Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994

by David Hepworth

  1975 PLAYLIST

  10cc, ‘I’m Not In Love’

  Bob Marley and the Wailers, Live!

  Bruce Springsteen, Born To Run

  Bob Dylan, Blood On The Tracks

  Neil Young, Tonight’s The Night

  Patti Smith, Horses

  Joni Mitchell, The Hissing Of Summer Lawns

  Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti

  David Bowie, Young Americans

  Dr Feelgood, Malpractice

  4 JULY 1976

  TAMPA, FLORIDA

  The X factor

  IN 1970 PETER Green left Fleetwood Mac, the group he’d begun in 1967. He turned his back on every aspect of the rock-star life and worked as a gravedigger. He wanted no part of the money that Fleetwood Mac earned. This wasn’t much of a problem in the early seventies because the group were usually in the red. It became more problematic around 1975, when Fleetwood Mac, the first album his old friends Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Christine McVie had made with the newly recruited American duo Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, began selling in unprecedented quantities. They called it their ‘White Album’, and at the time it was the biggest seller in the history of Warner Brothers Records. This had the knock-on effect of growing the sales of their back catalogue, which meant Green kept receiving royalty cheques. He was so bothered by this influx of cash that he visited his accountant’s office to remonstrate. To emphasize his point he brandished a pump-action shotgun. Green was subsequently sent to a mental hospital for his own protection as well as his accountant’s.

  In the early seventies it appeared that all the men who had previously stood out front in Fleetwood Mac had suffered misadventures from which they were unlikely to recover. Both Green and fellow guitarist Danny Kirwan suffered from mental illness which some attributed to an incident with bad acid in Munich. The other guitarist, the previously genial Jeremy Spencer, had gone out for a walk before a gig in California in 1971, joined the Children of God and never come back.

  But whereas the men at the front fell out of the fray in different ways, the two men who formed the rhythm section, and had the good fortune to share their names with the band’s, ploughed on determinedly, managing the band themselves and engaging different musicians to do the singing and guitar playing. This leadership from the back line was without precedent; the biggest show-offs usually did the leading. Fleetwood and McVie were blessed in their latest recruits. A recording engineer had introduced them to Buckingham Nicks, a romantically linked double act who were young, looked good and could sing and write songs. Before they decided to merge the two acts they asked Christine McVie whether she was worried about the danger of being upstaged by having the group fronted by a younger woman. She said she wasn’t. The fact that they asked this question was a hint of what a complex organization the new group was to become. All successful groups have some of the features of a family. In Fleetwood Mac’s case the complexities within the group were almost royal in scale.

  These came to the fore in February 1976 as Fleetwood Mac entered the studio to begin recording the follow-up to their breakthrough album. This was a record that carried the expectations of the company and all its senior executives on its back. Record-making is an activity that expands to fill the time available for it and the budget apportioned to it. When the Beatles made Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 the PR line was that it had taken an unprecedented seven hundred hours to record. It wasn’t as many as that but it was more than they would have devoted to previous albums, when the quest for perfection had to be kept within bounds. By 1976 the rewards of getting it right were so apparent that it was considered worth any amount of trouble.

  In the case of Fleetwood Mac the trouble could be considerable. The power was distributed evenly across the five of them. Fleetwood and McVie had tenure but they weren’t the ones who were expected to come up with the songs. They were expected to supply the rhythm tracks early on in the process. The simple matter of getting a distinctive drum sound in the mid-seventies was a process that could stretch for days with the drummer relentlessly bashing a snare or tom-tom as the engineers experimented with microphone placement and echo. They had to supply the base on which the other three would build their tracks but they understandably preferred to hold back their final decisions until they heard the vocal. Often they couldn’t hear the vocal until later in the process because whichever of the other three had written the words either hadn’t finished them yet or didn’t wish to share them with the others. As Fleetwood was to recall, ‘the problem was the songwriters were bringing no words because the words were in the room’.

  The reason the words were in the room was because all three people supplying them were preoccupied with the fact that they had recently broken up with other members of the group. Christine McVie, who had married John in order to please her dying mother, had recently announced their marriage was at an end and started sleeping with the tall, handsome young lighting designer. McVie found solace wherever he could, spending a year on the yacht he’d bought with the royalties from Fleetwood Mac and entertaining fantasies of winning the favours of Linda Ronstadt, then at the apogee of her pulchritude and about to make the first of a number of appearances on the cover of Rolling Stone in her lingerie.

  When Nicks and Buckingham were in a band called Fritz there had been an agreement that none of the men in the band could sleep with the girl out front, for fear this would be the end of the band. As soon as Buckingham and Nicks left the group and started being a duo they became a couple. As soon as they started recording the new Fleetwood Mac album, which was to be called Rumours, they split up. The tensions of being in close proximity in the studio had been aggravated by the fact that they were going home together. Calling it a day didn’t relieve the pressure. Each was furiously jealous of any moves the other made to see anyone else.

  The good thing about all this hoarded heartache was that ideas for songs came spilling out of them as if they were lovelorn teenagers exposed to their first book of poetry. The difficult thing was that the first person they would in the normal run of things sing it for was often the person who had inflicted the chest wound that inspired it. Christine wrote ‘Don’t Stop’ about John, ‘Oh Daddy’ about Mick and his wife Jenny, and ‘You Make Loving Fun’ about her new boyfriend, the lighting man. (He was swiftly let go.) For most of the time it took them to record ‘The Chain’ it had no words. It only became the band’s anthem at the very last minute. Lindsey wrote ‘Go Your Own Way’ about Stevie, who took offence at the lines about somebody ‘packing up and shacking up’. She wrote ‘Silver Springs’ about him. Much to her fury this was left off the final album, though it was made the B-side of the first single ‘Go Your Own Way’, thereby ensuring that she made as much money out of profiling her ex as he made out of his musical kiss-off to her.

  The fifth member of the group, its drummer and manager Mick Fleetwood, had trouble keeping his marriage together. His wife, the former Jenny Boyd, was the sister of Pattie Boyd, wife of George Harrison. She’d been with the Beatles and the Maharishi at Rishikesh. The new profile the band enjoyed meant she was often called on to be the plus-one in formal situations. To get through this she self-medicated with alcohol and cocaine, somehow still managing to get up in the morning to look after their children. After succumbing to stress she decided to divorce Mick and went to live in Surrey, not far from where Pattie was now living with Eric Clapton in a similar state of opulent unhappiness. After two months she returned to Los Angeles where she and Fleetwood remarried in order to ensure that their children’s immigration status was guaranteed. In time they divorced again.

  Fleetwood Mac started recording in February at a carefully chosen studio in Sausalito, north of San Francisco. The Record Plant was the last word in comfort and convenience for the new breed of recording stars with their multi-platinum expectations and highly developed taste for luxury. It had its own hot tub, a vending machine that dispensed cold cans of Coors at twenty-five cents a time, a nearby
hacienda that the bands could choose to stay in while they recorded, and a studio called ‘The Pit’, which had been designed by Sly Stone so that the engineers could sit surrounded by the musicians and the music. Stevie Nicks retreated here one day and came up with the basic idea of ‘Dreams’ in fifteen minutes. The sessions did not go smoothly. They had three grand pianos, none of which would stay in tune. Studio costs were $135 an hour. They racked up three thousand of those hours at the Record Plant, in the course of which the winding and rewinding of the original tape meant that it lost much of its quality and they eventually decided that the only thing that could be rescued was the basic rhythm tracks. The record was supposed to be finished in nine weeks. In the end it took the best part of a year.

  Some of this delay was down to their tastes, which had become more expensive in direct proportion to their success. The members of the original band were in their early thirties; Buckingham and Nicks were still in their twenties. Neither group had yet reached the realization that drinking five-star brandy in the studio might be impairing their performance. They also relied on cocaine to get them through the long sessions. (On stage a member of the road crew circulated among the musicians after every number, carrying a silver tray full of bottle caps of cocaine for those members who needed a small lift.) This had the unfortunate side effect of convincing them that the take they had just done was the perfect one, an impression of which they were disabused the following day when they heard it sober. With mass-market acceptance whatever starry tendencies they had were given free rein. Nicks in particular developed some of the habits of a theatrical leading lady, arriving for each day’s studio work in a fresh outfit as if she was going on stage, accompanied by her pet poodle.

  The record company was not in any position to put pressure on them to hurry because the manager figure was also the drummer and he refused to listen to them. Every last creative decision about Rumours was made by the band and its producer and engineer. John McVie came up with the name Rumours. When the time came to do the cover they called on an old hippy friend and shot a bizarre image of the 6ft 6in drummer and the 5ft 1in singer posing balletically with a pair of rhythm balls in his testicular zone. This was an indication of the latitude granted to rock stars and only rock stars. Even the biggest-name writers and film actors would never have been given the same control over such a crucial part of the package. It was just assumed that rock stars knew best.

  One of their last duties in 1976 was to pose for the cover of Rolling Stone. Such a photo session was now a job of work requiring as much commitment as another song. Rolling Stone, once the organ of the alternative society, was about to move from San Francisco to New York in order to be nearer its real customers, the agencies that bought colour ads for cigarettes, drink and cars which were aimed at its free-spending thirty-something readership. The editorial had simultaneously smartened up to provide a more seductive environment. The photographers were more upmarket, which meant they brought with them their customary armies of stylists, make-up artists, hairdressers and miscellaneous ministers of the arts of vanity to make sure that their subjects looked reassuringly rich as well as edgily stylish. The look of 1976 was expensive and dissolute. It was the Rolling Stones’ Black and Blue; Peter Frampton, his chest glowing on the cover of his live record; Rod Stewart, with trophy girlfriend Britt Ekland wrapped around him. The image of the members of Fleetwood Mac, swaddled in expensive silk sheets, Fleetwood with his arm around Nicks (a pose that was to prove prophetic), Buckingham snuggling up with Christine McVie, and her ex-husband upside down reading a magazine, announced what the market was already suspecting, that with this band you didn’t just get radio-friendly hits and stereo sheen, you also got a surrogate family whose interpersonal relationships you could gossip about.

  Although the talent within Fleetwood Mac was evenly distributed – Buckingham was the inventive musician, Christine probably the best natural voice, Mick and John the driving wheel that kept the band on the rails in both musical and practical terms – the member who cast the greatest spell and catalysed the other four was Stevie Nicks. When they were in the studio she was in danger of being passed over because she was the only one who didn’t play an instrument, but it was a different story on stage. Since the only instrument she played was a tambourine which had been carefully taped up to make sure that it would be seen but not heard, she was free to act as the band’s focal point, a task she took every bit as seriously as if she had been the lead guitarist. In close-up she had the Bambi eyes, Cupid’s bow lips, Farrah Fawcett hair and flawless skin of the girl you would never dare ask to the prom. At a distance she was a blur of gauzy fabric. There was nothing of the standard sex kitten about her. Nevertheless, out there in the dark thousands of young men were stirred. Many felt they would scale the steepest castle walls with a rose in their teeth in exchange for just one of her sidelong looks. The Stevie Nicks persona was an imaginative invention every bit as integral to the appeal of the group as her songs or her singing. The way she moved was a significant addition to the gestural arts of rock.

  On 4 July 1976 the United States of America celebrated its bicentennial. Fleetwood Mac took a break from work in the latest of a series of studios in which they were still wrestling with their new album in order to play a show at the Tampa Stadium in Florida. On this day in the sun $12.50 bought people the cream of the newly popular soft rock from Dan Fogelberg, Loggins and Messina, Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. These were all people who sold a lot of records. But of all the people on stage that day only Stevie Nicks among them could already claim to be a rock star.

  From his vantage point on the drum stool Mick Fleetwood looked out at the crowd as Stevie went into her big number ‘Rhiannon’. ‘I looked out of the crowd and saw a field of Stevie Nicks devotees; wispy, witchy black dresses, top hats, just everything Stevie incorporated into her stage attire.’ These were Stevie’s people: thousands of everyday girls who saw something in her look that was coquettish enough to attract the male gaze and inscrutable enough to send it bouncing off into space. Many more would join Stevie’s tribe over the years.

  This was some transformation. Just two Independence Days earlier she had been earning $1.50 an hour waitressing at a Beverly Hills restaurant called Clementine’s. Buckingham Nicks had made one album together for Polydor and then been dropped. She had to work to eat. She felt it was more important that she worked while Lindsey devoted himself to staying at home, perfecting his guitar. She even worked as a housekeeper for their producer Keith Olsen. She applied herself to these mundane tasks because she was determined to postpone the day when she had to go back to her mother and father and admit that her dream of making it in show business had come to nothing.

  Now there was no danger of that. Two years after the waitressing days Stevie Nicks was in a group that had gone platinum and was about to go higher, much higher. She had her face on the covers of magazines, and handsome millionaire Don Henley of the Eagles dancing attendance on her, even sending cranberry-coloured Lear jets to whisk her to his side and having limo drivers turn up as she was breakfasting with the rest of the band to strew armfuls of flowers and items of expensive hi-fi at her feet. There is no indication that she did anything but luxuriate in all this fresh attention. This could be what Glenn Frey of the Eagles had in mind when he encountered the new girl in Henley’s luxurious hilltop house in 1976 and, with the newly minted world-weariness of somebody who had made it to the top of this particular mountain a whole year earlier, acidly enquired of Stevie, ‘Spoiled yet?’

  1976 PLAYLIST

  Queen, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’

  The Eagles, Hotel California

  Peter Frampton, Frampton Comes Alive!

  The Ramones, Ramones

  Boz Scaggs, Silk Degrees

  Rolling Stones, Black and Blue

  The Isley Brothers, ‘Harvest For The World’

  Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers

  Eric Clapton, No Reason To Cry

/>   The Runaways, The Runaways

  16 AUGUST 1977

  GRACELAND, MEMPHIS

  Death is good for business

  THE GIRLS WHO shared Elvis Presley’s bed knew the drill. They had to listen for his breathing, which had on occasion seemed to stop in the night. If he got up to go to the bathroom they should knock on the door after a while and ask if he was all right. There were members of his personal entourage around the house at all times. Further staff, including a nurse who worked for his personal doctor George Nichopoulos, known to all as ‘Doctor Nick’, lived in trailers behind the house. Nonetheless the women he slept with were his last defence against the thing he feared most, loneliness.

  Since he was a small child Elvis had hated to sleep alone. Once he was famous he no longer needed to. If he wasn’t with one of his longer-term girlfriends, willing women could be brought to him. They would often be referred to him by his Memphis friend, the DJ George Klein. His Graceland people would vet them before they got to his bedroom. Anyone with dirty fingernails or opinions of her own would not proceed far beyond the ground floor. The ones who met with his approval would in due course be given money to spend on improving their appearance so that it approached his ideal. That meant big hair, pretty outfits, anything that contributed to the impress of virginal freshness and white underwear. Elvis liked women designed with display in mind. Their primary function in his life was to reflect his glory. Nobody took being the King more seriously than the King.