Warner Bros
Produced by Fleetwood Mac, Ken Caillat, Richard Dashut
Released: February 1977

TRACKLISTING

01 Second Hand News

02 Dreams

03 Never Going Back Again

04 Don’t Stop

05 Go Your Own Way

06 Songbird

07 The Chain

08 You Make Loving Fun

09 I Don’t Want to Know

10 Oh Daddy

11 Gold Dust Woman

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you already know that Rumours is Fleetwood Mac’s break-up album. The two couples in the band had split up prior to recording the album, but for the sake of the band they kept it all together, aided by the complete annual illegal production of Bolivia. All of the salacious rumours certainly add to the charms of Rumours but gossip alone would not have made it such a wildly successful album. It’s the unique chemistry in Fleetwood Mac and the craftsmanship in songwriting and production that makes Rumours the most perfect pop record of all time.

Fleetwood Mac was always a curious ensemble. Drummer Mick Fleetwood and bass player John McVie were blues players, veterans of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Their partnership was based around supporting guitar virtuosos like Peter Green, who gave them their first hit, the instrumental ‘Albatross’. Singer/pianist Christine Perfect, whose background was also in the blues, married McVie and joined the Mac in 1970. For the next few years the group slowly mutated into a conventional rock band and in December ’74, at Fleetwood’s instigation, they hired the Californian pop duo and couple Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. To everyone’s surprise, the mixture of British blues and light pop proved to be a winning formula.

The 1975 album Fleetwood Mac vaulted the group to superstardom but across the next 18 months it also saw both the McVie marriage and the Nicks/Buckingham relationship fall apart. After a decade of relentless touring, poverty and anonymity, Fleetwood Mac the group was too much to sacrifice for the sake of romantic turmoil. ‘We had two alternatives – go our own ways and see the band collapse, or grit our teeth and carry on playing with each other,’ Christine McVie told Johnny Black. ‘Normally, when couples split, they don’t have to see each other again. We were forced to get over those differences.’

There were no songs ready when sessions for Rumours began, so it was written in the studio. In those circumstances the songs reflected contemporary events. ‘We started trying to put down basic backing tracks,’ recalled Fleetwood. ‘We spoke to each other in clipped, civil tones, while sitting in small airless studios, listening to each other’s songs about our shattered relationships.’

According to engineer/co-producer Ken Caillat, ‘I remember them [Nicks and Buckingham] singing background vocals to “You Make Loving Fun”, sitting on two stools in front of a pair of microphones, directly facing me on the other side of the control room glass, and if we had to stop tape for whatever reason, they’d be shouting and screaming at one another.’

In reality, all five of the band were rarely together in the studio at the same time except for recording vocals and rhythm tracks and the occasional band meeting. Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham were responsible for the piano and guitar parts and the majority of the song crafting and they were not at loggerheads. The album was generally pieced together in the editing.

‘The only two instruments that were actually played together on that entire album was the guitar solo and drum track on “The Chain”,’ recalled co-producer Richard Dashut. ‘It wasn’t necessary or even expedient for them all to be in the studio at once. Virtually every track is either an overdub, or lifted from a separate take of that particular song. What you hear is the best pieces assembled, a true aural collage. Lindsey and I did most of the production. That’s not to take anything away from Ken or the others in the band – they were all very involved. But Lindsey and myself really produced that record and he should’ve gotten the individual credit for it, instead of the whole band.’

Buckingham was very much in the driver’s seat. Richard Dashut was appointed coproducer because of his friendship with the guitarist after a previous engineer was fired for being into astrology. Buckingham really wanted a partner in crime. ‘I was really just around keeping Lindsey company,’ Dashut said. ‘Then Mick takes me into the parking lot, puts his arm around my shoulder and says, “Guess what? You’re producing the album”. I brought in a friend, Ken Caillat, to help me. Mick gave me and Ken each an old Chinese l-Ching coin and said, “Good luck”.’

‘“Never Going Back Again”, took forever,’ recalls engineer Chris Morris of the song which is effectively a solo piece by Buckingham. ‘It was Lindsey’s pet project, just two guitar tracks but he did it over and over again.’

Buckingham grew up on Brian Wilson and the highly orchestrated pop of the late ’60s and early 1970s but his taste also leaned towards the sharper power pop of Big Star and Sparks. Without Buckingham’s edge, Rumours could easily have drifted into the middle of the road.

The album’s best known song was also a Buckingham composition that was inspired by the Rolling Stones’ ‘Street Fighting Man’. ‘“Go Your Own Way”’s rhythm was a tom tom structure that Lindsey demoed by hitting Kleenex boxes or something to indicate what was going on,’ said Fleetwood. ‘I never quite got to grips with what he wanted, so the end result was a mutated interpretation of what he was trying to get at. It’s completely back to front, and I’ve seen really brilliant drummers totally stumped by it. When Lindsey went out on his own, he took three drummers onstage and they did “Go Your Own Way”, but they couldn’t get it right. It’s a major part of that song, a back to front approach that came, I’m ashamed to say, from capitalising on my ineptness. There was some conflict about the “packin’ up, shackin’ up” line, which Stevie felt was unfair, but Lindsey felt strongly about.’

‘I very much resented him telling the world that “packing up, shacking up” with different men was all I wanted to do,’ Nicks told Rolling Stone. ‘He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing that he said. Every time those words would come onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that.’ As if to push his point, Buckingham piled on a sublime electric guitar part that cut through the layers of acoustics, perfectly playing off Fleetwood’s liquid drums. The solo was in fact edited from six different takes into one.

The strength of Fleetwood Mac was having three singer-songwriters, two of whom were women, which helped balance out the machismo. On Rumours, Nicks and Christine McVie were both at the height of their powers, able to write with style and candour about their interior lives. Nicks was the more flowery and esoteric; McVie more earthy and plaintive.

Nicks’ songs like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Gold Dust Woman’ displayed her abilities as a storyteller. ‘Dreams’ with its lines ‘Thunder only happens when it’s raining/Players only love you when they’re playing/Say, women, they will come and they will go’ was written in one go in the studio and perfectly summed up the soap opera that surrounded the recording. ‘“Dreams” developed in a bizarre way,’ recalled McVie. ‘When Stevie first played it for me on the piano, it was just three chords and one note in the left hand. I thought, ‘This is really boring, but the Lindsey genius came into play and he fashioned three sections out of identical chords, making each section sound completely different. He created the impression that there’s a thread running through the whole thing.’

Christine McVie was always the shyest member of the group and her self-confidence, never strong, was at its weakest as the recording began. ‘When we went in, I thought I was drying up,’ she said. ‘I was practically panicking because every time I sat down at a piano, nothing came out. Then, one day in Sausalito, I just sat down and wrote in the studio, and the four-and-a-half songs of mine on the album are a result of that.’

Her ‘Songbird’ is her tribute to the Fleetwood Mac situation – its lyric about the redemptive qualities of song and the resilience of real love was an important centring for the band. She performs it almost entirely alone on the piano. The tune harks back to the lilting melodies of classic British pop and folk music.

McVie’s talents as a musician and an arranger also came strongly to the fore. Her Fender Rhodes piano or Hammond B-3 organ are on every track giving a cool, dark weight to Buckingham’s layers of guitars and vocal harmonies. ‘Second Hand News’, which was inspired by the Bee Gees’ ‘Jive Talkin’, is a perfect example of the way her clear vocal pierces the galloping rhythm section and the sea of guitar and vocals. It’s the sound of a woman who is taking control of her emotional life and is feeling very upbeat about the whole thing. This is the positive side of divorce. Indeed, given that these are break-up songs, no-one seems to have any regrets.

Fleetwood Mac in 1977 Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, John McVie

The Rumours sessions were notorious not only for the emotional dilemmas but also for the amount of studio time the project ate up. The band spent two solid months in San Francisco before moving to Miami and then Los Angeles for several more months. At one point there had been so much overdubbing that the magnetic tape actually wore out.

‘It was the craziest period of our lives,’ said Fleetwood. ‘We went four or five weeks without sleep, doing a lot of drugs. I’m talking about cocaine in such quantities that, at one point, I thought I was really going insane.

‘Things got so tense that I remember sleeping under the soundboard one night because I felt it was the only safe place to be. Eventually the amount of cocaine began to do damage. You’d do what you thought was your best work, and then come back next day and it would sound terrible, so you’d rip it all apart and start again.’

The romantic soap opera around Rumours was a perfect hook on which to hang the promotion of the album but it wasn’t the reason for the album’s success. Rumours brought together English and American musicians from different schools – the blues and pop. It had strong lyrics written and performed by both men and women, three exceptional singers plus the sonic ambition of Lindsey Buckingham, the fluid inventiveness of a great rhythm section and it had the unlimited resources to make a totally state of the art pop album.