Fleetwood Mac has gone back on the road, partly to celebrate the 35th anniversary of their blockbuster album Rumours. On one of the first dates of the tour in Philadelphia April 6, the band introduced a new song called “Sad Angel” that may appear on a new EP that Lindsey Buckingham said is coming out “in a few days.”
Thanks to tyrant2525 for loan of the video.
Fleetwood Mac, around the time of ‘Rumours’
by Denny Angelle
Fleetwood Mac was one of the most successful and unique rock bands of the 1970s. After toiling for nearly a decade as a journeyman British blues-rock band, the Mac exploded into mainstream consciousness when they added American pop rockers Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to the lineup.
The peak came in 1977 when Fleetwood Mac released the album Rumours, which yielded four Top 10 singles, sold more than 40 million copies and won a Grammy Award for Album of the Year. The band took almost a year to cut Rumours and while doing so lived a rock and roll soap opera marked by divorce, infidelity and constant drug use, all of which threatened to tear the band apart.
Ken Caillat
Buckingham and Nicks were no longer a couple, and they wrote thinly disguised songs about their failed relationship. Christine and John McVie were in the throes of their own divorce, as was drummer Mick Fleetwood. And all the while, the drugs and booze flowed freely.
Ken Caillat, as one of the producers of Rumours, had a ringside seat to the drama. He’s written a book, Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album, that pulls back the curtain on the making of this masterpiece rock album. We caught up with him after he visited Austin to talk about his book at the Texas Book Festival.
30 Days Out: How did you come to write the book?
Caillat: It was a time and an event that means a lot to many people. It was extraordinary to be a part of this album. I’m one of the only people who can write about how this great album was made. It’s kind of my responsibility to tell the story, I wish somebody had done that with the Beatles. While we were making Rumours I wanted to try and jot it all down, and I have extensive records and track sheets of everything we did. Not only was I a producer, I was also a kind of documentarian, I knew the facts of everything we did and when we did it.
Caillat: Actually when I began writing the book I had the intention of going to the band and getting their perspective. So I started trying to set up the interviews with the band, telling them I wanted to make sure it’s 100 percent correct and accurate. And after a while I got this phone call … They declined! They said they don’t help people, that’s not what they do.
30 Days Out: What does that mean?
Caillat: You got me!
30 Days Out: We really like the way you did it, sticking only to your point of view. You really didn’t need the band, right?
Caillat: Well, I am sure there was something they could have enlightened me on … the type of guitar strings they used, or some trick they did that I didn’t know about. I made a rule I wasn’t going to speculate on what they did when they went home. What I knew, what I saw, that’s what I wrote about. It would have been cool to have some of the intrigue that went on, that I only heard about. For example with Christine (McVie) … John (McVie) kept sniffing around the hotel, she didn’t want anything to do with him. Christine had to hide in Stevie’s room.
30 Days Out: We get the impression from the book that Christine was sort of your favorite person in the band.
Caillat: Um, you know, sort of, but not necessarily. She was constant, she could be (unreasonable) at times, but most of the time you could just talk to her. Mick and the others, it wasn’t so easy. Sometimes you didn’t know what was going on and where you stood with them. If they were too high, you couldn’t talk to them.
30 Days Out: Were the members of Fleetwood Mac upset when they learned you were going to write this book?
Caillat: I don’t know … the funny thing is, I have done two DVDs about Rumours for two different companies at two different times. I interviewed the band for each one, and there was no problem. This time, though, after about two months of not getting any answers, I get a phone call saying the band has decided not to participate in my book. I think it was because Lindsey Buckingham may want to write his own book at some point. So he doesn’t want the band helping.
30 Days Out: You had a few problems with Lindsey down the road. How was he to work with?
Caillat: He was just a real nervous, intense guy. I used to say he’d walk in and suck the fun out of the room. There was an engineer who worked on the album after Mirage – Tango In The Night – the engineer read my book and called me up. He said ‘it’s so true. Whenever everyone walked out of the room and I was alone with Lindsey, it was very uncomfortable.’ You know he’s judging you, he’s thinking about something. He’s thinking that you are thinking something about him. At that point, while we were doing Rumours, he was a nervous nellie. He’s just like that: he’d come in in the morning, always rubbing his hands together. He kept a big tape box full of pot, and he was always rolling a joint. Nonstop, rolling a joint. One time I got into an argument with Lindsey in Reno at a casino … he starting yelling at this dealer. I said you don’t treat people like that, you are just a fucking asshole.
30 Days Out: But musically, he’s a genius …
Caillat: Absolutely, he’s a genius.
30 Days Out: When we look back at 1977 and Rumours, there really was nothing like that album or anything that even sounded like it at the time. When you were making that album, did you have a sense you were doing something really special?
The Mac won an armload of Grammy Awards for Rumours.
Caillat: Never got that idea. We were all so tired, we were exhausted. If you go to my website and listen to some of these songs in their original form, you’d probably say this is not very good. How those songs grew over 12 months to become these amazing things, it’s truly astonishing. We didn’t know!
Caillat: A friend of mine got to listen to Rumours when it was almost done. He said “I don’t hear a hit.” And we were totally devastated. It’s astonishing to me, that album had 10 radio hits out of the 11 songs. But at the time it came out we were so tired, working 15-18 hours a day on it for the good part of an entire year. I remember at one point driving into the studio in Hollywood, and I saw Christmas decorations on Hollywood Boulevard. And I said ‘Oh, is it Christmas again already?’
30 Days Out: There must have been incredible pressure from the record company to follow up their “white album” (Fleetwood Mac from 1975) with another hit.
Caillat: Just the opposite, no pressure. The record company was sitting back smoking big cigars, they weren’t in our face. I guarantee it would not be like that if we did the same record today. With a record already sliding down the charts, they’d come in and say who the hell are these new guys? We’re going to use our ‘genius’ which they don’t have to try and make it more commercial. They would ask, why don’t you make it more like Adele?
Caillat: My daughter (singer Colbie Caillat) is going through that now. On her second album the label had a whole team, they came in … and said you should try everything, do some hip hop, do some rap stuff. I said, ‘would you like it if we dyed her hair red and got her a boob job? Would you like that too?’
30 Days Out: With that kind of atmosphere, could you make another Rumours today?
Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks
Caillat: Sure! The thing that was amazing was that budgets were big then, and costs were relatively small. We were able to spend 12 months in the studio perfecting every little bit. Analog tape was our tool at the time, it rolled on a heavy reel, and you built a song from top to bottom. When it came time to rewind the tape it may take 2-3 minutes to rewind. While you’re doing it the artist sitting in the studio at the microphone, and you end up talking, you talk about what you did, you played this, I thought you were going to go here … you get this kind of conversation which doesn’t happen in today’s digital world. Now you instantaneously you go back to the top. I have to tell my engineer don’t press play every time, so we can have that time to communicate with each other.
30 Days Out: Rumours is about to come out in a 35th anniversary edition. Are you involved with that reissue?
Caillat: No. Why not? I don’t know, it always astounds me. I’m sure it’s the money. I would have done it for nothing! There was some of that in the first two years, but as time has passed I have really nothing to do with it anymore.
30 Days Out: Going beyond the scope of the book a bit, how did you get to Tusk (1979)? It was so different than Rumours.
Caillat: Yeah, well that’s Lindsey Buckingham. I had full intentions of improving our work on Rumours and making Tusk be Rumours II . Do better on everything. But the second or third day Lindsey came in, he had a bunch of home recordings all full of distortion and grunge. Punk was getting big then, and he was into all of that. He had this big hairdo during and after Rumours …, but now he had freaked out in the shower and cut all his hair off with scissors. It was really weird looking. He said OK, we’re going to do everything different. He made me take all the edge off the guitars, saying that’s how we are going to make this record. It wasn’t what I wanted. Tusk became something totally different, kind of experimental. I said to Lindsey, so you want a darker album? There was a lot of decadence at the time … a lot of drugs, excessive living. It was tough to work with Lindsey at that point. He was just a pain in the ass.
Ken Caillat, checking microphones in the studio back in the 1970s.
30 Days Out: Do you think you’ll write another book, maybe about Tusk and beyond?
Caillat: You’re the fourth guy to ask me that just today! I have all the information … I went through the tape vaults, all the scans of all the track sheets, instrumentation, date they were recorded. I’ve got all that … I was ready to go, ready to write a Tusk book. In fact, I got about a quarter of the way through. But I stopped because I’m not sure there’s a market for it. This book has only had modest success … for us to get another book out it’s gonna take somebody to come in and say we can do better with a second book. Rumours is a pleasant story, it has a happy ending. I don’t think books about Tusk and Mirage are gonna have happy endings.
30 Days Out: Tell us a little about working with John McVie.
Caillat: It’s weird, John was kind of like Jekyll and Hyde, he was the greatest guy in the world. So soft spoken, then all of a sudden he’d turn on you. Mostly he’d do that when he was drinking, he was a closet drinker. Ninety percent of the time he was just great. Great bass player. He was always complaining I never had the bass loud enough. He made me very conscious of the bass, so I’d leave it up in the mix. One time Gary Katz, Steely Dan’s producer, came in and said you have the best bass sound – how do you do it? I told him, bitching! Have your bass player complain to you all the time!
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, in the days before Fleetwood Mac.
30 Days Out: What about Stevie Nicks?
Caillat: Back then she was just the cutest little hippie chick. Adorable! She was funny, she had a cute giggle. She loved music, she only knew about three chords on the piano but she could make about 30 songs out of them. Her quirky side was she was always thinking about herself. I learned not to ask how she was doing that day. You’d spend 10 minutes just listening to her talk about herself.
Caillat: I always thought it was amazing, Lindsey and Stevie could never pass a mirror without looking at themselves. That’s just the kind of people they are. They are the kind of people who see a stage and want to be up there. They want the limelight. It’s kind of a double-edged sword … I’ve seen this sweet picture of Lindsey, taken right before Rumours, he’s sitting on the floor in an airport playing guitar. That guy’s gone. As they grew, as the Tusk album got really difficult for me, everybody became an asshole, really decadent, rather full of themselves. Not saying that’s a bad thing, it’s natural. But it wasn’t pleasant.
30 Days Out: How did it end with you and Fleetwood Mac?
Caillat: I had done Mirage (1982) and the live album, and they were gonna do Tango In The Night (1987). It was taking about a year to do and I just said, you know I’m gonna bow out this time. It ended great. I’m still friends with them, I think.
30 Days Out: So what’s next for you?
Caillat: I am starting a new label, Sleeping Giant records. Gonna be working with new artists, our main thrust will be artist development. And I’m going to continue working with my daughter Colbie. I can take no credit for her, she was born with this perfect voice and she loves to sing. She’s the nicest person in the world, she’d rather roll on the floor with the dogs and do just about anything else. And right now I’m working on on Spanish, Japanese and Portugese translations of Making Rumours. The audio book comes out in April, paperback comes out in April too. And I’m going to keep producing, all the time. Making the best music I can.
Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album web site (links to purchase)
YouTube: Fleetwood Mac playing “Go Your Own Way” in 1977
Continuing our series of duets albums, ending next weekend: today we spin one of the most famous rock duet albums, Buckingham Nicks, the 1973 effort with superstars-to-be Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
Buckingham and Nicks were bandmates in the band Fritz, which formed in 1968 and got to be pretty popular around the San Francisco Bay Area. By the time the band broke up in 1972 Buckingham and Nicks were romantically involved, and they moved to Los Angeles to make it big in the music bidness.
Suits from Polydor heard the duo performing and they cobbled 
together Buckingham Nicks with a handful of studio tracks and cleaned up some demos to round it out. The LP kicks off with Nicks’ “Crying In the Night,” anchored by Lindsey’s acoustic strumming and vocal harmonies. “Without A Leg To Stand On,” a Buckingham composition, is a soft rocker with more chiming acoustic guitar; you can hear a strong Cat Stevens influence at work here, down to the idiosyncratic rhythmic stutter that Stevens used so well.
“Lola (My Love)” is a country-flavored stomp with some cool fingerpicking from Buckingham but it suppresses Nicks’ background vocals – it’s probably the weakest song on the album and winds up sounding like a Stephen Stills throwaway. Better are the Nicks songs “Races Are Run” and “Long Distance Winner,” which showcase her awesome voice. On “Winner,” as on the instrumental “Stephanie,” Buckingham unveils his intricate guitar picking style that would later highlight the music-box-like “Never Going Back Again.”
A few of the songs here, like the loping “Don’t Let Me Down Again” and Nicks’ gorgeous “Crystal,” would show up in the Fleetwood Mac repertoire. “Don’t Let Me Down Again” would be played in concert by the Mac, and it turned up on the Live LP from 1980. “Crystal,” which was written by Stevie but sung by Lindsey, would be re-recorded by Fleetwood Mac for the 1975 eponymous breakthrough. The song would of course be a highlight in concert and wouldn’t be recorded with Nicks herself on lead vocals until 1998, when she cut a version for the movie Practical Magic.
When the album was released in September of ’73 it turned out to be a commercial failure, probably lost in the forest of countless West Coast folk-pop troubadours popular at the time. The duo moved to Colorado and Buckingham played guitar in the Everly Brothers touring band, which also included Warren Zevon on piano.
Keith Olsen, who produced Buckingham Nicks, played some of it for drummer Mick Fleetwood, who was seeking a replacement for Bob Welch at the time. Impressed with Lindsey’s guitar skills, Fleetwood made an offer to Buckingham only, but Lindsey insisted that he and Stevie were a package deal. So Buckingham and Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac in 1974 and in this case it would be totally appropriate to say “and the rest is history.”
One note about this album: it’s never been officially released on CD, although a number of labels have expressed interest at one point or another. It’s hard to find a decent copy burned off the original vinyl, but this came from the great, now defunct, blog The Research Garage by way of the equally great, but still alive, music blog Ngootb Redux.
Last week we featured our opinion of the worst nude album covers. This week here are some of the best…This post contains nudity, all photos after the jump are NSFW.
“Whipped Cream & Other Delights” – Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass – Hands down the best cover of all time.
In the early 1970s, John Stewart was a leading, although unappreciated, practitioner of the country rock movement. This singer-songwriter with the booming voice actually got his big break when he replaced Dave Guard in the Kingston Trio in 1961. The Kingston Trio was one of the best-selling folk acts of the early ’60s, and Stewart toured and recorded with them until their breakup in 1967.
Stewart went solo and wrote songs for other people, most notably “Daydream Believer,” a big hit for the Monkees (and later, Anne Murray). In the early ’70s he signed with RCA and in 1973 recorded Cannons In The Rain, critically acclaimed but not a hit. Wingless Angels, from 1975, followed a similar pattern.
It usually takes Lindsey Buckingham years to put out a solo album, so when I heard he was putting out another collection of tunes just two years after his last great effort, Under the Skin, I was pleasantly surprised. This latest effort, Gift of Screws, once again features Buckingham’s incredible songwriting and his unique guitar style.
While his last collection was acoustic, this one rocks. The opening track, “Great Day,” features a smoking guitar solo. “Did You Miss Me,” is a classic pop tune and “Love Runs Deeper,” has a great chorus. “Bel Air Rain” shows off Buckingham’s incredible acoustic stylings and sounds like it would have fit perfectly on his 1980s effort, Go Insane. The dark “Wait for You” has a great chorus and “The Right Time to Fade” is taken right out of the Fleetwood Mac songbook and both tunes feature John McVie on bass and grumpy drummer Mick Fleetwood (the reason I say he is “grumpy” is because the time I met him he looked at me like I just stole his cookie). “Gift of Screws” sounds like an old-fashioned rocker and “Underground” is nice smooth sounding “lay in a hammock on a Saturday afternoon-type” song.
Gift of Screws is Buckingham’s finest hour as a solo artist. While he’s had some great moments on his other collections, there isn’t a bad song here. Even the cover is great … he has the “just take the damn picture you jerk off” look. It must have been the same photographer that took Springsteen’s picture for the Magic cover.
The fall is here and the time is right for dancin’ to the sounds of some classic rock. A handful of new releases (and one older one) are here for your perusal today.
Let’s start with The Cosmos Rocks by Queen + Paul Rodgers, as they are calling themselves. Of course, you know Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury died in 1991 and since 2005 the remaining group members (Brian May, guitar; Roger Taylor, drums) have been performing with singer Paul Rodgers (Free, Bad Company). The Cosmos Rocks kinda sounds like Queen, kinda sounds like Bad Company, and it’s a pretty good effort. “Cosmos Rockin’,” which kicks off the album, indeed rocks, as does the single “C-Lebrity” (written by Roger Taylor and with background vocals from the Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins). One of my favorites is “Call Me,” a loping country-rock goof with a lead guitar part lifted straight out of “Killer Queen.” Rodgers fits right in with this band, the album is great – we shall see them on tour later this fall.
Today is the first day of summer. No matter where you live, it’s always the best time of the year. Enjoy our little summer mix – some of these have nothing to do with the season, they’re just good summer singles. And have a good weekend.
MP3: “Holiday Road” (live) by Lindsey Buckingham
MP3: “Always A Friend” by Alejandro Escovedo
MP3: “Summer Turns To High” by R.E.M.
MP3: “Summer Is Here” by the Outsiders
MP3: “Surf Wax America” by Weezer
MP3: “Ted F–king Williams” by The Baseball Project
MP3: “Little Pad” by the Beach Boys
MP3: “Watermelon Time” by Marcia Ball
MP3: “Girls In Their Summer Clothes” (winter mix) by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band
MP3: “All Summer Long” by Chris Rea
MP3: “Viva La Vida” by Coldplay
MP3: “Wildest Dream” by Journey (w/Arnel Pineda)
MP3: “She Loves The Sunset” by the Old 97s
I told a friend of mine the other day that I had seen a Lindsey Buckingham concert on HDNet. I told him how great it was and he told me that he thought Buckingham was one of the most underrated musicians in rock music. I tend to agree. When you look at this guy’s body of work, it is nothing short of outstanding, and yet he is never mentioned in the same breath as the greats of his generation. His latest Live at Bass Performance Hall confirms that this guy is indeed one of the best.
The CD’s 15 tracks feature old and new, and acoustic and full band versions of his solo work and hits from his glory days with Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham’s mastery of the acoustic guitar is second to none and it rings out on “It’s Not Too Late,” “Never Going Back Again,” a very dark “Go Insane,” the intense “Big Love,” and the best track, a slowed down version of his first solo hit “Trouble.” He brings out the band for excellent versions of “Under the Skin,” “Holiday Road” (which features a weird dog barking sequence), and a rousing version of “Go Your Own Way,” with a blistering guitar solo.
Lindsey Buckingham is a great songwriter and producer and a dynamic live performer. The great thing about this disc is you get to experience all three in one collection. Here’s a hint; if you actually buy the CD, and not the download off iTunes, it comes with a DVD, which features the concert and a documentary. Trust me it will be worth the trip to the store.
YouTube: Go Your Own Way
30 Days Out 
