CHAPTER 18

MY PARTNER, MY FRIEND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Mick, what’s wrong?’ she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During the time it was open, I met Christopher Rocancourt, a conman who went by the name of Christopher de Laurentiis, Christopher de la Renta and many other fake names in his day. If he were speaking with Hollywood or music industry people he’d claim to be the son or nephew of famed film producer Dino De Laurentiis, if he were speaking with fashion industry people he would claim to be the nephew of famed designer Oscar de la Renta, and eventually when he fled to the East Coast and began to swindle socialites, old monied families and Wall Street financiers, he referred to himself as Christopher Rockefeller, claiming to be an heir to the most powerful family of industrial, political and banking magnates in American history. When I heard about that I found it hilarious that none of those people who believed him to be a Rockefeller ever questioned the fact that he was French and spoke with a thick French accent.

By the time I met him, when he was in his twenties, Christopher was already a successful lifelong conman. From what I understand he had made over a million by forging the deed to a building and then selling it to someone illegally in France. He then came to the United States where he used that money and dozens of aliases to create a mirage to swindle countless people out of a tremendous amount of money, before he was caught and thrown in jail.

He would convince rich people to invest with him, promising them a quick return and double their investment, by spending tons of money on lavish dinners and cocktail parties for them. He always paid in cash, was very likable and charming and was always very well appointed so everyone believed the lie.

We met him at the restaurant, and soon he was serenading my parters and I, saying he wanted to buy the place and save it so that we could get our liquor license under a new corporate entity. He was residing at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in the most unbelievable suite and was driven around in a succession of Rolls Royce limousines. Whenever we would go by the hotel to see him, we’d find him entertaining all manner of high profile actors and directors at the bar, having meetings about various projects of theirs he was interested in producing. My partners and I got completely stung–we even asked after him with the maitre d’ and manager of the hotel all of whom verified that he was Dino de Laurentiis’ son. After that we never questioned him.

Eventually it all came out but to the end, the guy always had a story. At the time I wasn’t very well off, after my divorce from Sara and two bankruptcies, so I wanted to believe all that he promised me. Christopher would tell me,‘Mickey, you’re going to have everything you want. You’ll have a big apartment. I have one on Wilshire Boulevard–you can live there until you can buy your own.’

He took me down there in his big Rolls Royce to show me the place, and it was gorgeous, so I told him that Lynn and I would love to move in. I even met the people who were moving out of the apartment, but of course nothing ever came of it.

The entire time, until Christopher fled LA for the East Coast, I was schmoozing him, believing that he was going to save the restaurant and my financial situation as well. He and I became friends and spent a lot of time together, going shopping and having dinner and as you do when you want to woo someone in business, I picked up the tab more often than not, to show him my good intentions. This of course was all part of his plan and how he got things from people. One day we were out in a shop and I saw that he loved this eel skin briefcase and so to gain good favor I bought it for him. The amount of money he was planning to put in the restaurant was massive, so this was a trifle–although for me at the time, it was an issue. I could hardly afford to be buying eel skin briefcases at the drop of a hat but anything he wanted I got for him.

I also ended up paying for a trip to Austin, Texas that he and Joe and I took, ostensibly to scout locations for a second branch of Fleetwood’s once he bought it. When we got down there he had a helicopter on stand by and a few real estate agents present to show us spaces and then afterwards, farms and mansions since he insisted that I’d need to live down there during the opening. So off we went to tour these mansions and see a few massive farms outside of town from the comfort of the helicopter. One of them was absolutely stunning and Christopher said he’d buy it and just let me live on it as long as I liked. I thought I was in like Flynn.

As these things do, his con came apart eventually. My partners at the restaurant tired of the endless excuses as to why the money we needed to keep going wasn’t arriving from him. Christopher was always about to get the cheque, waiting for it to be approved by a bank in Switzerland or waiting for his father to sign off on it. We’d get concerned, have a meeting with him and he’d tell us it was just a small delay and that he’d bring us some cash to float us in the meantime. This went on for months. One time, Joe McNulty was supposed to receive a large brown bag full of money, and waited literally ten hours for it to arrive. Christopher’s con was very extensive and I don’t know how he did it, but he had Joe on the phone with all manner of people in Switzerland supposedly at his bank, confirming everything he was saying. It was unbelievably clever.

That bank scam is how he got his operating money I’m quite sure. He was duping loads of wealthy people and then using their money to live on and keep the scam going. One of the last times I saw him, when I began to suspect that it was all over and that he’d never invest with us, I was driving him back to the Beverly Wilshire and he picked up these Armani sunglasses that I’d bought for Lynn who had left them in my car. At this point I still believed that Christopher was who he said he was, but didn’t believe that he wanted to invest anymore. Lynn really loved those glasses and they were a present from me but I was such a whore, holding out that we may still have a chance through Christopher. So when he picked up the glasses and said he liked them and that they looked good on him, I told him he could have them. I figured I’d just buy Lynn another pair.

Lynn wasn’t okay with that, she loved the glasses primarily because they were a gift from me, and she said that if I bought her another pair it wouldn’t be the same. So to make amends I promised her that I’d get them back. It had begun to get a little strange with Christopher, not just with us but with other people around town from what we were hearing but he was still keeping up appearances. When I got to the hotel and went up to his suite however, he had a guy sitting outside that looked like a Mafia hit man. He was there alone in the hallway and I could see that he had a gun in his jacket, which wasn’t quite a garden-variety thing in the Beverly Wilshire. The thuggish guard let me into the suite, which was this marble Scarface type ordeal. I couldn’t see Christopher so I called out and from the bathroom he beckoned me to come in. I entered to find him in a bubble bath, smoking a cigar and sipping a glass of champagne like Marilyn Monroe. He hopped out completely naked, got into a robe, went into the living room and launched into a maniacal rant about my partners. They had threatened him, and having the connections that they had, I’m quite sure Christopher was taking it very, very seriously. He blamed me for it and kept saying, ‘Mickey I thought you loved me.’ Then his tone switched like a light and he began to tell me that he wasn’t afraid of them or of anyone because of all of the guns he had and how tough he was. I tried to be like a father figure and calm him down but it didn’t work. All I wanted was the sunglasses back, but there I was with Christopher going mad, raving on about this gang war he intended to have with my partners. Before I knew it he’d pulled out a .357 Magnum from the top drawer of the dresser, and I glimpsed a collection of other guns in there as well.

‘I’ve got the shit, too, I’m not afraid of them,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to hear shit from anybody! All of you can shut up and leave me alone!’

That was my cue to exit, and for the record I never got the sunglasses back. Christopher went to jail of course, but he was the kind of guy that if I saw him again I’d probably forgive him. What he did was so out there that it bordered on genius the way he had everyone going. I got what I deserved. I believed that money was going to drop out of the sky for me in my time of need, so I was the fool. I was ripe for the picking.

While the restaurant was open we also met some of the first Russians with money to come over to LA and get into business. It’s debatable which side of the line they were on but Joe and I were interested in talking to anyone that might be able to help us save the restaurant. One was a business man who invited us over to Russia to meet his people in Moscow and to be involved in a few ventures they had going, the primary one being the import of pure bottled glacier water from the mountains of Tajikistan. Another was to start a club and restaurant for the well-to-do in Moscow because there wasn’t anything like that there at the time. That is where we came in because we had a degree of expertise in that area. Expertise wasn’t exactly necessary for the various transactions we were being offered, however. The Russians we met asked us to broker all manner of deals. They wanted us to sell military submarines to a few of their South American contacts. Not exactly a continent known for it’s military power, I can only surmise that such vessels would have been used for, shall we say, clandestine transport of goods. We were also offered tanks, jets, and just about anything else that a carpet bagger businessman with money to spend might want.

Before I knew it I was in Moscow. In those days the Russian government allowed American currency to be used there so the dollar was king and many entrepreneurs went over to test the waters at that time, Joe and I being two of them. We spent weeks in Moscow and had incredible adventures just when the place had opened itself to the rest of the world. A lot of it felt like spy stuff because most of the businessmen we met were ex-KGB. It’s a well known fact that Putin is one of them, because all of those guys still run the country and it’s no different than it was before.

Back then there was at least an aspiration to do things differently. Every business plan was a joint venture, as they called them, with the Russians providing the markets and the foreign entrepreneurs providing the products and experience. One of the businesses we were made moves to start was a Tajik airline. We even found a 747 up in moth balls in Santa Barbara for the Russians to buy. We had Tajik Airlines printed on the side but that was as far as it went. Neither the plane nor the business ever left the ground but we had that plane for a while because we believed we were going to start an airline there in Tajikistan.

I remember going down back streets in Moscow to meet people who could ‘make things happen’ who took us to see properties that would become a club where foreign and local businessmen could meet. Of course it’s now common knowledge that doing business in Russia is treacherous. They tend to do business with foreign partners and then tell them to fuck off, keeping their money and shared assets. It’s still happening; there are very few people who survive doing business with Russians.

But there we were, in some kind of Klondike Gold Rush, this one just as dangerous, though we didn’t realise it to the extent we should of. I remember on one occasion being in one of the few existing businessmen’s discotheques and that place was wild. There were women of the night everywhere, whatever you wanted was available for purchase, and there was a tangibly present criminal element. Joe and I were sitting at a table with our guide who warned us to keep to ourselves no matter what happened.

Joe got really drunk and I did too and he is the most friendly person in the world, even more so after a few rounds. We were sitting near these girls and one of them told Joe her handbag had been stolen. Joe rightly figured it was the guy next to her, and was about to intervene. I told him not to get involved, but he wasn’t about to listen. Before he said anything, the girl got a better look at the guy and realised she should just leave it. She told Joe not to ask for it back but he wasn’t listening to her either. I took a long look at the guy and could immediately tell he was pretty fucking heavy, plus I had a clear view of the gun in his belt. I nearly leapt across the table, got in Joe’s ear and told him he’d better back the fuck off because the guy had a gun. That sobered Joe up and he let it go. But the guy had noticed us talking about him and began to get pissed off. He made a scene giving the bag back to the girl, and stood there boldly as she opened it and found it completely empty. No one said a word. Mick and Joe, welcome to Moscow.

One thing I intended to do on that trip was visit an antiques market I’d heard of because at the time the Russians were selling valuable art work and ancient religious icons to anyone interested. These were pieces that had been taken from churches and at first that wasn’t considered a crime by the government. I found out where to go and a cab driver from our hotel brought me there and waited for me while I did my shopping. We had been advised to always keep our valuables close, including our passports and visas, so I put all of those documents plus about five thousand dollars in cash in my rucksack and went down in my full length fur coat to buy some art, hardly fitting in, looking like a rockstar I’m sure. I found a stall full of antiques in this open air flea market manned by all these young dudes. I thought it was a bit weird that this group of young guys had collected all of this great art, and even weirder that they all spoke perfect English.

I started talking to them about the religious icons in their collection and the next thing I knew they recognised me, saying, ‘You’re Fleetwood Mac!’ They were all about 22, so it was pretty wild that they even knew the band, having grown up when the country was Communist and entirely closed to the West. It was even more awesome and bizarre when they began referencing the Peter Green years. I was amazed and thrilled and really taken in–which I suppose is what they wanted–because as I now know, while I was distracted and talking, one of them was relieving me of the contents of my rucksack.

I can only assume that my driver had tipped them off as to who I was, but I still don’t know how they knew about Peter Green, because they really knew their stuff, naming songs and albums and everything. In any case, I bought a couple of icons from them which I still have, and I’m lucky that I got them when I did because soon afterwards the government shut that down and made the possession and export of such objects punishable by jail time.

I wandered around a bit more, and by the time I was ready to leave, finally realised that the load in my sack had gotten much lighter. I was like a lorry driver in a cartoon who doesn’t realise that his cargo is falling off with each and every turn until he arrives at his destination. That was me, blissfully parading around, losing precious possessions with each passing minute. For the sake of security I’d brought all those things with me, only to have them pilfered inside of an hour right under my nose. I can’t say with certainty that the cab driver was in on it, but when I told him what had happened, he went into the market and got my passport and visa back quite quickly. Well, at least I got my icons.

I’d learned to travel young and obviously I don’t like to ever be bored. I was used to a high level of drama being in and running the band, so to me, stories like these explain who I am. I was never frightened to go on the craziest of adventures. I don’t know what the motivation is exactly, but it’s there within me and it certainly is poetic at its best, foolish at its worst. I consider it akin to going on hunting expeditions, or mountaineering, my drive has the same adventurous spirit. I’ve just always liked to pick up and go on trips that no one in their right mind would go on.

When we were first together, Lynn and I lived in a home in Encino. She worked for Orion Pictures, but in reality she spent more time looking after me and my life, and eventually she left her job to do just that. We were very much equal partners, because while I paid the rent, Lynn was paying her own way. I was still in the process of being divorced from Sara, but it wasn’t complete. There was a time when Sara harassed Lynn by calling our home, leaving messages for me from ‘your wife’, and saying cruel things about Lynn on our answering machine. Sara was hurt and felt betrayed, after she found out that Lynn and I had been together when she and I were separated. It was hard for me; I understood Sara’s distress and out of guilt, I let the calls happen. Eventually, Sara stopped lashing out and the calls ceased.

Lynn started to wonder if our relationship would ever grow or if it would simply remain in this type of limbo. She didn’t think I was emotionally through with Sara, so she broke it off with me.

‘I don’t know what it is, Mick,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s that Sara got sober and you didn’t, and now you are, but you’re hanging on to something. You’re not even divorced. I can’t be with you until you’ve figured that out.’

I was in Las Vegas playing a show with the Blue Whale, my blues band with guitarist Ron Thompson, bassist Bill Campbell and percussionist Oliver Brown, when I made up my mind and called her.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Lynn Frankel,’ I said. ‘I want to marry you.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

There was a long silence.

‘There’s something we have to do first,’ she said.

‘Anything.’

‘We have to date.’

‘What do you mean, sweetheart?’

‘We have to date. We never dated. You have to pick me up and take me out, then take me home and go back to your hotel. We never had a courtship, we spent it all in my apartment. You have to date me and I have to date you.’

‘Well, then let’s do it.’

So that’s what we did: I’d pick her up and drop her off and sometimes not even go inside. We had a lovely, formal courtship. It lasted only a few weeks, but it was important and it was a lot of fun. Our relationship deserved it and things felt different between us immediately. It erased whatever trust issues Lynn had about my feelings for her and allowed us to begin anew.

We moved back in together and set about planning our wedding. At the time I was in the throes of the mini-Mac, and since we were going to be in Europe, Lynn and I decided we’d marry in Italy. She got all the paperwork sorted and we chose a city, but then she came down with a horrible flu and couldn’t fly. So we looked at the tour dates again, and the Blue Whale was booked to play the Harley-Davidson Love Ride Convention at the Colorado Belle Hotel in Laughlin, Nevada. We thought that would be perfect–too kitschy to be true. The hotel had a riverboat for weddings that held eighty people and came complete with a minister, plastic flowers, the works.

Lynn told her family, and her mother and brother made plans to come out, as did her biological father. Lynn thought her father wouldn’t be able to make it, because it was short notice and he was in the middle of a very intense business negotiation. So I called him and asked properly for her hand in marriage, and told him how much it would mean to Lynn to have him walk her down the aisle. He agreed to come and Lynn was incredibly happy.

We got to Laughlin and did the gig to throngs of all these Harley people and it was wild. We made the mistake of checking in under the name Fleetwood, which resulted in calls up to the room all night from fans carrying on downstairs in the hotel bar. Eventually we had to ask the front desk to hold all our calls, so we could get some rest before the ceremony. Everything was in order on the boat and just as we were walking back to the hotel to go to our separate rooms and get dressed, we saw Lynn’s brother out in front of the hotel, crying. Lynn’s father had flown to Vegas the night before, but had suffered a heart attack and passed away during the night. Time stopped. We literally did not believe it to be true.

We were eventually married a few months later, on 26 July 1995 when the mini-Mac came to New York City. We had an afternoon ceremony at Tavern on the Green in Central Park and it was lovely. Then we set about building our life together, which continued to be a non-stop series of adventures that left the two of us both awestruck and giddy.

One such adventure, for which I can thank the Clinton administration, was the trip I took to Cuba with the Music Bridges Foundation. My partner Todd Smallwood who wrote and sang on the Mick Fleetwood Band album Something Big helped organise the event and he did a great job. In the end a really wild and creative bunch went down, everyone from Burt Bacharach, to me, to Bonnie Raitt, Gladys Knight, Woody Harrelson and Don Was. It was truly, as the event intended to be (and probably why the Clinton administration okayed the venture) a bridge between the two countries on a purely artistic level. Art, music, writing and poetry can make those connections regardless of politics, and that is exactly what happened. The premise was that artists from the U.S. and Cuba would meet for two weeks and collaborate, which we did. Lynn and I and the rest of the American cultural emissaries were put up in this fabulous old Havana hotel, a gorgeous place that had retained all the grace of Cuba’s heyday in the 40s and 50s. Each of us musicians were paired with a Cuban counterpart, with whom we wrote music and recorded it in this portable studio they had installed in a few suites at the end of the hall. The culmination of our efforts was a concert, and the celebration of yet another bridge between the US and Cuba: baseball. The Baltimore Orioles were flown in to play against a top Cuban team as part of the festivities.

It was an extension of the olive branch by the Clinton Administration and it was very profound. We got to watch the game, have an audience with Fidel Castro, the whole lot, and my wife Lynn was there with me through all of it. She was the greatest partner in that way: no matter what kind of crazy scenario I volunteered myself for, she was my co-pilot all the way, ready to pack her bag and go with me at the drop of a hat.

Cuba is just 80 miles away from the US and it amazed me how much their culture has remained untouched, even after the United States’ direct influence and intervention into their country. Somehow it’s all survived, perhaps a little worse for wear, but completely intact and out of time. It’s one of the most romantic and musical places I’ve ever been and the spirit of the people there nearly took my breath away. Havana was full of old and glamorous hotels, gorgeous classic cars from the 50s and music literally oozed from every nook and cranny. I’d drive by school kids, impeccable in their uniforms, waiting for their bus, all of them singing songs together, some of them banging on whatever bit of metal or wood lay nearby by way of percussion.

It was everything I’d imagined it to be, and what I’d envisioned when I read Ernest Hemingway’s works. I made a point to visit the hotel where he lived while writing in Cuba and I was allowed to see his actual room, which is closed off from the public. My guide even left me there for a few minutes. I closed the door, looked out the window at Ernest’s view, then lay on his bed and did my best to absorb that moment. Of all the things I’ve been allowed to do on account of my renown with Fleetwood Mac, I consider that one of the greatest.

Again, that trip wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for President Clinton, with whom Fleetwood Mac has had a longstanding and wonderful relationship. When President Clinton left office in 2001, Fleetwood Mac was asked to play a surprise going away party that the First Lady had planned for him. I’ll never know if he knew about it or not but it seemed like he didn’t. We agreed to play of course, since we’d played the inauguration, and we were meant to be yet another surprise on top of the surprise party.

We arrived that afternoon with our touring crew and friends, all in all an entourage of about 30, and to keep us out of sight, we were escorted to the West Wing and given complete run of the place. It was a huge honor, too much fun, and to say the least quite surreal. We were allowed to wander all over ostensibly the most important and powerful halls of any building in the world. The lot of us couldn’t believe it; we took pictures of bedrooms, meeting rooms, and my manager Carl and I snuck around and opened every single door we encountered. Behind one of them was a remarkable library-like sitting room lined in portraits of all of the former Presidents. We had to take a moment and sit in there, just soaking in all of the history and majesty of where we were.

Our group being a traveling rock band, I have to admit that events occurred that I’m quite sure do not fall within the White House code of conduct for guests. Rest assured that nothing was damaged, defaced or stolen, but suffice to say that some good-natured naughtiness was had by a few of our troupe. And though we felt like we had complete freedom and were utterly on our own, we most certainly were not. Spend any time at all in the White House and you’ll learn quickly that there are cameras everywhere and everything is observed–if tolerated–at all times. There’s no knowing what else those cameras recorded, and I for one will never tell.

The tents and tables for the festivities were set up outside on the lawn, and after we got dressed in the West Wing we were brought around behind the main tent so that no one would see us. The party got under way, there were speeches and we were kept out of sight, our instruments hidden behind a second curtain that concealed the stage. The proceedings were running behind schedule which was fine, we were all ready, me looking like Mr. Rumours with my balls and my tights on. Then a bit more time passed, until finally we were told that stage time was just a few minutes off. The only problem was that I’d had a few drinks during the delay and suddenly realised that I’d never make it through the set without first taking a pee. I looked around for a portable toilet but saw none, and gathered that returning to the White House, which was a few hundred yards away, wasn’t an option.

The closest toilet was only accessible through the audience, but that was an impossibility because Fleetwood Mac playing was intended to be a surprise and no one was going to miss me, at my height, winding through the audience like a wandering minstrel with wooden balls hanging off my crotch.

Not knowing what else to do, my manager Carl walked over to the nearest guard, who was in fatigues armed with a machine gun.

‘Sorry to bother you, but Mr. Fleetwood has to pee and we don’t see a bathroom back here,’ he said. ‘Do you have any ideas?’

It didn’t look like it but clearly the guy was mic’ed, and home base was listening. He never acknowledged Carl, just looked at him briefly. Then he put his finger to his ear, and said: ‘Mr. Fleetwood is clear to piss on the White House lawn, sir.’

The guard then escorted me to the back of the tent, took me outside and let me do my business, free as a bird in the wind, out into the night on the most famous lawn in America.

We went on stage as soon as I returned and it was a great evening. President Clinton was thrilled and that time along with every other experience I’ve had with the Clintons has been fantastic. They came to see us in St. Louis on our last tour and before the show ended I made sure to acknowledge them and say goodnight because I knew they planned to leave before the encores. Over the years, Bill Clinton has sent things to us to sign and we sent him some gold records to decorate his office after he left the White House. He always responded with gracious letters of thanks in return, which I treasure. Several times over the years I’ve also sent him drum skins that I’ve asked him to sign, and he always has, returning them with another little letter. We book ended his administration and I could not be prouder to have done so for such a great man. Above and beyond him being President, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as intelligent, focused and charming. He is the type of person who always remembered everyone’s name, the names of their children, and details of the last time that he has seen you. It goes above and beyond any preparation that his staff can do for him, it is just who he is. As a parting gift, the Clintons sent everyone in the Fleetwood Mac family a framed platinum record plaque that contained every single album that the band ever put out, with a notation of total sales and a letter from Hilary, Chelsea and Bill thanking us for being a part of the Clinton White House. I can’t think of anything more indicative of who they are as people than that.

As much as we loved our adventures, Lynn and I wanted to settle in one place and start a family, so we moved from L.A. to Maui and in 2002, we had two beautiful twin daughters, Ruby and Tessa. Though we are parting now, Lynn and I, as much as we possibly can, remain the best of friends, with our gorgeous girls as our main priority. We were partners and co-conspirators and the times we had were unbelievably and impossibly fun. The stories I’ve shared here are but a small sample, believe me. And though what we are going through now is hard, I hope that the best of us is what we both carry forth in our hearts in the years to come, because what we were together deserves that.