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.

Jenny has told me that she felt so stupid, all she could do was search her memory for signs. She remembered that Rolling Stone cover we did, the one where the band was all in bed, and how Stevie was next to me and when I came home from the shoot, I told her, ‘Stevie and I have known each other in another lifetime.’

Jenny stared at me, I stared at her. I’d come clean and that was all I could hold on to. Jenny was in a different place.

‘Mick I’m tired,’ she said. ‘You need to go. I’m going up to bed.’

‘Jenny, wait,’ I said, taking hold of her arm. ‘Don’t do that yet.’

‘Why not, Mick?’

‘I’m confused,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if I want to be with you or with Stevie.’ It may be hard to understand, but I was torn. I was in love with Jenny and the family we shared, but I was also in love with Stevie. It’s not logical but I was entirely of two hearts.

Jenny looked at me, stunned. ‘Mick, are you staying here or going home? Choose one. You can sleep on the sofa. I’m going up to bed.’

I wasn’t content with that, so I followed Jenny around, trying to get her to talk to me as I drank more vodka and dipped into my envelope of powder. There was nothing left to say but I spoke anyway, quite literally until both of us were exhausted. By the time the sun came up we both knew it was finally over. Jenny returned to England with the girls shortly thereafter–this time for good.

By early 1979, most of the songs for the album were in states of semi-completion, and we found that we had more than enough for a single album, so we decided to release it all as a double album. To us, the music was a break from what was expected, but releasing a double album was the type of grandiose, yet intimate gesture that was expected of us. The title track symbolises that message in every way.

The song ‘Tusk’ took quite a while to develop and it nearly didn’t make it out of the studio. We used to call it ‘the riff’, because it was something we would play before shows in the few minutes we had in the dark as we were being announced, so that our sound man, Richard Dashut, could get his levels right. Lindsey had that riff and I would play softly along on the drums, with John on the bass, and that was the origins of what became ‘Tusk’. The original refrain was something we’d play for less than a minute. But we did it the same way every night because we liked it, so we tried to make it into something more in the studio. Richard even created a loop of it to get the ball rolling, but nothing ever came of it. In the end, the inspiration that made ‘Tusk’ the song it is now came from a very unexpected place.

After my father’s death, my sister Sally took my mother to Barfleur, a beautiful fishing village in the north of France that Mum always loved. We all missed Dad, and I was looking forward to joining them and spending time with Biddy; it was the first occasion I’d been able to do so since Dad’s death. When I arrived off the long flight from Los Angeles to Paris, I was at the pinnacle of my rock star excess so, naturally, I hired a long white limo to drive me to this very small, quiet village. I’d had my share of drinks on the plane and continued to imbibe throughout the remainder of the journey, which is just shy of four hours. By the time I arrived, I was pretty well gone and I remember being taken by the full moon that night, and walking around taking Polaroids of everything.

When the exhaustion of the trip and all I’d had to drink hit me, it was quite late, so I went up to my bedroom to sleep. I drifted off for what felt like five minutes. Perhaps it was, because I was awoken early in the morning by a brass band playing directly under my window. I had a bracing hangover, so I was relieved when the band moved along and the sound of their horn section faded away. I’d just got back to sleep when, lo and behold, there they were again, before once more drifting off into the distance.

I slipped back into sleep, hoping that it was all some kind of jet-lag-fuelled bad dream, until I was woken up yet again by their return another thirty minutes later. I now realised that this band was very real and they weren’t going away, in fact they were probably returning every half-hour, on the hour, until the end of time. Since I couldn’t beat them, I did the only sensible thing and joined them.

I opened the shutters, winced at the light, and went out to the veranda. A few feet below me, I saw the entire village dancing in the streets. They were following the band. It was a festival for a local saint and everyone was involved in the party; generations of families, from the elderly in wheelchairs to the children, all of them dancing, the adults drinking Calvados and wine. The brass band was the Pied Piper that no one could resist. I was completely taken, and I was an outsider; I grabbed the remainder of my bottle of Beaujolais from the night before and went down to join in. We did loops round the town along the one main road for the rest of the morning. Each time we did a circuit, we gathered more people, until there was a proper Mardi Gras in the street.

That joyous, irresistible cacophony is what I heard when I listened to that loop of ‘the riff’. I wanted to capture the energy, that sense of community, and the gala created by that band in Barfleur. I realised that brass was exactly the catalyst that would make ‘the riff’ a proper song. Beyond that, I saw greater possibilities. This needed scope, it had to be vast, and it needed a natural echo. It also required a sense of communal elation. Here is how I saw it: we needed a huge marching band and we needed them, and the song, in Dodger Stadium. Visualising even further, after we committed that to tape, I imagined us recreating it on tour every night via a local marching band in each city. My bandmates thought I had lost my mind when I shared my plan. They had no idea why I would want to take ‘the riff’ to that extreme, but they let me try.

Our dear friend Judy Wong knew someone who worked for Dodger Stadium and from that inroad we made plans to record ‘the riff’ with the USC Trojans marching band. We had 112 players playing it live in an empty stadium, capturing the locomotive emotion of that piece of music in all its glory. We filmed it and it’s all right there in the video we released for the track. My favourite quirk of it all is that John McVie wasn’t present, but he was there. He’d recorded his part, so beautifully as always, and was done and gone. John is a perfectionist and in my opinion one of the greatest bass players alive. He’s under-rated too, because he’s English and humble and he’d never brag. I’m not joking; I’ve seen him come close to assaulting one of our producers for complimenting him on his playing to a degree that he deemed inappropriate. But I’m going to do it and he can come at me anytime he likes. John McVie is one of the elite. He’s up there with the best of all time; he’s one of the most sublime, gifted and nuanced bass players anyone could ever hope to hear. James Jamerson, John Paul Jones, John McVie–I can’t think of anyone else who deserves to be in that class.

Because John is so good, he’d done all his parts on Tusk and had made plans to sail his boat to Hawaii and then the South Pacific by the time we got round to filming in Dodger Stadium, so he was off and away. In his place, we had a life-sized cardboard cut-out of him, and Christine and I took turns walking him around and placing him wherever we went. I do wish John had been there that day, because we had so much fun. The marching band did their thing, Stevie did a baton performance, and it could not have been more over-the-top. It was musically and emotionally the absolute mirror of what we were doing and who we were.

Apart from the inspiration for Tusk, that Barfleur trip was also meaningful to me because I had dinner with my mother at a little restaurant on the harbour, just the two of us, and for the first time we spoke about my father, not just as Dad, but as the man he was. We talked about his life and about all that he accomplished, as well as the many things he bemoaned not doing. For the first time, I realised just how much I am like him in that way, and it wasn’t an easy revelation.

I torture myself; in fact, in my mind, I’m still fighting things that I’ve claimed have long been put to bed. My father was like that. He didn’t appreciate what he had done to the degree that he should have and he focused too much on what else he could have done. I’ve often felt that what I’ve done in Fleetwood Mac doesn’t amount to much and that I could have done more. Along those lines of logic, I tell myself that I know I’ve played on the songs and I’m a part of them, but I didn’t write them. I’ve woken up feeling as if I’ve done nothing compared to my musical compatriots. I don’t have a song that I can point to. But in recent years I’ve realised that I do. All of it, everything I’ve done for the band, is the song.

In the end, $1.4 million later, we delivered our twenty-song master mix of Tusk to Warner Brothers, at which point they completely freaked out. Mo Ostin and the team told us flatly that we were insane to want to release a double album and from a business standpoint they were right; in the wake of punk, music fans had started spending less on records. High fidelity wasn’t as important and swapping tapes, rather than buying records, was more in vogue. Warner Brothers weren’t sure they could sell our album at a price high enough to recoup our advance and move the kind of units they wanted to sell.

I say this without hesitation; as a band we really didn’t give a shit. Not at all. By then we had committed to our vision and the ensuing record and no one was going to change our minds. Our record company came up with a few advertising and marketing plans to try to draft Tusk into the existing Fleetwood Mac image and story, but none of them really worked. They had to accept that this was the record we had made and we were going to support, in the way we wanted to do it.

Tusk came out in September 1979 as a double album, priced at $16, which was very steep for the day. The label figured that we had to sell about 500,000 records to break even. In the end we sold four million, but not before Tusk was considered a commercial and critical failure. Keep in mind that any other band selling that many would have been considered a unanimous success, but given Rumours’ sales were then into the double-digit millions and still climbing, four million seemed anaemic. Not to us; we were completely fine with it. Considering the artistic leap of faith involved, I saw it as a huge success.

Personally, I think we would have sold more if our record company hadn’t agreed to let Westwood One radio broadcast our album in its entirety in England on the day of release. In my opinion, that allowed it to be recorded on cassette and duplicated–essentially it was avowed piracy long before digital media was even a spark in the eye. I can’t be angry about it, because I know exactly what I would have done if I were a fan. Given that chance to capture the album for free, or go buy it the next day for well above the average price of a record, the choice is clear.

Tusk itself proved to be an album way ahead of its time. Most of the critics who panned it, and didn’t understand it, have come back and admitted they were wrong, and a generation of musicians half our age single out that album as a defining inspiration, alongside albums like Pet Sounds. Tusk is unique and honest and singular of vision.

I know I’ve thrown kudos Lindsey’s way every chance I get, because he deserves it and he needs to hear it. For years he didn’t receive enough credit and I’m not talking necessarily about Tusk. I’m referring to all the work he did crafting Stevie’s songs, watching her become this iconic creature within our play, as he remained the workhorse in the background, when he must have been thinking, Bloody hell, doesn’t anyone realise who is really doing this? I know it was hard for him, continuing on that way after he and Stevie had split up, and he has bemoaned it in plenty of interviews over the years.

Lindsey had to wear two hats in the band and I, most of all, understood how hard that was because I did, too. Similarly, I often wondered if any of the others even noticed or understood what I’d had to do to get us to where we were and to keep us there. It was tough, because it felt inappropriate to admit that to them; I felt like a child craving attention, and though I was aware of this irrational need, that knowledge didn’t make it go away. My unrewarded labour was more academic though, while Lindsey’s was more creative, yet I always had empathy for his position because I felt myself to be in the same boat.

Tusk has become a legendary song and one that served to establish the sense of community that I hoped it would, though not in the way I originally planned. The marching band element has remained the connective tissue, however, because from time to time I have gone and marched with the USC Marching Band at the invite of Dr. Bartner, the musical director of the band. We also had the band there when we recorded the song for The Dance at our reunion show. But nothing was better than the first time we played Tusk–we did it live with them at the L.A. Forum and it was a spectacle. We were on the stage and we had the whole band up there with us, as the white horses that escort them onto the field at home games came galloping down the aisles. It was complete lunacy, with baton twirlers making their way through the audience and these gorgeous horses galloping in full stride. We’ll be playing the newly renovated and reopened Forum on this upcoming tour I’d love to see the USC players join us there again, though I’d wager that recreating that original spectacle falls quite outside the rules and regulations of the freshly manicured facility.

We have good memories and a wonderful relationship with the USC Band, and that song of course, though I did nearly blow it completely. In 1998, Dr. Barnter asked me to come down and join the band, as I’d done before and I was happy to do so. USC was playing Notre Dame, which is a long standing rivalry and an annual college football tradition. And that day, completely oblivious, I showed up with a green sweater on, which is the team colour of Notre Dame, not USC. I was quickly informed but there was nothing I could do really, I had no other clothes with me. So off I went, leading the home team’s band onto the field where we did a stirring rendition of Tusk while wearing the opposing team’s colours. Lynn, who found the entire episode endlessly entertaining, told me recently that footage of this moment can be found on YouTube for those of you interested in seeing this gaff in all its glory.

The entire day was a comedy of errors, really. Like an inappropriate jester, I lead the band in the wrong colour, then figured things would turn around because Lynn, my manager Carl and his wife Erica and I were promised ‘excellent seats’ by Dr. Bartner. The other three had been seated while I did my thing, so after I was done, I left the field, escorted by someone from USC, excited to meet them and at least enjoy the game. Following this guy, I began climbing. And climbing. And climbing. And climbing. After a ten minute ascent, during which I was convinced I’d have a heart attack, I arrived at our seats, which were, and I’m not exaggerating at all, in the very top row of the L.A. Coliseum. That arena holds 100,000 people, was built for the 1984 Olympics and is one of the largest stadiums of its type in the country if not the world. I went from being on the field to being five thousand feet in the air, barely able to see it, piled in with the sold out masses. I sent Carl on a mission to procure better seats but it wasn’t happening, there were literally none to be had. We all had to laugh, because I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, but it felt like I’d been penalised for turning up in green. I’ve learned from my crime and have since struck Notre Dame green from my wardrobe altogether for fear of making that mistake again.

We set out on a year-long tour of North America, the Pacific and Europe in support of Tusk. We wanted to play in the Soviet Union, but that wasn’t to be. That tour, in my opinion, was the very height of our touring at the top of excess. We had a team of karate experts as our security guards, a full-time Japanese masseuse, our catering was supplied by top-notch California chefs, and it usually went uneaten. We had our own airliner and we booked the best hotel suites around the world. We had rooms in those hotels repainted in advance of our arrival, specifically for Stevie and Christine. We had a huge cocaine budget and the usual fleet of limos waiting for us at every port of call. It was fabulously expensive, wonderful, and sometimes depraved. But in the end, it wasn’t a good time because more than ever, our musical family was as distant from each other offstage as our music was intimate on stage. To be frank, that tour nearly killed the band.

When we set out, it was to a mixed bag of reviews. In England the song ‘Tusk’ went to the top of the charts, but not so in America and elsewhere. Our performances were great, because the music was, but at every turn the press asked us the hard questions: ‘Are you breaking up after this album?’ ‘Is Stevie making a solo record?’ ‘Who is Sara?’ And on and on they went. I played my role the best I could, as the spokesman, typically after a sleepless night or three.

We toured the album through until spring 1980, and our shows, especially by the end, were the best and worst anyone would ever see of Fleetwood Mac. By then we were dead tired, burned-out and just sick of it all, but doing our best. We would run the gamut from inspired to flaccid each night and we never knew quite which it was going to be until we got a few songs in. By the end of it, Stevie’s voice was a ruin and Lindsey had pulled his back out so badly that he needed a spinal tap. During the last shows of that tour, Lindsey told our audiences that it would be a long time before we toured again. Boy, was he right.