Storms (2 page)

And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain

Everyone in the drafty rehearsal hall would be chilled into silence, even Stevie's constantly giggling band of girl fans. And after the last shudder had died away, someone would ask, as the band members gave each other knowing smiles and got back on course, “What was that all about?”

I'd shrug and say, “It's our anthem.”

The truth was that “The Chain” was really our alma mater song. Mick had been educated at a British boarding school. He left at fifteen to join a band, but he was eternally the boy from that exclusive, privileged-yet-deprived background, from a school with high-arched Victorian Gothic stained glass windows, stories of heroism, sadistic beatings, incomprehensible traditions, loneliness, and banding together against the odds. His plea to us to “hang on in there” came from the depths of his bitterest memories, which he shared with John Courage, who was, as he told us, one of the Courage brewing family in the United Kingdom. J.C.'s family, like the American Vanderbilts, were business aristocrats. It meant little to the U.S. contingent but a great deal to Mick, and to John and Christine, who hadn't shared the education but appreciated it. The four of them understood the unwritten rules of class and hierarchy and took it upon themselves sometimes to explain them to those of us from the U.S.

John McVie was the straight-faced, badly dressed joker, with a brilliantly dry wit, never sober, the big, crazy brother you never had, while Christine could out-drink any man but had never learned to do girly things or dress up like a homecoming queen. Once, driving to a band photo shoot with Richard Avedon, one of the world's most famous photographers, she was pulled over by the NYPD, who suspected they'd seen her snorting coke as she drove. Fortunately she'd snorted the entire stash, so there was no proof. But to her humiliation and fury she'd been strip-searched while wearing the large graying pair of knickers we all keep in the bottom of our lingerie drawer. “I was saving my new pink silk ones for the shoot!” she screamed at us all, still raging, when she arrived. “I was wearing my usuals!”

“Oh my God, Chris, not the cotton English granny knickers?” Stevie gasped. Big knickers weren't Stevie's style. From a wealthy family, she'd grown up in silk.

Christine nodded and burst into tears.

John Courage leapt to his feet, shaking his fist. “I'll have their badges!” he promised.

Christine was a guys' girl, a good sport—think Katherine Hepburn's elegance and boyish charm, or Hilary Swank in
Million Dollar Baby.
She was earthy and tough, despite the pure voice and the poignant love songs she wrote. She was the band mother, as Stevie was the wayward band child.

There were sixteen of us, including the band, in the family. We were part religious cult, part sex surrogates, part battle partners or sworn enemies, but always drifting as one. The original band had toured, recorded, toured again, leaving their roots in the UK. We were all the family each other needed, Mick used to say, and I remember wondering if that's what he'd been told by his classmates when, as a scared little boy, he was first sent to boarding school.

We were an incestuous, intense, self-sufficient group crowding around, and protecting, the five band members at its hub. Nothing was allowed to hurt the band, except the band itself. So when Lindsey ruined a live broadcast concert and shocked the entire audience, Christine was allowed to slap him across the face. That was in the rules.

Another rule was that if any band members played silly games, we could all join in. With her mystical naivete, Stevie was an easy target for jokes as the males in the band bonded and wept and swore brotherhood in maudlin drunkenness. At the start of the
Rumours
tour, Stevie had left her hard contact lenses in while she partied for two days to celebrate the band's success, and had worn off her cornea. After being carried piggyback onto the stage by the famed promoter Bill Graham, she struggled through the rain-swept gig, wincing every time the spotlight hit her, and was immediately ordered by the doctor to keep her eyes bandaged for a few days. It was too much of a temptation for the jokers, even for her regular band of adoring girlfriends who traveled everywhere with her. For the entire four days that she was blinded, they dressed her in outrageous outfits—” You look really pretty today”, we'd all grin—they put food and drink just out of her reach, and set booby traps for her to fall into. Very childish, of course, but we laughed like idiots. There was a touch of cruelty about it, but there was that boarding school undertone in much of the joshing that Mick and the two Johns initiated. They'd experienced bullying in their school days. Gently, and with a flourish, they passed it on down the chain.

Just outside this charmed inviolate circle of sixteen were the partners, male and female. None of them traveled relentlessly, as I did, with the tours all over the world, so mostly we met up in breaks. Julie Ruebens, John's girlfriend and later his wife, preferred to stay home. So did Jenny Fleetwood, who had two small daughters to care for. But when Mick's marriage failed, and his affair with Stevie faltered, I was joined on tour by the wonderful
Sara Recor, his girlfriend whom he eventually married. She was my confidante, and together we made our “road diary tapes” for our ears only.

The outer circle—the secretaries, engineers, makeup, wardrobe, technicians, and regular road crew—was headed and directed by the impeccable John Courage, known universally as J.C. He was Big Daddy with a cut-glass accent, efficient, wonderfully funny. Tall, with longish blond hair and a full mustache, he looked every inch the handsome, cavalier Englishman that he was. Sometimes he played butler, sometimes doctor, doling out illicit nonprescription dosages; sometimes he was a shoulder to cry on, always a rock. He would invariably know what to do. Among his crew was the handsome and debonair Curry Grant, the band's lighting director and resident playboy. During
Rumours
Christine was his conquest, and it was for him that she wrote the breathtaking “Songbird”, then—when she discovered his infidelities—” Oh Daddy”, not, as fans mistakenly speculate, for John. Years later, after both songs were beloved by millions, she would say that “Songbird” was written for and dedicated to “everyone” and that “Oh Daddy” was about Mick.

Curry never could keep it in his pants. At one band meeting he came in, leaned back surveying us all, then told me in front of Christine, “You know, you're the only chick in here I haven't screwed!” He never did, either. No one would have dared try it with Lindsey's old lady. Lindsey could terrify.

Unlike the gentle giant Mick. What the press and fans didn't understand is that the band was held together by “The Chain.” It had no real manager, just Mick Fleetwood, playing at doing the job. He performed the task with a bumbling amateurism that was again the legacy of his upbringing. There's a particularly British upper-middle-class characteristic of almost willing yourself
not
to succeed. Everything has to appear effortless, and money is vulgar. It's the total opposite of the American Dream. So Mick's greatest pleasure was “transcending”, a word he'd claimed for himself from old hippie meditation jargon, but downgraded from its religious context. To him it meant hanging out, getting stoned. Mick's ritual chant, paraphrasing Robert Frost, “the woods are lovely, dark and deep / and we have miles to go before we sleep”, would always herald the mirror filled with lines of cocaine in the recording studio.

We used to say that he lived under a little black cloud—nobody, surely, could be
that
unlucky with money?
He
was, because he'd been brought up
not to care about it. Despite the band's successes he later went bankrupt three times. And
he
was managing
our
affairs? How insane was that?

Yet Mick's influence was subliminal. We didn't realize at the time how pervasive it was, and how we'd all been drawn into his childhood world of medieval myth and magic, reinterpreted by Victorians, which we represented, Hollywood-style. Fleetwood Mac's stage clothes were romantic costumes. Mick's black velvet knickerbockers minstrel outfit with hanging wooden balls, Stevie's black chiffon, sequined scarves, and top hat—they were from the pages of British children's books, stained glass, the shadows of the past, intriguing but also darkly menacing.

Many writers have speculated about the origins of the mythology and imagery that underpins the Fleetwood Mac phenomenon. In fact, there is only one legitimate way to understand why this imagery resonated so strongly with the audience. Each band member was specifically an archetype, immediately recognizable to a world waiting for the legendary. Mick was the six-and-a-half-foot Wandering Minstrel announcing his arrival in the next town, the next performance, with pelvic thrusts that made his “wooden balls” click like a metronome. Stevie was the White Witch of your darkest perversions. Christine was the Warrior Queen—regal, inviting challenge, suddenly tender in defeat. John was the Court Jester in garish outfits, staggering drunkenly with a wry smile, while Lindsey, lurking in the shadows, was the Demon King.

These are all intense and archetypal figures straight out of our collective unconscious, and they connected powerfully with audiences the world over.

And me? Well, I became the Lady of Shallott. I read that Tennyson poem in high school and never remembered it until I started to live it. It tells of a woman imprisoned on an island, forced to look at the reflections of life through a mirror and weave tapestries to tell the stories of what she sees. She must never look out of the window. She must never confront, or be a part of, real life.

“It's so Fleetwood Mac!” I said, the first time I saw the home in Hancock Park that I chose for Lindsey and me to share. It was a perfect storybook setting for “The Chain.” The living room ceiling was covered in murals of knights and ladies, dragons and princesses. The windows were stained
glass, depicting knives dripping with blood and heraldic devices. Yet it was built in 1920. It was swashbuckling old Hollywood, a tower for a lady.

We threw a housewarming party there on Halloween, appropriately, during our first break from the
Rumours
tour. It was, of course, the hottest party ticket in town. There was a rich gourmet spread of expertly arranged food and drink, with vials of coke and bags of weed amid this mock baronial splendor. But after two hours of meeting and greeting the Warner Bros. executives, the Dodgers baseball team, the Beach Boys, and members of Eric Clapton's band, we did what the Fleetwood Mac sixteen always did—we left them to it. The Chain locked together, crept upstairs, hid in a suite of rooms with our own stash, and partied among ourselves. We felt safer that way. We were more in control with our own self-generated magic than any that could be created by the rock press.

They were usually wrong, anyway. They were certainly wrong about Lindsey, the soft-spoken brilliant guitarist who apparently hung back from the mythmaking and the dressing up, darkly mysterious. He always preferred to remain in the background, so it seemed, in those early days when rain fell incessantly and we both waited in Producer's Workshop for whatever the future would bring. Hoping to run from our own separate shadows, hand in hand, we raced into the darkness.

My reasons for writing this book are twofold. First, as an eyewitness, I want to share with you the highs, the lows, the truth behind the lies, the loving, and the hating that all went to make up an extraordinary band. Fleetwood Mac wrote the soundtrack to the lives of a whole generation—the band will always be part of my life, just as their music will probably always be part of yours, too.

Then there is a second, more personal reason for this book. In the years since I escaped from the Inner Circle—and I had to escape, as you will see, or perish—I have exorcized some demons, and made some sense of the beautiful insanity that was Fleetwood Mac at its most transcendent during the years from 1976 to 1984. But with one minor exception, I have never given any interviews or sought publicity: I prefer not being quoted to being quoted inaccurately. Here in this book, I want to go on the record—testify, if you will—about a time in my life that was happy, tragic, historic, and resonant with the music of its era. There is something profoundly and essentially
human about the music of Fleetwood Mac, and it is that essence that I must attempt to crystallize in these pages.

So, without further ado …

Ladies and gentlemen …

Prepare to embrace the band that rocked a generation …

Ladies and gentlemen …

This is how it really happened …

Please give a warm welcome to …

Fleetwood Mac!

“Hi”, he said, “I'm Lindsey Buckingham.”

He turned silently out of the shadows in Studio B and just stared at me. I think I stared back. But there was a time lapse. What is it with some memories? They etch themselves indelibly on your mind afterward, yet at the time there's just confusion and resistance and a flood of emotion to fight through.

But now I remember so clearly that first time I saw him. I remember in exact and overwhelming detail the light on the angles of his face, the slow, sensuous smile, the dark, dark halo of hair, the satanic goatee and mustache. I was face to face with my nemesis, staring into eyes of a blue that was never Californian. This blue was misty, like those English skies I'd seen on my travels.

I shuffled my studio schedules, turned my gaze away.

“I'm … I'm Carol Ann. Nice to meet you. I've, uh, gotta get back to work”, I stammered, trying to sound bright and efficient. But I could see he wasn't fooled, and neither was I. I raced toward the office, almost stumbling in my haste to get away, slamming my papers down on the desk once I'd reached my sanctuary.