Fleetwood Mac’s mega-selling Rumours has become so central to the canon of rock history that all keen novice record collectors automatically make a beeline for it. Start with Rumours, and build outwards from there is the received wisdom.
But actually making this eternally-fascinating record, co-produced by Ken Caillat, Richard Dashut and the band across a range of studios through 1976, was a legendarily dramatic affair.
“Something like Rumours could never happen these days,” co-producer Ken Caillat told us back in an interview we conducted in 2012. “A record label would have shut us down after two weeks.”
In the midst of its writing, married Fleetwood Mac members John and Christine McVie separated, as as did former lovers Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Even Mick Fleetwood himself left the sessions heartbroken, with his own marriage falling apart during the Rumours creation period too.
“There were fights, breakups, drinking, drugs... We all indulged in substances,” Caillat remembered. “But I had to be a therapist and record producer. When everything was insane, I had to be sane. If there was a rule book, nobody gave me one."
In our lengthy interview, Ken gave us his track-by-track breakdown of the record’s 11 songs, and shared some extraordinary insights into how some of the most well-known Fleetwood Mac cuts were crafted.
“Lindsey was beating his acoustic guitar as hard as he could and screaming his lungs out. The first time I heard it, I thought, What the heck is going on?” Ken remembered, of Buckingham’s first rendition of the iconic Go Your Own Way. “It sounded so non-musical. I didn’t know if anything would come from it.
“As the months went on, we filled it out and it became a song,” Ken continued. “Lindsey figured out some fantastic guitar parts to lay down. In particular, he did an acoustic part on the 1, a flourish overdub, and that really drove the rhythm.
“There’s two guitar solos, the tag and the first one. For both, Lindsey didn’t know what he wanted - the song had progressed from an acoustic piece into this searing electric rocker. I gave him seven or eight tracks and he comped the solos. They sound seamless, as if they were totally composed, but they weren’t.
Ken also told us about how crucial getting Go Your Own Way’s drum part was; “One day, Lindsey came in and said he heard Street Fighting Man by the Stones, and he thought that kind of feel would work well. I remember watching him guide Mick as to what he wanted – he’d be so animated, like a little kid, playing these air tom fills with his curly hair flying. Mick wasn’t so sure he could do what Lindsey wanted, but he did a great job, and the song took off.”
