FEATURE:
The Gospel Truth
A Perennial Best-Seller: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours at Forty-Five
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EVEN though it was released in 1977…
Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours continues to appear in the best-selling vinyl lists. As an album to own on vinyl, it proved very popular last year. Even if some say legacy albums getting big vinyl sales takes something away from new artists and asks questions about buying and listening tastes, I think it proves Rumours is an album all generations love and want to own on vinyl. The permanency of it means the album can be passed through the ages. On 4th February, the American-British band’s famous album turns forty-five. It is sad to think that Fleetwood Mac may never tour again. We do not know whether the band will record again either. Although Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks appeared on Fleetwood Mac’s eponymous 1975 album, they came to the fore as creative forces on Rumours. By that time, their relationship was beyond repair and there were definite tensions. In fact, everyone in the band was facing break-ups or strain. Christine and John McVie were also separating, and Mick Fleetwood was either in the middle of all of it or facing his own challenges. It is amazing that Rumours got made at all! I often feel the title alludes to indiscretion or rumours of a band nearing the end. Forty-five years after its release, Rumours is not only a must-own vinyl album; it is considered near-perfect by most critics. Largely recorded in California in 1976, it was produced by the band with Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut.
I have written about Rumours quite a lot through the years. I cannot really add too much to what I have already said. As it is forty-five very soon, I could not pass such an anniversary by. An album that continues to make the news because of its popularity on vinyl, the legacy and popularity of Rumours continues to rise and increase after forty-five years. I came across two different and interesting articles about Rumours. Albuism marked forty years of the classic back in 2017:
“Shrouded in a rock & roll mystique rivaled by few albums, Rumours’ infamous and extensively documented backstory is notable for many reasons. First, the album followed—and eventually eclipsed—the success of its immediate precursor, 1975’s Fleetwood Mac. A breakthrough album in its own right, the band’s self-titled long player formally introduced the aspiring and remarkably adept songwriting duo of Buckingham and Nicks. The pair’s energy and compositions (Nicks’ “Rhiannon” and “Landslide,” Buckingham’s “Monday Morning”) fundamentally reconfigured Fleetwood Mac’s sound and revived the band’s career, which had been gradually declining after nine, largely blues-rock imbued studio albums and the group’s late ‘60s, Peter Green indebted heyday.
“I didn’t want someone that was going to mimic what we’d done before,” drummer and co-founder Mick Fleetwood told Mojo magazine back in 2013. “That would have been hokey. Lindsey and Stevie came to us fully formed. It worked right from the start. Chris, Lindsey and Stevie’s voices created these wonderful harmonies.” Indeed, the creative and seemingly instant chemistry that the American Buckingham and Nicks so gloriously cultivated with Brits Fleetwood, keyboardist/vocalist Christine McVie, and bassist John McVie transformed Fleetwood Mac from a cult favorite with a modest track record of success in their native UK to international megastars many times over.
In addition to the musical context behind Rumours’ genesis, the album was created amidst incredible personal upheaval for all five of the band members. Fleetwood had recently finalized a divorce from his wife, Jenny Boyd. The McVies’ marriage disintegrated, but Christine and John persevered, at least professionally, for the greater good of the band. Meanwhile Buckingham and Nicks’ romance began to unravel as well. As a result of the pervasive turmoil, recording sessions were invariably fraught with tension and bitterness, emotions that inevitably bled into the songs themselves.
“You can look at Rumours and say, ‘Well, the album is bright and it’s clean and it’s sunny,’” Buckingham explained to Uncut magazine in 2003. “But everything underneath is so dark and murky. What was going on between us created a resonance that goes beyond the music itself. You had these dialogues shooting back and forth about what was going down between us and we were chronicling every nuance of it. We had to play the hand out and people found it riveting. It wasn’t a press creation. It was all true and we couldn’t suppress it. The built-in drama cannot be underplayed as a springboard to that album’s success.”
In retrospect, the fact that the record even came to fruition at all is a credit to the individual band members’ dedication to and belief in their musical partnership. “I am often still flabbergasted at how the hell we managed to make it in the first place,” Christine McVie admitted to Mojo in 2013. “But that was what tied us together—we knew that the music was good.”
Produced by Ken Caillat and largely recorded at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California throughout 1976, rumors—no pun intended—of the band’s liberal cocaine use and overindulgent recording practices still run rampant, many of them having long been substantiated by the band themselves. No matter though, as the group’s laundry list of shenanigans and dysfunction ultimately proved the means to a very gratifying end. The eleven excellent songs, which unfurl as the respective songwriters’ most personal of journal entries, matter much more than the studio hijinks and tabloid-friendly fodder that accompanied their creation.
Unlike most bands that typically boast one or perhaps two principal songwriters at most, Fleetwood Mac features a trio of gifted lyricists, and on the filler-free Rumours, the songwriting credits are divvied up in refreshingly egalitarian fashion among Buckingham, Nicks, and Christine McVie.
One of Rumours’ small handful of underappreciated tracks, Nicks’ wrote “I Don’t Want to Know” prior to joining Fleetwood Mac in 1975 and—much to her chagrin at the time—it replaced her “Silver Springs” (later released as the B-side to “Go Your Own Way”) in the album’s final track listing. An endearing duet by Buckingham and Nicks that examines the complexity and ambivalence of love, the song is also an intriguing artifact of the duo’s more innocent days together, before fame and glory arrived.
"The definitive magical Stevie Nicks vocal would have to be 'Gold Dust Woman,'" producer Ken Caillat insisted to Grammy.com back in 2012. "She was possibly possessed at the end of that song." Beyond Nicks’ impressive vocal performance on her ode to a troubled soul who finds escapism through cocaine, among other destructive vices, the meticulously produced “Gold Dust Woman” is also the album’s most intriguing and unorthodox track, musically speaking, with Buckingham incorporating more obscure dobro and sitar elements within the arrangement.
Though often overshadowed by the more prominent public personas of her California-bred bandmates, Christine McVie contributes four sublime songs that reinforce her multi-dimensional talents as a songwriter, vocalist, and instrumentalist. The most instantly recognizable of her tunes is the exultant “Don’t Stop,” a duet with Buckingham that she penned in the wake of her breakup with John McVie. With a new lease on life and fresh optimism, McVie refuses to allow the past to destroy her spirit, as she accepts that “yesterday’s gone” and wonders, “Why not think about times to come? / And not about the things that you’ve done?” With its themes of forward-looking progress and renewal, it’s no wonder that Bill Clinton claimed “Don’t Stop” as the anthem for his successful 1992 presidential bid.
Bookended by their other masterpieces, 1975’s Fleetwood Mac and 1979’s Tusk, Rumours remains the high water mark of Fleetwood Mac’s prolific recorded repertoire, its critical accolades and commercial triumphs more than well deserved. Reflecting upon the album’s enduring appeal during a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, Nicks confided, “I think the original feelings do come back. They take me right back to where we were….To me, they are always exciting. I never feel bored when we burst into one of our big hit songs, because what they were all written about was so heavy that they could never be boring.” The antithesis of boring, Rumours is a masterwork of emotion, passion, and the steadfast conviction in the power of music to overcome even the toughest challenges of life and love”.
I will not drop in a review as I normally do with anniversary features. I cannot wait to see how the world reacts to the upcoming forty-fifth anniversary of Rumours. Again, going back to 2017, Rolling Stone talks about, among other things, how the battle between Buckingham and Nicks sort of forms the centre of Rumours:
“Happy birthday to Fleetwood Mac‘s masterpiece Rumours, released 40 years ago this week, on February 4th, 1977. Human beings had been mating and separating for several dozen thousand years before Fleetwood Mac existed, but this band walked out of Rumours basically owning the whole concept of breaking up. The emotional trauma behind Rumours is the stuff of legend. As Lindsey Buckingham confided to Rolling Stone at the time, “Being in this band really fucks up relationships with chicks.” Buckingham split with Stevie Nicks. Christine McVie divorced the bassist and moved in with the lighting director, shifting John’s wedding ring to a different finger. Mick Fleetwood left his wife Jenny Boyd and fell for Nicks. As John McVie put it, “About the only people in the band who haven’t had an affair are me and Lindsey.”
It’s an album that has eerie soothing powers when you hear it in the midst of a crisis, which might be why it hits home right now, with our minute-by-minute deluge of apocalyptic news, the rottenest month to be an American since FDR died. People have always gravitated to Rumours in hard times – it’s the sound of five rock stars trying to plant their feet in the middle of a landslide, looking for strength amid all the emotional carnage. “Everybody was pretty weirded out,” Christine McVie told Rolling Stone. “Somehow Mick was there, the figurehead: ‘We must carry on. Let’s be mature about this, sort it out.’ Somehow we waded through it.” You know things are desperate when the voice of maturity is Mick Fleetwood. But Rumours remains so powerful because it’s so ruthlessly clear-eyed about the crisis, instead of smoothing it over. After all the tantrums and breakdowns and crying fits, the album ends with Stevie Nicks asking you point blank: “Is it over now? Do you know how to pick up the pieces and go home?” If the answers are “no” and “no,” you flip the record and play it again.
The battle of Lindsey vs. Stevie is the heart of the album – it’s still strange to see the Mac take the stage and open each show with these two lovebirds chanting “The Chain” together. As Stevie told me in 2014, “We write about each other, we have continually written about each other, and we’ll probably keep writing about each other until we’re dead. That’s what we have always been to each other. Together, we have been through great success, great misunderstandings, a great musical connection.”
Maybe, as Stevie warns in “Gold Dust Woman,” rulers make bad lovers – but these two are just so damn great at being bad lovers. You can hear the tension explode in Lindsey’s “Go Your Own Way,” where all three singers join their voices for a rant about packing up and shacking up. For some reason, this song generated harsh vibes. “Now, I want you to know – that line about ‘shacking up’?” Nicks said in 1980. “I never shacked up with anybody when I was with him! People will hear the song and think that! I was the one who broke up with him.” So what went wrong? “All he wanted to do was fall asleep with that guitar.”
The Seventies had so many divorce classics – Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Carole King’s Tapestry, David Bowie’s Low, Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear – except Rumours is where you hear the broken couples do their mourning and moaning together. It’s like if every woman on Blood on the Tracks got to narrate her own verse, from the topless dancer to the Dante freak to the mathematician. There’s pain all over the music, but there’s also enough playful energy and lust to remind you why these bad lovers find it tough to let go.
As Sly Stone sang in “Family Affair,” perhaps the finest 1970s divorce song that doesn’t involve a single member of Fleetwood Mac, it’s a story where you don’t want to leave because your heart is there, but you can’t stay because you’ve been somewhere else.
Strangely, when Rumours dropped, the question was whether it could follow up the success of their 1975 blockbuster Fleetwood Mac, which looked like a fluke. The long-running English blues band, originally led by doomed guitar guru Peter Green, rolled through a strange haze of lineup changes, with guys like Danny Kirwan or Bob Welch taking over and moving on. Lindsey and Stevie joined as new kids in town, a pair of hungry San Francisco singer-songwriters scrounging around L.A. The new Mac became a surprise smash – but they paid for it, in a blizzard of narcotic and sexual chaos. “I don’t care that everybody knows me and Chris and John and Lindsey and Mick all broke up,” Stevie said. “Because we did.” But she had no way then of knowing – none of them did – that Rumours would become a myth of monstrous proportions.
Part of it is the musical chemistry, anchored by Buckingham’s virtuosic guitars and a rhythm section with a decade of blues gigs behind them. It’s Fleetwood and Mac who define the groove – listen to any other band cover “Dreams” and you can hear right away it’s not the same song. “The Chain” climaxes with a bass breakdown – remarkably akin to Peter Hook’s epochal punk bassline in Joy Division’s “Shadowplay.” Buckingham showcases his finger-picking in “Never Going Back Again,” which sounds like a breezy acoustic interlude until you hear his wounded, defeated vocals. And “Second Hand News” is such an evergreen pop riff, it became a career-making hit two decades later for Hanson, who changed the words to “MMMBop.” For some daft reason, the Mac left “Silver Springs” off the album – barely anybody knew it existed until Stevie revived it on their 1997 reunion The Dance, giving Rumours a whole new self-sabotage legend”.
Among the albums celebrating notable anniversaries this year, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours’ forty-fifth ranks up there with the best. I am not sure whether the band are doing an anniversary edition this year, but there is a Super Deluxe version (it contains demos, different takes and live versions). Although I love so many different albums from through the years, I would definitely say that Rumours is…
ONE of my absolute favourites.