Rumours (album)

• 1. Introduction

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  Rumours, the eleventh studio album by Fleetwood Mac, took its name from a remark by bassist John McVie. He felt the band members were writing "journals and diaries" about each other through music. The British and American rock group released it through Warner Bros. Records on the 4th of February 1977. Those diaries were written by people who had recently separated from partners inside the same band, and who still had to turn up to the same studio each day. Drugs and press gossip surrounded the sessions. So how did a group in that state make a record that sounded so polished? What went wrong with the tapes, and how was it repaired? And why does an album about heartbreak keep finding listeners long after its own era?

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• 2. Broken Couples

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  Bob Welch left Fleetwood Mac in 1974, and Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined drummer Mick Fleetwood and the married pair Christine McVie and John McVie. In July 1975 the band released its eponymous tenth album. It reached number one in the United States in 1976, and its singles "Over My Head", "Rhiannon" and "Say You Love Me" all reached the American top 20.

  Success hid a great deal of damage. After six months of non-stop touring, the McVies divorced, ending eight years of marriage. They stopped speaking socially and discussed only music.

  Buckingham and Nicks had an on-and-off relationship and fought often. Their arguments stopped only when they worked on songs together. Fleetwood had his own crisis at home. He discovered that his wife Jenny, the mother of his two children, was having an affair with his best friend.

  The press made things worse by printing stories that were simply wrong. One report put Christine McVie in hospital with a serious illness. After a photograph with Fleetwood's daughter Lucy, Buckingham and Nicks were declared her parents. Papers also wrote of a tenth anniversary tour reuniting the original members Peter Green, Danny Kirwan and Jeremy Spencer.

  None of it changed the lineup, but nobody had time to absorb the separations before a new album began. Fleetwood later spoke of the "tremendous emotional sacrifices" everyone made just to attend studio work.

  In early 1976 the band crafted some new tracks in Florida. Fleetwood and John McVie then fired their producer Keith Olsen, who wanted less emphasis on the rhythm section. The pair formed a company called Seedy Management to represent the band's interests, and the next sessions would be in California.

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• 3. Sausalito Sessions

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  In February 1976 Fleetwood Mac arrived at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, to work with the engineers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut. The band and the two engineers shared production duties. Caillat was the more technically adept and handled most of the engineering. He had taken leave from Wally Heider Studios in Los Angeles, on the understanding that the band would eventually use that facility.

  The building was large, wooden and windowless, with several small recording rooms. Most of the band disliked it and wanted to record at home, but Fleetwood refused every request to move. Christine McVie and Nicks lived in two condominiums near the harbour. The men stayed at the studio's lodge in the hills.

  The main recording room measured 6 by 9 metres. It held a 3M 24-track tape machine, high-quality microphones and an API mixing console with 550A equalisers. Caillat was impressed, yet he thought the room lacked ambience because of its "very dead speakers" and heavy soundproofing.

  The working title there was Yesterday's Gone. Buckingham took charge of the sessions with the aim of making "a pop album". Dashut explained that Fleetwood and the McVies came from improvisational blues rock, while the guitarist understood "the craft of record making".

  In the early stages of each song, Buckingham on guitar and Christine McVie on piano built the basic structures together. She was the only classically trained musician in the band. During jams, Fleetwood often played his drums outside the studio's partition screen so he could read Caillat's and Dashut's reactions to the groove.

  Caillat and Dashut spent about nine days testing microphones and amplifiers to get a bigger sound. Only then did they find they could shape it on the API console.

  Outside the studio the band barely mixed. Members did not meet or socialise after the day's work, and new relationships formed after the separations. Sausalito still carried the mark of the hippie movement, and drugs were easy to find. Open-ended budgets encouraged self-indulgence, and sleepless nights and heavy cocaine use marked much of the production.

  Record Plant co-owner Chris Stone recalled in 1997 that the band brought "excess at its most excessive". He described the routine: "The band would come in at 7 at night, have a big feast, party till 1 or 2 in the morning, and then when they were so whacked-out they couldn't do anything, they'd start recording".

  The musicians saw a benefit in the strain. Nicks suggested the band made its best music in its worst shape. Buckingham said the tensions made "the whole being more than the sum of the parts". The three singers' harmonies were captured with the best microphones available.

  One song needed a different room entirely. Christine McVie's "Songbird" struck Caillat as needing a concert hall's ambience, so it was recorded in an all-night session at Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley, across the bay from Sausalito.

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• 4. Damaged Tapes

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  After more than two months in Sausalito, Fleetwood arranged a ten-day tour. It gave the band a break and a chance to gather fan feedback. Recording then resumed at venues in Los Angeles, including Wally Heider Studios.

  Christine McVie and Nicks skipped most of those sessions and stayed away until their remaining vocals were needed. That left the rest of the band, with Caillat and Dashut, to finish the overdubbing and mixing. The job proved hard because the Sausalito tapes had been worn down by repeated use. The kick and snare drum tracks sounded "lifeless".

  The delay had real costs. A sell-out autumn tour of the United States was cancelled so the album could be completed. The planned release date of September 1976 slipped.

  The fix was unusual. A specialist was hired to correct the Sausalito tapes with a vari-speed oscillator. In his left ear, through headphones, he heard the damaged tapes. In his right ear he heard the safety master recordings. He then brought their speeds together, guided by the timings of the snare and hi-hat tracks.

  The band and its co-producers had a clear goal for the result. They wanted a "no-filler" record in which every track seemed a potential single. After the final mastering stage, they heard the songs played back-to-back and sensed they had made something "pretty powerful".

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• 5. Song by Song

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  "The Chain" is the only track on which every member, including Fleetwood and John McVie, collaborated. Elsewhere the three main songwriters, Buckingham, Christine McVie and Nicks, worked individually, though they sometimes shared lyrics. Every song concerns personal and often troubled relationships. Christine McVie said the band saw this only in hindsight.

  The album opens with "Second Hand News", which began as an acoustic demo called "Strummer". After hearing the Bee Gees' "Jive Talkin'", Buckingham and Dashut built it up with four electric guitar tracks. They added chair percussion to evoke Celtic rock.

  "Dreams" is Nicks's account of a breakup, and it carries a hopeful message. She wrote it in an afternoon and led the vocals while the band played around her. The track has "ethereal spaces" and a recurring two-note pattern on bass.

  Buckingham's comparable song, "Go Your Own Way", is more pessimistic. It is guitar-driven, with a four-to-the-floor dance beat influenced by the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man".

  "Never Going Back Again" followed a short fling Buckingham had with a woman from New England. It is about the illusion that sadness cannot return once life feels content. The track began as "Brushes", a simple acoustic tune with Fleetwood playing snare rolls using brushes. Layers of vocals and instruments were added later.

  Christine McVie wrote "Don't Stop", a song of optimism, and said Buckingham helped with the verses because their sensibilities overlapped. Inspired by triple step dancing, it uses acoustic piano and a tack piano. In a tack piano, nails sit where the hammers strike the strings, giving a more percussive sound.

  She also wrote "Songbird", an introspective "little prayer" about "nobody and everybody". She conceived it alone on a nine-foot Steinway piano. It slows the album's pace.

  Side two begins with "The Chain", one of the most complicated pieces on the record. A Christine McVie demo called "Keep Me There" and a Nicks song were re-cut and heavily edited into parts of it. The whole band built the rest in the manner of a film score. John McVie's prominent fretless bass solo marks the speed-up that begins the final third.

  "You Make Loving Fun" is about McVie's boyfriend, the band's lighting director, whom she dated after leaving John. Inspired by R&B, it has a simpler design and features a clavinet.

  "I Don't Want to Know" has a twelve-string guitar and harmonised vocals. Buckingham and Nicks created it in 1974, before they joined Fleetwood Mac, under the influence of Buddy Holly.

  "Oh Daddy" was written about Fleetwood and Jenny Boyd, who had just got back together. The band nicknamed the drummer "the Big Daddy". McVie called the writing slightly sarcastic, since his direction for the band always proved right. The track was made spontaneously, with improvised bass patterns from John McVie and keyboard blips from Christine.

  The record closes with "Gold Dust Woman", Nicks's song inspired by Los Angeles and the hardship of life there. By then Nicks had become addicted to cocaine, and the lyrics speak of "keeping going". Its sound draws on free jazz, with a harpsichord, a Fender Stratocaster and a dobro, an acoustic guitar whose tone comes from metal cones.

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• 6. Release and Road

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  In autumn 1976, while recording was still under way, Fleetwood Mac played songs from Rumours at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. Warner Bros. confirmed the release details to the press in December. It chose "Go Your Own Way" as the promotional single that same month.

  The label had a head start from its aggressive marketing of the 1975 album. That campaign built links with dozens of FM and AM radio stations across America. Advance orders for Rumours reached 800,000 copies, the largest in Warner Bros.' history to that point. The UK release followed a week after the American one.

  On the 28th of February 1977, after rehearsing at SIR Studios in Los Angeles, the band began the Rumours Tour. It visited North America, Europe, Oceania and Asia. Nicks recalled that fans at first received the show poorly, because it was mostly new Rumours material they did not yet know.

  A one-off March show in Indiana raised money for United States Senator Birch Bayh. A short April tour of the UK, the Netherlands, France and Germany followed. Nigel Williamson of Uncut called the band's performances "rock's greatest soap opera".

  Meanwhile "Dreams" came out as a single in March 1977. In June it became the band's only number one on the US Billboard Hot 100.

  The cover shows Fleetwood with his foot raised on a stool, beside Nicks in her "Rhiannon" stage persona. The back has a montage of band portraits. Herbert Worthington took all the photographs. Fleetwood wears a pair of lavatory chains with wooden balls hanging between his legs, and holds a crystal ball in his left hand.

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• 7. Critics and Charts

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  Robert Christgau wrote in The Village Voice that Rumours was "more consistent and more eccentric" than its predecessor. He added that it "jumps right out of the speakers at you". John Swenson of Rolling Stone singled out the interplay among the three vocalists. Despite the long delay, he said, the record proved that the band's success "was no fluke".

  Not everyone agreed. Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times called it "frustratingly uneven". Juan Rodriguez of The Gazette thought the music was "crisper and clearer" but the band's ideas "slightly more muddled". Critics in The Village Voice's 1977 Pazz & Jop poll, which aggregated votes from hundreds of reviewers, placed it fourth.

  Later writers were warmer. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic gave it five stars. He called it "an unparalleled blockbuster" whatever its voyeuristic appeal. Patrick McKay of Stylus Magazine wrote that what makes it art is "the contradiction between its cheerful surface and its anguished heart". He described it as "a radio-friendly record about anger, recrimination, and loss".

  The public response was enormous. Rumours stayed at number one on the Billboard 200 for 31 non-consecutive weeks. It also topped the charts in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. In the UK it debuted at number seven and reached number one in January 1978, the band's first there.

  Both the United States and the UK certified it platinum within months. Billboard, Cash Box and Record World all named it Album of the Year for 1977. In February 1978 the band, Caillat and Dashut won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. By March, sales had passed 10 million worldwide, with over eight million in the United States alone.

  By 1980 the total was 13 million. It has since passed 40 million. In the UK it has spent over 1,000 weeks in the top 100 and is the 11th-best-selling album in the country's history. The British Phonographic Industry certifies it 14 times platinum.

  In the United States it holds a Diamond Award from the Recording Industry Association of America for 20 million copies shipped. In 2020 it was the UK's bestselling vinyl album, with 32,500 annual sales according to the Official Charts Company.

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• 8. Afterlife

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  In May 2011 Rumours re-entered the Billboard 200 at number 11, and reached number 2 on the Australian ARIA chart. The cause was a "Rumours" episode of the television series Glee that used several of its songs.

  A second revival came in October 2020. Nathan Apodaca posted a viral TikTok of himself skateboarding while "Dreams" played, and the album returned to the Billboard 200 top ten. Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham each made similar videos.

  Fleetwood calls Rumours "the most important album we ever made", because its success let the group keep recording for years. Writer Chuck Klosterman credits the sales to "really likable songs", but argues that likable songs alone give "no justification for greatness".

  Others have been less guarded. In 1998 Fleetwood produced Legacy: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, with one cover of every song by acts it influenced. They included Tonic, Matchbox 20, Goo Goo Dolls, The Corrs, The Cranberries, Elton John, Duncan Sheik and Jewel. Tori Amos, Death Cab for Cutie and Saliva are also counted among its heirs. Lorde called it a "perfect record".

  The lists tell the same story. In 1998 Q placed it third among the 50 best albums of the 70s, behind The Clash's London Calling and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. Rolling Stone ranked it 25th in 2003, and seventh in 2020 and 2023. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003, and the Library of Congress selected it for the National Recording Registry in 2017.

  The record has also been reissued repeatedly. A 2004 version added "Silver Springs" and outtakes from the sessions. Depending on the pressing, that song appears as track 6, 7 or 12. A six-disc super deluxe box set arrived on the 28th of January 2013. It included live recordings from the 1977 tour, session tracks and a DVD called "The Rosebud Film".

  The extras included two demos of Nicks's "Planets of the Universe", written in 1976 about her breakup with Buckingham. It was rehearsed for the album but never recorded. A new version appeared on her 2001 solo album, Trouble in Shangri-La. Pitchfork's Jessica Hopper gave the reissue a rare 10 out of 10.

  On the 8th of September 2023 the band released Rumours Live, drawn from the opening night of the tour at The Forum on the 29th of August 1977. Caillat recorded the show. Seventeen of its tracks were previously unreleased.

  The story has since reached the stage. The 2023 Tony-award-winning play Stereophonic fictionalises the recording sessions. In 2024 Caillat sued its creators, alleging they adapted his memoir Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album without permission.

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