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

by Mick Fleetwood

  I went to see him, the day after we returned from tour. We made some small talk until I could delay no longer.

  ‘Lindsey, I have to talk to you,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, what’s going on?’

  ‘I need to let you know that I’m seeing Stevie. I’m not quite sure how it’s going to end up but I don’t feel right having this going on without you knowing.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I understand.’

  ‘I’m not asking your permission, I just don’t feel right that you don’t know.’

  I don’t recall exactly what he said afterwards other than he appreciated me telling him. I’m glad I made the effort, and also glad that I waited until I knew that I was in love with her to do so.

  Sometimes I think about what would have happened if Stevie and I had agreed to make a go of it. We got distracted; she had a boyfriend and I was still hemming and hawing with Jenny, so it never happened, but there was a moment when it could have. I remember that time distinctly. I wanted it to be more than our circumstances allowed, I wanted it very badly. I wanted to let my family know how I felt for her and I wanted to tell them I was going to try and make it work. It would have been utter madness, just so complicated because of our other entanglements, from our bandmates to our significant others, to everyone else in our lives. But I assure you that there was a time when all of it seemed worth the suffering to me.

  Stevie and I used to slip away and go on adventures after gigs, which was an easy way to get away. After the band played a show in Hawaii, we went to Maui and drove up to the land I’d bought in Olinda and we stayed with a chap called Steve Cafferty, whose house overlooked my property. While we were there, Mo Ostin and his wife Evelyn, who were on the island for the gig, sent a helicopter for Stevie and me and that was very romantic. We had wild crazy times; we drove around Maui and found a house that we fantasised about buying. It’s one of the most beautiful houses on the island to this day, on fifty acres and just huge. The place is a gorgeous, Victorian nineteenth-century estate owned by the Baldwin family, who were one of the earliest missionary families to settle on Maui. It needed a bit of fixing up, which made it all the more romantic. That’s what Stevie and I would do, we’d dream. Today that house is owned by the Coca-Cola family and has been restored to perfect condition. Shoulda, woulda, coulda!

  Anyway, things were hot and heavy between Stevie and me. At one point on tour, when my mother and father were out with us, we were in Santa Barbara after playing a show there the night before, and Stevie came down and joined us for breakfast. Jenny wasn’t there, just my parents and my daughters, and I remember wanting to say something to them, come what may. I had to fight the urge to blurt it out, because I wanted my parents to know that I was completely in love with Stevie. It would have been such a scandal, because of Jenny, so I remained mute, but just barely. Sometimes I ask myself what would have happened if I’d laid it all out on the table that morning. Whether it would have changed things or not at all. I wonder if Stevie and I could have made a commitment to each other, and if our love would have grown, or if it would have been torn asunder by the circumstances.

  None of that happened, so it will always remain an unfulfilled love, but in terms of the intensity it was a proper Hollywood affair on a par with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. In terms of our relationship with each other, we still have the same connection to this day; we just love each other in the true sense of the word, which transcends passion. I will take my love for her as a person to my grave, because Stevie Nicks is the kind of woman who inspires that devotion. I have no regrets and neither does she, but we do giggle together sometimes and wonder what might have transpired if we’d given that passion the space and time to blossom into something more. We’ll never know, because we were moths drawn to a certain type of flame for a while. It was exciting, it was romantic, and our lives met behind closed doors. It suited something in our make-up for a while and we were each other’s perfect playmates. That’s not all it was, but that’s what we needed and what we needed it to be. It was the perfect fantasy.

  With my father dying, I did all I could to retreat into the world of the band, and spending time with Stevie was all part and parcel of that. When the band wasn’t on tour, I’d spend long nights out, doing all I could to work with the artists on Seedy Management’s label, or planning Fleetwood Mac’s next moves, or anything work-related to avoid the reality unfolding at home. Jenny and I grew further apart, even more so since she’d stopped drinking and devoted herself to helping my parents find holistic doctors for Dad. I couldn’t face what was happening to my father, so I usually found myself drunk and in tears whenever I tried to spend quality time with him.

  I didn’t know which way was up really; I loved Stevie but I also loved Jenny and my family, so the two of us took a vacation to the island of Bora Bora in the South Pacific, in an effort to grow back together. We were still on the see-saw, trying to make it work, but knowing it probably wouldn’t. Regardless, in that tropical paradise, we discussed whether we should remain married and both of us acknowledged how great the gap between us had become. We were open with each other, but I was still unable to tell Jenny of my feelings for Stevie. I wanted to, but words failed me.

  I was in a bind; I wanted my married life to work but clearly it wasn’t going to. And I was in love with Stevie. I held out for the hope that something would happen, a lightning bolt to strike and show me the way down one path or the other.

  In May 1978, we began work on the follow-up to Rumours, the album that became Tusk. The explosion of the punk movement had changed the musical landscape and the popular conception was that bands like ours, Led Zeppelin, the Stones, Elton John and everyone else from our era, were a bunch of dinosaurs who’d lost touch with the real world. That wasn’t true, of course, we were in touch and aware of all those changes in culture, Lindsey most of all. He was intrigued by punk bands like the Clash and lots of New Wave artists such as Talking Heads and Laurie Anderson, and he wanted to follow that muse creatively. The issue for him was whether or not he was going to be able to do that with the rest of us.

  The expectation, as far as our record company and the general public was concerned, was that we would continue in the Rumours groove, which was something we had perfected and obviously become quite comfortable with. The band would have been just fine carrying on as before, because together we are a creative enough group that we could have elaborated in that vein without running out of ideas. But that didn’t happen on Tusk. There are songs which sound stylistically like the band who did Rumours and those are the songs we approached as a band. They are peppered, in a very conscious and deliberate way, with stuff that throws you off the scent, and those elements were created purely and exclusively by Lindsey.

  Tusk was a bit less ‘we’ than any other record we’ve ever done because it was Lindsey’s vision. Today the album has all the power, and has received all the kudos, that it deserves, which is what Lindsey wanted when we put it out, but that didn’t happen at the time of release. The record was certainly not a failure, but neither was it the celebration of the quantum leap we felt we had taken.

  Lindsey wanted to produce and record this record differently than we had the last two and I don’t know if he thought I’d fight him on it, but I do know he was careful about approaching the subject with me. When he did, I was all for it, I thought it was a great idea. And what he may have not realised is that John and and I had been through a similar journey with Peter Green when we made Then Play On. When we began work on that record, Peter started playing six-string bass, so John didn’t play on a couple of songs, and Peter did his timpani thing so I wasn’t always doing percussion. On that album we suddenly went from being a blues band to a group with flutes and cellos all over the tracks. Lindsey saw us making the same degree, if not the same type, of musical departure. I was up for it, as was everyone, because we wanted to do for Lindsey as we had with Peter. We were happy to follow their lead out of a deep respect for their cr
eative genius. He wanted to record a lot of things on his own at home and use much of those completed demos as was on the album. The rest of the band had to go through a slight education at first, because they weren’t used to hearing tracks and being told that it wasn’t me on drums, it was Lindsey banging on a Kleenex box. Once the die was cast, however, we were all on board and had lots of fun making the album.

  I was still the acting manager of the band, though my days were numbered. By then the other members had got their own business managers and advisors, all of whom had opinions on how their money and our band money should be spent, which is why one of my last scatterbrained ideas as manager never came to be. I wanted us to invest in building our own studio and I even had a partner who would underwrite much of it. It would be done completely to our specifications, so we wouldn’t have to waste time moving ourselves between a handful of locations over the months we typically spent recording. If we built a studio, it would be ours; we could own it and it would be our home for years to come. When we weren’t using it, we could rent it out. My partner in this idea was Jordy Hormel, one of the heirs to the Hormel meat fortune. Jordy was a patron of the arts and a close friend of the band and he was willing to go into business with us to see this vision through. Jordy owned the building where the Village Recorder studios were housed, allowing us to gut a pre-existing studio and rebuild it.

  Unfortunately my idea was not supported by the band. No one else wanted to take on the responsibility of owning a recording studio, so in the end Jordy bankrolled a full renovation of Studio D down to every single one of our specifications, then rented it to us. It was completely taken down to the bones, then re-floated so that it was sonically balanced in every corner. We had our choice of wood, of sound panelling, and all of it still exists. When you walk into Studio D at the Village Recorder you are seeing the vision that Richard Dashut, Ken Calliat, Lindsey and I had. We designed the place blow for blow as if we were going to be partners, and Jordy, God bless him, is a true visionary who understood completely what we were doing, so he paid for it all. The irony is that if we’d gone into business with Jordy we would have saved money, as I predicted. We worked there for a year and a half, over which time we racked up bills that exceeded what our investment would have been. Not to mention the income stream we lost by not being partners in the studio; eventually it would have paid for itself and continued to earn for us.

  I understood why I was being met with resistance–why build a studio to make an album? But I knew how we made albums and I knew that this one, with all that Lindsey was striving for, might take even longer than the last, which it did. Regardless, that place became our home base, and it is still special to us. In fact, we’ve returned to it for what I hope to be the next Fleetwood Mac album. As of the writing of this book, Lindsey, John, Christine and I have been laying down the foundations for that album in Studio D, and I can honestly say that it sounds even better than I remembered.

  CHAPTER 14

  JUST TELL ME THAT YOU WANT ME

  Being back in Studio D again reminds me of the duality of Tusk. The album contains some of the greatest ‘band moments’ in our career, as far as I’m concerned; songs like ‘Think About Me’, ‘Sara’ and ‘Sisters of the Moon’ are as much our sound as anything on Rumours. When we worked through them, jamming until we figured out the arrangements and ultimately recorded them, it was the same process that we employed doing ‘Oh Daddy’ and so many other songs. There were just other pieces of music on the album that were approached very, very differently. It’s been fun being back in that studio together, there are memories there that will never fade. There’s a corner of the studio that makes me smile every time I walk by it, because I remember working with Lindsey, just the two of us, on ‘What Makes You Think You’re the One’. We set up my drums there and recorded them with a Sony boom-box so they’d be consumed by all that lo-fidelity compression.

  At the time I was living in my house in Malibu, Chris had bought a beautiful mansion in Coldwater Canyon, while John split his time between his sailing-boat, which was moored in Marina Del Rey, and his home in Beverly Hills. Stevie had a home in Phoenix, as well as a gorgeous Tudor-style house above Sunset Boulevard. Lindsey had moved into a very nice house in which he’d installed the home studio that he used throughout the making of Tusk. He and Richard Dashut spent hours there listening to all of the great achievements in production, such as the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and Phil Spector’s Ronettes records, and they’d analyse how it was all done.

  We broke from recording during the summer of 1978 to do a stadium tour, where we were supported by acts like the Little River Band, Steve Miller, and Bob Welch, whose album French Kiss was a huge hit that year. What should have been a triumphant run for us on all fronts was not, however, because my father died during that tour. We were in Philadelphia, when I got a call from my sister that the end was near and I flew directly to Washington DC, then boarded the Concorde to get to England as quickly as possible. I got there in time, thank God, and I saw my father on the last night he was alive. He was sedated but lucid and I’m so thankful that I was able to say goodbye. The next day I flew back and rejoined the band, despite being utterly destroyed by the loss.

  At this point Jenny and our daughters were living in England, because we’d grown so far apart, and with me on tour, recording and being utterly entrenched in the band and my lifestyle, she didn’t want our girls around me. The day they left me in California a few months earlier had been very hard.

  I hugged my girls and I hugged Jenny.

  ‘Take care of yourselves,’ I said.

  Jenny has told me that she was only an instant from staying. If I’d said, ‘Please don’t go,’ she would have stayed and she would have tried. But I didn’t, because we didn’t know how to talk to each other. It’s incredibly sad.

  My girls waved to me out of the window of the car as they pulled away. They didn’t know quite what was happening, they just knew they were going to England. Jenny has told me that she did this to make a point; it wasn’t that she wanted to be apart, but she hoped her absence would provide the impetus for me to take a look in the mirror and change my lifestyle. Quite the contrary; it only made it easier to spend time with Stevie. But I did miss my family when they left and I did want to do all that I could to make it work with Jenny.

  So that summer when I visited England, I took Jenny on a trip to Ireland. We had a wonderful dinner in a Dublin restaurant, getting reacquainted as our daughters played under and around the table. It felt like we were a family once again. That’s when I asked her to come back to California. It was another turn on the cycle of parting and coming back together. It seemed to me that the only way to get my family back was by a grand gesture that symbolised a new beginning. I wasn’t self-aware enough at the time to realise that I was just repeating a familiar pattern, nor that my relationship with Jenny was still fundamentally the same, and therefore doomed to suffer the pitfalls of the past once more. I had very romantic notions about it all just working out.

  ‘You don’t have to live with me,’ I said. ‘I’ll get you a house by the ocean. You’ll be close enough that we can think about our future and figure it out together. You’ll have space to do that on your own.’

  ‘We can’t live with you in your state, Mick. Not with the drinking and drugs.’

  ‘I know and that’s why I’m not asking you to. Please consider my request. I want my family back.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Jenny was willing to give us another chance.

  We left our kids with family friends and spent the last few days of our holiday on our own, in a quaint, cold room above a rowdy pub. Ireland had worked its magic and it was like Jenny and I had never been apart. Devoid of distractions, we were completely comfortable, joking and marvelling at the surroundings, taking in the world together the way we used to.

  I got them a house in Little Ramirez Canyon in Malibu and after they’d settled into their new home, I had to come clean to Jenny. If
we were going to stay together, I had to. By the time the night came round, I couldn’t take it anymore. Jenny and I had been relatively sober together in Ireland, but the weight of what I had to reveal to her was too much to bear. I started drinking vodka, because that was all we had, and after a while I pulled out a packet of white powder, much to her dismay.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Lots going on.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘The usual stuff. The next record, meetings with Warner Brothers, I’ve got to sort things out,’ I said. I took a long drink from my glass.

  ‘Well,’ Jenny said, ‘have you had any more thoughts on us? I guess we’ll just take it as it comes?’

  ‘Yes, Jenny,’ I said, and took another drink. ‘There’s something I ought to tell you.’

  Jenny slumped back on the sofa.

  ‘I’ve been having an affair with Stevie for the past few months.’

  Jenny told me that she didn’t understand the words at first. She was in shock. Then once she took in the meaning of it all, she felt sick.

  ‘How long has this been going on?’ she asked. ‘While we were in Ireland?’

  She stared at me and I said nothing. She’s told me since that a paralysing anger came over her. She wondered why she was even there and didn’t understand how I could have neglected to mention it before deciding to move her back.