‘Don’t Stop’: How Bill Clinton got Fleetwood Mac to reform
How do you get a group of people who despised each other to the very core to reunite onstage together under a common cause? For many famously fractured bands, the answer lay in unimaginable sums of money but, for Fleetwood Mac, it was all down to former US president Bill Clinton.
Back in their mid-1970s heyday, Fleetwood Mac firmly established themselves among the biggest powers in pop rock, with albums like 1977’s Rumours routinely hailed among the most iconic albums to ever hit the airwaves. For years, Mac were inarguably on the upper echelon of the music scene, but they were just as noted for the intense infighting and severed relationships within the band as they were for their music.
With the high-pressure environment of tirelessly touring the globe and being shut away in a studio for months, fall-outs are part and parcel of the music industry, particularly with the added influences of huge sums of cash and an unlimited supply of narcotics, which Fleetwood Mac enjoyed. However, the group took those fall-outs to entirely new heights, fostering genuinely hateful relationships, typically surrounding Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.
When Buckingham was first recruited to join Fleetwood Mac back in 1974, he insisted that his then-partner Stevie Nicks be brought onboard too. This was a decision which the musician would soon come to regret, however, when a deluge of drug use and infidelity quickly drove the pair apart to the point that the band members would argue and fight onstage on numerous occasions. Still, that tumultuous relationship did produce some of the band’s greatest material.
A break-up in Fleetwood Mac was inevitable given the extent of their infighting, with Buckingham finally leaving the group in 1987, and Nicks following suit a few years later, in 1991, thus bringing an end to the ‘classic’ line-up of the band. Although Nicks went on to carve out a beloved solo career in the wake of her departure, calls for a reunion of the Rumours era of Fleetwood Mac started to arise almost instantly – calls which still persist to this very day.
It would take a lot for the band members to bury the hatchet, but seemingly all the band needed to reform was the instruction of Democratic politician and US president Bill Clinton. Throughout Clinton’s presidential campaign, the politician used the band’s 1977 track ‘Don’t Stop’, originally written by Christie McVie. Clearly, the presidential candidate pitched the song as a message to look ahead to the future, but McVie actually wrote the song about the demise of her marriage to the band’s bassist, John McVie.
Now, Bill Clinton, using a song written about failing marriages by a band plagued by infidelity, certainly took on another meaning as the Democrat’s presidency continued, particularly when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. Nevertheless, his use of the song became a core part of his campaign, which Fleetwood Mac wholeheartedly supported. So, when it came time for the president’s inauguration in 1993, the classic line-up of Fleetwood Mac reformed to perform the track.
Of course, the reunion didn’t last long; it was a one-off performance upon the request of the President of the United States. Nevertheless, the fact that anybody was able to get the likes of Buckingham and Nicks together in a room, only a few years on from their respective departures from the band, was fairly miraculous.
