An “astrological” affair and a move to America: Why breaking up was the best thing to happen to Fleetwood Mac
Nobody has ever said that being in a rock ‘n’ roll band is a steady profession, but Fleetwood Mac make it seem about as stable as a Jenga set on the San Andreas Faultline. Their lore is so melodramatic that even series like Daisy Jones & The Six barely seem like a parody at all. If anything, you’d have to tone down the reality to offer up a feasible fiction of the band.
Beset by sex, drugs, cults, divorces, feuds, firings, highs, lows, swindlers, misfits and tragedies, the biggest miracle of Fleetwood Mac is that they are still just about kicking around today. Ironically, it is not only this chaotic character that imbues their pop-rock with its awesome drama, but it is also the reason that they survived long enough to make it to the crescendo of Rumours.
Things were always nearly falling apart for the band. They were born from the break-up of John Mayall and The Bluesbreakers and teetered on the brink of their own one right up until the present. However, it was the brief time when they actually did call it a day that led to their most successful period.
In 1973, the band were six years into their journey. It had been a time filled with enough musical excellence to grant them kudos, but also enough tragedy to fill a pamphlet on Shakespeare. They had already parted ways with their two main guitarists in 1970 following a disastrous post-gig party in Germany.
“Peter Green and Danny Kirwan both went together to that house in Munich,” their one-time manager Clifford Davis recalls, “Both of them took acid, as I understand. Both of them, as of that day, became seriously mentally ill. It would be too much of a coincidence for it to be anything other than taking drugs, as of that day.”
So, in 1973, they were forced to shore up a degree of stability and brought in Bob Weston on guitar. This turned out to be a bad move. His guitar playing wasn’t the problem, though. The issue was that Weston and Mick Fleetwood’s wife Jenny Boyd, ”Were born within an hour of each other”. From the outside looking in, it remains difficult to see why that would’ve been an issue. However, according to Weston, this happenstance created an “astrological” connection so profound that they simply had to have an affair.
Mick found out, fired Weston, cancelled the tour, and temporarily called a halt to the band. He had had enough. He had seen Peter Green and Danny Kirwan lose themselves to drugs. Jeremy Spencer fled mid-tour to join a cult, and now his wife was riding Weston because they shared a birthday. Meanwhile, the hits were waning, the money was drying up, and substances were flying around like an explosion at Johnson & Johnson.
It was time for Mick to hang up his top hat. Everything went very quiet until 1974. With so many members coming and going in their seven years as a band, the contractual question of ‘Who owns Fleetwood Mac?’ came to the fore when the drummer looked to settle up.
Who owns Fleetwood Mac?
Manager Clifford Davis said, “This band has always been my band,” while the band themselves said that he had the matter the wrong way around: the band will always be the band, and he will very shortly not be their manager. With the legal arm wrestle ongoing, the band thought that if they were fighting for their name (literally), then they may as well reform. So they did, moved to America, signed to Warner Bros., and eventually settled out of court with Davis four years later.
Ironically, this legal struggle over their existence ensured that they survived the body blow of Weston and got back on the horse. Mick Fleetwood’s thinking seemed to be that if they were cursed to the extent that retirement still seemed to bring about its own set of problems, then they may as well embrace the fact that chaos will always follow them. It took the low point of this brutal realisation for the group to fully realise their appeal beyond the music. So, they put out an ad, Buckingham & Nicks answered, and the rest is history.
