When Lindsey Buckingham tried to strangle a producer: “His hands could have crushed my windpipe”
All the stories about the recording of Rumours suggest one thing—Fleetwood Mac’s studio must have been an incredibly tense place. With two couples breaking up, affairs being revealed, and arguments playing out both in real-time and through song, the atmosphere must have been suffocating. And yet, against all odds, they made it work—though not without a touch of chaos and, on occasion, a mild amount of violence.
It’s almost a miracle that the album ever got finished. Not only were Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham breaking up from a long-term relationship, but both poured their feelings into songs that the other was forced to play, no matter how insulting they found the lyrics. But John and Christine McVie were splitting up their marriage.
While the story of ‘Go Your Own Way’ and ‘Dreams’ is emotionally fraught enough, ‘You Make Loving Fun’ takes it a step further. Imagine going through a tumultuous separation, trying to keep things cordial and professional because you still want to work together and collaborate. Then, one day, your soon-to-be ex walks into the studio with a seductive song about someone else—the band’s lighting director. Suddenly, you find yourself playing bass on a track about an affair that blindsided you. McVie, however, always tried to insist to her then-husband that the song was simply about how much she loved their dog.
But somehow, when making the song, McVie wasn’t the issue. Instead, something about that material seemed to send Buckingham over the edge. Maybe it was avoidance as he fixated on this track rather than dealing with the mess his own were making and the pain in his own split. Or maybe it was simply a case of everything boiling over all at once and being channelled into a kind of toxic perfectionism.
“So, we started recording over our least favourite tracks,” producer Ken Caillat said, with this track about McVie’s infidelity definitely standing out as a low moment in the making of the record. But out of everyone, Buckingham was the issue, as Caillat recalled, “Things got hot and heavy as he got into his guitar solo. He didn’t want to wait for anything. ‘I can do better than that,’ he said after one take. ‘I can do better. Tape over that last one!’ He was asking me to record over what I thought was a really nice take. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘That was really great.’ Frustrated, he shouted, ‘No! Go over it!’”
Swept up in his own perfectionism and the emotional carnage going on both in his head and in the room, Buckingham was a nightmare. When he then realised he liked the old tape better, he kicked off at Caillat for simply doing what he told him to.
“Then he put his guitar down and charged into the control room, approaching me from the front while I was in my control booth seat,” Caillat recalled of the moment it all blew up. It got physical as he continued, “Lindsey placed both of his hands around my neck. ‘You’re an idiot!’ Lindsey screamed at me, his hands tightening around my throat. I was in an engineer’s chair that swivels and tilts back. Lindsey had pushed me all the way back in my seat, and his hands could have crushed my windpipe.”
For the producer, this was a moment when everything changed. While the entire making of the album has been incredibly stressful for all involved, they’d been managing. The women of the band stayed in one place, the men in another, they would come together and work in the days and then go off, doing everything possible to simply keep things as together as they could for the band. But as Buckingham attacked the man helping them make it work, a line was crossed.
“At that moment, time slowed down for me. I didn’t feel fear or anger,” he said, “I just thought that Lindsey was being really stupid, and I felt so regretful that he could so quickly cross this line with me, after all that we’d been through.”
