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 never 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.

One of the problems we had with completing anything during the writing of Rumours was that our songwriters weren’t bringing us words. I imagine that had to do with the subjects of the songs quite often being in the room, not to mention that they were working out their feelings on a day-to-day basis. Lindsey, by nature, always holds back on his songs until he feels he’s perfected them on his end. Writing this record he was even more private; he crafted his contributions until the very last minute, requiring the rest of us to revise our parts accordingly. My basic drum tracks were usually the only thing that would remain the same. When Lindsey reworked a song, everything from the vocal backing parts to the melody would change, so there was no chance of keeping Chris’s original, basic vocal take, for example. The entire arrangement was different so it all had to be redone.

We didn’t get that as much from Chris or Stevie, because Stevie knows how she wants to deliver her words, so when she makes adjustments, they’re less drastic in terms of the overlying structure of the song. Chris is a blues player and says what she wants to say very directly; she knows the melody she wants and it’s all right there, or evolved enough that we can usually get there together pretty fast. But even Chris wasn’t doing that this time. Making Rumours, all three of them held back on their lyrics to the point that John and I, as blues players who were used to going right to an idea, were on the verge of ripping their sheets of lyrics out of their hands and saying, ‘Just give me the shit now!’

But as blues players we also knew how to support our bandmates properly, so we went through as many permutations of an idea as necessary. That was our training; whether it’s in increments or wild leaps, if you must go all over the place to get where you need to be, that’s what you do.

Even if we’d been on a roll, we had to take a break at that point to do a bit of touring since we’d cancelled a series of spring dates to continue work on the album. There was a great demand because a full year later, Fleetwood Mac was still climbing the charts, and when we released ‘Say You Love Me’ with the B-side ‘Monday Morning’, we scored another high-charting single. We hadn’t played a gig in nearly six months, so when we hit the road, we were like a bat out of hell; all that inward focus, frustration and introspection fuelled us.

We toured through June and into July on bills with bands including Jeff Beck, Jefferson Starship, Ted Nugent, and the Eagles, who had released One of These Nights and were riding high.

On this tour, Stevie Nicks really came into her own and I saw what she had begun to represent to our female fans. Stevie was the mysterious mystic, the seductive songstress, the ethereal being who could not be possessed. Her style, as unique as her voice, was catching on everywhere. I will never forget playing on 4 July 1976, on the American bicentennial, with the Eagles in Tampa, Florida. I looked out at the crowd and saw a field of Stevie Nicks devotees; wispy, witchy black dresses, top hats, just everything Stevie incorporated into her stage attire. When we launched into ‘Rhiannon’ and Stevie said, ‘This is a song about a Welsh witch,’ the place erupted. Stevie delivered and she gave herself up to the music just the way her fans were beginning to do to her, all of them swaying, dancing with their eyes closed. Stevie had found something within herself that she’d poured into performing that number, something that came from deep inside her, something as real and magical as the Welsh witch she sang about.

During this tour, I reconnected with Jenny. Living in London with my sister Sally’s family had been a relatively sane and soothing existence for her and just what she needed. It had given her time and stability to think about her future, and to build a firm determination to commit totally to her life with the children and me. She felt that she’d broken the bond between us, so she had to be the one to mend it. The environment and lifestyle had changed us both, and even though we’d legally divorced by then she believed there was hope for us. She was closer to my parents than her own, we had two gorgeous daughters, and she knew we both loved each other, even though in her eyes I didn’t show it properly, which caused her a lot of suffering.

She’d thought it through and was ready, so she flew out to Chicago to join me on tour. This was a test, and if all went well, we’d reunite with the girls together at the end of the tour. Jenny says that the moment she got into the black limo I’d sent to fetch her from the airport, she was seized with anxiety. She was back in the life of luxury, as she called it, in the lion’s den where the nuggets of gold resided.

I met her backstage, happy to see her. She looked rested, great, and beautiful as ever.

I held her hand and led her down the hall. ‘I’ve just spoken to the girls,’ I said, ‘and they know you’re arriving today.’

‘How are they?’ she asked tentatively.

‘They’re good. I told them you’d be with me on the road and they’re very excited.’

‘How long are we on the road?’

‘Another two weeks,’ I said.

She stopped walking. ‘Mick,’ she said. ‘I feel nervous.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I’m here. You’ll be fine.’

‘I’m nervous about what the band will think of me. All of this being together and then breaking up. It makes me feel so silly.’

I hugged her and held her close. ‘Don’t you worry about that,’ I said. ‘They don’t care–believe me. Come on, let’s go find JC and get you some coke. You must be tired. It’ll help you stay awake for the show.’

Jenny sat at the side of the stage that night and I remember staring at her throughout the set and feeling like my wife was back. She felt the same. She told me that she felt home once again, on familiar territory. The lights dimmed after every song and she watched our road manager bring a silver tray full of bottle caps of cocaine for the band members who wanted them. She then helped herself to the allocation reserved for wives and girlfriends in the backstage dressing rooms. She got tipsy on vodka and orange juice and thoroughly enjoyed herself. There was always a party after the show in those days and it went on late and rowdy. Jenny remembers the party on that particular evening after the show, because back then we’d developed a habit of pouring glasses of wine over each other, which we did that evening with gusto. We carried on until the early morning, until, at the end of it all, exhausted, she and I walked to our room in silence.

Jenny fell back into our life on the road very well and I remember thinking that we had a chance. She’s told me that on that tour she realised that touring provided the type of cocoon she’d been after; she and I were isolated from the outside world. She liked that part, but the problem was that the world we were in was far from normal. She thought a lot about Peter Green saying that we should all have lived our lives as travelling gypsies. For the first time she saw the wisdom in his vision and wondered if we would always have been together if we’d gone that route.

At the end of the two weeks, I thought it best for Jenny and me to have some time together before seeing our daughters again, so I sent my parents and the girls to Hawaii for two weeks. We arrived at the Topanga house, just the two of us. It was lovely to be home with her, because I’d always hoped that house would be our home. Jenny remembers the excitement she felt walking through the house and seeing signs of the children everywhere, all the familiar toys, books and drawings and the sepia photograph taken of us all by Herbie Worthington that hung in their bedroom. To her it was an idyllic family portrait, me in a chair with Amelia in front of me and Jenny at my side holding baby Lucy, and she saw it as both a good token and a reminder of the work that needed to be done to bridge image with reality.

I’d hung a map in the girls’ room and placed pins in all the cities I’d travelled to while on tour, so they’d have an idea of where Daddy was, and that warmed Jenny’s heart. She had returned renewed and determined to create a home for our children and to commit to our marriage, no matter how crazy things got. The house she came home to was still partially under construction, so with workers there all day, and nothing but a tarp for a front door, Jenny busied herself during the afternoons, usually by coming down to the Seedy Management offices.

We weren’t home for long before the pressure to complete our album started coming from Warner Brothers. We blocked out a week off in Miami to continue work at Criteria Studios, where Bob Marley had just finished recording Rastaman Vibration. We could tell, because the place smelled strongly and pleasantly of ganja. I flew my parents out there straight from Hawaii, thinking that it would be a more suitable location for Jenny to reconnect with our daughters, which it was. It seemed like we were back together for good.

The first Fleetwood Mac album continued to rise through the ranks, hitting number 1 on the US charts on 4 September 1976, fourteen months after its release, thereby ending the unstoppable ten-week run of Frampton Comes Alive! It was great to feel that our work on that record had ‘arrived’ but it was hard to celebrate with so much unfinished work to do. Our chart success did nothing but increase the pressure from without and within.

To their credit, Warner Brothers were patient, they really were. By that time we’d spent a small fortune, we weren’t done yet and we refused to play them so much as a note. This was the advantage of not having a manager, or having an artist as manager. I sided with the band; we weren’t going to play them anything until it was finished, no questions asked. A manager who wasn’t an artist would have had his mind solely on business. We’d have been urged to finish sooner, to cut corners and to get the product to market so it could start earning. Instead we got to do it our way, and thank God we did. We chose the art director for our albums, we chose the photographer, our crazy friend Herbie. All of these decisions were organic and holistically art-driven. We’d choose to work with our friends, not someone the record company or an outside manager would invariably have chosen for us. We were horribly unpackaged by design at a time when rock and roll was commodified, planned and marketed more than it had ever been in the past.

If we had been attuned and concerned with trying to capitalise on ourselves in that way I don’t think we would have survived. Yet in remaining ‘unpackaged’ we developed an aesthetic, which essentially became our ‘brand’. We made money out of just being who we are. We dressed the way we did because that’s the way we dressed. If we’d had a manager, I guarantee that we’d have been squashed into a box, or even worse, become a version of the Beatles when they had their mop-tops. That happened to Peter Frampton after the success of Frampton Comes Alive! He’d managed to shed his pop star roots in England and legitimised himself by playing with George Harrison and releasing a monster of a rock album, only to allow himself to be packaged once again as a teen idol in America. Things such as that awful film version of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ruined him and I think he never recovered. By managing ourselves, we escaped that fate.

At the same time we were trying to finish Rumours we had to keep promoting our first album, which had also finally broken overseas. The band took ten days in October 1976 to go to London to meet the European press and it was the first time we’d done so in years. We stayed at the Montcalm Hotel, near Marble Arch, and were met with overwhelming enthusiasm, the likes of which we hadn’t seen since 1969. We were also met with a sobering surprise when Peter Green showed up at our hotel and stayed in our rooms for a few nights. Peter had let himself go; he was unkempt, his hair long and straggly, and he’d put on a good deal of weight. It depressed all of us to see him that way, but John in particular took it very hard. I tried to find the old Peter in there but it was tough; John was too upset to even try. Peter would stare long, hard, and unsettlingly at whomever he was talking to, when he wasn’t gazing vacantly at the nearest wall. There was an aggression in his manner that we’d never seen before and it was disturbing. It didn’t bode well and the next time we returned to England, in April 1977, we learned that Peter had been committed to a mental institution for threatening our former manager, Clifford Davis, at gunpoint over sending him royalty cheques that Peter didn’t want to cash.

Danny Kirwan paid us a visit, too, and it was equally sad to see that time had not been kind to him either. Alcoholism had taken its toll, and after his short lived solo career, he’d more or less left music behind. He’d spent time doing odd jobs and had been homeless and itinerant for some time. He kept scratching himself and told us that he was living in a shelter and had contracted ‘worms’. I’ve not seen Danny since.

It was great to be in London with my family, to ride double-decker buses with Amelia and Lucy, who by then had become so used to travelling by limo that the buses were a novelty. After going by private plane to a few select European cities, the press tour was over and it was time to go back home.

Another rude awakening awaited us there when we landed. American immigration realised that John, Chris, John Courage and I were British citizens still working with tourist visas from years back. Tourist visas don’t exactly allow you to work for American corporations and earn money the way we’d been doing. We had never got around to getting our US permanent resident visas, known as Green Cards, but we were going to have to find a way quickly if we stood a chance of fulfilling our touring obligations. Getting it handled quickly and efficiently proved to be a huge hassle. Some of us had misdemeanour marijuana possession arrests on record back in England, which complicated everything, and since Jenny and I were no longer married, if we didn’t take care of it, she and my daughters would be deported along with me.

We did everything we could think of to speed things up, and though we’ll never know if this had any effect, we even played a fundraiser for Senator Birch Bayh, the Democratic committee chairman from Indiana. The only catch was that Jenny and I had to be married in order for us, and our children, to be granted Green Cards, so we had a solemn ceremony in the offices of our lawyer, Mickey Shapiro, with Lindsey acting as my best man and our two daughters as our witnesses.

The house in Topanga, which was going to include a recording studio and all the bells and whistles, still wasn’t finished, so in November 1976, Jenny and I rented a house in Malibu at the Colony, the famed gated community on the beach. Jenny loved it there, because it was more social than the quiet sprawl of Topanga. In the row of thirty or so houses backed up to the beach, she’d run into Diana Ross, whose children played with our children every day on the Rosses’ big trampoline. Diana’s husband managed Ronnie Wood, who lived a few doors down with his wife Krissy and their new baby. Neil Diamond lived close by, too, and could usually be found on his front door step, pencil and paper in hand, writing songs.

We wrapped up the work on our second album as 1976 drew to a close and that’s when John McVie came up with the title–Rumours. John hit the nail on the head as always. By then, given the success of Fleetwood Mac, all eyes in the music business in LA were on us and everyone involved in that business pretended to have the inside scoop on the inner workings of our band. We’d been hearing stories about ourselves for months, most of them so outlandish that we had to laugh. According to this grapevine, every combination of male–female intimate relations were on-going, violent fights were common, Stevie was leaving the band, Christine and Lindsey were running off to start a band together, we were all too addicted to drugs to even play, and Stevie’s devotion to black magic had cursed us all. It was ridiculous, as rumours always are, yet they still hurt when they come back to the source, which they inevitably did. There were multiple times when we called one another to confirm that what we were hearing wasn’t true, such was the tenacity of these stories. John’s title handled all that bullshit with a dose of irony and intrigue. It was perfect.

The first single from Rumours was ‘Go Your Own Way’, its B-side a beautiful song by Stevie called ‘Silver Springs’, and it was released just before Christmas 1976. It became an instant radio hit, going straight to the Top 10. Record stores around the country ordered 800,000 copies of the album for its release in February, based on the popularity of the single, which at the time was the largest order for an album that Warner Brothers had ever received. Our first album had sold four million copies, which was then the company’s best-selling album of all time. Conservative bets had Rumours doubling that figure before long.

With the excitement of Rumours heading up the charts came the endless publicity photographs and press articles. These sessions took place at various photographers’ studios, and one of these–for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine–continued, as so often, through the night. I remember arriving home early the next morning, just before the children got up. Jenny could tell it had been a night of drink and coke, and I was elated. I described the idea we’d had of being photographed in bed together; me and Stevie cuddled up at one end, with Lindsey and Christine together at the other, and John alone reading the paper. The intention was a spoof on the rumours about our private lives, and yet, symbolically, the picture showed us exactly as we were. All married to each other.

But in the course of the session, as I told Jenny in all seriousness, I had realised something vital. ‘Stevie and I have definitely known each other in previous lives,’ I said, before going off to sleep. That image of the two of us cuddling, a large satisfied smile on my face and Stevie giggling beside me would later haunt Jenny for years to come.

As the album sped up the charts we hit the road in March, playing a powerhouse set that consisted of hits from both albums, selling out arenas that held from ten to fifteen thousand. Rumours went platinum by the end of March and everywhere we went crowds of girls dressed like Stevie sang along with her on every song, hanging on her every word. This was just the start, because the album hadn’t even begun to reach its maximum heights. What that album went on to achieve is common knowledge but what is not is the efforts of the sonic masterminds behind it all. Without the patience, dedication and zealous belief in us that Ken Calliat and Richard Dashut shared, Rumours would not have come to be. They were the sixth and seventh members of our band, they made the sound that the world knows as ours come to life in the recorded medium. Along with Lindsey Buckingham and to some degree myself, those two changed the way albums were recorded and they deserve more kudos than these mere words can convey.

A tour supporting the album’s release was already booked and we rehearsed for it on the Studio Instrument Rentals lot, just behind the Seedy Management office. I was there every day, and Jenny would come down with the children from time to time to see how it was going. There was a real buzz in the air and a whirl of activity as every aspect of the stage show was honed, with people rushing around, finalising all the details. We knew we were on to something big this time, even bigger than the last album. I predicted that sales would reach around nine million, an astonishing number. The whole thing felt so huge, so all-absorbing, that I know Jenny felt grateful when I could spare time to be home from my frenetic routine of rehearsing, getting tied up in the office, or making plans to manage Bob Welch’s solo career.

Any moment when we could be like an ordinary couple, seeing friends at our home, was to be treasured. It was a rare thing for us to invite people round for dinner. The people I wanted to see, I saw every day, and the others I would bump into at parties or backstage at a gig. But one evening, when she knew I’d be available, Jenny invited Ronnie Wood over and he brought his old friend Keith Moon, from the Who. It was the very first dinner we’d hosted for friends and it was really enjoyable, because it was a rare occasion when it felt as if we were truly working as a couple. We reminisced with Keith about old times at the Scotch of St James’s club back in the sixties. He told us that night how difficult he found life sometimes. Because he was a funny man, and often very silly, he had built up an image that had grown so large he felt trapped inside it as too often happens to our most gifted entertainers. Everyone expected him to be wild, to be funny, and he couldn’t help but play the part. He was more than that, very introspective, but that element of his personality hardly ever got a look-in, except on rare occasions such as this. Keith didn’t feel the need to be a clown that evening, and the memory of our talk has become more precious and meaningful to me over the years, for it wasn’t long afterwards that he died.

We toured Europe in April of that year. Jenny and the children came with me to London where we played at Wembley Stadium, our first gig back home with the new line-up. Jenny’s sister Pattie came along, with her boyfriend Eric Clapton. It was a huge success. Then we went to Paris, Jenny and the children, my parents Biddy and Mike, and the rest of my family. We stayed at the Hôtel George V, in a magnificent suite with two bedrooms and a huge sitting room, luxuriously furnished with gilded sofas and chairs and enormous French windows. Jenny sat on the window sill, watching Biddy and Mike as they sat beside me, laughing at the almost excessive splendour of the room and then falling about as I pulled two pencils from a pot and knocked one against the other, saying, ‘Look at me. I’ve got all this money because I can hit things with two bits of wood!’ It seemed hilarious and set the tone for a delightful stay in the city.

After Europe we returned home to the West Coast for a moment, then we went back out to tour the Midwest and Northeast. We had toured so much by then, not to mention surviving the strain of making the album, that the only way we could deal with the demands put upon us was by opting for first-class accommodations and transport wherever possible. We’d spent years touring in station wagons, long after we were due for an upgrade, simply because that’s how we always did it. We were late bloomers. We thought it was cool, actually, showing up in a fleet of station wagons that we drove ourselves, rather than a tour bus. But once we realised that we could have a private jet, well then, by God, we had one. We got a taste for travelling in style that has never gone away and so we earned a reputation for it. Our rider was extensive, detailed, and exhaustive: we had fourteen black limos at our beck and call, for a time Stevie wanted her room to be pink with a white piano (we’d often have to hire a crane to lift the piano in through the window), and the list went on. We were pleasantly out of control. I remember trying to downsize those demands on one tour in the 1980s to maximise our profits. The changes I made were hardly going from a plane to a cargo van; I think I cut the number of limos on call and tried to get that piano off the rider, just the upper echelon of excess. John Courage and I talked to everyone before the tour, telling them that we were running a tighter ship on this run so that we’d all have more money in the bank. Everyone agreed–until the tour started. Within weeks, people were complaining. They wanted a car on call outside the hotel. Stevie wanted that pink room. We got way too much flak to try that again.

For years our ‘lifestyle’ bills were a corporate expense. When we went on tour we bought cocaine in bulk and everyone in the band and crew would show up each night at the company canteen. Everyone in the operation, no matter their role, would queue up about half an hour after the show was over, and the rations would be handed out. We even listed the time on our daily tour schedule. Everyone who lined up got their packet. Of course, there would be the begging: ‘I didn’t pick up yesterday, so I should get two today.’ Also those claiming they needed to pick up rations for another member of the entourage. Our tour manager heard it all.

I was in the inner circle so I always had a little extra something, but even I queued up every night. I also knew who amongst our big touring family were more gentle than me and thus more likely to be in possession of unused packets. Many a night, as our after party wound on, I’d find one of them and tap their pockets, looking for a packet.

‘You haven’t fucking used all of your shit,’ I’d say. ‘Now, give it to me.’

No one ever tried that with Stevie or me, because they knew better. The two of us never had spare packets.

These antics earned me the disreputable accolade ‘The King of Toot’, according to all manner of English tabloids in the 1980s. One of them listed the top ten spenders in rock and roll and I came in at number one for the amount I’d spent on cocaine. Paul McCartney was number three for some expensive wall or something that he built on his farm in Scotland. My reputation wasn’t unfounded, but it all stemmed from a game we played with one of our engineers in the studio one night. We tried to figure out how much cocaine I’d done in my life by cutting out a line of average thickness for me. Using that as a guide, we estimated how long a gram would be at that thickness. Then assuming an eight ball–that’s an eighth of an ounce–a day for twenty years, we calculated that one line comprised of all the coke I’d done would be seven miles long. Foolishly I mentioned this in some interview and said that at best it would have measured one loop around Hyde Park. In any case, this mythical line of mine became the fish that got bigger, every time it got away. By the end, it stretched from here to the moon. That was the figure they used in that chart, which estimated that I’d spent $60 million on cocaine.

In the studio, we had a ritual, in which the engineers and band members all started humming a tune–it changed over the years–which would serve as a siren’s call for cocaine, specifically the cocaine that I was invariably holding. The most memorable song was Vangelis’s theme to Chariots of Fire, released in 1981. If I were tuning my drums, say, and anyone in the studio started humming that tune, it would begin. One of them would start, then it would spread until everyone present in need of a toot was humming it and, as if in a trance, I would drop what I was doing and in slow-motion, beckon them over. In homage to the film, I’d make them run to me in slow-motion, then get on their knees and beg, before I’d administer the goods. Anyone in our inner circle knew that if they hummed that song, ‘Uncle Miltie’ would succumb. They called me Uncle Miltie, after the veteran American comedian Milton Berle, because of my toothy smile when under the influence.

Whatever our means and whatever our demands, none of it mattered once Rumours took over the number one spot on 21 May 1977, ousting the Eagles’ Hotel California. It took seven studios, a full year and just over a million dollars. All of the struggle, the cost, and the hard work were validated because our album stayed there for thirty-one straight weeks in America. During that time we stayed on the road, as one single after another was released and rose to the top of the charts.

I remained the band’s acting manager through all of that wonderful chaos and I remember being portrayed by the press as somewhat of a menacing Svengali figure, which was the furthest from the truth. I was the guy who stopped off at the local magic shop to pick up fake blood, or a joke cigar, to keep people laughing when the going got tough. I was the gentle jester, the prankster who kept spirits high, but I understand why the press sometimes saw me differently. I was tired, plain and simple. I was playing two roles in Fleetwood Mac, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. My blood, sweat, and tears was Fleetwood Mac and I refused to trust anyone else with it. Through the years of low record sales and no record sales, through all the ups and downs, this was my way of life and my life’s work. I had taken a vow to see Fleetwood Mac through it, come what may. And absolutely nothing has changed. Aside from the fact that I’m more careful about getting my rest.