Jenny went to Benifold to pick up some clothes during this time and while she was there, in need of guidance, she arranged to see a psychic from the village. Jenny told me recently about this woman, how she’d described the whole painful situation so accurately. She could see I was in Africa–I had travelled to Zambia–and was a very unhappy man, and then she said, ‘You’re being used as a pawn by the powers that be. There is something greater that will happen because of this situation, but now your place is with your husband.’ Jenny knew she was right. The psychic had given her the guidance she needed. She ended the affair. Bob was very angry and hurt, because he’d felt something more for her. At that point she got in touch with me and told me she wanted to try again.
I had taken off to Zambia, because to say the least, I needed to clear my head. The whole band did; after Bob was fired and the tour cancelled, everyone retreated to different parts of the world for a much-needed holiday, before gathering once again at Benifold. In the interim, our manager Clifford Davis put together a fake version of Fleetwood Mac featuring members of a band called Curved Air that he also managed. He refused to forfeit the money that had been advanced for the remainder of our tour and opted to pass off a bogus version of our band, claiming he owned the rights to the name.
This of course was the last thing we needed. It was also the most preposterous thing we’d ever heard and the greatest betrayal from one of our own that we could have imagined. If there was ever a time to call it quits, this was it. There we were in England, far from what had become our core audience, thousands of miles from our record company and with our band in tatters, as our trusted manager of seven years tried to move on without us. It was heartbreak heaped on heartache for me. Reuniting with Jenny at Benifold was much the same. My feelings for her had remained the same but I was deeply hurt. She’d gone from feeling unnoticed amongst the band to being the person everybody talked about.
It had all gone so wrong, but I wasn’t going to let it end. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t allow other musicians to tour under our name, whoever they were. Bob Welch was my ally in this and I needed his resolve because the others, John and Christine included, were drained. Their marriage was on the rocks and the idea that not only would we need to find yet another guitarist, but also have to fire our manager and fight for the right to our name, was dumbfounding. This mountain seemed insurmountable, even for us.
Bob Welch, the McVies and I would sit round the table at Benifold for hours debating what to do. We didn’t have a manager, which to me was our biggest problem. I didn’t know how to proceed, because I’d always relied on someone else to book our gigs and handle our affairs.
‘We don’t need anyone else to do it, Mick,’ Bob said one day. ‘We can do it ourselves. Between the two of us, you and I have enough experience. We’ve been gigging musicians for years, we know how it works.’
He wasn’t wrong and we’d seen first-hand what could happen when the affairs of the band were left to those who didn’t have our best interests in mind. Bob and I decided that we’d manage the band together and do what had to be done legally to reclaim our name from Clifford Davis.
The first thing we had to do was file a lawsuit against Davis and since he was touring the bogus Fleetwood Mac in the States, that’s where we needed to file it. We had no idea how far Clifford would take his pursuit of ownership, but if he wasn’t willing to settle quickly and the suit went into the American judicial system, we would be required to appear in lawyers’ offices and in court; in short we’d be making frequent trips across the pond.
‘If we’re really going to do this, Mick,’ Bob said, ‘we should be close by. Every time a paper is filed with the court or we need to sign something, we’ll be delaying the process by days or weeks being so far removed. If we are managing the band, we are the representatives and we’re going to have to be there.’
‘But we have the house, Bob,’ I said. ‘This is our home. We’ve made our last two albums here, this is us. I just don’t know.’
‘I know, Mick,’ he said. ‘But look at it this way. If we’re going to keep going, this band needs a new start. You have to remember, there were good times here but they weren’t all good.’ He cracked a wry smile.
‘You can say that again,’ I said and started laughing.
Bob was right. Jenny was back with me but the pain in my heart from what had transpired between her and Bob Weston was far from healed. There at Benifold, reminders were all around. A change would do us good if we were to save our marriage.
Our record company, Reprise, was in America, too, so it made sense that we should be accessible to them during the process of rebuilding our band. Above and beyond all that, our front man Bob Welch was never really into communal living or our country mansion. He was a California guy and he wanted to go home. He had a life there and he had a girlfriend, whom he later married, and though those were his ulterior motives, he was absolutely right that West Coast sunshine and a taste of the music scene that was evolving in Los Angeles was just what we needed.
As a group we decided that we’d relocate for six months, reclaim our name, get back in the studio and then go out on the road. It was going to be a case of do-or-die; we weren’t selling Benifold, we were going to Los Angeles to regroup and start again, or fail trying. The hope was that we’d have our affairs back in order by that time, or at least have the machinations in motion, and then we could make an informed decision about where we wanted to live.
Jenny’s affair with Bob Weston inadvertently became the catalyst for a great deal of change. It had cost Bob his job and momentarily broken up the band. It had shaken me so much that I went off to Africa for a month and took my eye off the ball, and when that happened our manager absconded with our name and all that we’d worked so hard for. As a result we moved to LA, and what was meant to be a six-month trip turned into a two-and-a-half-year legal battle and a permanent relocation. I hadn’t been paying proper attention to my marriage and I’d allowed someone close to me to take advantage of my distraction. The same can be said of my relationship with the band. Both affairs and all that came from them were wake-up calls for me, so going forward I vowed never to drop my guard again. I knew I couldn’t control the future, but I was determined to keep my focus on the band no matter how much my emotions and love life might serve to cloud my vision.
CHAPTER 9
FALLING INTO PLACE
We landed in Los Angeles in the spring of 1974; Jenny and I with our two children, our close friend Sandra, and the McVies. John and Chris stayed in a house owned by John Mayall for a while, until they found their own place, and Jenny and I stayed at the infamous Chateau Marmont until we found a nice two-bedroom house in Laurel Canyon. John and I both bought ourselves used Cadillac convertibles for $1,000 each, mine was metallic gold and John’s was white. I remember driving that huge yacht of a car through the winding roads of the Hollywood Hills and cruising along Sunset Boulevard with the top down feeling immediately reinvigorated. It was a new start for all of us.
It had been months since we’d worked as a functioning band and it would be close to a year before we would do so again. We had an arduous process ahead of us, a legal battle that Bob and our lawyers set in motion as soon as we all got settled. The meetings and paperwork were endless and Clifford Davis didn’t plan to concede. He believed he owned Fleetwood Mac and that the name had value in itself, regardless of who played the music. It made no sense and as we got deeper into the lawsuit, the degree of deception he had shown us was loathsome.
Once I’d found myself unable to continue playing with Bob Weston and had cancelled our tour to retreat to Africa and heal myself, Clifford Davis had sent letters to the other members of the band inviting them to be a part of a ‘star-studded new project’ he was putting together. None of them took him up on it. Meanwhile he’d told all of the members of the bogus Fleetwood Mac, none of whom had even played or recorded with us, that Christine McVie and I would be joining them later in the tour. He made
similar promises to promoters and the press. When the tour began and his plans fell apart, he told the band that I’d pulled out of the tour entirely and that they’d have to go on with a replacement. Audiences felt duped, word spread fast and ticket sales fizzled. Those guys ended up staying together and renaming themselves Stretch, then went on to score a minor hit called ‘Why Did You Do It?’ that reached number 16 on the UK charts in November of 1975. The song was a direct attack on me for not showing up for the bogus Fleetwood Mac tour, which I’d never promised to do in the first place, of course. All of it was too bizarre.
We sued Davis, he counter-sued us and on it went. We got an injunction barring the faux Fleetwood Mac from touring. Consequently Davis’s side won an injunction barring us from performing–as ourselves–until the legal proceedings had concluded. We could write and record but we couldn’t release an album, tour, or otherwise earn money as Fleetwood Mac. Pre-existing albums were excluded so our record company, Reprise/Warner Brothers, re-packaged some singles and material from albums they hadn’t released Stateside and put it out as English Rose.
As these things do, it took far too long but eventually the court ruled in our favour, at which point John McVie and I established a company called Seedy Management and vowed to handle our affairs on our own from that point on. We also signed a new record deal with Warner Brothers and dived into recording Heroes Are Hard to Find as a quartet, with Bob and Chris co-fronting the band. It was the first time we’d ever had one guitarist and I don’t think it would have worked before then, but Bob Welch delivered. It made me reconsider what Fleetwood Mac meant and what was possible. The new arrangements allowed for more space in our sound and more experimentation with harmony and even horns.
The album was a more sedate affair than our previous efforts with Bob, the result of spending too long in creative limbo, but there are a few standout songs in the collection. Both the title track and Chris’s ‘Come A Little Bit Closer’ are anthemic and melancholy and were among her best to date. Bob’s writing was strong as well, on songs like ‘Born Enchanter’, which was a bluesier variation of the jazzy, esoteric-pop style he’d achieved so well on ‘Hypnotized’. The album charted better in the States than any of our previous efforts, reaching number 34, which was a tremendous boost to our spirits and if our record company had questioned whether we still had an audience, it sent a positive message that we most certainly did.
From the moment we set down in Los Angeles, we began to attract a following of interesting fans and friends, among them the great photographer Herbie Worthington. Herbie was, as Jenny put it to me, ‘a big bear left over from the hippie era.’ He was a bright soul, always smiling, usually wearing loose white Indian cotton tunics that flowed to his knees, with a pair of Jesus sandals. He was a self-proclaimed seeker of the Light, who meditated, and he introduced Jenny to an inspirational book shop called The Bodhi Tree that was a place of sanctuary for her over the years.
Herbie saw what was happening with the band because he was very in tune. Jenny told me recently just how much Herbie found my eccentricity ‘mind-blowing’. I’m flattered, I really am, because Herbie was an artist as iconic as the images he created. He could make anyone comfortable, because he wore his heart on his sleeve and so from the start, he was able to capture fleeting moments in our world. He was the one we chose to shoot the cover of Heroes Are Hard to Find, an image that features me modelling gorgeously a pair of lace underpants that belonged to Sandra. I’ve got my chest puffed-up, which means my ribs are showing, and I’m holding my three-year-old daughter Amelia’s hands as she stands on my shoes. He took that photo of us in a three-way mirror, so the final image is three sides, back-to-back.
Herbie was to remain a close friend of the band. In fact, he was the one who took the iconic photos that became the covers of Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, our first two releases with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Herbie was such a sweet love child, unprepared for the scene he fell into. Cocaine was particularly inappropriate for someone like him. It was inappropriate for all of us at one point or another, but he became captivated by it and it was a shame. He wasn’t suited for that type of world, but that was still a few years off.
We set out on a tour of the States, because our album didn’t even chart in England, but we didn’t care. Judging by our record sales, our audience had shifted completely to the States, which was fine with us since LA was our new base of operations. We toured nationally and had a great time. It felt like the train was back on the tracks; we made money, we sold out some venues, everything went smoothly and we began to feel like a functioning musical entity once more. This victory was short-lived.
In December 1974, Bob Welch resigned from the band, ending a four-year period in which we’d finally found an identity and recorded, in my opinion, some of the best pieces of music we’d done since Peter’s departure. Bob’s exit wasn’t like the others; there was no big blow-up, no signs it was coming, no change in his character, and no hard feelings. It was all above-board, and to me, all the more a sad goodbye. I knew things weren’t great in his personal life, but I was surprised that Bob wanted to leave the fold, because he’d invested so much. After all, he’d lobbied us to relocate to America and he’d been there with me every step of the way through the tedious legal battle for our name. He didn’t have to go those extra miles, but he did. Then once we’d finally won and got under way again, he wanted to go. There was no sense that Bob might turn round and change his mind, the way Peter Green had done, and there was no time for me to try and stop him. His exodus was sudden and the rest of us were disturbed that he hadn’t given us more warning.
What he told me was that the touring and the lawsuit had taken their toll on him. Besides, his marriage was on the rocks and creatively he felt he had nothing left to give to Fleetwood Mac. We could do nothing but respect Bob and honour his decision. We all remained close with him, so much so that our company, Seedy Management, managed his solo career well into the 1980s and all of us played on his records.
We lost Bob forever in 2012. In fact the end of 2011 ushered in a year of loss in the legacy of Fleetwood Mac; Bob Welch took his own life, our original bassist Bob Brunning died of a sudden heart attack, Bob Weston died of a gastrointestinal haemorrhage, and Herbie Worthington, the photographer whose iconic images defined the next era of the band, passed away from heart disease.
The McVies and I were, once again, a back line without a front end. We had all come to enjoy living in Los Angeles, so we made our relocation permanent. Jenny and I did our best to patch up our marriage in our quaint little house in Laurel Canyon. Finally she had the homestead she’d always wanted. In true bohemian style we got all of our furnishings secondhand from garage sales in the area and fell comfortably into the easy-living lifestyle of Los Angeles in those days. There was a community up in Laurel Canyon that was quite apart from the bustling clubs and nightlife that lay just over the hill on the Sunset Strip. It was night and day from the bucolic solitude of Benifold and she loved it. I could see that it opened Jenny up and I hoped, as she did, that we’d find our way back to loving each other the way we had before.
Things weren’t perfect by any means, because we hadn’t learned to communicate any better, but each of us tried. I was still hurt and angry, but I did my best to put that behind me. I had the band to focus on. For her part, Jenny sought out the Self-Realization Fellowship, a church open to all denominations, established by Paramahansa Yogananda to teach meditation. She’d been inspired to go by her brother-in-law George Harrison, who had given Yogananda’s book Autobiography of a Yogi to Jenny many years before. Meditation was very good for her and I was glad she had found a practice that resonated with her view of the world.
We were still in that house in Laurel Canyon when Bob left the band, and on the day that changed it all for Fleetwood Mac, I’d driven my Caddy down the winding road from our place to the Canyon Country Store to buy some groceries. That store has a rich musical legacy. It’s where musicians from t
he Byrds to Crosby, Stills and Nash and Joni Mitchell gathered to jam on the lawn. Jim Morrison lived just behind it and Mama Cass from the Mamas and the Papas lived in the basement for a time. That is where I ran into a guy I knew from the scene around town, whose name I now can’t remember for the life of me, but he was doing some PR work for a new recording studio, inviting musicians he knew to come and check it out. It was called Sound City and it was out in the Valley. That guy is responsible for Fleetwood Mac as most people know it and he should be bragging about it to this day. Maybe he is, because honestly, I’ve not heard from him since.
‘Good to see you, man, what are you doing now?’ I asked him.
‘I’m good. I’m working for a new studio. You should come check it out, you’d like it,’ he said.
‘You are? I’m looking for a studio right now. And I’ve got to get it figured out before the band goes back on the road.’
‘Well, come down and see it then,’ he said. ‘I can get you a good deal.’
I looked at my groceries sitting in the sun in my backseat. ‘Let’s go right now,’ I said. ‘Can I put those in your car? They won’t last long out in the sun with my top down.’
Sound City was fine; the live room seemed like it would capture drums well and when I met the house engineer Keith Olsen, I liked him a lot. I thought it could be the perfect place to record the next Fleetwood Mac album and I couldn’t wait to bring Bob Welch there. I never did, of course, because he quit a few weeks later.
‘Do you want to hear something I just finished working on?’ Keith asked.
I followed him into the control room and couldn’t help being distracted by the fetching waif of a girl we passed in the hallway. It was Stevie Nicks. She was there with Lindsey, who was doing a few overdubs in another room in the studio.
Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac: The Autobiography Page 14
