Making Rumours
The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album
by Ken Caillat with Steven Stiefel
Wiley
While recording the mellow rock hit “You Make Loving Fun,” Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham laid down solo after solo, feeling himself on a roll. When the studio tracks were used up, he needed to record over solos he had previously played.
At one point, he told the engineer, Ken Caillat, to tape over a solo that Caillat had thought was a pretty sweet take.
“Are you sure?” Caillat asked. “That was really great.”
A frustrated Buckingham shouted at him, “No! Go over it!”
They replaced that solo with a new one, and then Buckingham asked Caillat to play the one from before. When reminded that they had just recorded over it — at Buckingham’s request — the volatile guitarist lost his mind.
Buckingham’s face “turned bright red, and the veins in his neck began to throb.” The guitarist, writes Caillat, then “charged into the control room, approaching me from behind” and “placed both of his hands around my neck. ‘You’re an idiot!’ Lindsey screamed at me, his hands tightening around my throat . . . pull[ing] me all the way back in my seat . . . his hands could have crushed my windpipe.”
While the rest of the band came to the engineer’s rescue — Buckingham apologized, then asked if he could get Caillat a beer — this was but one explosive moment in the storm that was the creation of “Rumours,” a maelstrom of cocaine, marijuana, violence and emotional devastation that, ironically, made the band superstars.
“Rumours” is one of the best-selling and best-received albums in rock history, winning the 1977 Grammy for Album of the Year and selling over 19 million copies to date in the US alone.
But if ever a band suffered for their success, it was Fleetwood Mac, as the album’s classics were inspired by quickly fracturing intra-band relations, co-producer Caillat writes in a new history of the album.
Initially a British blues rock band, Fleetwood Mac had released 10 albums without any US hits when drummer/co-founder Mick Fleetwood asked Buckingham to join, with the guitarist insisting that he and his then-girlfriend, vocalist Stevie Nicks, were a package deal.
Now on their second record with the band, Buckingham and Nicks were ending their relationship just as the recording of “Rumours” began. Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way” and Nicks’ “Dreams,” both Top 10 hits from the album (“Dreams” hit No. 1), were each one’s stab at the other, but the conflict was not limited to music.
During an early vocal session for “You Make Loving Fun,” the pair were singing background vocals when Caillat stopped to rewind the tape. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Buckingham and Nicks launched into a vicious screaming match.
“Stevie suddenly looked at Lindsey and cried out, ‘F – – – you! You can go to hell!’ Lindsey responded with a tirade of his own. ‘When we get back to LA, I’m moving out.’ ”
Caillat rewound the tape as quickly as he could and hit “record,” and the pair shifted from ranting to crooning “you make loving fun” without missing a beat.
While Buckingham and Nicks were a combustible pair, the guitarist’s aggression landed in all directions.
He dated a girl named Christina later on in the sessions, and one morning the pair, along with another producer, barged into the studio with Christina “white and trembling” and “crying hysterically.”
“I think it’s over,” she said. “And what’s worse is that Lindsey punched me in the face.”
(Caillat later writes, “I wondered whether Lindsey had ever physically hurt Stevie. I didn’t know if he had in the past, but I would see him kick her in the butt onstage during the ‘Tusk’ tour three years later.”)
But Buckingham and Nicks were hardly the band’s sole purveyors of friction. Bassist John McVie, who would sometimes start drinking as early as 6 a.m., was still in love with his wife, singer/keyboardist Christine McVie, who had ended their marriage because John chose alcohol over her.
John fell deeper into booze and heartbreak as Christine took up with the band’s lighting director, Curry Grant — the subject of “You Make Loving Fun” despite Christine’s initial claim, to spare John’s feelings, that it was about her dog — leading to the sad slapstick of the producers spiriting John out of the room whenever Grant snuck in to give Christine a kiss.
(John began dating a woman named Sandra and did himself no favors when, during an argument with Christine about Grant’s presence in the studio, he screamed, “Sandra means nothing to me!” loud enough for her to hear. She responded by throwing a glass of champagne in his face.)
In the end, “Rumours” landed four Top 10 singles — the first album in history to do so — thanks to the band’s ability to tap into their emotional chaos and turn it into music.
“ ‘Rumours’ probably succeeded,” Caillat writes, “because it was brilliant group therapy in which we all — wittingly or unwittingly — participated.”