(By Cameron
Crowe, Rolling Stone Magazine, 24 March 1977)
Fuck it...
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..."
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