In early 1976, Fleetwood Mac convened at the Record Plant studio in Sausalito, California, to record the follow-up to their breakthrough album. The problem was that almost everyone in the band was breaking up with almost everyone else, in the same room, in real time. Christine and John McVie's eight-year marriage was ending; they communicated only about music. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, the Californian couple whose arrival had transformed the band, were tearing apart in slow motion. And drummer Mick Fleetwood was discovering that his wife was having an affair with his best friend. Out of this wreckage, over about a year of sessions fuelled by heartbreak and heroic quantities of cocaine, came Rumours — an album about the people in the band, sung by the people in the band, to the people in the band, which went on to sell more than forty million copies to everyone else.
The songs are open letters between bandmates. Buckingham's "Go Your Own Way" accused Nicks in a lyric she found slanderous and had to harmonise on every night for decades. Her reply, "Dreams" — written quickly in a spare studio room on a black velvet bed, by her account — answered him with eerie serenity, and became the band's only US number one single. Christine McVie's "You Make Loving Fun" celebrated her new boyfriend, the band's lighting director, while her estranged husband played the bassline; she told John it was about her dog. "The Chain" — the only song ever credited to all five members, assembled in the studio partly from scraps of earlier pieces — turned the band's predicament into an anthem, and its climactic bass run later became the theme of the BBC's Formula 1 coverage. Even sunny "Don't Stop", Christine's pledge of optimism to John, was a divorce settlement in waltz-free 4/4; it later became Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign song.
Chemistry, in every sense
The Sausalito sessions have entered legend for their excess. The band worked nocturnally, argued in the corridors, and consumed cocaine so integrally that Mick Fleetwood later joked — in a line endlessly recycled since — that the band had considered thanking their dealer in the album credits, only for the man to meet an untimely end before the honour could be bestowed. The engineering war stories are as lurid: the master tapes were played so many times during the endless overdubbing that the transients audibly dulled, forcing the team to synchronise back to safety copies. Yet the discipline inside the chaos was real. Buckingham, the band's studio perfectionist, layered guitars and vocal harmonies with obsessive care, and producers-engineers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut — credited as co-producers with the band — polished the record into the warm, immaculate California sound that made private agony feel universal.
One casualty of the sequencing became famous in its own right: "Silver Springs", Nicks's torch song for Buckingham, was cut from the album for reasons of vinyl running time — to her lasting fury, compounded when the publishing income she had earmarked for her mother went with it. Relegated to a B-side, it smouldered for twenty years until the band's 1997 reunion performance turned it, at last, into a hit and a fan scripture.
The bill and the paradox
Released in February 1977, Rumours went to number one in Britain and America, held the top of the US chart for most of the year, and won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1978. It has since become one of the best-selling albums ever made, its total commonly given as over forty million. Accepting the Grammy, the band stood together — five people who had spent the year unable to be in the same room without either a song or a fight breaking out.
The paradox of Rumours is that dysfunction did not merely fail to stop the album; it was the album. A band in five-way marriage counselling, minus the counselling, chose to conduct the sessions anyway, and the tension is audible in every immaculate harmony — ex-lovers blending voices on lyrics written to wound each other. Later generations keep rediscovering it: a 2020 viral video of a man skateboarding to "Dreams" with a bottle of cranberry juice sent the song back up the charts forty-three years on. The lesson bands have drawn from it ever since is bleak and irresistible: happiness writes white, but heartbreak — properly produced — goes forty-times platinum.
Quiz nuggets
- Rumours (1977) was recorded amid the McVies' divorce, the Buckingham–Nicks break-up and the affair involving Mick Fleetwood's wife.
- "Dreams", written by Stevie Nicks, is Fleetwood Mac's only US number one single.
- "The Chain" is the only song credited to all five members, and its bass outro became the BBC Formula 1 theme.
- Rumours won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1978 and has sold over 40 million copies.
- "Silver Springs" was cut from the album for vinyl running time and only became a hit after the 1997 reunion.