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

by Mick Fleetwood

  After one of those calls from her, I’d always tell Lindsey: ‘I got another call from Chris, have you? She’s called me a few times, throwing around the possibility of writing for us.’

  ‘Well, she’s not. She’s gone,’ Lindsey would say, without hesitation.

  All the same, I know that Lindsey started to believe that Chris might return, particularly during the early stages of recording Say You Will. He and I disagreed completely on this, however; I knew how serious Chris was about the change in her lifestyle that departing the band represented to her, while Lindsey thought that she wasn’t serious and it was just a momentary phase. In the end, I was right.

  Lindsey has taken responsibility for Say You Will, in the sense that he brought to the studio a lot of musical ideas and pieces that he had already developed at home. This harkened back to the Tusk days, and his self-sufficiency proved to be a bigger problem for Stevie than he could have imagined. It made her feel apart and a bit of an outsider when it came to writing. As the only other songwriter in the band, Stevie had thought she and Lindsey were going to have a new and closer creative partnership. But instead, she felt separated from the proceedings, and that was not good. In retrospect, Lindsey has said that he brought in too much of a preconceived vision and if given the chance, he’d not do that again, because it alienated her. Although Stevie never felt a part of the process during that album, at the end she did jump in and write a bunch of cool songs. But for the first time, she felt alone while doing it.

  Lindsey now knows that his creative relationship and his friendship with Stevie have to be balanced just right, and to do that, their bond has to be approached delicately. It wasn’t as right as it could have been during that record. Considering that it was our first album without Chris, the misfiring of their creative union could have derailed things completely. To his credit, though, Lindsey had a vision for the direction he saw the band going in without Chris, and to explain it further, there is a fever pitch to how Lindsey works, especially when he knows what he wants to do. I think the reality is that he wasn’t taking over and imposing his vision, as much as Stevie thought; I think he was holding out in the hope that Chris was coming back. If she had, what he was doing would have been the perfect template for the band to resume in the way we were used to. Once the writing was on the wall, however, he made the necessary adjustments and he and Stevie did their thing and did it well.

  We released Say You Will in 2003 and it set the musical precedent for us for the next ten years. Lindsey and Stevie handled the lead vocals, and after that first outing, they found their stride fronting the band and writing the songs. Lindsey began writing differently than he had in the past; he would bring us and Stevie demos that were spare ideas, recorded simply, allowing plenty of space for all of us to contribute. It also left room for a new story to be created between the two of them, or an old one to be picked up again.

  Lindsey’s vision for Fleetwood Mac without Christine became fully realised in the decade after Say You Will. He and Stevie have been able to resume where Buckingham Nicks left off, and in some ways revive what was subsumed by Fleetwood Mac. Without Chris in the band, their performance style changed, and their vocal harmonies grew closer to how they were in their early days together. I think the Extended Play EP and our 2013 tour showcased just how much the band has grown into that groove, which has been a wonderful connective bridge for Stevie and Lindsey to explore. That is one of the reasons why we opened our 2013 shows with ‘Second Hand News’, a song that has come in and out of our sets through the years. The subject matter is very much Lindsey and Stevie. Beginning the show with it set the tone, because the concerts we played on that tour were very much a celebration of Stevie and Lindsey, and the tremendous musical and personal journey they’ve undertaken within this band.

  New versions of songs like ‘Second Hand News’ and ‘Without You’, an old Buckingham Nicks demo on the EP, have had the effect of getting Stevie and Lindsey out front and centre, literally and symbolically in every way. It has been a proper revisiting of their dual vocal style, and Lindsey in particular has been exploring this return in the past ten years. He wrote a number of songs for the EP that didn’t make the final cut, but all of them were designed with Stevie in mind; to sing on, to put words to–all of them expressly for her. Of the songs that did make the EP, the most poignant of his, ‘It Takes Time’, was a homecoming to their story because it’s entirely an apology to her, which is beautiful and heartbreaking.

  Overall, the last few years have been a wonderful return to form. I was hoping that we would take this new approach even further on the last tour, and have Stevie and Lindsey do songs together that Chris used to do on her own, and reinterpret them through the lens of Buckingham Nicks. We used to try and do that but the efforts always got dumped. I understood why; Lindsey and Stevie felt they were trespassing in Christine’s world. Had we pushed, they would have found a way to bring them together, but that didn’t happen. I’ve even thought about what it would be like if they sang songs together that they usually sing alone–imagine Lindsey joining Stevie for ‘Landslide’ or Stevie coming out when he plays ‘Big Love’? If that ever happens it will be one for the books.

  I’ll consider that my version of ‘producing’ a Fleetwood Mac track all by myself.

  CHAPTER 18

  MY PARTNER, MY FRIEND

  Things have been coming together and coming apart for me lately. Here in the twilight of my sixties, I feel I’ve learned so much, and yet I still have so much to learn. I’ve taught myself to undo some bad habits and I’ve begun to see recurring patterns in my life that need to be addressed. It’s been a time of flux, because just as my musical family is finally reuniting, the nuclear family I’ve known and cherished for the past twenty-three years is coming apart.

  As of this writing, my third wife, Lynn, and I are going through a divorce. Lynn is a wonderful woman, and the mother of our gorgeous twin girls, Ruby and Tessa, twelve. It was a long time coming, I suppose, and in that way it’s all the more heartbreaking, because neither of us did anything wrong other than grow apart.

  Lynn and I met in August 1989 in Los Angeles, through our mutual friends, Colin and Jill Stone; he was a friend and a Fleetwood Mac roadie, dating back to the 1960s, and Lynn knew Colin’s wife on her own. Lynn was invited down to the studio by Colin and Jill while we were recording Behind the Mask, but she didn’t go, because, as she told me later, she wasn’t a big fan. She owned Rumours, and she knew who Stevie Nicks was, but the rest of us were a mystery to her. A few days later, Colin and Jill brought her round to my house to hang out. Sara was out because by then we were heading toward divorce and had begun living in separate bedrooms.

  It wasn’t a set-up, it was just friends coming for a visit, but I was taken with Lynn immediately. As she reminded me when I asked her about it while writing this book, I spent the entire afternoon more or less staring at her, which everyone else present noticed, to the point that it became quite creepy. We hung out for a bit and then went to lunch at Carlos and Charlie’s in Malibu and we ended up sitting next to each other. As Lynn has told me, she noticed how I kept getting up to use the bathroom and powder my nose. Guilty as charged.

  Lynn was working in PR at New World Pictures at the time and I recall it taking a few days after that lunch for me to get in touch with her, because her boss’s son had died tragically in a car accident. When I spoke to her next she sounded exhausted and distraught, so I suggested that we spend some time together, if only to take her mind off things. At the time, she lived about five minutes from the studio, so I dropped by later that day. She has said I was drunk and showed up with a water bottle filled with some kind of alcoholic beverage. It was probably something mixed with brandy, which was my drink of choice at the time, that I called ‘beef’ as in ‘Where’s the beef?’

  Lynn and I just hung out that afternoon, holding hands and talking, and I felt very close to her immediately. I spent my dinner break from recording with her and comfortin
g her, and when I left I wanted to see her again. She felt the same way, and so began what became a beautiful friendship, because she is the type of woman who loves to understand what makes people tick and I presented her with quite the study, apparently. I began to visit her several times a week during our daily dinner breaks and after we were done recording for the night. I’d go over and get into bed with Lynn but nothing happened between us. We would just lie there together, watching David Letterman, talking and sharing things about ourselves, and then I’d go home. It was the start of a deeply emotional connection.

  Lynn had ended an unfulfilling relationship and was still hurt, and I was going through my break-up with Sara. We were there for each other and we became great friends, who were clearly attracted to each other but didn’t have any kind of intimate relationship for a few months. It was all very tender and sweet. There were a few hiccups along the road, because I was still married and understandably Lynn had misgivings about getting involved, but after we parted for a time, we missed each other. So we came back together and at that point we were intimate. After a while, when Lynn didn’t see my divorce from Sara proceeding, she told me she had to protect herself and needed to stop seeing me. She was falling for me and understandably didn’t want to be the other woman. She said quite simply that I had to figure it all out with Sara and if it didn’t work, then I should call her.

  I stayed in touch with her during the first months of the Behind the Mask tour, which began in Australia in March 1990, but I didn’t see her in person, because essentially Lynn was a secret. Sara and I had separated but we hadn’t divorced, and although everyone knew it was coming, it was still too soon for me to be seen with Lynn publicly. I did spend thousands of dollars in phone bills calling Lynn from all over the world, however, and between the various legs of that tour we spent every moment together, almost entirely in her apartment in Westwood. That became our lovely little bubble. When I was gearing up to go back on the road after the holidays that year, there was a great sadness, because it seemed like the distance might be the end of us, but in our case it only made our hearts grow fonder. We’d stay on the phone endlessly, sometimes for ten hours at a stretch.

  By the time the Behind the Mask tour returned to the US towards the end of 1990, Lynn and I were very much in love and so I brought her out on the road with me. It all had to be done in secret, with her in a different hotel room checked in under the name Justin Case, since we had that extra room, ‘just in case’. Billy and Rick Vito knew about her, as did John Courage and the other lads, but the girls didn’t know a thing. Though Lynn had to hide, sitting in a seat in the audience at the show, or at the soundboard, we did have fun and I think she enjoyed her first experience touring with a rock-and-roll band. We usually had Lynn arrive at the next city before the band, checking in early so she could relax and avoid being seen by the others, then when I arrived with the band she’d come down to my room. It was definitely tumultuous, because I was still carrying on with my old habits and Lynn didn’t drink alcohol; in fact, she didn’t partake in booze or anything else during the whole of our marriage. During that tour, on a stop in Phoenix, we were staying in a beautiful suite with a balcony. It had been about a year since I’d met Lynn and we were sitting there sunning ourselves, listening to George Harrison’s Cloud Nine album, and I looked at her and started to cry.

  ‘Mick, what’s wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing at all is wrong,’ I said. ‘I love you, Lynn. That’s all.’

  Eventually, at the end of 1990, Sara served me with divorce papers. She’d gone to the Betty Ford Center and got sober and she remained so for a really long time. I did not get sober and I wasn’t very respectful of it, which made it truly impossible for her to stay with me. So I moved out of the house and into the Malibu Inn and for a few weeks I didn’t talk to Lynn, because I wanted to be sure of how I felt about her, about Sara, and about all of it, now that I was off the road and back into reality with divorce papers in hand. It was hard on Lynn because I simply disappeared. But afterwards, we were free to take up with each other openly and starting in 1991, we were never apart from then on.

  Lynn still had her place in Westwood and we lived there together for quite a while. Things were great, but my drinking was becoming a problem. Lynn never gave me an ultimatum, and she wasn’t judgmental, she just didn’t drink because she didn’t like the taste. She’d tried it, of course, and had experimented with drugs and still took the occasional pill here and there, but drink wasn’t for her. So she never came from a high and mighty position about it, but obviously she enjoyed me better when I wasn’t blind drunk. The thing about Lynn is that she could keep up with people drinking and carrying on and be right there with them the whole night through.

  When Lynn hung around with our lot, partying well into the night, I think our lunacy rubbed off on her and swept her up with us. She didn’t have to be drunk to throw caution to the wind and she didn’t have to do a pile of blow to stay up all night and party. She pulled it out of herself, or absorbed it from the people around us, and I found it astounding and wonderful. It was perfect for me; I never had to worry about her, she was up for anything and she looked after me. I couldn’t have been luckier.

  Lynn did, however worry about my health and she should have because by April 1992, even I realised I’d been going at it a bit too hard for too long. It had got really bad; I’d bloated up, I didn’t look well and I’d begun to embarrass myself. This was after my work with the Zoo, who were a hard drinking lot. So I decided to quit alcohol altogether. Lynn booked us a vacation that we agreed would be my time to kick the booze and just be with her and straighten out a bit.

  But old habits die hard and at the last minute I told her I was going on that trip with Billy Thorpe, the great Australian singer-songwriter who had played with me in the Zoo instead and that I still intended to get healthy. To Lynn’s dismay Billy and I went to Maui and did anything but that. Eventually I patched it up with Lynn and flew her down, promising that we’d have the trip we talked about. It was her first time in Hawaii and she was really excited about it. But I didn’t exactly get round to curbing my drinking.

  It wasn’t an easy trip for Lynn: Billy was sore that my girlfriend had showed up and ruined our boys trip, and while she was there we went to see Bob Dylan and ran into my ex-wife Jenny backstage, who was uncharacteristically rude to Lynn. Like many others, Jenny was wondering what the hell a young girl like Lynn, who was 26, was after with a guy like me, who was 43. For the record the two of them are great friends today.

  I definitely smoothed it all over with wine, to the point that Lynn decided it was time for her to go. She said that she couldn’t see me do this to myself and it made her too sad to be a party to it. But we still proceeded to have a lovely last night together in our room, just having silly fun, with her doing stuff like drawing little faces on my toes.

  As the night drew to a close, I told her not to go.

  ‘Lynn, I’m going to need to spend the day in bed tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be sick, I’m going to be hungover and I’m going to need to repair myself. But I will wake up after that and I won’t drink. Please, please don’t go.’

  Truthfully, the threat of losing Lynn wasn’t my only motivation to clean up my act. For the first time in my life, I was worried. It was easy to see how I’d deteriorated and that I wasn’t invincible. I was also shaken by the fact that my sister Susan had been diagnosed with cancer. It was time to put things in line.

  ‘Mick, I’ll stay,’ she said, sceptically. ‘I’ll wait and see how it is when you wake up.’

  I stayed true to my word. I slept the day away and when I woke up I didn’t have another drink for a decade.

  From the start, Lynn and I were the best of friends, and she was every bit my co-pilot on a series of unbelievable adventures; from the time we began to be officially together, through to the end of our marriage. That aspect never changed: Lynn was always ready, bag packed, to go wherever fate–or me–mi
ght take us. And good thing she did, because starting in the early 1990s my life away from Fleetwood Mac became very interesting, indeed.

  After I’d been relieved of managing the band, I strove to flex my flair for entrepreneurship in other areas, because I’ve always had a interest in business and the possibilities it presented me. This lead me to open a restaurant and music venue called Fleetwood’s L.A. Blues in Los Angeles on Sweetzer and Santa Monica in 1991. It was a gorgeous restaurant and more or less the blueprint for the House of Blues which opened its first location just a year later. Along with my business manager and close friend Joe McNulty, my partners and I raised millions to open this fabulous place. One small problem was that my partners, unbeknownst to me, happened to be connected to the Gambino crime family. They were descendants and weren’t directly linked to any illegal activity, but they were close enough to the action that I was summoned to a hearing by the FBI to let me know exactly who they were and that they were under investigation. The FBI also let me know in no uncertain terms that because of them, our business would never be granted a liquor license. We had been operating under a catering license, which I thought was odd, until I suddenly found out why.

  It was too late by then because we had already opened and every night we kept telling people that we’d be getting our liquor license any day now. We’d started out with a bang, too. We had all manner of musicians and celebrities in attendance; John Lee Hooker was there, arriving in a huge Cadillac with two gorgeous women on his arm. My blues band played and the party was quite a sensation. We had the recipe for success; we’d built this incredible restaurant and performance space, our chef was top notch and we got rave reviews from the LA Times, but without the ability to serve alcohol, there was no way the place was going to survive. It was all of the stuff I’d dreamt of in one perfect venue, but it was doomed to die on the vine. It ended up closing just a few months later which was a huge disappointment to me.