For embroidery, he borrowed a folky guitar figure previously used on his own song “Lola (My Love),” recorded with Nicks for the 1973 pre-Fleetwood Mac album Buckingham Nicks. Working backwards from the bridge, Buckingham used Fleetwood’s kick drum as a simple metronome to keep time. So I wrote verses for that bridge, which was originally not in the song and edited those in.” Then we listened back and decided we liked the bridge, but didn’t like the rest of the song. “We didn’t get a vocal and left it for a long time in a bunch of pieces. They settled on an ominous 10-note bass passage played by John McVie over a slow crescendo of Fleetwood’s drums.
“We decided it needed a bridge, so we cut a bridge and edited it into the rest of the song,” Buckingham told Rolling Stone in 1977. At its core is the Christine McVie composition “Keep Me There” (also known as “Butter Cookie”), a tense, keyboard-driven track that remained incomplete during the early album sessions in February 1976. Built from a handful of disparate musical fragments, “The Chain” has the distinction of being the only song credited to all five members of the late Seventies lineup. The second side of Rumours kicks off with Fleetwood Mac’s very own Frankenstein’s monster. “The Chain” has its basis in an unreleased Christine McVie song. In honor of Rumours‘ 40th anniversary, here are 10 little-known stories about its creation.ġ. To date, the LP has moved more than 45 million copies worldwide, making it one of the highest-selling albums of all time. The RIAA agreed, later certifying the album as such. In the end, the excruciating emotional pressure yielded a diamond of opulent late Seventies rock. Rumours is ultimately an unhappy love story with a happy ending. “It was hard to do, but no matter what, we played through the hurt.” “We refused to let our feelings derail our commitment to the music, no matter how complicated or intertwined they became,” Fleetwood later wrote in his 2014 memoir. Singer Paulette McWilliams on Her Years With Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, and Steely Danĭrama aside, Rumours is among the finest work the band ever produced.
The musicians’ personal lives permanently fused within the grooves, and all who listened to Rumours become a voyeur to the painful, glamorous mess.īlack Sabbath on the Making of 'Vol. This inner turmoil surfaced in brutally honest lyrics, transforming the album into a tantalizing he-said-she-said romantic confessional. Meanwhile, Mick Fleetwood’s extra-band marriage was on the rocks, leading to an affair with Nicks before the year was out. The Rumours saga is one of rock’s most famous soap operas, but here’s a refresher course on the dramatis personae: Stevie Nicks had just split with her longtime lover and musical partner, Lindsey Buckingham, while Christine was in the midst of divorcing her husband, bassist John McVie. Sessions for Fleetwood Mac‘s masterwork have all the elements of a meticulously scripted theatrical romance – elaborate entanglements, enormous amounts of money and mountains of cocaine. Dra- ma,” was how Christine McVie described the recording of Rumours to Rolling Stone shortly after its release on February 4th, 1977.