Fleetwood Mac on Fleetwood Mac: Interviews and Encounters

By Sean Egan

This collection of interviews across the entirety of Fleetwood Mac's career features articles from many celebrated publications as well as interviews that have never previously appear in print. Edited by Sean Egan, Fleetwood Mac On Fleetwood Mac is a fascinating insight into an era-defining rock band.

Fleetwood Mac was a triumph From The Beginning - their first album was the UK's bestselling album of 1968, and their 1977 album 'Rumours' became one of history's immortals, a true classic that remained in the charts for years and public affection forever.

In the press, the ethereal Californian Stevie Nicks, the tormented rocker Lindsey Buckingham, the dignified English rose Christine McVie, the blunt-speaking John McVie, and the loquacious Mick Fleetwood have all regularly been astoundingly candid. In Fleetwood Mac On Fleetwood Mac, readers will learn the Fleetwood Mac story from the band members' own mouths, and experience it contemporaneously rather than through hindsight.

Editor Sean Egan is an author and journalist who has interviewed members of Fleetwood Mac, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and many others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Jul 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783238606

Sean Egan

Sean Egan is a music and sports journalist, and has previously edited Keith Richards on Keith Richards, The Mammoth Book of The Beatles and The Mammoth Book of The Rolling Stones.

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Copyright

INTRODUCTION

In 1968 Fleetwood Mac’s eponymous debut—colloquially known as The Dog and Dustbin LP in reference to its cover photograph—was the United Kingdom’s bestselling album. Although it boasted fine musicianship, its success was surprising because its music mainly consisted of hardcore blues at a point when the UK blues boom was considered long over.

There was more to the original Fleetwood Mac than blues, however. Their string of classic, groundbreaking singles over the next couple of years—Black Magic Woman, Albatross, Man of the World, Oh Well, and The Green Manalishi (with the Two Pronged Crown)—covered the waterfront of popular music. This was clearly a remarkable band on more than one level.

Those hits were written by vocalist and virtuoso guitarist Peter Green. Green’s colossal talent, though, was like a butterfly—here and gone. By the end of 1970, he was an acid casualty and an ex-member. With fellow guitarist Jeremy Spencer’s involvement in a cult rendering him also lost to the group, it would seem Fleetwood Mac was finished. Some viewed with skepticism or even contempt the decision by John Mac McVie and Mick Fleetwood to keep the show on the road. The band might have been named after the pair, but only through a moment of whimsy on the part of Green. They were merely bassist and drummer, respectively, and neither wrote songs. In the early seventies, such brand-name-oriented behavior rendered people nothing less than uncool breadheads.

However, the rhythm section laughed all the way to the bank. Moreover, they eventually turned the band into something arguably even more artistically valid than the original lineup. In 1977 a Fleetwood Mac of which only McVie and Fleetwood were original members released an album called Rumours. The album didn’t quite match the debut’s feat of becoming Britain’s biggest-selling long-player of its year of issue, but it was up there. More important for the band’s finances, it was America’s top album and a bestseller in a host of other countries. Moreover, it was hailed as a cast-iron classic, one of those select records that remain in the charts for years and public affection forever.

Indivisible from the quality, success, and high profile of Rumours is the internal trauma that gave rise to its songs. The band’s latest lineup, unusually for the time, was mixed-gender. Keyboardist and songwriter Christine McVie was the wife of John McVie. Guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter Lindsey Buckingham and vocalist and songwriter Stevie Nicks were lovers. In the calendar year preceding the release of Rumours, both couples split. The songs subsequently written by Christine McVie, Nicks, and Buckingham understandably dripped with heartbreak and recrimination, made worse by their obligation to continue to work together—and indeed play with their ex-partners on songs that were postmortems on their relationships.

As if the band’s recordings weren’t already like diary entries, the Fleetwood Mac members sometimes seemed to use the press like a therapist’s couch. The ethereal Californian Nicks, the tormented, frustrated punk rocker Buckingham, the dignified English rose Christine McVie, the blunt-speaking John McVie, and the loquacious Fleetwood all regularly had their say and were all astoundingly candid.

Miraculously, the band did not allow their troubles to undermine their career, and this despite an ill-starred affair between Nicks and the married Fleetwood. Instead, for the next decade they continued to release fine music in their thoughtful, melodic style. Double LP Tusk (1979) was perceived as their expensive folly but continues to be highly listenable. Mirage (1982) was a solid mellow effort. Tango in the Night (1987) was burnished adult-oriented rock that constituted a beacon of soulfulness in an emotionally and musically sterile decade.

Buckingham’s departure in ’87 seemed to bring to a close the era of the Rumours Five. However, he has returned, as have Nicks and Christine McVie despite their own later never-again declarations. Releases by any configuration of the band have become few and far between, and perhaps even irrelevant to large parts of the audiences who flock to the tours Fleetwood Mac continues to mount. However, 2013 and 2014 brought news that made millions ecstatic: the reassembling of the Rumours Five and talk of a new album.

Through interviews across the decades, Fleetwood Mac on Fleetwood Mac examines the group’s long, tortured journey: their initial joyous rise; the tragedy of Peter Green’s mental deterioration; their struggle to find a new voice with transitory members like Bob Weston, Dave Walker, and Bob Welch; the emotionally troubled but commercially triumphant years of the Rumours lineup; the successive departures of Buckingham, Nicks, and Christine McVie and their respective returns; and the ensemble’s glide into the twin statuses of senior citizens and Heritage Artists.

It is a saga described in more than one of the features included herein with the ambiguous phrase rock’s greatest soap opera. One thing about Fleetwood Mac’s remarkable history is not ambiguous: this soap opera has the greatest soundtrack of them all.

—SEAN EGAN

PETER GREEN—THE GUITARIST WHO WON’T FORSAKE THE BLUES

Norman Jopling | August 19, 1967 | Record Mirror (UK)

This is one of the earliest pieces of Fleetwood Mac press exposure, published before Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac had even released a record and before the name of the band had impressed itself on the consciousness of even those who knew about them: Jopling refers to them as Fleetwood Wing.

An example of just how early is provided by the revelation that it’s inconceivable to their lead vocalist/lead guitarist/guiding spirit Peter Green that the group might ever abandon the blues. Herein, he virtually accuses Eric Clapton of selling out on that score—rather ironic considering that Clapton famously left the Yardbirds two years previously over the alleged abandonment of their blues roots.

ANYONE who in a year has built up the reputation of being Britain’s best blues guitarist, must have some interesting things to say, and therefore be interesting to write about and read about. That’s what I figured and indeed Peter Green is very interesting.

He made his reputation as John Mayall’s lead guitarist when he replaced Eric (then slowhand) Clapton. It is necessary to know that Peter Green really and truly lives for the blues and with the blues, everything from his East End upbringing (he was a shy and reticent child) to his natural talent has contributed to his present reputation.

When he replaced Clapton after a series of auditions by John Mayall in which Peter won hands down, he was taunted on nearly every date by cries of We want Clapton from some of the audience.

They weren’t the kind of things which made me play better, said Peter, they would just bring me down. For a long time with John I wasn’t playing at my best, as good as I was able. Only in the last few months with him could I really feel uninhibited.

Peter first became interested in the blues when he heard a Muddy Waters’ record when he was fourteen. At that time he was playing bass, but after hearing more and more blues he felt he could play blues guitar and switched instruments. From playing Shadows material he has changed to playing real blues—he is on the new Eddie Boyd LP and in a private letter to a record producer Eddie said that Peter could play Blues guitar better than anyone else he had heard—a truly fine compliment.

Peter’s guitar playing has made him into one of the most highly-rated musicians in the country, but does Peter think that his very specialist form of music can be truly appreciated by the audiences?

"No, no, only by a few. I think this is demonstrated by the applause I get when I play very fast. This is nothing, it doesn’t mean a thing, playing fast—it’s something I used to do with John when things weren’t going too well. But it isn’t any good. I like to play slowly, and feel every note—it comes from every part of my body and my heart and into my fingers, I have to really feel it. I make the guitar sing the blues—if you don’t have a vocalist then the guitar must sing.

Only a few people in this country can really do this. Clapton could. I would watch him and think how great he was. But he sat in with us the other week and he isn’t the same, he’s lost the feeling. Mind you he could, I think get it back—but he’s so easily influenced. He sees Hendrix and thinks ‘I can do that, why don’t I?’. But I’ll always play the blues.

A while ago Peter wanted to go to Chicago, because he felt that the blues scene in Britain wasn’t wide enough. But he has abandoned the project now and formed his own band, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Wing. Why did he leave John Mayall’s band, which has the reputation of being the country’s most successful blues outfit?

Various reasons. But the most important was that I didn’t agree with the kind of material which was being played. It was becoming, for me, less and less of the blues. And we’d do the same thing night after night. John would say something to the audience and count us in, and I’d groan inwardly.

Peter’s group will record for the Blue Horizon label, a specialist label which will soon be distributed nationally.

If you appreciate blues, and real blues guitar, don’t miss them.

ROCK’N’BLUES VIA PETER GREEN

The Big Beat Bug Bites Bluesman Peter

Norman Jopling | March 9, 1968 | Record Mirror (UK)

Only half a year after his blues purist interview with Norman Jopling, Peter Green was justifying to the same journalist the incorporation of mainstream rock oldies into Mac’s set. Even so, the band’s just-released first album cleaved to that blues purism. Green waxes strangely lukewarm about it, but the record proceeded to eclipse the sales of the contemporaneous likes of The White Album by the Beatles and Beggars Banquet by the Rolling Stones.

THE BIG BEAT Rock’n’Roll bug is biting everywhere.

Think of the most unlikely place for it to bite. No, not Des O’Connor. Not even warm. Think of a dedicated musician NOT in the rock’n’roll field who has spent a long long time building up a reputation as a blues guitarist . . . you got it, baby—Peter Green.

If you go and see Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac and you hear Jenny Jenny or Keep A Knockin’, don’t run away and grab your bicycle chain to hit them with. Stay and listen and you’ll hear Peter and the boys play some pure blues numbers. Then the similarity between the two kinds of music will be apparent to you—and you’ll be able to see how the early primitive rock’n’roll developed from the blues. And remember that the Sun studios (who first recorded Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison) were recording blues artistes—some of the best—many years before the rock’n’roll craze started.

I’ve always liked rock, confessed Peter to me, while he was sipping a glass of Mackeson. "And it’s a pity in a way that everyone is going on about the rock thing because it seems as though we’re just being ‘in’. Actually I’ve always wanted to do this kind of thing on stage—but it doesn’t mean we’ll be neglecting the blues.

We’re still doing the same kind of numbers as we always did—but I’m playing more to the audiences nowadays. For instance—when we started we used to play to please ourselves, and didn’t bother too much about the audience. Now—I play numbers that are requested—like ‘Going Down Slow’ for instance which they like because of the guitar sounds we can get into it. Funny about guitar playing—the people in the audience think you’re great if you play fast but that just isn’t so. Now I only play fast when I want to, which isn’t THAT often.

On stage—if you’ve ever seen the Fleetwood Mac—they wear no stage clothes, amble on stage, and tune up before the audience. A necessary part of the white blues stage ritual perhaps, but effective. It makes them seem dedicated. And when the group starts playing the audience really get into the music.

Peter talked about his new LP out on the CBS label Blue Horizon.

It really represents what we first started doing when the group was together. I think that ultimately we will think all the time in LP’s, but of course I’d like a hit single.

I told Peter that I thought it was difficult for a British studio to get the hard sound that blues studios in America get—take Howlin’ Wolf or Elmore James records for instance.

Yes, that’s true, admitted Peter. "I asked our producer Mike Vernon if we could do a ‘live’ LP but he said no. I’ve always wanted to play straight through the LP—no stopping for mixing and reductions etc. On a new LP we’ve just recorded with Eddie Boyd we’ve done almost just that. It’s all recorded in mono but it is played just how I wanted it to be. I’m very excited with it. Our own LP I’m not fully satisfied with, but I don’t think I’d ever be satisfied with our records—it’s already sold quite well so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

"Talking about studios I was talking to Marshall Chess who was over here and he said that if we were ever in America we could use his Chess studios. I’d love to take him up on that offer.

Some of the tracks on our LP are very exciting—‘Shake Your Moneymaker’ for instance and I think that the echo effect and the dropped voice used on ‘I Loved Another Woman’ is very effective.

BIG MAC

Two All Gold Albums Special Songs Let-ups Cheesecake Pickles Divorce on a Star-Crossed Success Run

John Grissim | November 1976 | Crawdaddy (US)

At the point in time covered by the first entry in this book, the lineup of Fleetwood Mac was Peter Green (guitar, vocals), Jeremy Spencer (guitar, vocals), Bob Brunning (bass), and Mick Fleetwood (drums). By the time of the second entry, John McVie had replaced Brunning. Between then and December 1974, the following people joined the band:

Danny Kirwan (vocalist, guitarist)

Christine McVie (keyboardist, vocalist)

Bob Welch (guitarist, vocalist)

Dave Walker (vocalist)

Bob Weston (guitarist, vocalist)

And the following people left:

Peter Green

Jeremy Spencer

Danny Kirwan

Bob Welch

Dave Walker

Bob Weston

This sort of wholesale change was then not only uncommon in rock but—for many—ludicrous. Losing Peter Green, the band’s original guiding voice, was bad enough, but to rapidly also suffer the departure of fellow guitar hero Jeremy Spencer was, on the face of it, untenable. It seems reasonable to conclude that only the serendipity of the band’s name being a conflation of the surnames of its extant rhythm section prevented the group suffering a terminal validity crisis.

In January 1975 came some personnel news bizarre even by the standards of Fleetwood Mac. A duo called Buckingham Nicks who had released an album on Polydor Records were to abandon their own career to be subsumed into Fleetwood Mac. For those not keeping up with the group’s revolving-door membership, it now constituted Fleetwood, McVie (J), McVie (C), Buckingham, and Nicks—an ensemble with an almost equal division between the genders, then remarkable. Moreover, the new double appointment was in step with the soap-opera intrigues established by the McVies’ married status and Bob Weston’s notorious affair with Mrs. Fleetwood: Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were a couple.

For the first time, though, the upshot of adding new members was something more than workmanlike music and the impression of a mercenary attempt to return to past commercial heights. The craftsmanship of Buckingham (guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter) and Nicks (vocalist and songwriter) was injected at the precise same time that Christine McVie was blossoming as a composer. As if to underline this genuine rebirth, the group made their first album with that lineup another eponymous one. Fleetwood Mac (July 1975) was sheened, melodic soft rock graced with multipart harmonies but shot through with an unusual emotional grit. It would be this lineup’s defining style. The album slow-burnt its way to number one in the US charts.

This feature—written as the band was recording an album that would be called Rumours—is suffused with the group members’ euphoria over their newfound success, although there is also a tinge of sorrow: the couples in the group have split. (Strangely, Christine McVie never went back to the sweet maiden name that made her, literally, Miss Perfect.)

Note: For Lindsay read Lindsey.

What does it feel like to have won? You couldn’t have put it better. Mick Fleetwood laughed contentedly in the back of the limousine headed for the soundcheck at the San Diego Sports Arena one afternoon late in August. John McVie, sitting in front in aviator shades and a white cotton longshoreman cap, had an answer. Well, he said, throwing an elbow over the seatback, in terms of going down to the bookstore and looking at boating magazines and drooling, which, I have for five years—I can now buy one. And I just did.

Mick unlimbered his 6’6 frame from what a moment earlier had been an attempted nap and curled up sideways like a praying mantis in hibernation. Winning on our own personal charm is the most important. I mean the money is great, but in a lot of ways it has nothing to do with money. The thing is we are all tremendously pleased with ourselves."

He removed his blue felt-brim hat and tossed his head back, revealing a tarnished brass pendulum earring. It is one of several fashion accoutrements which, like the old I Ching coin around his neck and the narrow rectangular heirloom wristwatch, possess the same well-seasoned character of their owner.

Fleetwood sat up now, seeming more intense. "But right now we are so completely involved in what we are doing that it’s hard to relate to any of it. The number one item on everyone’s mind is the album. We absolutely have to finish the album."

Chris, I think we should go for one more take to get a little brighter mood. The pleasantly modulated voice flowing through the studio talk-back speaker belongs to Richard Dashut, Fleetwood Mac’s sound engineer and production assistant. He is standing at the console, his finger pressed on the talk button while he gropes for a helpful description. This is really more of . . . a cocaine song . . . than it is an alcohol song—if you know what I mean.

After several seconds of silence, Dashut peers through the double glass windows. Uh . . . Chris?

Sitting behind a mammoth Steinway grand facing the far wall of the darkened studio, Christine McVie ponders the situation without looking around or moving her hands from the keyboard. A single directional spot overhead highlights her mopsy blond hair and the bottle of Blue Nun on the piano.

Well, she drawls laconically, rocking ever so slightly to one side. "I am drunk."

Dashut falls back into his armchair laughing as everyone in the control room cracks up. Mick Fleetwood’s grim countenance vanishes. Stevie Nicks, sitting cross-legged in a reclining chair embroidering a pair of denim pants, stands up for a near-sighted glimpse of Christine, whose own laughter percolates through the monitors.

The comic relief, however inadvertent, is desperately welcome; especially at 4:30 a.m., near the end of another in a series of intense all-night sessions at the Record Plant’s studios in Sausalito. For some time, there hadn’t been much to laugh at. Here it was, early March, and Fleetwood Mac, after nearly a month in the studio, was way behind schedule in finishing the thirteenth album in its kaleidoscopic nine-year career. The group was feeling the strain of heavy recent-success pressure with too little time off. Part of the delay had been mechanical: pianos (three in succession) had failed to stay in tune; and a tape machine, nicknamed Jaws, had acquired an appetite for eating fresh takes.

Then there was the night some delicious grass cookies showed up with the food prepared by Andrea and Robin, the Record Plant’s caterers. Pooh-poohing the advertised potency, the band gobbled freely. There followed what had come to be known as the thousand-dollar cookie session. The band spent most of the night in an exceedingly bent condition and the engineer went home early. All John McVie remembers is spending hours sitting with Stevie while the two of them giggled over a copy of Playboy.

Of greater consequence was the plethora of soap opera scenarios that dominated the band members’ personal lives, playing havoc with the album’s progress. John and Christine were struggling to go their separate ways after seven years of marriage. The Buckingham-Nicks non-marital five-year coupling was also lurching towards an end, accompanied by occasional tears and ill-concealed arguments. And Mick was broodingly preoccupied with what seemed the end of his 12-year partnership with ex-model wife Jenny, the mother of his two daughters. More soap flakes had appeared in the person of Sandra, John McVie’s silently svelte English girlfriend (as well as one-time companion of Fleetwood Mac’s former lead guitarist Peter Green).

We were all in pretty bad shape, Stevie Nicks would later observe from a much happier perspective. What was remarkable about the group’s handling of the situation was the consideration its members seemed to show for each other’s hurt feelings; an attitude, they’ll tell you, that had more to do with a collective sense of family than any wish to keep together an act that was on the brink of becoming enormously successful.

No one in Fleetwood Mac was ashamed of the romantic turmoil, but one might have questioned their wisdom in allowing an observer access to the studio during those hectic weeks. To an outsider, the band appeared to be dangerously directionless, operating without management and governed only by some vaguely functional group mind.

Complicating matters was the surrounding social scene that grew more intrusive in direct proportion to the weekly chart position of the band’s unkillable lp, Fleetwood Mac. By the time the album turned platinum in February, the secondary sanctums inside the Record Plant—the lobby, recreation room and carpeted dining nook—were populated by aloof, fashionable men and women with purposeful expressions that suggested they were there for serious reasons that had nothing to do with vamping on the excitement of their proximity to Studio B. There seemed to be a stream of trendy strangers passing by band members in the corridor with hardly a side-long glance—a two-way procession like some kind of weird unbonded double helix. "Hey, who are all these people?" Lindsay whispered in the kitchen one midnight while scrounging in the refrigerator for cold chicken. He was less irritated than curious. No one had a clue.

Inevitably the ersatz entourage developed its own hierarchy, the top rung of which could be found within a cigarette haze in the semi-privacy of the sunken lounge room. By unspoken agreement, the role of host was reserved for whichever nameless calfskin-coated stage door heavy was tapping the glass.

In the meantime the band stayed sequestered, working long hours, doing its best to ignore the phone calls from Warner Bros. Records and the pressure to come up with a brilliant follow-up to its most successful album ever. Fleetwood Mac would do the best it could, driven by necessity and sustained by a lot of freefloating creative tension.

Stevie Nicks, physically the most fragile, exemplified that drive. The night she recorded the vocal track to her Gold Dust Woman, she did the first take standing up in a fully-lit studio. The song required a lot of power and an equal measure of feeling. As take followed take, Stevie gradually withdrew. The lights were turned down; a chair was brought in for her, and she wrapped herself in an oversized cardigan to keep warm. Forty minutes later she was barely visible in the darkness—a mere waif wearing flight-deck earphones, huddled in a chair while next to her on a stool sat a convalescent stash of Kleenex, a Vicks inhaler, a bottle of Calistoga mineral water and a box of throat lozenges. Stevie had achieved an astonishing command of the material and on the eighth take she sang the song straight through, nailing it perfectly.

As tempestuous as the Sausalito sessions were (the group returned home to Los Angeles in mid-March with only the basic tracks completed), there was one major compensation that made life a lot easier to bear: their ship was coming in. Fleetwood Mac, a transplanted British band with a good, albeit low-profile reputation and a solid cult following, was at last achieving mass acceptance. The change in fortunes was little short of phenomenal. Quite possibly no group in contemporary music had been around so long as a durable second-line attraction and then made an almost quantum jump to become one of the hottest acts in America.

The transformation began early last year when the British nucleus of the band—Mick Fleetwood (drums) and John and Christine McVie (bass and keyboards, respectively)—asked Americans Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to join the band, replacing guitarist Bob Welch. The singer-songwriter duo, who had recorded one much underrated album (Buckingham-Nicks) agreed, and within days the five of them went into the studio to record, having never performed together in public. They were pleased with the resulting album, Fleetwood Mac (titled to reemphasize the band’s continuity despite line-up changes) but hardly suspected it would remain on the charts for more than a year.

For nearly six months following the lp’s July ’75 release, Fleetwood Mac worked the road relentlessly. Things had clicked onstage from the beginning. The infusion of fresh voices with new songs added depth and variety to the repertoire. Buckingham’s inventive guitar phrasing—at first restrained, then growing bolder—merged easily with the band’s unpretentious but now punchier sound. And Stevie’s powerful, distinctly nasal vocals blended beautifully with Christine’s darker voice, notably on Over My Head, a melodic hit single that soared into the top ten.

Months later, Stevie’s haunting, ethereal Rhiannon (about a schizophrenic Welsh witch, she claims) was similarly successful as a single. In concert, the song became the focal point of the set as Stevie, dressed in diaphanous black chiffon and a silk hat, would swirl and writhe across the stage in a stunning dance that was at once mystical, seductive and totally feminine. By the end of the year she was on her way to being heralded as the most vivacious woman in rock. Not bad for less than a year into a new gig.

Last summer, Fleetwood Mac toured for six weeks, sharing the bill several times with the Eagles and the Jefferson Starship before as many as 62,000 people. The band sizzled, the reviews were superlative, and Stevie Nicks—seen now as the blonde pixie with the hypnotic voice—grew even more magnetic and glamorous.

Paralleling the stage success was the rinsing off of virtually all the Sausalito soap: these days Lindsay, Stevie, Christine and John all seem happily single. And Mick and Jenny, while legally divorced, are again living in the couple’s Topanga Canyon home.

Add to that Fleetwood Mac finally reaching Number One a year after release and it’s easy to see why Mick is looking so chipper these days. This afternoon he’s sitting on a couch in the lounge of the group’s Hollywood offices, sipping a Heineken and discussing the recent past. A clear-eyed, spindly Englishman, he’s a striking contrast to his sidekick, John McVie, who’s scrunched into a beanbag chair on the floor. John’s wearing a wrinkled cap, a slept-in sweatshirt, Levis and the hangover of a man accustomed to one. He suggests it’s still a bit early in the day for someone who hasn’t been to bed the night before.

It was such a good tour, Mick says. And after all the things that had gone down, it was doubly important. When we got back here we were all thinking, ‘Shit, man, we did it! That’s bloody good!’ All the weirdness is gone.

The discussion turns to the flurry of rumors around Hollywood that Fleetwood Mac, having finally hit, will no longer continue to manage itself and will soon sign with an industry heavy. Fleetwood and McVie, who have shared the management responsibilities for two years, become splendidly animated.

That’s the hardest thing for people in this business to accept, John insists. They can’t believe that this band has achieved all this without professional help. Some people still think that Mick’s just a dumb drummer and I’m a dumb bass player.

Mick grins. "Before, people would come up to us and say, ‘You won’t make it without us.’ Now they say ‘You really need our help now, you can’t possibly keep it up without us.’ But take this band six months ago with all the heavy emotional stress that was occurring—I doubt seriously if we’d had a manager that we’d be here today. It would have been fatal, because the band was totally responsible to itself. No one could take sides. Besides, there was no way of anyone even beginning to understand how the people in this band work. With the band managing itself—the fact is it’s working, it has worked, and we’ve got the results to show it."

The two are obviously proud of their independent business stance; however their vindication is not without humor. They recently took out a full page ad in the trades that featured a doctored photo of the group gathered happily around a desk where John and Mick were sitting disguised as sleazoid fly-by-night scammers in black hats, pinky rings and suits with large bills stuck in breast pockets. The ad announced that Fleetwood Mac was proud to be signing with Seedy Management.

There was a time when the group did have a manager, whose departure led to a bizarre episode that seriously threatened the band’s credibility. In early 1974 Clifford Davis, insisting he owned the rights to the name Fleetwood Mac, hired several unknown English musicians, booked a national tour, and sent the New Fleetwood Mac on the road for three months. The real Fleetwood Mac quickly got a court injunction to prevent the use of its name, but in the meantime a lot of astonished fans were angrily demanding ticket refunds. The legal battle is heading for resolution at a hearing in London, and Mick is optimistic: There’s a chance it’ll be settled out of court, which is entirely at our discretion. Up to now the other side has been totally stubborn but there’s been a change of heart. Maybe it’s because we’ve now got the money to continue paying lawyers.

Exactly why Fleetwood Mac has survived for nine years is hard to explain. So many musicians have come and gone that its identity should have long since been diluted beyond recognition.

In 1967, John McVie, a four-year veteran of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, teamed with Mick Fleetwood (hence the group’s name) to form a rock-oriented blues band with guitarists Jeremy Spencer and Peter Green, the latter also a former Mayall sideman and one of Britain’s premiere blues stylists.

A third guitarist, Danny Kirwan, was added several months later and for a brief time the aggregation was billed as Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. Within a year the group had the first of several hit singles on the British charts.

One admirer in particular was Christine Perfect, pianist and singer with the blues band Chicken Shack. Whenever I had a night off, she recalls, I’d always go hear Fleetwood Mac ’cause I adored them. Christine’s own musical career had been circuitous. The daughter of a Birmingham music teacher, she hated studying classical piano until one day when she found a book of Fats Domino tunes in the piano bench. Her blues interest continued through four years of art school (from which she received a completely useless degree in sculpture). There followed a stint in London as a window dresser before she joined Chicken Shack and married John McVie.

For a while life was hectic. I was in Chicken Shack for another six months and it worked out that John and I were meeting each other on the doorstep with suitcases in hand. He’d be coming back from a tour just as I was leaving—or vice versa.

After a half year of this hello/good-bye lifestyle, Christine left Chicken Shack to be a full-time wife. A year later she would join Fleetwood Mac but not before an abortive solo career. It was a disaster. I hadn’t written any material and didn’t have a band. But I got one together and recorded the lp in about a month. The two or three songs I wrote weren’t very good. I was such a novice.

That album, originally titled Christine Perfect, has recently resurfaced, having been reissued last August as Christine McVie and subtitled The Legendary Christine Perfect Album. Predictably, she is sort of offended and embarrassed by the fast-bucks attempt to capitalize on her Fleetwood Mac success. Anyway, she adds, I’m too young to be a legend.

In the summer of 1970, following a European tour, Peter Green announced his retirement from rock, claiming he wanted to live as a Christian laborer. Shortly thereafter he left to become a cemetery gardener and later a hospital orderly. Christine has a theory: On the European tour Peter had met a group of decadent German jet-set types who were into black magic and weird occult stuff. They put a couple of tabs of acid in his drink and I think he took a couple of pretty heavy involuntary trips that way. I think that did contribute to his later state of mind.

The band was at loose ends until a decision was made to find another instrument to fill out the sound. Christine McVie was perfect. A week after joining, she found herself playing her first gig with Fleetwood Mac at the Warehouse in New Orleans.

In Los Angeles a year later (1971) yet another band member became a rock ’n roll casualty for Christ. Guitarist Jeremy Spencer walked out of his hotel room to go shopping and got cornered on the street by some Children of God, a heavy-duty religious sect. He never made it back to the hotel. When we found him, Christine says, he was surrounded by about 400 kids chanting prayers. Fortunately he came out of it more or less OK. He’s now living in South America, has a band and five children, and seems very religious.

Guitarist Bob Welch, a native of San Francisco, was recruited to fill the void left by Green and Spencer. Bare Trees was released in 1972 and reflected the shift in emphasis from blues to a mellower rock.

Many changes followed: Danny Kirwan, who had become increasingly nervous on stage, was reluctantly ousted in ’73 (the only member of the band ever to have been fired). Replacing him was former Long John Baldry guitarist Bob Weston, who remained in the fold for two albums, Penguin and Mystery to Me, both of which sold respectably but lacked the old fire.

After the situation was made even more perilous by Clifford Davis’ bogus band fiasco, Fleetwood Mac made a permanent move to Los Angeles, recorded Heroes Are Hard to Find, and went on tour, anxious to reestablish its credibility. Bob Welch left amicably around Christmas ’74 to form the power trio Paris, but this time Fleetwood and McVie had anticipated the departure. They had a hunch that Angelinos Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks might be the right combination to finally set Fleetwood Mac’s career a-buzzing.

The arrival of a second female band member was a nice change for Christine McVie. Despite many years on the road, and a reputation as a Blues Mama, she appears warm and easygoing. Her manner is that of a seasoned rocker, a mature lady, a scarred survivor.

"I think I have seen it all, Christine states unabashedly. It’s really not an easy life. You have to take reasonable care of yourself—and be adaptable. Before Stevie I was the only girl, and I was also with John 24 hours a day—for years—and that’s exactly why everything went wrong. So I had to decide; either I’ll be lonely or I’ll damn well adapt enough to be like big sister, to be with the guys and still retain that respect. I mean I love to be with men, generally more so than women, but since Stevie’s been with us, it’s great, especially on the road. If you got a gripe about an old man or whatever, you can just sit down and rap and drink coffee."

How does she feel about Stevie’s high voltage visibility on stage? Isn’t the pretty upstart stealing her thunder?

It’s great, Christine counters, because Stevie’s a show woman and she loves it. I’m the keyboard player, which keeps me out of the limelight. I enjoy it because I’m not an extrovert. Nobody contrived for Stevie to be a foxy chick. It just emerged. She moves and dances purely because she likes dancing. But she has a split personality. Onstage she’s the goddess of whatever, but offstage she’s very often like a little old lady with a cold or a sore throat. Yet she’s amazing—she can feel like shit before she goes onstage but then she goes out there and pulls out the stops.

Stevie, in fact, does have a slight cold one afternoon when she discusses life and love at the top. Barefoot, and wearing a patchwork shirt and white stretch-weave tube top, she is relaxed and pleasantly disheveled, her shag hair still streaked here and there with green highlights from the last gig.

Her surroundings are comfortable, the patio next to a black rock swimming pool at the Benedict Canyon home of Irving Azoff, the 28-year-old wizard manager of the Eagles, Minnie Riperton, Dan Fogelberg and Boz Scaggs. Stevie is staying there for two weeks while she looks for her own place. Azoff’s digs are appropriately posh: a ranch-style home hidden at the top of a winding driveway protected by a remote-controlled gate. The game room, with its bar and billiard table, appears to have been installed roughly two #1 albums ago—but not used extensively. And scattered casually about the living room—on the floor, on bookcases and along the mantlepiece—are an overflowing array of framed gold and platinum records.

Stevie sits in an outdoor lounge chair spooning her way through a cup of low-cal apricot-flavored yogurt as she talks. Her voice even at conversational level is throaty and resonant.

It’s not like I just go onstage and sing every night, she begins. "I scream. And crash tambourine on my leg and dance around a lot. It’s almost an athletic trip for me ’cause I’ve never been very strong. In fact, I’m like a snake all day, just grooving along slowly. Then for two hours onstage I have all that energy. Afterwards I’m a basket case. I’ve got to be practically carried away immediately.

As for the dancing, it’s nothing I haven’t done my whole life. It’s not a ploy to be sexy. I decided from the beginning that if I didn’t have something visually interesting to do I wouldn’t stand out there. I leave the stage when Lindsay or Mick has a heavy solo. `Rhiannon’ is the heavy-duty song to sing every night. Onstage it’s really a mind tripper. Everybody, including me, is just blitzed by the end of it. And I put out so much in that song that I’m nearly down. There’s something to that song that touches people. I don’t know what it is but I’m really glad it happened.

There is a guileless—even girlish—enthusiasm here, but Stevie regularly mixes in punchy bottom liners: I feel a lot older than when I joined this band. I’m 28 now—no breaks.

Stevie comes from a fairly wealthy background. Born in Phoenix, she was raised (successively) in Los Angeles, New Mexico, Texas, Utah and San Francisco while her father moved up in business, eventually becoming vice-president of the Greyhound corporation and president of Armour and Company. In 1968, while living in the Atherton-Menlo Park area of the San Francisco peninsula, Stevie joined Fritz, a riff-oriented quasi-acid rock band which had a bass player named Lindsay Buckingham. The group worked the area steadily for 3½ years before breaking up. After that, Stevie and Lindsay teamed together offstage as well as on, and moved to Los Angeles in 1972 to pursue a record contract.

The album that resulted, Buckingham-Nicks, was released on Polydor in late ’73 and promptly stiffed despite its striking bare-skinned cover photo. After a frustrating year of turning down offers to become a Top Forty lounge act on the steak and lobster circuit, Stevie went to work as a waitress at Clementine’s, a fashionable Twenties-style singles rendezvous in Hollywood. Lindsay held a somewhat shady job soliciting ads by phone for a non-existent business products directory. In their spare time the couple worked on a demo tape for a second album. Finally, on New Year’s Eve, Mick Fleetwood (who had met Lindsay briefly in the studio and had heard the Polydor album) called with an invitation to join Fleetwood Mac.

If the Buckingham-Nicks addition to Fleetwood Mac was a natural, so was Stevie Nicks’ emergence as the new flash fox in rock. One senses she hasn’t deliberately created that identity, at least as a primary concern.

Seriously, I’m not terribly aware of that image, Stevie asserts. "And I rarely see the things written about me. When it comes down to it, I’m pretty naive really, and gullible. Plus, I’ve always had the fear of walking up to another band, even since I’ve been in Fleetwood Mac and saying, ‘Hi, I’m Stevie, I really like your music.’ I’m so afraid they’ll think I’m a glorified groupie.

"I hate that trip that’s put on women in rock ‘n roll. But I’d love to meet more people, especially now, since for the first time I’m independent. I haven’t been in that position for six years."

Gullible Stevie got her chance a few months back when the Eagles’ Don Henley called out of the blue, asking to meet her. Both were touring at the time, so the sweet-talking titillation continued by phone for some time before the two groups ended up on the same bill.

"It was weird—and fun. We arrive and the Eagles are in the next dressing room, right? Now I would never go in there and say ‘Hi, I’m Stevie.’ Never. I would die first. So I go into our dressing room and here’s this huge bouquet of roses with a card in it. So I open up the card and it reads ‘The best of my love, dot dot dot. Tonight, question mark, Don.’ And I said ‘That’s about the uncoolest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life! I mean how could he possibly preconceive something like that?’ And I’m dying right? My face is red and I’m fuming. And then, finally, Christine grabs me and takes me aside and says ‘Don didn’t send that. Mick and John did.’ They were in hysterics."

Introductions were eventually made and a fast friendship was born. Despite the inevitable gossip this star-crossing inspired, the relationship is pretty to look at but not, intimates advise, celestial.

Balancing any romantic attachments is Stevie’s determination to firmly establish her autonomy, to which end she has acquired an apartment, a car and a roommate. A secure nest takes precedence over a rampantly exotic lifestyle. Moreover, she seems little disposed to play the role of rock siren and in fact, up close, does not exude a savvy sexual aura.

"The last thing I need is to hear one more person saying, ‘Isn’t Stevie Nicks cute.’ I’m not responsible for the way I look, but I am responsible for what I do creatively. Nothing would make me happier than recognition as a songwriter."

There’s an openness to Stevie, a disarming willingness to trust, that suggests: Here is a girl-woman to whom life has been kind. She seems vulnerable and yet her lack of conceit, coupled with an intuitive knowledge of who can be trusted, belies a deeper strength. She’s been in rock nearly as long as Fleetwood Mac has existed as a group. That experience has enabled her to survive the uncoupling with Lindsay without damaging either the group or their close relationship.

Splitting up has not been an easy thing for either Lindsay or me, Stevie confides. I think we both knew deep down that it was the only thing we could do. We weren’t creating, either of us. . . . It’s much better now.

It was probably the last time it would ever happen to Lindsay Buckingham in his hometown. On one side of Sunset Boulevard was this giant billboard in lights, advertising Fleetwood Mac’s four-day sold-out appearance at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. And on the other side is the Rainbow Bar & Grill, Tinsel Town’s rock ’n roll watering hole and disco body exchange.

Lindsay had decided he would drop into the Rainbow and make the scene and maybe meet some ladies—and not get recognized. But he didn’t really try. As a bona fide star who’d recently played to more than a million people across the country, Buckingham instead was reminded of the grim years he spent romancing LA’s bitch goddess success.

I guess we’ve gotten there now, realized the dream, whatever the dream was, he admits afterward, driving his BMW back to his home in West Los Angeles. "I’ve thought about it, that this is everything I’ve ever wanted to do, to be, for the last ten years as a musician. But it’s not as weird as I thought it’d be. I feel pretty normal. In a lot of ways I’m still working out a lot of insecurities. Being in this position hasn’t automatically given me new confidence, nor am I necessarily getting a lot of validation. In fact I probably had more confidence five years ago than I do now. It’s odd, but having been in LA for a while and having a lot of people tell you that you’re shitty doesn’t help.

Stevie and I weren’t ecstatic about Mick’s offer to join Fleetwood Mac because we really believed in what we were doing with our second record. But when we went up to their house to meet them, that clinched it right there. You could just tell the five of us in that room that there was something happening.

At the time was he familiar with Fleetwood Mac’s music?

"No, except for the Then Play On album. But they’ve always had good guitar players. So we just did it. Nobody knew what was gonna happen but that’s the way Fleetwood Mac has always been—played everything by instinct; by feel rather than calculation. I’ve got to hand it to them—that’s probably why they’ve been around so long."

Back at a spacious white stucco house (which he shares with sound man Disco Dickie Dashut and Curtis Brothers drummer Bob Agurra) Lindsay puts on a vintage Beatles record and pops a beer. He recalls one off-the-wall episode just after joining the band:

"Someone in Birmingham, Alabama called out of the blue and asked us to headline a show there. Stevie and I had gone there twice in the previous year to open