Before meeting us, Lindsey knew of Fleetwood Mac because of Peter Green. Lindsey’s favourite album of ours was Then Play On and he knew it really well. I find it a wonderful coincidence that Lindsey’s favourite record of Peter’s was the one most like Tusk, in the sense that Peter had to do that record his way, to be able to stay in the band. As they say, great minds.
Stevie was a fan of ours as well, but I think she was more familiar with our most recent material. Once she’d joined, Stevie made a point of listening to all of our previous records, to better grasp the depth and width of the legacy she was willingly becoming a part of. After she’d studied everything we’d done with Peter and Jeremy, and all the versions, she told me that the common thread was a sense of the mystic. There was something that we were channelling that was greater than the players. That remains the greatest compliment I feel we’ve ever been paid.
CHAPTER 10
THE ‘WHITE’ ALBUM
Out at their beach-side apartment in Malibu, Christine started writing songs for what would become our album. She had an old, worn-in Hohner electric piano set up so that she’d get a view of the Pacific Ocean out the window. That’s where she wrote ‘Say You Love Me’ and ‘Over My Head’, as well as ‘Warm Ways’ and ‘Sugar Daddy’.
In one day, I heard Chris’s demos as well as Stevie and Lindsey’s, basically the bones of our debut album. I was completely floored. ‘I’m So Afraid’ was a track that Lindsey had been labouring over for four years; he’d got the harmony of the guitar parts so in tune they were a virtual orchestra unto themselves. ‘Monday Morning’, ‘Landslide’ and ‘Rhiannon’ were show stoppers, even as rough sketches recorded on Lindsey’s four-track.
We worked on all of those songs as a group for a few weeks until they became fully realised. Each day the energy built and the excitement grew because it was like being in a boot camp where everyone was so focused that results happened very quickly. Lindsey and Christine were two musicians who fell in with each other immediately; it was a departure for him, because he’d been used to working only with a poet. Whereas a lot of what Lindsey did for Stevie was interpretation, building musical soundscapes for the stories she told so beautifully in her lyrics, Chris’s songwriting came from the blues and got right to the point. Lindsey took that and ran. It was the yin to the yang–and that doesn’t count his own songs. Watching him work his way through all of it was inspiring; I hadn’t felt that way since Peter Green had been at the helm, and I know John felt the same. It was wonderfully overwhelming; watching Stevie dance around the studio as she worked out her vocal parts, one thought kept pounding through my head: there wasn’t an audience alive that wouldn’t respond to her when we hit the road.
I’d dedicated myself to carrying the band across the finish line, but it now gave me a fanatical zeal. In just two months, by February 1975, we’d all agreed that we were ready to record. We moved into Sound City and signed Keith Olsen on as our producer. We recorded all of our demos, plus two new songs we decided to do once we’d got going. The first was a cover, ‘Blue Letter’, by the 1960s country-rockers the Curtis Brothers. The idea came to us literally on the spot; the Curtis Brothers were recording demos at Sound City and when we heard them play the song we decided to give it a go. The other last-minute add was a cover as well, ‘World Turning’, our reinterpretation of Peter Green’s original.
As much as we were excited to work together, there were growing pains. Lindsey had a long list of ideas as to how things should be done and how they should sound. He can play any instrument I’ve ever seen put in front of him, so it was natural for him to sit at my drum kit and suggest rhythms, which was fine by me. But as I think I’ve made clear by now, I don’t exactly play the way one ‘should’ play drums; in the same way John doesn’t approach bass in a technically perfect style. We do it our way and those ways happen to blend seamlessly.
I still like it when Lindsey suggests drum fills to me, because we think the same about music but feel it differently. Usually I get something from his idea, even if it’s just a concept of what I don’t want to do. From me he gets a sense of ‘vibe’, for lack of a better word, that doesn’t always click for him right away. In any case, John did not take so kindly to our new bandmate’s ideas when it came to his instrument. Very early on in our honeymoon period, he put Lindsey in his place.
‘Hang on a sec,’ he said, interrupting Lindsey who’d picked up a bass guitar and started playing a rhythm line. ‘You realise who you’re talking to, right?’
‘Well, yeah,’ Lindsey said, smiling, a bit unsure.
‘I’m McVie,’ John said. ‘The band you’re in is Fleetwood Mac. I’m the Mac. And I play the bass.’ And that, once and for all, was the end of that.
Lindsey had been the man in charge in Fritz and in his duo with Stevie, but this was new territory for him. Fleetwood Mac was a unit and though we made creative decisions by consensus, there was a history that he had to respect. He always did so, even when it meant stepping outside of the band to do what he needed to do.
That album was the first time, but far from the last, that we relied on cocaine to fuel the long hours of work. That drug hadn’t been in our world much before then, but we soon became quite conversant with it. Let’s just say that Sound City wasn’t just made of bricks and mortar, there seemed to be white powder peeling off the walls in every room. It was readily available within the boundaries of that establishment. It was part of the culture of that studio and that’s how we got into it. We all partook; Keith Olsen and the whole crew that worked there, all of us. We found that a quick blast of rocket fuel gave us the energy to keep at it until we got everything just right. There wasn’t going to be a short way round this, considering how many perfectionists we now had in the group.
I never really knew much about cocaine before then. I’d had some and I hadn’t really liked it very much. I thought it was like heroin. In fact, I think my first ‘cocaine’ experience, which was during the Peter Green era of Fleetwood Mac when we played with King Crimson at the Fillmore East, was heroin. Someone was cutting it up for the bands backstage and now that I know exactly what cocaine does, I can safely say that my first time had to have been heroin. All I felt was sick to my stomach, so from then on I refused to do any cocaine when it was offered, because I’d decided I just didn’t like it. I guess I’d been a prude–a drunk, but a prude–all my young adult life. In any case, when we started up at Sound City, I’d never bought it before in my life, but oh, how quickly that changed!
I refuse to be romantic in my perspective of drug abuse, but back then, when it was new, it wasn’t a problem. It was all about going forth together; it was all new and undiscovered territory. It was a part of the culture of the day. At the time, everyone in LA, at every level of entertainment was doing it. This was the first wave of the tsunami of white powder that rolled in and drowned everyone in that city in the 1970s and 1980s. Whether you did it or not was your choice, but I can say with relative certainty that if you came through the door to record at Sound City at the time, you were going to be offered some as if it were simply another of the available services at your disposal. There was an engineer who would test it for purity with his set of oils. It wasn’t like smoking a joint, it was like a chemistry lesson, and I thought it was kind of cool. I got into the ritual of it; I’d do some and we’d all end up talking and bouncing ideas off of each other. It was really good for someone like me who had a lot to say, but sometimes didn’t really talk when he probably should have done. On that level cocaine certainly got me talking and I don’t think I’ve ever stopped talking since.
It allowed me to stay up late and be free with my ideas, and we got a lot of productive stuff done that way. Certainly not all of the time, but in the beginning, it was more often than not. Our first album together, the ‘white’ album, was the signpost at the start of an era from which so many stories of our debauchery have been exaggerated. I’m not here to confirm or deny. It’s all so tired at this point. That said
, I will share this memory, just to give you an idea.
In a somewhat nostalgic fashion, I remember wanting to keep track of all the bottles we’d consumed while recording, so I sequestered an area of the live room and ordered everyone to deposit their bottles there when they were through with them. I planned it to be a tribute and I called it ‘the graveyard beside the battleground’, the battleground being the area where we rehearsed and recorded. I had plans to take a photo of the graveyard when we were done with the album, to include on the record sleeve. All manner of dead bottles were buried there; wine, whisky, beer, brandy, cognac–I believe every spirit known to man was represented. Before we were anywhere close to completing the album, the graveyard had nearly taken over the battlefield and had to be scrapped. It became intimidating and it shamed us, and after we agreed that it must be emptied out, I did not begin that experiment anew.
The album Fleetwood Mac was completed in June 1975 and I knew it was something special. It felt so good and so right, and I know everyone in the band felt the same. Music is a process of chasing the intangible, something that can’t truly be verbalised, because it abides in the realm of feeling. When you are with the right players, connecting those dots, and you create something you all really believe in, as a musician, there’s nothing more powerful.
I believed in it so much that I set up a meeting with Mo Ostin, the president of Warner Brothers, to tell him so. I was excited, we were all excited, and to me that meant other people would be too. Mo had become a friend, someone whose taste and experience in music I respected, and still respect, immensely.
‘There’s some great stuff here, Mick,’ he said after listening. He wasn’t discouraging, but he didn’t share my degree of enthusiasm by a long shot.
To be fair to Mo and to the staff at Warners, they didn’t know what to do with us. Here he had this gangly Englishman who was both a band member and manager of a band that did all right, but were somewhat of a pain in the ass. We had frontmen coming and going, line-up changes, tour cancellations. We were an outfit that could be counted on consistently to move between 250,000 and 300,000 records whenever we put out an album, but that was about it. We never did better, we never did worse. Essentially, what we earned covered the expense of keeping us on the label and little more. I used to like telling Mo, and the other staff that worked with us, that we paid for the lights and hot water in their office. They knew we were good for at least that, so they kept us on year after year.
My fervour did make some kind of impression however, because I managed to convince them to add an additional 50,000 copies to the album’s initial print run, though they refused to give us further money for tour support and promotion.
For one thing, the band had never played live to an audience, which is something everyone was worried about. Our fan base didn’t know Stevie and Lindsey so it was going to be a huge introduction. The first time we did it was going to be a sink or swim situation. I decided to take that bull by the horns, and in the midst of making the album, booked us a series of dates.
It wasn’t strictly an artistic decision: the band as a whole needed money and I figured that no matter what I thought of us, there was only one way to find out whether or not this was going to work. I threw us out of the frying pan and into the fire, taking us on the road before we had even officially announced our new line up. It was boot camp for Lindsey and Stevie who had to front the band, playing our new songs, some of their songs, which our audience didn’t know, as well as Bob’s songs and Peter’s songs. Perhaps it was cruel, I don’t know. My only regret is that I don’t have a quality recording of any of those shows, which to say the least were unique.
Our first show took place in El Paso, Texas on 15 May 1975, kicking off a bare-bones two-month tour of Texas, then the Midwest and Northeast. We opened that first show with ‘Station Man’ and a few more songs from Kiln House that came off all the better through the harmonic vocal filter of Stevie, Lindsey and Christine. When Lindsey played Peter Green’s beloved ‘Oh Well’, the crowd cheered. We did ‘Rhiannon’, ‘Crystal’ and ‘Blue Letter’, all from our forthcoming album, and the crowd was with us.
That night I saw the seed of what ‘Rhiannon’ would come to mean, very soon, to so many people. Stevie’s star ascended with each passing day, in her tight jeans and flowing tops she was our sensuous gypsy and when she did ‘Rhiannon’ she transformed, taking the song and the crowd with her out into the ether, somewhere far beyond what we had laid down in the studio. It changed every time she did it and it was beautiful to watch. On that tour, I made ‘World Turning’ into a drum solo, which felt right, because it was a link from past to present, and in that spirit, I came out from behind my kit and played the African talking drum that Peter Green had given me in London years before. It felt like I had him there with me, a part of things, for that moment in the set.
It’s always hard to tell, as a musician, which shows are your best and worst, because musicians pay attention to different details than audience members. There have been so many times that I’ve come off stage knowing that the band made too many mistakes to count, only to hear that we’d just played the best show of our lives according to long-time friends and followers. This show was the first of the tour, which is almost always touch-and-go and with a new band, even more so. Having said that, even after all these years, I have to admit that first show was damn good.
After the first short tour, we went back to the studio and finished the record. We’d had such a great time and felt everything fall into place so naturally that we booked another much longer tour as soon as we were done recording. We didn’t care that the album was a few months away from being released, we wanted to get out there and introduce the new line-up to the public ourselves.
On that tour we generally played three-thousand-seat arenas opening for acts such as Loggins and Messina, Ten Years After and the Guess Who. We took in about $3,000 a gig and if we didn’t sell out a venue, which happened a lot because people didn’t know who we were, and we were essentially a band playing mostly covers, I’d give the promoters some of the money back. That wasn’t expected for the day, but I had a plan; I wanted them to remember my good favour and book us again. I wanted to engender loyalty in a business that has precious little of it.
Touring has always been my natural habitat and most comfortable form of existence, as unnatural as it is to the average person. Among all of the bandmates I’ve ever had, I think I’m alone in feeling that way. Touring has always served to stress the fissures in Fleetwood Mac and this tour was no different. It was a tremendous success, but it brought the worst out in John and Chris’s marriage.
They had worked, played and lived together since the start. They were never apart and the years of stress caused by the tumult of the band had done irreparable damage. At some point on that tour, they’d get at each other so fiercely that Chris stopped being able to stay in the same room with John. Neither of them was going to let their personal issues derail the tour, so they kept it to themselves, but as a couple they needed space and on tour there was little to be found.
The thing is, Chris and John were always, and still are, really good friends. There’s a deep bond of respect there based upon whence they came, so even at their worst they honoured that as best they could. It was tough to watch because they were the perfect couple and perfect for each other.
I tried to talk to him about it but that didn’t go well because John has always been the elder statesman in our relationship. And he still is. He’s the one to take me aside and ask, ‘What the hell are you doing?’, not the other way round. The sad part is that there was no one to do that for him, including me. I’d try and be driven to tears, begging him to stop hurting her feelings and driving her away. But that never got through, he’d become defensive and dismissive and that would be the end of that. Often it was the drink talking, though at the time he refused to see it.
Once he realised the damage, it was too late, so my job as John’s friend at that poi
nt was to help him understand that his marriage was over, and that the best thing he could do to honour their relationship was to put it right between him and Chris and move on. He eventually did, and married his wife Jules and had a beautiful daughter, and has been the most incredible father. But none of that came before much soul-searching. Nonetheless, John was able to handle working with his ex-partner with much dignity but not without much pain.
He was the kind of man who would normally have refused to do so, but he respected Chris that much and he respected our band that much. He was willing to suffer for it and let me tell you, it was hard for him. I respect him immensely for it, because he faced up to it, whereas I would have found some way to weasel through without confronting how I felt. John is a very strong individual, which works both ways. He never asked to go home, but that same strength might have been what made him deaf to hear the advice that he needed to hear.
With all of this drama beginning to gestate, our tour continued to do increasingly well. I was worried that the splintering of the McVies would derail the whole thing, which would have been a shame because the new band was so exciting. Still, we had one problem; we lacked a hit single. I saw so many possibilities on our forthcoming new album but our record company did not agree. I wanted to get something out in advance of the full record, so that our tour sales would be invigorated, allowing us to rise above the opening act slot. We had support from our label but I wanted more of an impact so I hired an independent PR man named Paul Ahearn to get us radio play. Paul was a friend and roommate of Glenn Frey of the Eagles whom I’d met when he was our neighbour in Laurel Canyon. Paul loved the songs, but thought they weren’t mixed properly. He said that they needed to be reworked so that they’d sound good on the radio. There is an art to compressing music, to highlighting the elements that appeal to the listener in such a format, and we had not given any of our songs that treatment.
Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac: The Autobiography Page 16
