“I actually broke down”: why joining Fleetwood Mac reduced Mick Fleetwood to tears
As culture glorifies moments in music history, it’s easy for the human aspect of it all to disappear. Over time, musical legends become more like status than people as a mass audience seems to forget the more relatable aspects of their story in favour of a big, grand tale. They forget that a band’s fight is just like any friendly spat, or the writing of an emotional song isn’t too dissimilar from grabbing a journal and a pen and moving to work through some deeply human and normal experience. In the story of Mick Fleetwood, it’s easy to forget that it was merely friendship that got him the job in Fleetwood Mac.
“Anybody can play the drums,” Mick Fleetwood said in a 2021 interview with Classic Rock. Many would argue back to that statement, saying that not everyone can or should give the instrument a bash, but even less would ever be able to match up to the Fleetwood Mac player’s skill. By now, the collective cultural world has Fleetwood firmly placed on a pedestal as one of rock’s finest drummers. So when the musician himself breaks that status down, accounting his whole history and success to a simple act of friendship, it’s a rare, humbling move rarely seen from a rockstar.
But the actual story of how he came to be in Fleetwood Mac was one he’d forgotten too, falling for his own mythologising as he lost track of the simple and human reason for his job offer. While working on his book, Love That Burns, he sat down with Peter Green, the band’s founder and former leader, who spoke about his decision to hire Fleetwood, beginning simply, “Don’t you remember, Mick, you were so heartbroken?”
“You were my friend, and I wanted you to be okay,” Green told him, attributing Fleetwood’s whole musical career to the drive of one friend to ensure that the other is doing better. While Fleetwood’s playing is undeniably great and worthy of his role in the band, it would be all too easy to rewrite this tale into some glorified version that centres the drummer’s talent. But, in fact, his entry into the band was all to do with Green extending a hand of friendship during a rough patch.
“My then-girlfriend had left me, and I was totally broken-hearted,” Fleetwood recalled, remembering not just how that felt way back in the late 1960s but how Green’s revelation made him feel decades on. “I talk too much, but when Peter said that, I stopped,” he said, “He didn’t know it, but I actually broke down in tears. Because it was just so indicative of my relationship with Peter.”
Beautifully reflective of the kind of caring and considerate friend Green was and the love these people had for each other beyond just being musicians sharing a band; the actual story of how Fleetwood came to be in Fleetwood Mac, eventually giving the band part of its name and enduring as one of its only consistent members from this early era into the next, is simply a story of friendship. “ It had nothing to do with music, actually, at all,” Fleetwood said, still moved by Green’s kindness.
