In early 1976, the members of Fleetwood Mac were facing some of the most trying moments of their personal lives. And they had a decision to make. Christine McVie later explained: “We had two alternatives – go our own ways and see the band collapse, or grit our teeth and carry on playing with each other. Normally, when couples split, they don’t have to see each other again. We were forced to get over those differences.” Channeling their inner struggles into their songwriting, the band found a way to come together professionally and artistically to create one of the most commercially successful and musically powerful albums of all time – Rumours. The album would take a full year to make, and the musicians and producers would have to carefully navigate personal and artistic differences. The result was a truly collaborative effort, with songwriting credits across the band and songs which offered a transcendent vision of resilience, hope and the human experience.
In 1975, the now classic lineup of Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood resulted in Fleetwood Mac releasing their second eponymous album. While it was the first album to feature the lineup that most listeners now associate with the band, it was technically Fleetwood Mac’s 10th studio album. But what a change! The album hit number one on the Billboard 200 chart and boasted three major singles: ”Over My Head”, “Rhiannon” and “Say You Love Me.” While the album was a massive success, personal relationships were strained after the band’s six month tour. The McVies ended their 8 year marriage but remained in the band. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks’ relationship was on and off, and Mick Fleetwood’s marriage to English model Jenny Boyd also struggled during this time. Despite all of this personal turmoil, the band came together, writing and recording what is now considered their magnum opus, their 11th studio album…Rumours.
In February of 1976, the band gathered at the Record Plant studio in Sausalito, California.The band brought in Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut to co-produce and engineer the album alongside the band. Dashut recalled: “I’d worked with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks since their debut album, Buckingham-Nicks. After they joined Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey invited me to do their live sound. They started recording Rumours in Sausalito, across the bay from San Francisco, with the Record Plant’s engineer, but they fired him after four days for being too into astrology. I was really just around keeping Lindsey company, then Mick takes me into the parking lot, puts his arm around my shoulder and says, Guess what? You’re producing the album. The funny thing was, I never really wanted to be a producer. I brought in a friend from Wally Heider’s studio in Los Angeles, Ken Caillat, to help me, and we started co-producing. Mick gave me and Ken each an old Chinese l-Ching coin and said, Good luck.” Similarly, Caillat told Sound on Sound: “At first, I was only going to engineer. However, the group’s attitude was, ‘Hey, you can’t sit in there and just turn knobs, kid. You’ve got to tell us what’s going on. You need to be our eyes and ears.’ After we’d done a couple of takes, I was asked which one I liked best. I was looking at them like, ‘Well, why don’t you just come in and listen?’ The fact was, they didn’t want to come in. They wanted input from the control room. So, when they then asked if I liked one bass part more than another bass part, I spoke up, and it was the same with Richard. He and I quickly figured out this wasn’t going to be just a ‘sit back and turn the knobs’ gig. We’d have to pay attention and maybe take notes once in a while, and soon we were telling them, ‘Hey, that was a great take. We really like that second take more.’ It was kinda like Producing 101.
While the band members’ lives were falling apart, personally, they channeled that pain and frustrations into the music. Dashut explained: “It took two months for everyone to adjust to one another. Defences were wearing thin and they were quick to open up their feelings. Instead of going to friends to talk it out, their feelings were vented through their music: the album was about the only thing they had left.” Buckingham similarly saw the album as an artistic expression of the turmoil that all of the band members were feeling in their lives: “You had both couples, John and Christine McVie and Stevie and myself, in the process of breaking up during the making of the album, so you had all this cross-dialogue going on in the songs.”
“Second Hand News”
The album’s opening track, “Second Hand News” sets the tone for the album. While the album may have been a cathartic release for the band, emotionally….musically it largely operates in a space of hopefulness. The lyrics of “Second Hand News” aren’t necessarily optimistic, but the sounds and the music are uplifting. Lyrically, it tells the story of a breakup and hard times, but it juxtaposes that sadness against a lighthearted tempo and instrumentation…it even features the nonsensical scatting of a chorus of “bow bow bows”s.
“Dreams”
Dreams is certainly one of Fleetwood Mac’s most well-known songs and one of the album’s biggest tracks. The song was written by Stevie Nicks. She explained the origins to Blender:
“One day when I wasn’t required in the main studio, I took a Fender Rhodes piano and went into another studio that was said to belong to Sly, of Sly & the Family Stone. It was a black-and-red room, with a sunken pit in the middle where there was a piano, and a big black-velvet bed with Victorian drapes […] I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me. I found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on and wrote ‘Dreams’ in about 10 minutes. Right away I liked the fact that I was doing something with a dance beat, because that made it a little unusual for me.”
While the song is now a classic, the band didn’t quite understand it at first. Christine McVie once recalled: ‘Dreams’ developed in a bizarre way. 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. The band recorded the song quickly after its composition in Sausalito. According to recording assistant Chris Morris, only the drum track and Stevie’s live vocals were retained from the session, with the rest of the parts crafted and shaped around it later, at Wally Heider’s studios in Los Angeles. The simplicity of only a few chords repeating back and forth, creates a hauntingly incessant atmosphere. “Dreams” was released as the album’s second single in March of 1977 and hit the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in June of that year.
“Never Going Back Again”
“Never Going Back Again” was written by Lindsey Buckingham as the band was wrapping up work in Sausalito. It originally had a working title of “brushes”, since the song featured Fleetwood playing brushes on the snare drum for the track, alongside a gentle acoustic guitar accompaniment. In their efforts to focus on the beauty of Lindsey’s guitar, they actually ran into some difficulties as he tried to lay down the initial guitar track in iso 2. Ken Callait recalled:“While Lindsey played his acoustic guitar, we could hear the click track going pop, pop, pop inside his headphones through his array of guitar mics. We were going for a big guitar sound because there were no other instruments. The guitar sounded great but not with the pop, pop, pop throughout the song. We had to be creative to get rid of this. We wrapped duct tape around Lindsey’s headphones to hold them tight against his ears. Then I found a wool beanie and had him pull it down over his head and ears to seal the headphones to his head. That worked, and we forged on.”
Most of “Never Going Back Again” was recorded and produced at Sound City in Los Angeles, and Lindsey has stated that the extensive guitar work on it was inspired by Ry Cooder’s playing. Getting the guitars just right took a good amount of time. Even at the end, the final guitar tracks didn’t match what Lindsey had recorded on vocals, so they had to slow them down.
“Don’t Stop”
If the entire tone of Rumours is one of overcoming challenges and pushing forward in the most challenging of circumstances, “Don’t Stop” is the pinnacle of the album’s optimistic resilience. The song’s driving rhythm section carries the track,.but we can’t discount the brief, but powerful anticipatory intro. The piano oscillates on the E and the A, with a suspended synthesizer string sound building the anticipation until the triplet rhythm in the snare crashes into the song’s fantastic shuffle groove. By the time Lindsey begins singing the first verse, the entire band is in full force, just radiating a sense of exuberance and joy.
Caillat recalled that the atmosphere in the studio on this track was one of the band’s best moments of coming together positively: “On “Don’t Stop,” I could really see that everyone in the band was starting to collaborate and work together. They were always democratic when it came to expressing different ideals, but everyone had an unswerving faith in Lindsey’s visionary ideas and production sense. Lindsey, in turn, knew that he could push the other members of the band to give their best – not just Stevie, but also Christine. […]
Drums, bass, eclectic guitar, and electric piano were the setup of the original tracking session, so that Christine could sing and play her electric piano. Later, she and Lindsey would re-sing the song as a duet and Christine would replace the electric piano with an upright tack piano. Christine was really excited about the song. We got the master on take 25.”
The song was written by Chrstine McVie in response to the breakup of her marriage to John, but it is sung by both Christine and Lindsey Buckingham. Despite being written as a response to a breakup, the lyrics are generous and warm. While Lindsey and Christine alternate singing the first two verses and choruses, they come together to sing the third verse:
All I want is to see you smile
If it takes just a little while
I know you don’t believe that it’s true
I never meant any harm to you
Christine has stated that the final line of the third verse “I never meant any harm to you” was the true sentiment of the song in her mind. The song is built of short verses alternating with its optimistic, uplifting chorus. The fact that we hear the “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” chorus so many times, is part of why this song has become such a classic track for upbeat, positive thinking. There’s never any doubt what the song is about or how you’re supposed to feel when listening to it. It’s the ultimate song in optimism and resilience.
Go Your Own Way”
“Go Your Own Way” was written by Lindsey Buckingham and was released as the first single, ahead of the album, in December of 1976. It also gave the band their first top 10 hit. Lindsey had begun working on the song while the band was on tour in Florida, several months before the band headed into Sausalito. They began recording it on their third recording day in the studio, and it was the second song they worked on for the album.
At first, John asked Lindsey to play the song on acoustic guitar, and almost immediately added his fantastic bassline. Once the band had figured the basics, they all went into the same room to record. Mick was on an eight-inch Ludwig snare, Chrstine was on the Hammond B3 organ, John was on his Fender Bassman and Stevie had her tambourine with flowing long black ribbons. Lindsey switched to his 1959 Fender Stratocaster so he could be in the same room at the band to record: “Lindsey started out playing the electric guitar, instead of the acoustic, because he liked playing in the same room with everyone else, and best of all we wouldn’t get any leakage from the other instruments into his electric guitar. He could look into everyone’s eyes, so communication was easier.”
The song is also a powerful example of the band’s drive to create an album that was greater than any single vision or ego. Stevie Nicks has said. “There was a part of me that was very offended by the lyrics of “Go Your Own Way,” but the album really needed that big, up-tempo song.” Biographers and journalists have loved to dive into the gossip and drama surrounding an album which everyone knows was created in the midst of two major relationship breakups within the band, and additional relationship troubles outside of the band….but the really incredible part of the story is that all five members of the Fleetwood Mac were fully invested in crafting an album which musically and artistic hit their collective vision. They worked for months on this record and the result was a masterpiece.
“Songbird”
“Songbird” was written by Christine McVie, and came together quite quickly. Caillat told the Recording Academy in 2014: “‘Songbird’ was amazing…We were finishing up one of the crazy sessions [at] Sausalito Record Plant and I was wrapping up some [studio] cables. Christine sat down at the piano and started playing this beautiful song. I stopped what I was doing and I turned around and watched her. I was just amazed at how beautiful this song was.” The song was released as the B-side single to “Dreams” but has created a legacy of its own equal importance.
The song was also recorded separately from the rest of the album. Inspired by his work as an engineer for Joni Mitchell’s 1974 live album Miles of Aisles – which was recorded, in part, at the Berkeley Community Theater – Caillat suggested a live-theater setup for “Songbird.” He told Musicradar in 2012: “The Berkeley Community Theatre wasn’t available, so we used the Zellerbach Auditorium, the same kind of vibe. Christine sat on the stage and played a nine-foot Steinway, and she sounded magnificent. I used 15 tracks for the piano – two close mics and the rest were distant mics. For something like ‘Songbird’, I wanted the room to really speak.” After the up-beat, intensity of “Go Your Own Way,’ the album moves into the glistening intimacy of Christine McVie on piano, gently singing “Songbird.” Lindsey’s acoustic guitar brings a warmth underneath the track, but Christine’s vocals and piano are the shining stars of this unforgettable song.
“The Chain”
The Chain is the only song on the Rumours album to be credited to all five members of the band. It developed out of several different ideas and previously rejected material. Christine McVie explained: ‘The Chain’ started as the tail end of a jam and we did it all the wrong way round. We kept the end bit and added a new beginning. We used Stevie’s lyrics, I created the chorus and Lindsey did the verses. I really don’t know how it all came together.“ Caillat credits Christine with kicking off the song compositionally using song material under the working title “Keep Me There.”
“Keep Me There” was the first song they recorded for the album and although it would eventually morph into the “Chain” Caillat also credits it with inspiring a lot of excitement for the album making process. “The song felt fantastic and, about halfway through, the band got even more inventive, jamming and loosening up. At the break in the middle, John played this amazing bass line that we kept in the final recording of “The Chain”: “Dum, da da dum, da da dum, da da dummmm.” Then Lindsey lit into a minute-and-a-half screaming guitar solo out of the blue. Richard and I just looked at each other. Holy shit. Where did that come from? After “Keep Me There” was recorded, they all gathered in the control room to hear the song. The result was that they had found their groove. Both the band, the producers, the engineers had found their template for building a song in the studio, and they were ready to jump into the rest of the album.
11 months later, the band would come back to “Keep Me There,” retaining Christine’s ending, but wanting to rewrite the verses and choruses. They took lyrics from a Stevie Nicks song and Lindsey rewrote the chord structure, and finally worked together to find the arrangement of all the pieces that they wanted.
“You Make Loving Fun”
“You Make Loving Fun” is another Christine McVie song. It was released as the fourth and final single from the album and was another top 10 hit for the band. The song came from a chord progression that she had been playing from the band’s early days in the studio in Sausalito. Christine and Stevie were first into the studio the day they began working on the song’s recording, and starting laying down the first tracks. Christine was on the Rhodes – which Caillat wanted to really boost. “We wanted to make it even crunchier, so we ran it through an amp, cranking it up. It was getting there, but it needed more. I grabbed my custom-boxed Rick Turner Stratoblaster, boosting the instrument’s output by 15 decibels. Putting the Stratoblaster in the circuit really made the Rhodes growl.” The growling Rhodes, inspired them to add a clavinet to the mix later. By the time Lindsey and the others had joined the sessions, the song was well on its way. It already had the Rhodes, the Clavinet and the Hammond when Lindsey brought in his Les Paul for the rhythm guitar parts. They ran the guitar through an amp, and also through a Leslie. Caillat reflected in his memoir: “Ordinarily, a guitar player wouldn’t play his guitar through a rotating organ speaker cabinet but rather a guitar amp. We had an extra one, though, and I liked the sound. So, I sent his guitar through the Leslie cabinet. When Lindsey heard it, he liked it, to. That was probably my biggest contribution to the album, my sounds.”
“I Don’t Want to Know”
“I Don’t Want To Know” is another upbeat, break-up song which found its origins much earlier. It was a song that Lindsey and Stevie had performed together prior to joining Fleetwood Mac, and was used as a replacement track for “Silver Springs” – a song that Stevie Nicks had composed for Rumours. “Silver Springs” did get released as the B side to the “Go Your Own Way” single in 1976 but there was a fear that the album had too many slow songs.
“I Don’t Want to Know” — with its country-rock feel, and Everly Brother’s style harmony — was recorded fairly quickly, without Stevie even in the initial sessions. Lindsey sang her lead vocals in the first sessions, which he knew from their days as a performing duo.
While Stevie was upset that “Silver Springs” had been removed and that “I Don’t Want to Know” had been decided on and recorded without her, she quickly resolved to come in and sing the lead vocal line herself. The vocals on the song are tight and harmonious. Stevie laid down her part in two or three takes and the vocals are clearly one of the strongest elements of this great pop track.
“O Daddy”
“Oh Daddy” is yet another Christine McVie song, this time penned for Mick Fleetwood, a father of two who was going through his own breakup at the time. Mick later told Caillat: “‘Oh, Dadd’ is a lesson in less is more. It’s one of my favorite songs that Christine has ever recorded. I think it’s a fantastic song.” The song is a beautiful, expressive ballad and one of the saddest songs on the album. It doesn’t have the optimistic tones lyrically or musically that some of the other songs employ…but there’s a tenderness in both the song’s lyrics and Christine’s vocals. The challenge was getting the correct tempo – too fast, and it would feel rushed, too slowed and it would become lethargic.
“Gold Dust Woman”
“Gold Dust Woman” was written by Stevie Nicks and was released as the B-side single to two different Rumours tracks. In the US, it was the B-side to “You Make Lovin’ Fun” and in the UK, it was paired with “Don’t Stop.” Although it’s placed as the last track on the album, it was one of the earliest contenders for inclusion.
A haunting track, the song has a dark, country vibe to it, with these incredible mysterious lyrics. Everyone seems to have different interpretations.
Stevie has explained that although gold dust references the drug scenes that surrounded them, it was written before the Rumours sessions: “I wrote ‘Gold Dust Woman’ before we started Rumours, and there weren’t that many drugs around back then. It’s about groupie-type women who would stand around and give Christine and me dirty looks. But as soon as one of the guys came in the room, they were overcome with smiles. We recorded seven takes of that song and kept take 4 as the master.” They revisited the song several times throughout the sessions and the final version of “Gold Dust Woman” that made it on the album includes a Dobro, a cowbell, electric harpsichord, the Rhodes and sound effects such as glass breaking.
Production and Release
In 2012, Ken Caillat told MusicRadar “Records like Rumours don’t happen anymore…We spent a year and a lot of hell working on it. Lives were changed, people changed, everything became different. Something like Rumours could never happen these days. A record label would have shut us down after two weeks.” It’s an epic album, and it took an equally epic amount of time, energy and resilience to complete. Working 14-15 hour days, the first two months of the album’s recording were completed at the Record Plant in Sausalito. And it took several days for Caillat and Dashut to find their footing. Caillat was used to the Record Plant’s API desk from his time at Wally Heider Recording, but still struggled initially to get a good sound of the equipment and room: “Richard and I nearly got fired. I think it took us about eight or nine days before we could get a sound that was good. Everything sounded like a miniature person was playing these miniature instruments, and we were just pulling our hair out. I’m sure Fleetwood Mac were going, ‘What the hell did we do? We only tried out this guy Caillat on one mix. He certainly can’t engineer.’ Richard and I tried everything to make the sound bigger. We even taped two kick drums together out of frustration, trying to get some size and some beat out of them, but nothing would work, and finally I got pissed off. I said, ‘Goddamn it, what the hell’s going on here,’ and I literally just started turning knobs, and within about five minutes of doing this on a track we were trying to cut, it was sounding great.”
In terms of equipment, the electronic instruments such as the bass, guitars, Rhodes, Wurlitzer and Hammond B3 all were recorded directly, along with an amp in another room. Caillat recalls using SM57 and a 451 consistently for Lindsey on his amps, in addition to the direct input. For microphones on the drums, they used two AKG 451s overhead, dynamic microphones on the toms and a Sennheiser 441 on the kick drum. They’d also use an AKG C414 with a 20dB pad on the snare. Guide vocals were often with SM57s, SM58s and 441s. Caillat told Sound on Sound:
“Sometimes we’d use weird mics, like the RCA 77, and I remember doing a lot of backgrounds around one mic, whereas sometimes we’d do three-part harmonies with three mics and then blend them later. Everything got bounced down, because we were filling up tracks. We’d have the equivalent of 50 or 60 tracks on the 24-track, combining and combining, going down a generation, and it’s amazing because when I did a 5.1 mix of Rumours a couple of years ago everything sounded great. To retain as much transients as possible without saturating the tape, I’d recorded it at 15ips, Dolby, zero level. I could have pushed the tape harder, because back then the standard was +3, but I wanted to keep a lot of headroom for transients. It was a different time.”
About four months were also spent at Wally Heider Recording studio, mostly working on Lindsey’s guitar parts. Occasionally John and Mick would join, but Christine and Stevie did not join back up with the group until the end when they added some final vocal work. However, the long process of working on the album also took its toll on the original tape. Luckily, they had a backup from their time at Sausalito and were able to hire an expert from ABC Dunhill to help them recover and sync up the tapes.
“Tape machines will never run at the same speed twice, so this guy put a pair of headphones on, and he put the hi-hat and snare from the original tape in his left ear, and the hi-hat and snare from the safety master in his right ear, and we kept marking the tape and hitting ‘start’ on both machines at the same time until it was close enough at the beginning, and then he would use the VSO [vari-speed oscillator] on one of the machines, carefully adjusting the speed slightly and basically playing it like an instrument, keeping the two kick drums and snare drums in the centre of his head. If he put his headphones in the right direction, as one machine moved faster than the other, the image in his head would move to the right. So he would turn the VSO to the left, and basically it was like steering it. I tried that a couple of times and it nearly scrambled my brain, but he did that all night long and saved our butts. Rumours would have been dead, just about. What a coincidence that we’d just happened to record double basic tracks.”
Rumours was finally released on February 4, 1977. The album’s name was a reference to the gossip and anticipation surrounding the album’s release. Rumours was a massive and instant success, selling over 10 million copies worldwide in the first few months. It held the number 1 spot in the Billboard 200 for 31 non-consecutive weeks in the US and also hit number one in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It was one of the first platinum records in history, hitting that benchmark in the first few months of its release. In 1977, Billboard, Cash Box and the Record World all named Rumours their pick for “Album of the Year.” It boasts 4 top 10 singles: “Go Your Own Way” “Don’t Stop” “You Make Loving Fun” and the number 1 hit, “Dreams.” Its legacy has extended even further and is often considered the band’s greatest release – an impressive feat considering their many successes and hits across their long career. Rumours is an album of resilience, dedication and heartbreak, and in allowing that vulnerability to infuse the album without destroying it, Fleetwood Mac offered the world an incredible body of work – one which tapped into the human experience and the lived truth of audiences for generations to come.