The cocaine prank that nearly snuffed Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ out of existence
Cocaine, carnage and collapsing mental states are all constraints that, by rights, should preclude triumphant creativity. But somehow, Fleetwood Mac conquered their many and varied daemons with Rumours and made a masterpiece not despite these fraught factors but in spite of them.
The album is dripping with all those beleaguering issues, but the manic sound alchemically produced from the stymied stew of divorce and drug abuse is the perfect testimony that humans are hardwired for transcendence, and music is the proof. Rumours connects with people in a way that is both hard to fathom and yet immediately apparent.
William Saroyan might have written The Human Comedy in 1943, but Fleetwood Mac gave him a run for his money with a tragic Shakespearean twist on the old tale—the crux of which was a cocaine intake that would require a mule as big as Nelly the elephant after filming the animal version of Super Size Me to cross state lines. While, for the most part, the substance was the icing on the cake of a living hell, as any good tragedy decrees, even comedy can come from the darkest holes.
Enter the Sausalito studio producers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut, holding up the sober end of the creative spectrum. “During the early part of the sessions in Sausalito, Ken and I hadn’t quite got our foot in just yet, we’d just met everybody, I knew Stevie and Lindsey quite well, but I didn’t know the rest of them,” Dushut recalled. They were cagey and baffled by the amount of cocaine floating around the studio.
Things seemed testy. Their worries worsened when they saw just how much the band were using. The atmosphere was tenser than a triathlete’s calf with two yards to go. They worried that the whole thing would implode unless they somehow managed to bring some levity into the equation.
They came up with a cunning plan that very nearly backfired. “Ken conceived of this joke. [There was] a certain bag that they were keeping in the control room that we had control over while they were playing, and they asked for it at some point.” In other words, the producers ruled over the coke stash.
At this point, Caillat takes over the story by adding, “They were always asking for it! So, everybody is in their iso-booth, and we knew sooner or later somebody was going to say, ‘Can you bring that bag out?’ So, I think we’d been thinking about it for a couple of days, and we decided to set up a duplicate bag.”
The fake flour bag plan was afoot: “We put it on the console, and I remember I rolled the bag up the wrong way purposefully so that when I picked it up, I was actually holding the bottom of the bag. So, I walked out with it in my hand, and I said, ‘Here you guys go,’ and I let my hand go so that the bag would unroll, and everything started falling out. They’re all there strapped in, speechless. Then screaming, ‘Ken, Ken, stop, stop, what are you doing!’”
Nobody was laughing, that much was for sure. Mick Fleetwood once claimed to have snorted the equivalent of seven miles of cocaine in his time, so the substance was a big deal to him. What he was watching was the equivalent of Scrouge McDuck seeing his fortune go up in flames. He was not happy. But somehow, some of his peers were even angrier. In a studio where half the people present already wanted to kill each other, this could’ve been the end.
The studio was already a manic place, but now a melee of amazement, agony and anger ensued. “Of course, Ken plays the role perfectly and looks more like an oaf because as they start to yell at him he’s getting more excited, ‘What? What?’ and this stuff is flying all over the place, and they’re panicking, and they’re starting to get genuinely mad,” Dashut comically recalls. But then he recalled the worry kicking in. What if this was a joke too far?
With a slurry of music’s finest wide-eyed talents turning from rabbits in the headlights to rabid beasts, in a paradigm of the hellish studio energy, Dasgut struggled to keep it together. He had to laugh or cry. “I think at that point, I started roaring with laughter in the control room. I couldn’t hold it any longer, and at that point, they realised it was a joke. But I think Fleetwood was actually getting a little upset there for a minute, I remember him being not so pleased.”
And he was, essentially, the only man who could’ve sacked the two people holding the whole ship together. Could the magic of Rumours have been crushed by the weight of an led balloon? Thankfully, his fellow bandmates were more frantic than enraged, so for the most part Mick Fleetwood just stood there in a stunned stupor.
“John was ready to dive right over the console,” Caillat finally adds. It is a mark of the talent of the band and the odd twisted chemistry that somehow a masterpiece was borne from this wild mania. I suppose all is well that ends well?
