morning and said, Fuck this, I don’t want to be unhappy, and started getting some girlfriends together.
Then Stevie couldn’t handle it…
Almost immediately Christine McVie entered into a romance with Curry Grant, FM’s strapping lighting director. They lived together for a year in Christine’s home, above Sunset Strip. “I haven’t been without a man in my life for… God, it must be 12 years. I can’t imagine what it’s like not to have an old man… but I have no intention of getting married. I don’t think I’m in love…” She considers that for a few seconds. “I don’t really know what the hell love is.” Then, she suddenly adds, “I’m proud of having been John’s wife.” She still wears McVie’s ring, but on another finger. Maybe we don’t feel the same about each other anymore, but I wouldn’t like to wipe that off board. John can’t handle Curry too well, even though he’s much more at ease with other women around me than I am with men in front of him. He’s making an effort. But if I was the kind of girl who wandered in with a new boyfriend every week, enjoying my newfound freedom, I don’t know how he could handle that.”
Isn’t she tempted to play the field?
“It would be a new experience,” she says shyly, growing amused at the thought. “Sure, you know.” She leans toward a telephone. “Kenny Loggins! Call me up. I’d love to have a load of dates. I haven’t done that since I was at college. But it’s really out of the question. I mean I hardly meet anybody. I’m so involved in the band.”
Christine McVie’s eyes light up with a revelation. “Seven more years until I’m forty. Then I’ll start all over again…”
John McVie stares silently out across a windy Marina del Rey, a half-hour away from Hollywood. “Two choppy today,” he mumbles. “We shouldn’t take the boat out.” Having had this 41-foot schooner a year now, he is brisk and expert at tidying it up, taking down the sail and draining out side compartments before we find seats outside, on the stern, to talk.
For years, McVie dreamt about buying a boat. With the success of Fleetwood Mac, he was able to get one of the best. And when Christine asked for a separation, he moved on board, storing away everything, but some sailing books, a radio, a television set and numerous statuettes of penguins.
McVie, who is 30, claims that he’s “much more comfortable here than in a house anyway.” But he seems oddly unhappy. He is a solemn man. If he is pleased with realizing one of his fantasies, his poker face doesn’t show it.
One wonders what success has meant to him.
“This,” he says quietly, knocking the stern of the boat, “the freedom to be here, rather than slogging your heart out in Hollywood. But this isn’t… would you say this is a luxury? If there was a house with it, I’d say so. But this is half the price of a house.”
John McVie, the Mac in Fleetwood Mac, started the band with Mick Fleetwood, Jeremy Spencer and Peter Green in ’67. Before that he was a four-year charter member of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. He has seen Fleetwood Mac through the complete musical spectrum – 6 guitarists, 3 label changes, innumerable tours, every album and many, many, times more bad than good.
If Fleetwood Mac had been a mediocre-selling album for the band, there would have been no desperation or breakup. If Buckingham or Nicks hadn’t worked out, McVie would have dutifully helped find replacements. He’s a strange creature to rock and roll: a patient man.
“Fleetwood Mac was doing fine before that album,” he figures. “People are always asking me how does it feel to have made it. If that’s the case, what do I do now? Now that I’ve made it. I hate that phrase.” For once, his voice is audible above the din of the marina. “I didn’t anticipate all the commotion around the last album,” he says. “Not as much as 4 million sales. There’s a lot of good albums we’ve done. It’s just one of those things – the right album the right time. But that’s the criteria of making it in this business: a big album. Then you get your own TV show, you go make a movie. It’s not important. Being seen wearing a Gucci suit… that syndrome is so sad.”
So what’s the motivation to be around it for more than 14 years?
“Playing bass,” comes the ready reply. “I’m not a dedicated musician particularly, but it’s the one thing I enjoy doing.”
Would he soon consider retiring?
What would I do? Sit on the boat, but that would get as boring as sitting around the studio…”
One cautiously broaches the subject of his split with Christine. It must have been a major turning point…
“Yeah,” McVie agrees. “It still affects me. I’m still adjusting to the fact that it’s not John and Chris anymore. It goes up and down.”
Feeling suddenly awkward, McVie stops and assembles a statement explaining himself. “Its difficult to tell someone, yeah, I’m this kind of person… the quiet thing is fine,” he says softly. “If I had anything that I thought was world shaking or profound, I’d say something. I really can come up with anything on politics, state of society, the relation of music to society… it’s just horseshit. I play bass.”
McVie sounds like his soft-spoken fellow member from the Bluesbreakers, Eric Clapton, in both philosophy and personality. (Christine McVie: “those two? They’re like two peas out of the same pod”).
Clapton has said he finds his personality by drinking…
“I drink too much, period,” McVie bristles, “but when I’ve drunk too much, a personality comes out. It’s not very pleasant to be around.”
In the end, John McVie is a droll, likable gentleman with a sullen aura. Used to touring and recording with his wife and band, he is suddenly alone on his boat.
“He’ll cheer up,” an associate of the band says with a laugh. “He always does. Everyone’s attitude is just leave him to himself. They know there’s only one thing that could bring him around instantly: an affair with Linda Rondstandt.”
McVie wistfully admits to this crush. Last year, suspiciously soon after learning that Fleetwood Mac would be on the Rock Music Awards show with Rondstandt as a fellow nominee, he bought an exquisitely tailored burgundy velvet, three-piece outfit. He wore it that night, and Fleetwood Mac won Rock Group of the Year, among other honors.
Rondstandt never showed up.
Mick Fleetwood’s the tall menacing-looking one who is, for all purposes, the manager of the band. When former manager Clifford Davis burned his bridges by sending out a bogus band with the same name and owners of the name, Fleetwood Mac was too broke to find another. Decisions fell directly to Fleetwood and McVie, the original members and owners of the name. McVie held no ambitions as a businessman, but Fleetwood became obsessed with the music business. He grew to love the new responsibility of managing himself. Fleetwood retained a lawyer, Michael “Mickey” Shapiro, and together they guided the band’s career.
Fleetwood is surely in his element this morning. We’re sitting in the executive conference room at the tip of a private Warner’s jet returning to LA from a last minute Fleetwood Mac benefit in Indiana for Birch Bayh.
“Everything has taken a very natural course,” he reflects pleasantly. “We’ve never made records with the attitude of making hits. With us, it’s potluck. The fact that they are is great. That’s not just from the present lineup of the band, that’s going back years and years. Like when Peter Green wrote “Albatross” [FM’s first successful single in England]. Everyone thought it was a concerted effort. It was a complete accident that it was a hit. The BBC used it for some wildlife program and then someone put it on Top of The Tops and it was a hit. If Rumours was a radical failure, I’m sure we’d all be disturbed, but we wouldn’t feel disillusioned.”
Mick Fleetwood, like John McVie, cannot think of a time when he was ever frustrated with the band’s stalled sales figures. After ten years, they value Fleetwood Mac more as a way of life than as a business investment. Success was a pleasant surprise. “You go to the office every day and you don’t think about it in the end, you just go,” Fleetwood explains. “That’s what we were doing. Being part of Fleetwood Mac, playing through the ups and downs.”
Fleetwood is resolute: “I could have never planned any of this. I don’t even believe in making plans. They only create an atmosphere of disappointment. So, it’s not a day-to-day situation with us, but there’s always full potential of either great things happening. That is very important to me personally… Fleetwood Mac, from point one, has been like that. We’ll always be able to move without breaking a leg… I definitely want to have a baby in the next four years. For sure, I want to have one or two children and I don’t want to wait any further than, say, 34. This is all part of my plan. By that time I hope that I’ll be living up in the mountains somewhere with a very pretty house and a piano and a tape recorder, just writing, and then going to New York every once in a while to shop. I love that too, but I mostly like to be in a really warm place with a bunch of animals, dogs and cats.”
It’s a long way from Peter Green.
Twenty-eight-year-old Stephanie “Stevie” Nicks is an endearing blend of beatnik poet and sassy rock and roller. One thing is for sure: success does not faze her. She has, in fact, lived around it much of her life. Until heart surgery forced him into early retirement two years ago, her father, Jess Nicks, was simultaneously executive vice-president of Greyhound and president of Armour Meats. Stevie, the only girl, was “the star in my family’s sky.”
Born in Phoenix and raised along her father’s corporate climb in LA, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and finally San Francisco, she nearly graduated from San Jose State with a degree in speech communication. Instead, she quit a few months early to go on the road in 1968 with an acid-rock band called Fritz.
“That did not amuse my parents too much,” Stevie notes wryly. Just out of the shower and toweling off her mousy-brown-flecked-with green-tint hair on an antique couch in her Hollywood Hills duplex, she makes easy conversation. “They wanted me to do what I wanted to do. They were just worried I was going to get down to 80 pounds and be a miserable, burnt out 27-year-old.”
Despite a senior citizen’s penchant for detailing her various aches and pains – she’s always got a sore throat or a cold – the one thing Stevie Nicks does not exude is weakness.
Through the three and a half year existence of Fritz, her all-male band members made a private agreement: hands off Stevie. That included Lindsey Buckingham, the slender, curly-haired bass player with whom she shared lead vocals.
“I think there was always something between me and Lindsey, but nobody in that band really wanted me as their girlfriend because I was just too ambitious for them. But they didn’t want anybody else to have me either. If anybody in the band started spending any time with me, the other three would literally pick that person apart. To the death. They all thought I was in it for the attention. These guys didn’t take me seriously at all. I was just a girl singer, and they hated the fact that I got a lot of credit.”
Nicks flouts the memory, laughing with defiance, “They would kill themselves practicing for ten hours, and people would call up and say: ‘We want to book that band with the little brownish-blondish-haired girl.’ There was always just really weird things going on between us.” Now she is charged up and scoots to the edge of her sofa to make her point: “I could never figure out why I stayed in that band. Now I know that was the preparation for Fleetwood Mac.”
But it would be another two years between the inevitable breakup of Fritz and an invitation to join Fleetwood Mac. Stevie and Lindsey chose to stay together as a duo, calling themselves Buckingham Nicks. “We started spending a lot of time together working out songs. Pretty soon we started spending all our time together and… it just happened.”
They moved down to LA, started knocking on doors, and eventually signed a contract with Polydor Records. They released an album and toured to good audience reaction. The band even developed a cult following in Birmingham, Alabama.
In New York, however, Polydor was not impressed and dropped them before they could finish a second album. Lindsey resorted to a phone-soliciting job. Stevie became a $1.50-an-hour waitress in a Beverly Hills singles restaurant.
Waiting on tables? What about mom and dad?
“I’d get money from them here and there,” says Stevie, “but if I wanted to go back to school, if I wanted to move back home, then they would support me… If I was gonna be here in LA, doing my trip, I was gonna have to do it on my own.”
They auditioned for Russ Regan, head of 20th Century records, who, Buckingham recalls, “thought we were a smash act but couldn’t sign us” and Ode records president and artist’s manager Lou Adler, who listened to half of one song and thanked them very much. Another manager recommended they learn the Top 40 and play steak and lobster houses.
When she visited home just seven months before joining Fleetwood Mac, her father was also discouraging. “He saw me getting skinnier and I wasn’t very happy. He said, ‘I think you better start setting some time limits here,’ they saw, I really think, shades of my grandfather A.J. (Aaron Jeff Nicks). He was a country and western singer and he drank way too much. He was unhappy, trying to make it. He wanted to make it very badly. He turned into a very embittered person and he died that way.”
In late 1974, Keith Olsen, engineer on the Buckingham Nicks LP, met with Mick Fleetwood. Olsen, pitching himself and his studio for the Fleetwood Mac account, presented Stevie and Lindsey’s demo and his studio portfolio. Fleetwood listened to the album and made a mental note. When Bob Welch left Fleetwood Mac six weeks later, he looked up Stevie and Lindsey.
They went up to Mick Fleetwood’s house in Laurel Canyon to talk. Buckingham offered to do an audition, but Fleetwood declined. Instead, he simply asked: ‘Want to join?’ The two looked at each other and said, ‘Yes.’
“John and Mick,” Buckingham says, “have always been open to having a lot of different people in the band – which is odd. I would never be able to do that. I would think it was real important to keep an identity. I remember being a kid – if a new member joined a group, I just didn’t like that at all. But that openness is what’s kept them going for so long.”
But he and Nicks had one more commitment: a headlining concert in Birmingham. The show drew a screaming sellout crowd of more than 6000 fans who knew all the words to their songs. “We went out in style,” says Buckingham.
Fleetwood went directly into the studio, reworking such Buckingham Nicks material as “Monday Morning,” “Landslide,” and a new song written originally on acoustic piano about a Welsh witch Stevie had read about named “Rhiannon.” “Everything was already worked out,” says Buckingham. He plucked up a belly-backed acoustic guitar and played the introduction to “Rhiannon.”
The newest members of the band were happy with the album, but Stevie Nicks went through an anxious period of self-doubt. She can quote entire passages from a review in Rolling Stone that, she says, almost caused her to quit. “They said my singing was ‘callow’ and that really hurt my feelings.” She began to think that maybe she wasn’t that good, and that she had been asked into the band only because she was with Buckingham. “Time after time I would read: ‘…the raucous voice of Stevie Nicks and the golden-throated voice of Christine McVie, who’s the only saving grace of the band.’ When it comes to competition, I won’t compete for a man and I won’t compete for a place on that stage either. If I’m not wanted, I’ll get out. I was bummed.”
But the bum didn’t last long: Fleetwood Mac immediately became a gold album and Christine’s ethereal song, “Over my head,” broke big in both pop and easy-listening radio. Nicks, who’d done harmonies on the track, felt better. And when “Rhiannon” found an even bigger audience, with its mainstream rock and roll getting both AM and FM airplay, she forgot all about quitting.
She also became Rhiannon, a witch in Welsh mythology. “I see her as a good witch,” Stevie says. “Very positive. I sink into that whole trip when I’m on stage.” With her diaphanous black outfits, her chiffon and lace, and a graceful way around the stage, she just as quickly became the band’s first willing star/focal point.
There was, of course, a price for all this. Last year, during the ill-fated stretch in Sausalito, she separated from Buckingham after over six years.
“The best explanation is: try working with your secretary… in a raucous office… and then come home with her at night. See how long you could stand her. I could be no comfort to Lindsey when he needed comfort.”
She cites an example from Sausalito. Lindsey was feeling depressed because he couldn’t quite get some guitar parts down right. “So we’d go back to where we were staying and he would really need comfort from me, for me to say, ‘it’s all right, who cares about them?’, you know, be an old lady.”
One problem, “I was also pissed off because he hadn’t gotten the guitar part on. So I’m trying to defend their point of view at the same time trying to make him feel better. It doesn’t work. I couldn’t be all those things.”
Stevie has kept mostly to herself since the breakup with Lindsey. Outside of a short romance with drummer/singer Don Henley of The Eagles, she’s spent her days either in the studio or at home writing and taping her songs. She icily denies talk of an affair with Paul Kantner.
“It’s strange for me,” she says in confidential tones, “I’ve never been a dater. I don’t really like parties. I’m very alone now. I’m not one of those women who are just willing to go out and sit at the rainbow. In my position I could meet a lot of people just because of the band I’m in. Well, I don’t want to meet anybody because of the band I’m in.”
Stevie doesn’t mind airing her personal life like this at all. “I don’t care that everybody knows me and Chris and John and Lindsey and Mick all broke up,” she declares. “Because we did. So that’s fact. I just don’t want people to pick up a magazine and go, ‘oh, another interview from Fleetwood Mac,’ if it’s interesting, I’m not opposed to giving out information”.
“On this album, all the songs that I wrote except maybe ‘Gold Dust Woman’ – and even that comes into it – are definitely about the people in the band… Chris’ relationships, John’s relationship, Mick’s, Lindsey’s and mine. They’re all there and they’re very honest and people will know exactly what I’m talking about… people will really enjoy listening to what happened since the last album”.
The sun sets in Hollywood and Stevie lets her house darken along with it. “I’ll tell you an interesting thing that hit me after the Rock Awards,” she says. “We won the Best Group and the Best Album awards – that was very far out and everybody was really blessed out over that and we went to some party at the Hilton or something afterward and just stayed about 30 minutes. My brother Chris and I got in our limousine and came home. And it really struck me, driving home in the back seat of a black limousine. I was so lonely.”
“I thought, ‘Here I am, we just won these fantastic awards, we’ve just been on TV, everybody is singing our praises and here I am driving home in my black limousine,’ terribly alone. Sort of knowing how it would feel to be Marilyn Monroe or something. It was a very strange feeling and I didn’t like it at all.”
Stevie Nicks opens her eyes very wide. “It scared me.”
Lindsey Buckingham is no doubt the first member of Fleetwood Mac to list Brian Wilson as a major inspiration. Lindsey’s California influence on the band is legitimate too. Born and raised in Palo Alto, Buckingham was “another jock in a family of swimming jocks.” His brother Greg won a silver medal in the ’68 Olympics. Late in high school Lindsey drifted into a rock and roll band and was sufficiently smitten to spoil family tradition. He quit the water polo team. “My coach went insane,” Lindsey says. “He started screaming, ‘you’re nothing, you’ll always be a nothing.’”
And he was nothing for a while, when that band went psychedelic and became Fritz. Buckingham couldn’t master mind-blowing lead guitar and was put on bass for the next three and a half years. “I was just a young kid who thought it was really neat that we were in a band,” he says. Then he teamed up with Nicks, and finally they joined Fleetwood Mac.
Now, Buckingham lopes into the house of a mutual friend, looking a little dazed. Listening to the radio on the way over he’d finally heard himself singing the just released single, “Go your own way.” “It sounded real weird,” he shrugs. “I just want it to be so good that I got paranoid. I have to relax, get this whole time behind us…”
Ten months devoted to Fleetwood Mac’s album has left Buckingham spindly and studio wan. He gives a rundown of how a group can spend so long taping 45 minutes of music: “there’s one track on the album that started out as a one song in Sausalito. We decided it needed a bridge, so we cut a bridge and edited it into the rest of the song. We didn’t get a vocal and left it for a long time in a bunch of pieces. It almost went off the album. Then we listened back and decided we liked the bridge, but didn’t like the rest of the song. So I wrote verses for that bridge, which was originally not in the song and edited those in. We saved the ending. The ending was the only thing left from the original track. We ended up calling it “The Chain,” because it was a bunch of pieces.”
His face lights up as he realizes that it’s all behind him now. “I feel really lucky that I’ve had the opportunity to go through some of the heartaches and shit we’ve been through the past year. it’s had a profound effect on me. I feel a lot older. I feel like I’ve learned a whole lot by taking on a large responsibility slightly unaided.” Buckingham laughs to himself. “Being in this band really fucks up relationships with chicks. Since Stevie, I have found that to be true. I could meet someone that I really like, have maybe a few days to get it together and that’s about it. The rest of the time I’m too into Fleetwood Mac”.
Buckingham has overcome the breakup with Nicks. “It was a little lonely there for a while,” he admits. “The thought of being on my own really terrified me. But then I realized being alone is a really cleansing thing… as I began to feel myself again. I’m surprised we lasted as long as we did.”
Buckingham doesn’t object to the confessional tone of Rumours either. “I’m not ashamed of my personal life,” he proclaims. “Just ’cause you’re in the public eye doesn’t mean you don’t go through the same bullshit.”
Lindsey Buckingham sets down the guitar. “Tonight I just want to get drunk,” he announces. “I know the exact place too. They let me throw the foos…”
The two doormen at Kowloon’s Chines restaurant greet Buckingham and his party warmly. They know him as the young gentleman who leaves a big mess and a bigger tip.
“Do you know who he is?” one doorman asks the other.
The other doorman nods casually. “He’s an actor or something. I think he plays in a soap opera…”
For a long while, the major distinction of Fleetwood Mac was not cashbox success but rather that it was the most groupie-proof rock group on the road. Co-founder drummer Mick Fleetwood was a joyously married father of two. John McVie, his co-captain, was wed to the Toni Tennille of hard rock, Christine, the outfit’s keyboardist and one of its singer/songwriters. And lately joining those Brits were two Californians, inventive lead guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and his own lady of eight years, Stevie Nicks, a singer-writer, too, and electric onstage writher.
The group enjoyed only modish attention in the States until suddenly last fall Chris’s creamily smooth “Over My Head” became a smash single. A tumultuous tour made the quintet’s first joint, superbly diverse LP, Fleetwood Mac, into a colossal platinum hit. After an astounding 41-week stay on the charts, sales are soaring toward two million.
Chris, 32, who, with Stevie, has added a softened, more melodic feel to the Mc Vie-Fleetwood rock bottom, confesses, “I’m mystified. I just write songs by stepping into other people’s shoes. Lyrics derive from relationships around me. That makes it easier to write love songs.”
Sadly, Chris may find that sort of material increasingly scarce. Love has kept the Captain and Tennille together, but, after seven years, road fever has put the Fleetwood Mac members personally (if not professionally) asunder. The McVies broke up late last year. Fleetwood and his ex-model wife, Jenny, are getting divorced, and the Buckingham-Nicks nonmarital arrangement ended just last month.
“We married two years before I joined the group,” Chris recaps calmly. “Then I joined in 1970 and we were together all the time. But after five years on the road seeing each other at our worst, we never had that space to step back, to enjoy missing someone—that sweet sorrow trip. Otherwise, you can go insane. We were Siamese twins. ‘Hi Chris, where’s John? Hi, John, where’s Chris?’ ” The wisest perspective on what happened comes perhaps from John. “It was very heavy for a couple of months,” he says soberly. “But what matters now is accepting what’s left between us. Look, man, we were together every second for more than five years, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, in the studio, on the road, during time off. In anyone else’s scene, we were married for the equivalent of 40 years.”
Chris wants now “to be in a vacuum, to have no problems,” and like all five Macs, to get on with the music and transcend any centrifugal peevishness that could corrode their platinum status. John has a new lady now, but he reports with unmistakable affection that “Chris’s reaction to the whole thing has been extremely mature.”
Only a hardily seasoned and disarming wit could have enabled her to survive the road life all these years. Born Christine Perfect in England’s Birmingham, she had to put up with even more nameplays at school than Chevy Chase. Her father, a music professor who gave violin recitals at cathedrals, urged her on to a career in classical piano. But by 12, Chris “loathed piano,” went to art school for five years and “finished as a uselessly qualified sculptress.” By then her musical tastes had been secularized by the Everly Brothers and black blues artists like B. B. King and Otis Spann. To escape deepening boredom as a London department store window dresser, she joined a local club band, Chicken Shack, and shortly thereafter fell in love with McVie. Along with Fleetwood, he had played with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers on the mid-’60s English blues club circuit.
“It takes stamina to stay in rock,” says Chris. “Lots of girls try it and slip by the wayside. You have to take care of yourself and avoid the weird drugs, or even the heavy-duty Southern Comfort stuff. You can definitely fall down and end up in an asylum. But I don’t see why a girl couldn’t sit down and learn lead guitar,” she continues. “I daresay to a guy it’d be rather sexy,” she adds, mock-riffing on an imaginary ax. “But I guess it is a bit butch. I like to retain my femininity, even in jeans [she has 40 pairs]. I don’t want to come off the least bit lezzo—leather jumpsuits and all that.”
A new LP is near ready, but luxuriantly being held while Fleetwood Mac thrives, and a summer tour is planned. And money is also coming in from previously frozen oldie revenues. It was held up by a still unsettled court battle against an ex-manager who sent out a bogus “Fleetwood Mac” group. “Money is frightening,” admits Chris, who plans to move from a rented apartment in Hollywood and buy a home. “I like to spend it as it comes in as long as I can pay taxes and live comfortably.” (She’s a tax exile from the U.K. where she would be in the 83 percent bracket.)
Road life has toughened Chris. “You have to detect the real friends from the lurking creeps with ulterior motives. Female groupies line themselves up for me—not sexually, thank God—and they turn out to be people who (a) write poetry, (b) write songs, (c) want to be palsy-walsy with me or (d) fancy the drummer.” But for now Chris and comrades can cope with the peculiar perquisites—and domestic pains—of hard-won rock fame. “It’s all just another chapter of weird Mac karma,” muses the dry, laconic Fleetwood. “We all got it on so right, musically, from the start—and we all have ended up biting the emotional shoulder.”
PHOTO (COLOR):Chris McVie wrote almost half the LP that made Fleetwood Mac a supergroup when ail three of its couples were splitting, including her and co-founder John.
PHOTO (COLOR):”To a guy, a girl on lead guitar or drums would be sexy. But to me, I daresay, it’d be rather butch. The piano isn’t.”
PHOTO (COLOR):They play and stay together despite the breakups: from left, John McVie, bass, Chris’s ex; Lindsey Buckingham, guitar; Mick Fleetwood, drums (divorcing); singer Stevie Nicks, Lindsey’s ex; and Chris.
PHOTO (COLOR):”We still enjoy playing and working together,” says John, with Chris. “It’s bizarre what you win—and pay.”
PHOTO (COLOR):”You must take care of yourself,” finds Chris. “I’ve never popped pills or done weird drugs. If anything, I’m a wino.”
PHOTO (COLOR):In her L.A. pad between tours, McVie says, “I’m a bit of a cynic. I know the reasons people hang around. I love time to myself.”
Jim Jerome / People (Vol. 5 Issue 19, p71. 2p.) / May 17, 1976
FLEETWOOD MAC’S Mirage (Warner Bros.) has already climbed to the top of the album best-seller charts, just a few weeks after its release. It sounds as if it could repeat the phenomenal commercial success of Rumours, which made the present Fleetwood Mac lineup into a supergroup several years ago and went on to become one of the best-selling pop-rock albums of all time.
