Jealousy, infidelity, and divorce, hardly sounds like a recipe for a successful album. The fact that Fleetwood Mac’s hit album Rumours was never finished, let alone stayed atop the charts for 31 weeks, won Grammy for Album of The Year, and became one of the biggest selling albums of all time, selling more than 45 million copies.
It was created in the United Kingdom in 1967 by guitarist Peter Green and drummer Mick Fleetwood, with bass guitarist John McVie. Keyboardist and vocalist Christine Perfect married John McVie and joined the then-blues-focused group in 1970, a British blues band that was shortly after named after them going by the name, ‘Fleetwood Mac’. Four years later, vocalist Nicks and vocalist/lead guitarist Buckingham added their folk/rock/pop styling to create the foundation behind the band’s first massively successful album, creating hit singles like “Over My Head,” “Say You Love Me” and “Rhiannon.” Although the band started as a blues band it evolved through many pop/rock sound iterations. During ‘Rumours’ the band consisted of Mick Fleetwood the drummer, Christine McVie the keyboardist and vocalist, John McVie the bassist, Lindsey Buckingham one of the singers and last but not least Stevie Nicks the other.
Such a huge successful prior album and lauded tour added pressure on the band to make something extraordinary as a follow-up. In public they were on top of the world, but behind the scenes things were falling apart.
Christine and John McVie, who had been married for 8 years entered the recording studio at a point on divorce. The former couple stayed silent around each other, avoiding contact other than during work sessions. Only further deteriorating the situation was Christine starting to openly date the band’s lighting instructor.
Meanwhile Nicks and her longtime boyfriend and musical partner Buckingham had recently called it quits as well, but unlike the McVie’s who ignored each other Nicks and Buckingham reportedly would get into shouting matches that only ceased when the recording light was on.
In addition to that Fleetwood has become aware of the fact that his wife and the mother of their two children had been having an affair with a close friend and divorce soon followed this couple as well.
At the time Nicks and Fleetwood had begun a love affair by year’s end.
As emotions fueled the creative output for the album, alcohol, pot, and cocaine helped fuel the groups physical need to stay focused, work long hours and navigate the increasingly tumultuous landscape, –”You felt so bad about what happened that you did a line to cheer yourself up,” Nicks told MOJO in 2012. Rumour’s producer and engineer Ken Caillat described the drug use as having an Atlantic divide. “There were the blues Fleetwood Mac from England – they were the boozers and that was pretty much what they did,” Caillat said to the Huffington Post in 2012. “And there was the California Fleetwood Mac – they were the pot-smoking hippies with Lindsey and Stevie. Then the cocaine entered the picture. So it was booze versus pot really, with a little cocaine cocktail.” Cocaine use was so rampant the band even considered thanking their dealer in the album credits, but such recognition never came to pass. “Unfortunately, he got snuffed – executed! – before the thing came out,” Fleetwood wrote in his 1990 memoir Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac.
Each song on this particular album has a deep meaning which is why i’ll walk through them in order starting with “Second Hand News” all the way to “Silver Springs”
The first song on the Rumours album was “Second Hand News,” sung by Lindsey Buckingham. The upbeat tone of this song makes things crystal clear Buckingham was doing just fine in the “tall grass,” with women who weren’t Stevie Nicks. Buckingham was inspired by the Bee Gees’ “Jive Talkin’,” reportedly playing it when Mick Fleetwood couldn’t nail the rhythm as an example. As well As John McVie’s bass part being scrapped altogether, soon replaced by one that Buckingham wrote himself. As co-producer Ken Caillat told the MusicRadar in 2012, “It took him a while, but eventually, while John was on vacation, he put down his own bass line, one that was very simple, just a quarter notes. It worked though. Lindsey had a grand plan in his head, and he got his way. This was the start of him really calling the shots. It became a my-way-or-the-highway with him, which he perfected in the “Tusk” album.”
Our second song on the album needs no introduction because I believe whether or not you know Fleetwood Mac or not, or don’t listen to them you’ll probably know “Dreams,” one way or another, “Dreams” the one to make it to top 10 in the US along with, “Go Your Own Way,” “Don’t Stop,” and, “You Make Loving Fun,” though unlike the previous songs I just mentioned “Dreams,” hit #1. During the recording for Rumours Nicks had quite a bit of freetime which she spent in an empty recording studio down the hall built for Sly Stone, the room included a sunken pit, victorian drapes, and a black velvet bed. Nicks recalled in an interview with Blender in 2005, “I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me, I found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on and wrote ‘Dreams’ in about 10 mins. Right away I liked the fact that I was doing something with a dance beat because that made it a bit unusual for me.” When the song was shown to the band they were less than impressed.. “It was just three chords and one note to the left hand,” Christine McVie said, “I thought, “this is really boring,’ but the Lindsey genius came into play and he fashioned three sections out of identical chords, making each sound completely different, that created the impression that there’s a thread running through the song.” The first part of this song to me sounds like a response to “Second Hand News,” in Buckingham’s song he sings, “lay me down in the tall grass, and let me do my stuff,” while in Nicks song she says, “You say you want your freedom Well, who am I to keep you down?” to me this sounds like a response of sorts.
The third song on the Rumours is, “Never Going Back Again,” The song was initially going to be titled “Brushes,” because the original recording included only one other band member, drummer Fleetwood, who played snare using brushes. An inordinate amount of time was spent on “Never Going Back Again,” one of the last songs to be written for the album. Caillat noticed that Buckingham’s acoustic guitar strings didn’t sound quite as bright after just 20 minutes of playing and suggested a tactic to help with this: Change the strings every 20 minutes. “I’m sure the roadies wanted to kill me. Restringing the guitar three times every hour was annoying, Lindsey however had lots of parts on the song, and each one sounded magnificent,” Caillat said. His innovative idea came crashing down the next day when they realized Buckingham had played everything in the wrong key, forcing them to record all over again- this time without the restringing.
Our next song on the Rumours album is “Don’t Stop,” written by Christine McVie, during her divorce with husband and bassist John McVie. Christine wrote the song as a way to encourage the band to let go of the past and look to the future. “Don’t Stop’ was just a feeling,” Christine said in the 2004 book The Fleetwood Mac Story: Rumours and Lies “It just seemed to be a pleasant revelation to have that ‘yesterday’s gone.’ It might have, I guess, been directed more toward John, but I’m just definitely not a pessimist.” John admitted to Mojo in 2015 that he was unaware the song had anything to do with him. “I never put that together,” he said. “I’ve been playing it for years, and it wasn’t until someone told me, ‘Chris wrote that about you.’ Oh, really?”
“Go Your Own Way,” another one of Fleetwood Mac’s more notable and popular songs,
It was one of the more knife-twisting lines on the album, Buckingham took direct aim at Nicks: “Packing up, shacking up’s all you want to do.” It was a low blow. “He knew it wasn’t true,” Nicks later told Rolling Stone. “It was just an angry thing that he said. Every time those words would come onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that. It was like, ‘I’ll make you suffer for leaving me.’ And I did.” The drums on “Go Your Own Way” were inspired by the staggering beat on the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man.” Fleetwood applied his interpretation of a rhythm that astonished drummer Jeff Porcaro, who begged Fleetwood to tell him how he achieved the sound. Fleetwood found he couldn’t put it into words. “It was only after we continued to talk that Jeff realized I wasn’t kidding around,” Fleetwood said in his 2014 biography, Play On. “We eventually had a tremendous laugh about it, and when I later told him that I was dyslexic, it finally made sense.”
“Songbird” , the 6th song on the album, came to Christine McVie spontaneously. She wrote the song in about a half-hour. “I’ve never been able to figure out how I did that,” she told People in 2017. “I woke up in the middle of the night, and the song was there in my brain – chords, lyrics, melody, everything. I played it in my bedroom and didn’t have anything to tape it on. So I had to stay awake all night so I wouldn’t forget it, and I came in the next morning to the studio and had Ken Callait put it on a two-track.” The song was then recorded concert-style at the Zellerbach Auditorium on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, with 15 microphones placed around the hall and Buckingham strumming an acoustic guitar offstage to keep time.
“The Chain,” another song that needs no introduction. More than any other song on Rumours, “The Chain” came about in a piecemeal manner. Using a chord progression from an earlier Christine McVie song titled “Keep Me There,” Buckingham recycled an intro part he and Nicks had used on their 1973 song “Lola (My Love).” Fleetwood and John McVie worked out the song’s ending segment, while Nicks wrote new verses. The track was then literally spliced together using razor blades to cut the tapes. It’s fitting then that “The Chain,” a song about allegedly unbreakable ties, is the only song on Rumours to include writing credits for all five band members.
The 8th song you’ll hear when listening to Rumours would be, “You Make Loving Fun.” Sly Stone’s studio down the hall thee same one that helped Nicks write “Dreams,” came in handy again when Caillat suggested a clavinet – which Stone conveniently had for “You Make Loving Fun,” which Christine McVie had written about her new boo, the band’s lighting director. “To accentuate the ‘clav-iness,’ we put it through a wah-wah pedal,” Caillat remembered. “Christine couldn’t play her keyboard part and work the wah at the same time, so Mick got down on his hands and knees and worked the pedal while Christine played. Being a drummer, he knew just what kind of rhythm it needed.” Meanwhile, Nicks and Buckingham reportedly argued throughout their backing-vocal recording session, ceasing their name-calling when the tape rolled and then picking up where they left off when the mics were cold.
9th song on the album a song that was chosen over Nicks “Silver Springs,” because of the long runtime of that song, “I Don’t Want to Know” at first the song was cut Nicks having wrote it before she had Joined Fleetwood Mac ended up on Rumours as a replacement for “Silver Springs.” Nicks wasn’t pleased. “I started to scream bloody murder and probably said every horribly mean thing that you could possibly say to another human being,” she said in a BBC radio interview in 1991. “I said, ‘Well, I’m not gonna sing ‘I Don’t Want to Know.’ I am one-fifth of this band.’ And they said, ‘Well, if you don’t like it, you can either (a) take a hike or (b) you better go out there and sing ‘I Don’t Want to Know’ or you’re only gonna have two songs on the record.’ And so, basically, with a gun to my head, I went out and sang ‘I Don’t Want to Know.’ And they put ‘Silver Springs’ on the back of [the] ‘Go Your Own Way’ [single].”
“Oh Daddy,” the 10th song of the album, one that went through many interpretations. Buckingham’s ex-girlfriend Carol Ann Harris and Nick’s biographer Zoe Howe have said the song was about Christine McVie’s relationship with the band’s lighting designer. But McVie later stated that it was really about Fleetwood, the only member of the band with children at that point and who had become the most parental-like figure in the group. “Defenses were wearing thin, and they were quick to open up their feelings,” co-producer Richard Dashut told writer Dave DiMartino. “Instead of going to friends to talk it out, their feelings were vented through their music. It created a certain sensitivity. Our personal lives were in shambles, and the album was about the only thing we had left.”
“Gold Dust Woman,” our 11th song on the album, a perfect dramatic ending to the roller coaster ride that is the Rumours album As Caillat noted, the song built in more intensity and “evil” the longer the band worked on it. To emphasize Nicks’ wailing, witchy vocals, Fleetwood broke sheets of glass. “He was wearing goggles and overalls – it was pretty funny,” Caillat recalled. “He just went mad, bashing glass with this big hammer. He tried to do it on cue, but it was difficult. Eventually, we said, ‘Just break the glass,’ and we fit it all in.” Nicks has never been completely clear on the meaning of the song but credited the tension of the recording sessions with producing some of the group’s best work. “All of those problems, and all of those drugs, and all of the fun, and all of the craziness all made for writing all those songs,” she told DiMartino. “If we’d been a big healthy great group of guys and gals, none of those great songs would’ve been written, you know?”
Now on the album most of the time you won’t find this song but I felt it was an honorable mention, Stevie Nicks’ “Silver Springs.” Silver Springs is one of, in my opinion, one of the best of Stevie Nicks that was initially scrapped for, “I Don’t Want to Know.” Nicks says she remembers when she first found out that it was getting snubbed, “I went to the studio and Fleetwood and Buckingham were in the parking lot and they said ‘we need to talk,’ and that was never good,” she recalled to People. Although it was initially snubbed for “I Don’t Want to Know,” because of the shorter run time, it was later released as a single, and was nominated at the grammys when Rumours won Album of The Year.
On February 4th, 1976, about 49 years ago, the likes of Stevie Nicks, LIndsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie got together and created Rumours, Fleetwood Mac’s 11th studio album was released, during a time of turmoil and drama within the band, with breakups, divorces, cheating, drugs, and strong feeling. In my personal opinion Rumours is worth a listen. Each song you can hear the passion and feelings and the intense emotions they felt during the time of creating the songs in each song.
