Fleetwood Mac
were the lovingest, fightingest,
druggingest band of the '70s.
Twenty years later, the psychodrama continues . . .
Twenty minutes after coming offstage in Burbank, Calif.,
Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie look just a touch stunned in the unsparing
light of a trailer that's serving as their ad hoc lounge. A film of sweat fights
it out with their foundation makeup. They've just played 90 minutes' worth of
what was meant to be Fleetwood Mac gems. Tonight's show wasn't entirely to their
liking: Nicks muffed the first verse of "Dreams" while crane-mounted TV cameras
cruised and snooped, and McVie simply seemed to be hoarding strength for the
next taped show - Friday evening, 19 hours from now. They have the wide-eyed
graciousness of party givers who can't get their guests to leave as they
politely shake hands and slump back beside a zealously beaming Winona Ryder, who
rises to depart with a fervent observation: "Weren't they amazing?"
You can see on the ladies' faces that they don't feel that
amazing tonight, but they're glad for Ryder's dewey-eyed vote of confidence.
When a man is tired of London, said the essayist, he is tired of life; and if
you tire of this rejuvenated band, you are tired of, well, classic rock. You
could feel both audience and band rediscovering that in the first few measures
of the first number, "The Chain": Mick Fleetwood's peaty bring-out- your-dead
opening drumbeats; Lindsey Buckingham's astringent guitar; Christine McVie,
Nicks and Buckingham's baleful harmony - "Listen to the wind blow/Watch the sun
rise . . ."; and John McVie's darkly muttering bass combined to pretty well blow
the dust off the legacy and bring you forward in your seat - this is as bleakly
intoxicating as what the trade magazines call pop music can get. By the time
Buckingham was squeezing out an anguished "And if you don't love me now/You will
never love me again," he had reclaimed, at 47, the title of angriest dog in
rock. Fleetwood's face, which in repose is capable of a kind of distracted,
off-putting gravity that wouldn't be out of place in an old German vampire
movie, creased happily as he patted the song to a close.
It's from 1977's Rumours, of course, the only cut on which
all five shared the writing credit. It's also the band's old and new testament
to its own tortured togetherness, because it perfectly captures the ominousness
of that chain letter warning you of loneliness and loss: "I can still hear you
saying/You must never break the chain."
As we know, this band did individually suffer - whether
because it broke the chain or because it really could not - a string of woes
including but not limited to heartbreak, enmity, alcoholism, cocaine addiction,
penury, divorce, carpal tunnel syndrome and, as Fleetwood tried to pound the
body back to life, being sandwiched on a nostalgia package tour, in 1995,
between REO Speedwagon and Pat Benatar. In place of Buckingham and Nicks, that
Mac iteration featured such unlikely figures as one-time Traffic operative Dave
Mason and Bekka Bramlett, daughter of the redoubtable '70s rock duo Delaney and
Bonnie.
It was Buckingham, of course, who left the gate open for the
imposters with his repeated walkouts on the band, but he is also the creative
linchpin of the fivesome. Nicks had her solo hits like "Edge of Seventeen" and a
pair of great duets with Tom Petty; Christine McVie is a viable solo artist with
(like Nicks and Buckingham) a label deal at the Mac home base of Warner/
Reprise; and Fleetwood and bassist John McVie are always employable as what
Fleetwood calls "gigsters" - but Buckingham is the tormented genius you could
lift out of '70s rock and set down, with his fierce chops and raging vocals,
anywhere you like. Among the mixes for his next solo album, which is on hold as
the band tours, is a cut that takes its title from the last word of the lyric
"Think of me, sweet darlin', every time you don't come" and features a honking
guitar workout that should serve as a do-ya-feel-lucky-punk invitation to any
doubting arrivistes who haven't replaced their six-strings with samplers.
Buckingham's back-to-back performances of "Big Love" and "Go Insane" (the latter
of which shows up only on the long-form, costs-money video version of the band's
new live album, The Dance) made the audience in Burbank stand up peering midway
through the generally sedate tapings, like a crowd watching stock cars flip
over.
The wall chart of the Mac's fortunes goes in its rough
strokes by 10-year jumps, at least in the Buckingham-centric view of things:
from 1967, their founding as an English blues band; to 1977, when Buckingham and
Nicks invigorated the band's 25 million-selling Rumours; to 1987, when, after
the torturous Tango in the Night sessions at Buckingham's house, he balked at
touring and was sent away; and now to 1997, when Buckingham has been persuaded
to join up again and co-produce The Dance. The question that hangs over the
entire enterprise is whether the current U.S. sweep of 43 dates in major cities
will turn into a world tour. And while Nicks and Christine McVie hint that they
may yet opt out of the larger plan, it's really Buckingham's call to make.
"You know," says Nicks, who still wears chiffon but is a good
deal more battle-hardened (and speaks a bit deeper) than the hippie priestess of
one's former imaginings, "Lindsey made a whole lot more money than everybody
else did because he produces. The producers get paid first. And he probably
didn't spend nearly as much money as everybody else did; he lives way simpler.
So he didn't have to do this for money, you know. The rest of us would all like
to put something away for, you know, our golden twilight years. But he has to
want to do it, or we don't want to do it either."
If Buckingham is the brains of the operation, Fleetwood is
the heart and viscera, keeping the beat going in every sense. Picture him just a
few years ago, Rumours money squandered, brandy bottle near, coked out and lying
in a borrowed bed in a damp cellar watching soap operas, and you know this is a
heart through which hard times and bad habits could not drive a stake.
The reunion may have been inevitable from the moment that
Buckingham invited Fleetwood to help with his solo album. "I had some
ambivalence about Mick," Buckingham says. "He was clearly into my album, and yet
I knew he was to a substantial degree instigating this whole band thing. I
couldn't be mad at him, because Fleetwood Mac is his life's blood, really. He's
spent his whole life trying to keep this ship afloat.
"Everyone has said to me, 'This is going to be a good thing
for you,' and, of course, you kind of are suspicious of their motives, too. I'm
a suspicious guy. I'm working on that."
Lindsey Buckingham was born to relative privilege in Palo
Alto, Calif., and raised nearby in Atherton. His father, Morris, ran a coffee
plant ("Small and slowly not doing so well and eventually went under"); two
older brothers were golden, suburban jock types - brother Greg won a silver
medal for swimming in the '68 Olympics. Lindsey was a high school junior singing
California Dreamin' at somebody's house when transfer student Stephanie Nicks, a
senior, saw him. Two years later, she was the chick singer and he the bassist in
a post-high school band called Fritz. It was understood that none of the guys
would hit on her. But when Nicks and Buckingham migrated to Los Angeles to shop
the band's demo (he was on guitar by now), they were tapped by the Polydor label
- without their band mates. In Nicks' room at the Tropicana Motel, confusion was
sown, innocence lost. "Why it happened between me and Lindsey was because we
were so sad that we had to tell the three guys in the band that nobody wanted
them, only us" she says.
Once they'd broken up with the band and their respective
steadies, "our relationship was great," says Nicks. "We had other problems:
didn't have a lot of money, alone in L.A., didn't have our families, no friends,
didn't know anybody. But we had each other."
"I knew that we were going to be somebody," says Nicks. "I
think that he had a little bit less belief in the fact that we would really make
it big. I always knew."
This particular crystal vision did have to wait. When
Buckingham got mononucleosis, they moved back north, short on cash. Nicks
continued college but often stayed with the Buckinghams in their living room.
The two cut tracks, working nights in a spare room at the gloomy coffee plant.
"It was scary there," says Nicks. "Good acoustics, though." Working with a
four-track Ampex tape machine, they built songs one channel at a time, the old
Beatles way. The tracks would form the basis for their 1973 album,
Buckingham-Nicks, but the musical idyll was interrupted by his father's heart
illness and death, at age 54. "His dad died within a year, as we watched, and it
was awful," Nicks says. "I picked up the phone and had to hand it to Lindsey the
morning his father died. Devastating. Changed all of our lives."
The singing duo set up shop in a slightly beat section of
L.A. with engineer Keith Olsen and another musician friend, and despite the
occasional passed-out sessionman on the floor, Nicks and Buckingham grew
domestic. "From '71 through '75," says Nicks, "I lived with Lindsey all those
years. We were absolutely married. In every way [but for the ring], I cooked, I
cleaned, I worked. I took care of him."
Buckingham-Nicks, made with credentialed studio players like
Jim Keltner, had an almost Delaney and Bonnie Southern twang and even got a
pocket of rabid fans in Birmingham, Ala. This aberration may have been what led
to an odd New York meeting with a Polydor A&R type who told them, "I think you'd
be better off, you know, if you did something more like this," and put a 45 on
his office turntable - Jim Stafford's crackerbilly hit "Spiders and Snakes."
They had a tenuous spec deal to make a second record, but even as the advisers
"were trying to glom us off on the steakhouse circuit, the one-way ticket to
Palookaville," as Buckingham says, Fleetwood was making his legendary visit to
Olsen's studio and hearing "Frozen Love," from the duo's LP. A week later, when
Bob Welch left the band that Fleetwood had been nurturing since 1967, Buckingham
got the call, and within days, the newly minted Mac were in rehearsals.
What would become a sturdy friendship between Nicks and
Christine McVie took immediately, in a let's-see coffee-shop meeting. By
contrast, John McVie, who still missed the band's original but now acid-damaged
guitar god, Peter Green, found Buckingham - who began by advising him to play
"simpler" - brash.
John McVie, a man of wry and placid, not to say mournful,
aspect, misses Green (now embarked on a low-key comeback) to this day. He
distinctly recalls the fateful trip to Germany where Green went astray. "We had
been selling more records than the Beatles," he says. "It was an amazing time,"
Then, one night at a gig, came "German jet-set kids, hippies with money, and
they had a whole ploy. They dangled a carrot in the shape and form of a
beautiful young German model in front of him, and they got him away for two or
three days in a studio in a basement. And if I ever meet those bastards . . .
because what they did is unforgivable."
"Somebody gave him some bad acid," says Christine McVie, who
was married to John but not yet in the band, "and it freaked him out. I saw one
Peter Green leave and a completely different one come back - pale, wan,
depressed. A little mad, really."
This was far from the end of sex, drugs and rock & roll for
this most tumultuous of bands, but the fivesome's honeymoon produced 1975's
Fleetwood Mac, with its suitably goofy cover art and, despite its pop
accessibility, curiously dour demeanor. Christine McVie's "Say You Love Me"
thrummed irresistibly; Nicks' "Rhiannon" was an obvious FM classic, and her
"Landslide," written in Aspen, Colo., during a bitter-sweet moment in relations
with Buckingham, seemed to herald the arrival of a rock goddess just spooky
enough for a generation's second stoned decade.
With the abruptly successful band trapped between its new
hordes of hangers-on and its own romantic troubles (not just the couples:
Fleetwood's marriage had been running erratically ever since his wife, Jenny,
briefly ran off with his pal, lead guitarist Bob Weston, from two lineups
previous), Commander Fleetwood mandated that the record would be cut in the
slightly remote outpost of Sausalito, just north of San Francisco. What they did
there is one of the legendary blood-and-glory tales of rock-album making. "We
had a good time, bad time, fun time, sad time," says John McVie. "Something
great came out of it." Twenty-five million records later, Rumours carries its
own bona fides; among its many attributes, it would seem to be the most
inescapable album of its era.
Nicks and Christine McVie encamped in a pair of nearby
condos. "All we had was each other, really," says McVie. "We certainly weren't
getting on with our respective husbands or boyfriends." Meanwhile, says John
McVie, "we lads had our thing, too." In a residence that was part of the studio
complex, the boys set up shop - "with parties going all over the house," says
John. "Amazing. Terrifying. Huge amounts of illicit materials, yards and yards
of this wretched stuff. Days and nights would just go on and on. It was very
loose."
It got to the point where the craziness seemed normal. "In
those days," Christine McVie says, "it was quite natural to walk around with a
great old sack of cocaine in your pocket and do these huge rails, popping acid,
making hash cookies." Oddly enough, Nicks' "Gold Dust Woman" had been written
several years before, when she had little experience with cocaine. By the time
she cut the song, she still wasn't fully wise to the drug. Even singing, "Take
your silver spoon and dig your grave," she says, "we did not realize how scary
cocaine was. Everybody said it was OK, recreational, not addictive. Nobody told
you that you may end up with a hole through your nose the size of Chicago."
The steady drugging, combined with the pressures of recording
under the band's highly collaborative system, tore at the already weak fabric of
the couples' relationships. Though she'll hint that Buckingham was at least
somewhat possessive and controlling, Nicks says, "I don't even remember what the
issues were; I just know that it got to the point where I wanted to be by
myself. It just wasn't good anymore, wasn't fun anymore, wasn't good for either
of us anymore. I'm just the one who stopped it."
She remembers the day quite vividly: "In Sausalito, up at the
little condominium. Lindsey and I were still enough together that he would come
up there and sleep every once in a while. And we had a terrible fight - I don't
remember what about, but I remember him walking out and me saying, 'You take the
car with all the stuff, and I'm flying back.' That was the end of the first two
months of the recording of Rumours."
Back in L.A., in a Sunset Strip recording studio, Buckingham
added the vocal to his "Go Your Own Way," an outburst of a song to which Nicks
dutifully added backup vocals. "I very, very much resented him telling the world
that 'packing up, shacking up' with different men was all I wanted to do," she
says. "He knew it wasn't true. It was just an angry thing that he said. Every
time those words would come out onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He
knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that. I was like, 'I'll make you
suffer for leaving me.' And I did. For years. Lindsey immediately got
girlfriends. I never brought men around, because I wasn't going to tick him off
any more than I had already." Back and forth it went. When Nicks wrote a song,
she'd bring it to him, and he'd ask, "Who is that about?" "You don't really want
to know," she would say. "So I'm not going to tell you. It's just about
nothing." Even so, without Buckingham's help, some of those songs she was
scrawling in her notebooks never quite got finished. Her productivity plunged.
"That's where the double-edged sword came," Nicks says, "whether he wanted to
help me or not: 'So, you don't want to be my wife, my girlfriend, but you want
me to do all that magic stuff on your songs. Is there anything else that you
want, just, like, in my spare time?' "
Meanwhile, Christine McVie remembers, "Mick was sort of
holding everything together. But the music was, also. The music was very
rewarding. It was very powerful to be there recording these songs." Somehow,
amid the emotional devastation, her signature tune, "Songbird," arrived gift-
wrapped. "I wrote it in half an hour," she says. "Just stayed up late one night.
I think I just was thinking of all the band members - 'God, wouldn't it be nice
just to be happy?' "
There was little chance of that, as she reluctantly prepared
to split with John. "I dare say, if I hadn't joined Fleetwood Mac," she says,
"we might still be together. I just think it's impossible to work in the band
with your spouse. Imagine the tension of living with someone 24 hours a day, on
the road, in an already stressful situation, with the added negativity of too
much alcohol. It just blew apart."
"John," says Nicks, "drinks too much. And that's why Chris
and John aren't together. Period. And John knows that he needs to quit, but you
know none of us are going to go over there and nail him to the wall. So
hopefully it will all be OK. You know, I pray every day, 'Please, God, just take
care of John.' "
From the time that "Rumours" was released and had its quick,
massive success until Buckingham ducked out, in 1987, Fleetwood Mac were
imprisoned by their own near-mythic popularity. Behind the tinted glass, things
could get ugly. "It was just having to be together and being so unhappy," says
Nicks. "You don't want to sit in the same room, be on a plane after a show, with
somebody who hates you. It was not fun."
As frontman for the band, Lindsey Buckingham gave
performances that were more like exorcisms; toward the end of the U.S. leg of
the 1977 Rumours tour, he collapsed in the shower in a Philadelphia hotel room
and was later diagnosed as having a mild form of epilepsy. By then, Fleetwood
and Nicks had a serious flirtation cooking - despite his marriage and her
relationship with a record executive. On the band's Pacific tour that fall,
after a show in New Zealand, they went back to her room and began a covert
affair that moved from there through Australia and back to the U.S.
"Mick and I," says Nicks, "were absolutely horrified that
this happened. We didn't tell anybody until the very end, and then it blew up
and was over. And, you know, Lindsey and I have never, never talked about Mick.
Ever."
That wasn't the only psychodrama Australia would see; one
evening, as Nicks performed her patented witchy dance on "Rhiannon," twirling
under her hooded poncho, Buckingham wrenched his jacket over his head and began
dancing in a crude, crowlike imitation of her. "Lindsey was angry - just mad at
me," recalls Nicks. "That wasn't a one-time thing. Lindsey and I had another
huge thing that happened onstage in New Zealand. We had some kind of a fight,
and he came over - might have kicked me, did something to me, and we stopped the
show. He went off, and we all ran at breakneck speed back to the dressing room
to see who could kill him first. Christine got to him first, and then I got to
him second - the bodyguards were trying to get in the middle of all of us."
"I think he's the only person I ever, ever slapped," says
Christine McVie. "I actually might have chucked a glass of wine, too. I just
didn't think it was the way to treat a paying audience. I mean, aside from
making a mockery of Stevie like that. Really unprofessional, over the top. Yes,
she cried. She cried a lot."
Without quite denying such incidents, Buckingham looks
genuinely a bit puzzled to hear them played back. "What I do remember," he says,
"is a show where I purposely sang much of the set out of tune. We got offstage,
and everyone was irate, obviously. They were talking about firing me and getting
Clapton. Very well founded, because it was not a professional thing to do."
Ultimately, the guitarist's voluntary departure, in 1987,
stopped the toxic brawls. In fact, except for a couple of weeks in the studio
when the band cut Tango in the Night, in 1986, Nicks says she spent little time
in the '80s around Buckingham "and his insane kind of going-insane thing."
Nicks had her own battle to wage - against the cocaine that
had become her key companion during her solo years. "I haven't done cocaine
since 1985," she says, "when somebody advised me to go and see a plastic
surgeon. He said to me, 'The next toot that you do could be your last. The
tissue in your nose is very delicate. It could go straight up to your head, and
then you could drop to the floor and die a lousy, two-hour death.' So what I did
was finish my tour. I had to be very careful - just a tiny little bit, very
careful."
Nicks came off the road and packed her bags for 28 days of
rehab at the Betty Ford Clinic. "They are hard-nosed," she says. "They're harder
on you if you're famous - 'Oh, if it isn't Miss Special.' It's awful. But it
works. Now, I don't do things that make me feel bad, 'cause I have way too much
work to do. When they told me that my brain might blow up, it was very easy to
quit."
For Fleetwood, the warnings would take longer to arrive. His
marriage to Jenny Boyd was in trouble, his father was dying of cancer before his
eyes, and he was spending the $3 million he'd already made from Rumours on
cocaine and real estate. And despite, or almost because of, his cash influx,
Buckingham, "our chief architect and creator," was under the spell of the Clash
and other Brit-punk bands, and intended to kick the next album well to the left
of Rumours. Buckingham told Fleetwood that he felt stifled by the band format
and wanted to record some of his tracks at his home studio; further, he was sick
of pouring his best musical ideas into the others' songs.
Yet there were plenty such songs, and the band was ready to
make the double album that would be named Tusk, after Fleetwood's slang for an
erect male member. ("We just liked the sound of the word in the abstract," he
later lied to People.) His father died, in the summer of 1978. In the life
reassessment that followed, Fleetwood confessed to Jenny about the now-cooling
Nicks affair; Jenny went back to England for good soon after. By year's end, he
had taken up with Nicks' pal, model Sara Recor, who happened to be married.
The band was making new music: Buckingham's plaintive "Walk a
Thin Line" ("I said, 'Stay by my side'/But no one said nothing' ") and lurching
"What Makes You Think You're the One" and "Not That Funny"; Nicks' "Sara" (where
the libidinous Fleetwood appears "just like a great dark wing"); Christine
McVie's poppy "Think About Me." The title track was recorded with the USC
marching band. The persisting joke is that Warner Bros. execs heard the
scattershot, challenging two-record set and saw their Christmas bonuses fly out
the window. To make the battle more uphill, Warner Bros. issued it in September
1979 with a price of $16, about three bucks more than was typical. Fleetwood Mac
survived another wearying world tour - the ailing Buckingham undergoing a
diagnostic spinal tap that left him on all fours in pain and caused the
cancellation of a gig for 80,000 people in Cleveland - and fetched up back in
L.A. so worn out that Buckingham impulsively told a crowd that it would be a
long time before anyone saw the band again. Within days, after the four other
band members told Fleetwood that they wanted more professional counseling than
his Seedy Management could offer, the band agreed to take nine months off.
Fleetwood flew to Ghana to make a record with some pals and
the local hot-shot players. He drummed all day and led sprees all night. On one,
grousing about poverty, he took off his $8,000 Rolex President and smashed it to
bits with the heel of a beer bottle. Buckingham immortalized the expedition in
his sardonic solo song "Bwana." "We all have our demons/And sometimes they
escape," he wailed. "The jungle cries for more."
Fleetwood's demons were definitely about. He bought a house
in the same L.A. canyon as Don Henley and Barbra Streisand, dubbed it the Blue
Whale and made it the clubhouse of his Zoo band - many musicians, too much coke.
Making payments on two sizable homes, running the parties, he was finally forced
to declare bankruptcy. Christine McVie remembers the sad epoch when Big Daddy
became Little Daddy: "Everything about him became little. He wasn't walking with
his shoulders straight like he always used to. It was sad to see that. He didn't
seem happy, didn't know how to function unless he was high. He would just sleep
the whole time - just hooked on drugs, about as low as he could get. I remember
him telling me he was living in somebody's basement with a damp carpet. The
carpet was soaking wet, and the bed was damp, and he used to lie in bed watching
soap operas all day long."
For the recording of 1987's Tango in the Night, Fleetwood was
functional enough to play the drums. Buckingham, encouraged by the band's
willingness to come to his home studio, labored long and hard to produce the
album's rich sonic sheen. His own unfettered "Big Love" featured overlapping sex
moans (Buckingham's voice equalized into something many thought was Nicks').
Christine McVie's "Everywhere" took the band's vocal formula to a teeth-achingly
pretty extreme. But Buckingham had put off his third solo record - for 17 months
- and torn his favorite songs out of it for Tango. Here's how he remembers those
era-closing sessions: "I think the final snapshot I have is from that period of
time, making Tango up at my house. We had a Winnebago parked in front because we
didn't want the whole house to be used for a lounge, so to speak. I had a
girlfriend then who was very threatened by the whole situation, and that didn't
really work very well, either. But the snapshot would be us trying to get things
done in an atmosphere where there was just a lot of crazy stuff going on and not
a lot of focus, and not a lot of unity and certainty. And no sense of us wanting
to do this for . . . for the reasons we originally got into it for. That's my
last snapshot of 1987. And then a little 10-year vacation.
The night after it amazed Winona Ryder, the band reconvened
for another show. Once again, the invited 400 seemed to want the Mac thing very
much. Brought to attention by "The Chain," stroked by "Everywhere," almost
chastened by the rigors of "I'm So Afraid," the band settled in during the
deceptively peaceful opening strains of "Silver Springs." But Nicks, who had
shown a good deal of power the previous night, was clearly going for the whole
enchilada this time. "Time cast a spell on you, but you won't forget me/I know I
could have loved you, but you would not let me," chanted all three singers as
Nicks gathered herself, then gripped the mike and turned toward her ex-lover
with every semblance of smoldering anger and hurt: "You'll never get away from
the sound of the woman that loved you."
By the time Nicks was virtually shouting, "Was I just a
fool?" and "Give me just a chance," Buckingham was peering sideways as he sang
his part, eyes guarded behind whatever masking his guitar and mike could afford
him. "'Silver Springs' always ends up in that place for me," says Buckingham
later, "because she's always very committed to what those words are about, and I
remember what they were about then. Now it's all irony, you know, but there is
no way you can't get drawn into the end of that song."
It's four months later as night settles in outside Stevie
Nicks' L.A. house, and a couple of dozen candles stacked around the room flicker
in the breeze coming through the open French doors. "At night the ocean gets
really loud," Nicks says. "And then you realize how close you are to it." An
oversize original print of her and Buckingham bare-shouldered, as they appeared
on Buckingham-Nicks, sits nearby, awaiting shipping to a museum. She's
discussing her performance of "Silver Springs" that will be seen in a few days
on MTV. "I never did that before," she says of her fervent, face-off reading of
the song. "I left that for Friday night. The earlier shows were good. I just
paced myself. They weren't the show I wanted to leave behind for posterity, just
in case Fleetwood Mac never did another thing."
"I think," says Buckingham, "some people are probably getting
the impression that we are back together or something along those lines. Which
is certainly not true. Not yet, anyway. You never know. I don't foresee that at
all. But, you know things . . . "
Stevie Nicks sits up very straight when she hears that
notion. "Over my dead body. See, I don't want to be part of that darkness. He
knows that. When we're up there singing songs to each other, we probably say
more to each other than we ever would in real life. If you offered me a
passionate love affair and you offered me a high-priestess role in a fabulous
castle above a cliff where I can just, like, live a very spiritual kind of
religious-library-communing- with-the-stars, learning kind of existence, I'm
going to go for the high priestess."
Mick Fleetwood has invited Lynn, his wife of two years, to
come out on the road and see a few shows - just not the early ones. "Lynn and I
were talking to someone who is new to this whole thing called Fleetwood Mac," he
says. "And she said, "What you've got to understand is that these people have
something in between them that is extraordinarily theirs. And you will never
know. It is you and them, but you have to get used to it, because when these
people are together, there is an unspoken thing that absolutely exists."
"You know, this whole thing is not happening as a bunch of
corporate decisions. The celebration that Stevie and Lindsey are now able to
have is interesting to watch. It's good - an understanding of where they've come
from. I would hate to see anyone walking away or something going wrong, because
now they're at the point in their lives where they can relate to the fact that
they did come as a couple - first as a couple musically, then they joined this
thing called Fleetwood Mac. And then they went to hell and back, basically. And
now they are able to talk about that. It's also a celebration for me and John -
I sometimes go, 'Wow, this man has been standing next to me for 30 damn years.'
Christine, too. It's something to be proud of."
Christine McVie, singing a couple of songs at stage front for
the first time, says she occasionally feels "like I've stood up in an airplane
that's in turbulence." But back behind her keyboards, she thinks of history,
too. "I do have flashbacks occasionally. The beast might have had its nails
clipped a bit - I don't know. We're certainly not as dangerous for each other.
Wouldn't that be a nice way for things to turn out?"