Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac: The Autobiography

by Mick Fleetwood

  The Pit was a studio featuring just that, a pit, sunk ten feet into the ground where the engineer’s control board was placed, with the idea that the musicians would be above, around the outside of the pit, allowing the engineer to experience the sound in 360 degrees. Everything, the walls, ceiling, floors and stairs of the pit were covered in garish maroon shag carpet which deadened it sonically but made it awful and claustrophobic to stay in for long periods of time. There was also a loft, accessible through a large pair of red lips, with a bed in it and audio jacks next to the bed so that a vocalist could, quite literally, record their parts while lying between the sheets.

  The pit itself had a great sound to it, better than the rest of the room, and from what I was told Sly Stone preferred to record there, defeating the purpose of it altogether. While recording Fresh he had his organ hoisted down there and apparently even crowded his entire horn section into there to capture their performance. We never made use of the Pit to record, though it did become a hideaway for some of us, myself included, when we needed a few minutes alone. When all seemed to be lost, I’d go down there and pray for the strength to continue. Sometimes I had to find another quiet spot, because as I discovered, the Pit was the type of spot non-working visitors used for holing up with powder and mirror.

  We’d recorded our first album in three months and before we started I knew this one wasn’t going to come that easy. I did not think for a moment that it would take nearly a year and multiple studios. I suppose it’s a miracle that it didn’t take longer, considering the state we were in. When we were at the studio, everyone behaved professionally and civilly, if a bit chilly. But again, how could they not be when our songwriters were writing songs about their ex-partners, who were there playing on those very songs, listening to them over and again until we got it all just right? Any outbursts that did occur usually happened after hours or on a break, or when we’d decided to party more than record, all of which derailed things for the day at one point or another.

  We’d brought in our own engineer Richard Dashut and his friend Ken Caillat, because we didn’t see eye to eye with the Record Plant’s engineer and we wanted to have control of the production, as we had with the last album. I’ve always felt that a band with a real identity should do the production themselves to keep their vision pure. So with Richard and Ken at the board, we dived right in.

  Our songwriters had some great material, but we needed to get our musical arrangements worked out. We spent long twenty-hour days over five weeks, most of them full of terse words, members storming out only to return shortly thereafter. As heated as tempers ever got, we all knew that the music was the only solution and would be our salvation.

  With John and Chris barely speaking and Stevie and Lindsey completely at odds, we struggled to get any kind of musical foundation laid. Stevie had broken up with Lindsey and he’d taken it very, very hard. I could see him suffering, struggling under this great weight. When he simply could pine no more, he started dating to get his mind off Stevie. That upset Stevie terribly, of course, because she still had deep feelings for him and was very confused about her decision to end it. These undercurrents of tension caused endless thinly-veiled arguments to erupt at a moment’s notice.

  Things weren’t much better with Jenny. Shortly after she moved into the apartment, she discovered that her shoulder blade was protruding a few inches from her back. She was admitted to the neurological ward at UCLA for ten days to undergo tests. They looked for tumours, found nothing, and concluded that the shoulder had undergone some kind of trauma and would eventually right itself. That had occurred during the tour that preceded our move to Sausalito, so for those ten days I had the girls on the road with me and my parents there to care for them. Such was my preoccupation at the time, I had no idea what Jenny had gone through in the hospital and passed it off as a bit of hysterical hypochondria. She’s told me that during her hospital stay she felt abandoned, forgotten and at an all-time low physically, mentally and spiritually. She’d heard nothing from me and she missed the girls, as she endured one test after another, with her marriage in tatters.

  Towards the end of her stay in hospital, Jenny was allowed out for the day to spend some time with Sandra. They had remained very close and to a major extent, Sandra was a lifeline for Jenny in LA. They used to take the girls to Disneyland and Universal Studios and Sandra, more than anyone else, understood what Jenny was going through with me.

  Sandra had just returned from Sausalito, and had done John a favour by driving his car back down to Los Angeles. Cruising through Hollywood, with Bob Welch’s girlfriend Nancy beside her and Jenny in the back, Jenny asked Sandra how things were going at the Record Plant.

  ‘It’s crazy,’ Sandra said. ‘Every room I walked into, every time I’d try to find somewhere to lie down, I’d come across Stevie sobbing or one of the others deep in a serious conversation. There was always some kind of drama going on.’

  ‘Did you see the children?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘No,’ Sandra said, ‘Biddy and Mike took them back to Topanga after the tour.’

  ‘How’s Mick?’

  ‘He was trying to be the big daddy, of course,’ Sandra said. ‘He would go from room to room, mediating with everyone and everything that came up. He had his hands full. But the music sounds amazing.’ Jenny told me that her eyes positively lit up when she said that.

  ‘There’s one thing, though,’ Sandra said, looking round at Jenny. ‘Mick’s been seeing someone else. She’s been on the road with him and she was at the studio. I just thought you should know.’

  ‘What’s her name?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Ginny.’

  Jenny tells me that almost at the very moment Sandra told her, they were hit by another car as they crossed an intersection. The sound of glass smashing, metal crunching and Sandra wailing about John’s car all happened at once. Jenny hit her head against the window and cut her knee badly and was whisked back to hospital in an ambulance. So much for her day off. The two of them were X-rayed, but they weren’t injured other than the stitches Jenny needed for her knee.

  I remember hearing about all of this and thinking that Jenny was literally falling apart. It made me resolute in my decision that Jenny and I should be divorced. I worried for her and I worried for our daughters; knowing what lay ahead for the band, I would be around even less and it didn’t seem to me like she could properly look after the girls.

  During one of our breaks in recording I paid Jenny a visit at her apartment and told her of my decision. Her memory of that time is of me looking stern, frightening and all-powerful. I was wearing a dark green silk shirt, an embroidered waistcoat, and smelling of musk and patchouli. She felt she’d lost touch with the Mick she’d known for so long and that her fear of what would happen to me, if the band really took off, had become a reality. It was a surreal moment and I know I felt the great divide between us. Inwardly I was sad, but I knew separating was the right thing to do.

  I know now that her unhappiness was overwhelming; she felt so lost in the world we now inhabited, so far removed from the connection we’d once had, and she had finally lost all faith we could find it again. I began divorce proceedings.

  The Record Plant, like a lot of studios of the day, was more than just a place where music was recorded. It was a total social scene. For those in the Bay Area music community, from the artists to the hangers-on, the drug dealers, the weirdos and all of their friends and acquaintances, it was like a cocktail party where the house band changed every few weeks. We had our group of friends with us and that was fine, but there always seemed to be a rotating gang of people in and out of the studio, hanging around and partying while we tried to get some work done. The drugs of course were plentiful and we partook in the finest Peruvian flake quite a bit, both to numb the pain and to find the energy to persevere.

  Throughout this period, I was still in contact with Jenny, in fact, as the recording dragged on, I asked her to come up with the girls and stay with me. I
wanted her to see some of what we were doing and, in truth, I missed her and my family. I hoped that, even though I’d begun to file for divorce, we still stood a chance of staying together. Jenny had been around us when we were recording before and she fell right in as if nothing had ever gone wrong. Nothing had changed on a fundamental level between us, but we were in familiar territory and we got along well. We both wanted our marriage to work; we just didn’t know how to do it within an ever-changing and drug-addled world. We decided to try anyway.

  When we returned to LA, Jenny and the girls came to live with me in Topanga, as did my parents. I was hopeful that this was truly a new start for us and at times it seemed possible. There were wonderful days, but sadly they were few and far between. Whenever my responsibilities to the band pulled me away, mentally or otherwise, I could feel Jenny’s reaction and we were once again at a distance. She can tell me now, all these years later, it was at this time that my cocaine consumption escalated and how painful it was for her to witness the very nature of the drug at work, bringing with it excessive self-confidence and a numbing of the heart. There was no denying that things had changed since Fleetwood Mac became famous, people treated us differently, and I know Jenny found this hard.

  It got to the point where Jenny decided it was best for her to move out and return to her apartment, and when she did, my parents stepped in for the sake of the children. They’d known Jenny nearly all her life and they were worried for her. They told her that they would care for the girls and that she wasn’t to see them until she’d had some time to get herself together. Jenny returned to England for almost two months, to regain herself and find some much-needed peace and serenity.

  Our record company used to check in on us when we were up in Sausalito, and as time dragged on and we had nothing to play for them, the calls came more frequently, the tone of the voices on the other end more concerned. I was in a unique position because as manager, they had to be honest with me, but I was also in the band. I’d go to meetings as our representative and they knew they were never going to hear me say ‘I can get them to do that’ to make the label happy, and then talk my band into a compromise they wouldn’t like, the way other managers did so often. They also assumed appropriately that anything they said went straight to the band. There was no bait and switch to be had. Sometimes I waited to fill the rest of them in on certain things, but I never withheld information.

  After nine weeks at the Record Plant, to put it lightly, we were spent. Lindsey wanted to have more control of the process, which wasn’t going to happen because there was no control to be had. I remember sitting with him one night in the studio and telling him that as a musician, you’re either in a band or you’re not, and he needed to decide which he wanted to be. He had it the hardest; not only was he called upon to help Stevie write songs that were inspired by and not always kind to him, but he also had to sing them with her. His songs about her cut the same way and all of that weighed on him terribly.

  One night I found him sitting cross-legged in the studio, playing sitar, completely frustrated and distraught, unsure that he could remain in the group and complete the album.

  ‘Lindsey, if it’s making you this unhappy, then you don’t have to do it,’ I said. ‘It’s not easy, we all understand.’

  I thought the emotional strain of making the album had become too much for him, but that wasn’t it. He’d begun to wonder if he could be in a band at all, because he found the group dynamic involved in the creative process stifling. Moreover, he had a vision in mind for the band’s sound that he wanted to bring to life and he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to do it. He got his chance to fully realise it on Tusk, but we weren’t there yet.

  ‘Linds, I’m hearing you. And I’m here to tell you that some degree of what you want is possible. But you have to remember that you’re in a band. It’s a compromise. In a band you’re never going to get it all your own way. If that becomes a huge problem, then you have to not be in a band at all.’

  That made sense to him.

  It wasn’t easy on Stevie either but, like me, she dealt with the pressure of what we were doing by having too much fun, and I, for one, was ready to be her partying partner. She also had all manner of suitors to distract her almost immediately, though I believe she really just wanted to be with Lindsey.

  However hard it was, we all stuck together. I’m thankful that we didn’t have outside management, because if we did, they would have circled like sharks and probably broken us up. We didn’t need the added pressure; we were such perfectionists that finding the right studio with the right room to record in was laborious enough.

  CHAPTER 12

  RUMOURS

  After recovering for a spell in Los Angeles, we reconvened to listen to what we’d done and were utterly shocked by what we heard. Nothing sounded right, not one single thing. All of it sounded odd for lack of a better word. We tried different speakers; we tried different mixing studios, but nothing made much difference. We were desperate to find a studio where we could get to work on this raw material, some place where the music didn’t sound as though it had been played by a band that none of us were in. That place happened to be a small mixing room on a shoddy stretch of Hollywood Boulevard surrounded by porno theatres. That’s where Rumours was sculpted from a pile of strange clay into the album it became.

  More or less all that we kept from the Sausalito sessions in the end were my drum tracks. We took the tapes and stripped every song down to those, then set about overdubbing all of the instruments and vocals. We basically remade the record from scratch, forcing every member to relive all the heartache inherent in those songs that we’d lived and breathed for nine weeks, nearly twenty-four hours a day.

  We’d grown obsessive about the album, perhaps because it had become a diary of our own pain. But we also wanted it to be perfect, and in Sausalito, there were elements that just never came together. For one thing, we couldn’t find a piano that would stay in tune. We must have rented every piano in the Bay Area but none of them were ever in tune because of the Looner Tuner, who was the engineer at the Record Plant who tuned pianos. He’d insist they were in tune, but they weren’t.

  This guy was in his own world and he drove us crazy. He kept tuning and retuning, but clearly his version of sound scale was based on an alien conception that we could not and did not want to fathom. We went round in circles with him for weeks, which was ridiculous because Christine has perfect pitch and can tell when a piano isn’t in tune. It got to the point where we even brought in a blind piano player to see if we had lost our minds. We hadn’t, he agreed right away that the piano wasn’t in tune. In the end we scrapped all the piano tracks rather than wasting any more time with the guy.

  That was one of a few things that befell us. There was also a tape machine we called Jaws because of its appetite for destroying fresh reels of tape without warning. We’d jam and get some ideas down only to find that they’d been eaten and were beyond salvaging. Add to that the general obsession with getting every element perfect and it’s easy to see just how wrapped up in the process we became. Plus, there was a party going non-stop there, one that we hadn’t necessarily thrown.

  It was hard on everyone, because what we’d created was a very intimate, very personal album; it said everything to each other and about each other, through the songs. We realised that this album was so deeply a part of us and so revealing about us that if it was ever to come together at all, our next studio sessions would need to be closed. So we shut the doors to friends and family and in March 1976, we got down to work. Despite our best efforts, by June we weren’t much closer to the end, but real progress had been made.

  The turning point was ‘The Chain’, which had taken shape but wasn’t complete by any means. I don’t know if it was Chris or Lindsey’s initial composition, but John and Stevie are the ones who saved it. It is the only song in our catalogue for which all of us are listed as the writers. It was a piece of music we kept returning to but could ne
ver take any further. We’d jam on it and it would evolve, but inevitably no words presented themselves to our songwriters and I can’t count the number of times we almost threw it out for good. We kept coming back to it and trying it different ways, but it was still headed for the scrap pile until Stevie put words to it. Then it became our rallying cry and a symbol of why and how we’d persevered through the making of the record. It became, and still is, our anthem.

  By June, ‘Don’t Stop’, which Chris wrote for John, was still only half-finished. ‘I Don’t Want to Know’ wasn’t done either and ‘Oh Daddy’, which Chris wrote for me as I was the only dad in the band, hadn’t quite arrived. We recorded ‘Songbird’ in an empty university auditorium in Berkeley, because we wanted the song to sound like Chris was singing it at the end of the night, after a show to an empty house. It needed that solitude sonically.

  The way our band works when we write is that we try to stumble towards each other, then work it all out. We wait for our songwriters to come to us with an idea and some words, or a sense of what the song will be about. From there, John, Christine and I get a notion of our parts, and then we begin to fine-tune. John doesn’t like to finalise his bass parts until he knows exactly what the song is about. Many times he’s gone back in after the song is complete and redone his parts, because he’s got an intrinsic knack for placing his bass line where it will best complement the melody, once he’s heard the vocal. He comes up with these lovely bass lines that become another song underneath the main recurring theme he plays. He needs to hear the entire song idea to do that properly, whereas I can get started with a vague concept of how the singing will be and the intended mood of the song. I think of my role as more lumbering, just keeping time and establishing a vibe that locks the others in. Later, once I understand the song, I can have fun, adding all of my percussion parts. Those are my fairy dust and how I endeavour to amplify the narrative.