The album Mick Fleetwood considered a total mess: “We were all in a ditch”
Not every album has to have the best production trajectory to be considered a masterpiece. Even if someone has the right songs and the right attitude to bring them across, that doesn’t always make for the healthiest environment for someone to make an album of music in. And while Fleetwood Mac never knew what the concept of a stable band looked like, Mick Fleetwood knew when some albums were going to divulge into absolute chaos.
From the first notes that any member of the band played together, though, they were bound to be a bit shaky. Peter Green had been the resident genius of the group for years, but for all of the great moments that he had during his tenure, the years he was lost to LSD meant he was bound to become a casualty in the same way that Syd Barrett had been in the early days of Pink Floyd.
And when he left, that started a neverending cycle of a quality rollercoaster for the group. Whether it was Danny Kirwan in the mix, Christine McVie leading the charge, or Bob Welch coming into the picture, every album seemed like either them re-establishing their footing, and transitioning to another tone when something else went wrong. And despite a lot of those albums sounding pretty good, a record like Bare Trees was only going to last them so long.
By the time Welch left the group, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks at least seemed like a sensible choice. They were already tempting fate by getting a couple in the group, but when there was enough song power in them to build an entire other band around, there was no problem with them playing tunes like ‘Rhiannon’ and catering to what Buckingham wanted out of his songs.
But once Rumours started, the whole thing devolved into the perfect storm of problems. Outside of the band members breaking up with each other during production, the entire process of getting each song down needed to be perfect, whether that meant McVie working in a massive hall to record ‘Songbird’ or changing strings periodically so that Buckingham would sound perfect when playing ‘Never Going Back Again.’
Even though everything worked out fine once it came out, Fleetwood only remembers the band being in shambles during the recording, saying, “By the time we got to Rumours, the emotional rollercoaster was in full motion, and we were all in a ditch. Everybody knew everything about everybody, and I was definitely piggy-in-the-middle. But my best friend was also having an affair with my wife, and it was all weird and twisted. It was a total mess, and that’s how we made the album.”
It was also probably easy for them to use these sessions as unintended therapy sessions half the time as well. Fleetwood was already recovering from a broken heart, so having to break glass for ‘Gold Dust Woman’ and fly off the handle towards the end of ‘The Chain’ may as well have been cathartic for him half the time.
Granted, there’s a good chance that everyone would have traded their massive success to not have to go through that kind of emotional hell again. There’s no rulebook that says every artist has to endure some sort of personal turmoil to be one of the biggest artists in the world, but if there were one album that stands as a perfect example of why that works, this is it.
