Did Mick Fleetwood urinate on the lawn of The White House?
While they remain one of the most successful bands of all time, synonymous with the heady soft rock emerging from 1970s California, Fleetwood Mac stand out in the sprawling epic of rock music. With roots in 1960s London’s formative blues and R&B scene, the band enjoyed a significantly winding history long before Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks entered the fold, bringing with them immense success and drama. Astoundingly, one man has been present for it all: drummer Mick Fleetwood.
A constantly evolving soap opera, Fleetwood Mac had already experienced significant turmoil before the young hippie duo of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined the band in 1975. At the onset of the decade, they lost founder, songwriter, and guitar hero Peter Green to a flurry of LSD use and the debilitating mental health issues that would plague him for the rest of his life. During this period, the group fell victim to the darker side of hippiedom; founding guitarist Jeremy Spencer abruptly left to join a cult in 1971, further reflecting their turbulent status.
Furthermore, around this time, the arc of the band’s young guitar prodigy, Danny Kirwan, also played out disastrously. He was fired in 1972 after growing increasingly alienated from the rest of the group, culminating in him angrily smashing his guitar before a show in an alcohol-induced breakdown.
Not only was Mick Fleetwood present for all these tumultuous events, but he was also instrumental in helping the group navigate the mind-boggling and often existential fallout. As the group’s ballast and sole remaining original member, his holistic, first-person perspective on Fleetwood Mac’s journey is invaluable.
Not only has Mick Fleetwood witnessed the most notorious flare-ups in Fleetwood Mac’s history, but the bearded drummer also participated in his fair share of the band’s intoxicated drama, including the emotional trainwreck of the Rumours period. However, that was years ago, and his indulgences in recent decades have been far more down-to-earth compared to the days when sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll were the name of the game.
Yet, he’s still Mick Fleetwood, and given the life he has led, the character of the world-renowned and road-hardened rock star is inextricable from his being. While this has produced many memorable moments for the Cornish musician, one of the standouts is when he allegedly urinated on the lawn of the home of world power, The White House. I’d wager only a handful have gotten away with this in the years since construction finished in 1800.
At face value, it might appear that pissing on the immaculate lawn of The White House would be the ultimate symbol of the counterculture sticking it to the man. Still, according to Fleetwood, it emerged more out of necessity than anything else – I’d said he’d changed over the years.
It all unfolded when Fleetwood Mac reunited to perform as a surprise at President Bill Clinton’s leaving party in January 2001. Fleetwood recalled what happened when speaking to The Guardian in 2014. Asked to explain himself years after the event, he said: “Please don’t make it sound like I’m prone to weeing on people’s lawns! I was dying to pee, and I didn’t have time to go back to the house before we appeared.”
Like every fan listening to the tale, Fleetwood was also surprised that the bastion of American power did not have a portaloo on the premises for such a star-studded event. He continued: “I was surprised, too. I was saying to my manager: ‘What the fuck am I going to do?’ I was dressed like Mr Rumours, in knickerbockers, with my wooden balls hanging out. The security guys must have heard because suddenly this fella with an earpiece said something like ‘permission granted to urinate on the lawn’. One of our musicians took a picture of me doing it.”
The Fleetwood Mac drummer concluded that the Clintons didn’t know about him fertilising the lawn but was confident that they’d forgive him if they found out. That’s quite a position to be in.
