In February 1976, Fleetwood Mac began work on what would be their eleventh studio album at the Record Planet in Sausalito, California.
The Anglo-American quintet's self-titled tenth album, the first to feature vocalist Stevie Nicks and guitarist/vocalist Lindsey Buckingham, had been a huge success in the US, reaching number one on the Billboard 200 chart, and spawning three top 20 singles. But if the group were in great shape in the eyes of the industry as they began work on album number eleven, behind closed doors the group were in turmoil.
Keyboardist/vocalist Christine McVie had already revealed that she was leaving her husband John, the band's bassist, and starting a relationship with the group's lighting director, Curry Grant. Boyfriend and girlfriend when they joined the band, Buckingham and Nicks too were having relationship problems as was bandleader Mick Fleetwood, who had discovered that his wife Jenny was having an affair with his best friend.
Working with the band for the first time, the album's engineers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut had no idea of the emotional maelstrom they were walking in to.
“I thought I was going to be making a regular album,” Ken Caillat told MOJO magazine writer, and band biographer, Mark Blake when discussing the making of Rumours in 2012. “Then I heard this yelling, and saw Chris throw a glass of champagne in John's face. Then Stevie and Lindsey started having an argument over the microphone. Then Mick walked in with tears in his eyes as he'd just got off the phone to his wife. I started to think it was contagious.”
"I had to be a therapist and record producer," he recalled to Music Radar. "When everything was insane, I had to be sane. If there was a rule book, nobody gave me one."
If such a rule book had existed, it's unlikely to have had a section recommending the use of endless quantities of cocaine, placed in a bag on the studio desk for communal use, to ease tensions and soothe nerves among emotionally-raw musicians in the studio.
"Rumours was the beginning of their cocaine use,” Caillat told Mark Blake. “At that time, they were amateurs. This bag sat there for anyone to help themselves."
You felt so bad about what was happening that you did a line to cheer yourself up
Stevie Nicks
“You felt so bad about what was happening that you did a line to cheer yourself up," Stevie Nicks admitted. “We honestly thought that it couldn't harm us. That it wasn't addictive. How wrong we were.”
“When it comes to these war stories about our substance abuse, I am the prime candidate," Mick Fleetwood conceded. “I was very open about my cocaine use. These days I try to de-romanticise all that. But it’s true. It happened. I always imagine us making Rumours was a bit like Paris in the 1920s.”
My attitude was, ‘When in Rome..." Buckingham told Blake. “But I was never the guy buying the stuff. On Rumours, I don’t think I went for more than 36 hours straight without sleep. Though I can’t speak for the rest of the band, and certainly not Mick.”
In fact, Fleetwood's gratitude towards the band's dealer was such that he seriously considered giving him a 'thank you' credit on the album's sleeve notes, much as Black Sabbath had done on Vol 4, which carried the message, "We wish to thank the great COKE-Cola Company of Los Angeles."
“Unfortunately, he got snuffed – executed! – before the thing came out,” the drummer lamented in his 1990 memoir Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac.
Ultimately, all the pain, all the heartache, all the tension, all the sleepless nights paid off.
Released on February 4, 1977, Rumours would spend 31 (non-consecutive) weeks stayed at the top of the Billboard 200, albums chart and also topped charts in the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It is officially the 12th biggest-selling album of all time.
