Storms (29 page)

One of the first songs that he wrote was “That's All for Everyone”, which was about loneliness and a man's search for someone or someplace in which to find refuge. It was so emotionally powerful to us both that we almost drowned in every single note. As this song was forming itself in the basic track, Lindsey's demeanor during those weeks was like that of a man holding on for dear life every time he came out of the studio and rejoined me. Sadness hung about him like a dark aura and I sensed that
he needed every single bit of reassurance that he was not
alone
—that I was always waiting for him, no matter what. He told me over and over again how much he loved me, as though he were afraid that I'd disappear from his life.

The music was manifesting itself in our lives, and I was as protective, loving, and reassuring as I could possibly be. I didn't leave the house. I put my modeling shoots on hold. Not just because I couldn't bear the thought of him walking out of the studio into empty rooms where no one was waiting for him. But also because I felt that if I wasn't available to him whenever he might need me, the
music
might, in some indefinable way, suffer.

Finally Lindsey wrote the lyrics to “That's All for Everyone”, and the song was essentially finished. We both sat on the floor of the studio with tears streaming down our faces as we listened to it again and again. Sitting with hands clasped tightly, leaning against each other, we didn't speak about what we were feeling—we didn't have to. I was sharing Lindsey's pain that was coming through the music and he knew it.

I felt that it was one of the most beautiful songs I'd ever heard, and it ripped my heart into pieces each time I listened to it.

During the recording of the next two songs I assumed an entirely different persona. As soon as he began to record “Not That Funny” and “What Makes You Think You're the One”—both songs tinged with anger and sarcasm—Lindsey's personality went through a radical change: he was sexually aggressive, ordered me around like I was his handmaiden, and strutted around the house like a friggin' king. Instead of being his refuge in an emotional storm, I played the part of the subservient courtier. I
felt
that this was what he needed from me. His behavior was the exact opposite of what it was when he was writing and recording “That's All for Everyone” and it took a great deal of submissive—and repressed—behavior on my part to survive the recording of these new songs. Honestly, sometimes I just wanted to scream at him to
get over himself!
But I didn't. For I knew, once again, that it was all about the music.

Nevertheless, it was with relief that I listened to the final mixes of these two brilliant numbers. I loved them, and I knew that Lindsey had found the “cutting edge” that we talked about during our New Wave listening parties. It had his completely original stamp of genius. It was a cutting edge that didn't sound anything like Fleetwood Mac. In fact, I had a foreboding that
when the others heard his new songs, this new cutting edge could very well slice Fleetwood Mac's fragile truce into tiny, bloody shreds. And I knew that when this happened Lindsey was going to need all the moral support that I, so far his only emotional cheerleader, could give him.

But the song closest to my heart was “Save Me a Place.” One day, standing on the balcony of our bedroom, I begged Lindsey to take a few days off so that we could spend time together. He answered that he didn't know how to explain it, but that he just couldn't—but “if I saved him a place, he'd come running” after the album was finished. When I heard that song for the first time I was overwhelmed by the love in it, and its harmonies were so beautiful that I once again began to cry.

Two days after the final mix of “Not That Funny”, I awoke to the smell of coffee coming from our downstairs kitchen. Throwing on a short dress, I skipped down the stairs, following the heady aroma all the way into our breakfast nook. As I walked into the octagonal room I grabbed the back of an antique chair to keep from stumbling at the shock of what was waiting for me. And then I let out a scream. Lindsey was sitting at the table, trying to pull off an air of complete nonchalance as I stood and gaped at him, my eyes traveling back and forth between the long brown curls of hair lying on the floor at his feet and the short, uneven locks that were sticking out from his head.

“Lindsey! What the hell happened?”

“Uh, I just wanted to try something new. You know. Like we talked about”, he answered sheepishly.

I stared at him with my mouth open for thirty seconds and then started to giggle. “Oh my God! I know we talked a lot about finding the ‘cutting edge' with your
music
, Lindsey, but I swear to God I don't remember talking about your hair!”

As I collapsed into a chair next to him, trying to stop my giggling so as not to hurt his feelings, I took a close-up look at what he'd done while I was sleeping. Lying on the table in front of me was our pair of old kitchen scissors and a hand mirror. He'd used the dullest pair of scissors in the house to chop off all of his hair, and he now looked like a medieval prisoner about to be taken to the guillotine.

“You don't like it?” he asked in a small voice, his forgotten joint burning in his hand.

“Oh … huh … yeah, Lindsey, I do! I think maybe we need to even it up a little bit, and then it's going to look great! Really! But, uh, I don't think the mustache and goatee look that hot with your hair short, do you?”

“Really?” Lindsey grabbed the mirror off the table and examined his reflection. “I don't know—it seems like a lot to cut off my mustache and beard. I'm not sure if I want to.”

I cringed before I answered slyly, making a point that I knew would surely shock him out of his reluctance to shave his now effeminate-looking facial hair. “Well, you
do
look a lot like Bjorn right now, actually. I mean, not that you resemble him—but it's the same kind of look he has, you know what I mean?” I said matter-of-factly as I looked at Lindsey's face. His cheekbones were much more pronounced with his hair short and with his blue eyes and strong chin he could have easily passed for one of Bjorn's close—in the biblical sense—friends. Despite the bad job he'd done in the actual overall haircut, Lindsey looked
gorgeous.
But I knew that wasn't the look he was going for. Lindsey wanted to look punk, not like a male model—and especially not like one of Bjorn's paramours!

Peering in the mirror again, Lindsey let off a string of curses that left little doubt over his horror of looking like he'd just stepped out of Studio 54 in New York. He glared at me as though it was
my
fault that he looked so “pretty” with his short hair, beard, and mustache. I put my hands on my hips and stared him down. “You could do worse, you know”, I told him. “Bjorn's great looking. But it's not exactly rock ‘n' roll, is it? And anyway, Bjorn would have a heart attack if he knew you cut your hair off with a pair of scissors that barely cut paper! God! You must have had to almost saw it off!”

With a shrug Lindsey calmly answered, “I couldn't find any other ones. Fuck it. Let's go upstairs. I'm going to shave my face clean and then we'll do the hair again. Will you help me?”

With that we ran upstairs together and an hour later Lindsey's transformation was complete. His hair was, at most, two inches long, sticking out in choppy pieces from his head, and he was now completely cleanshaven. And I fell in love with him all over again. He looked beautiful and, I had to admit, more than a little diabolical. We looked at each other and screamed, “Yes!”

His new look signaled a radical new Lindsey Buckingham. It was a physical persona that matched his new music and I, for one, couldn't wait
until the band saw him. It might, just might, give them a forewarning of the explosive changes in musical direction that Lindsey was secretly shaping for Fleetwood Mac's next album.

As I was soon to find out, the changes wouldn't just be in the new direction that his
music
had taken. Lindsey's new sound and persona would literally transform the fundamental balance of power on stage and in the recording studio. And it would shatter Fleetwood Mac's uneasy peace.

Lindsey posing with his new look.

A few weeks after Lindsey's transformation I got an urgent call from Bjorn. He wanted me to start doing shoots again. “I know you've been ‘standing by your man', Carol, but we need to do lots more photo shoots for your portfolio. Surely Lindsey can survive without you for a few days or nights a week, can't he? I mean, you haven't left his side for almost two months! Aren't you bored?”

“I don't know, Bjorn. I do miss seeing you and of course I want to get back to work on my portfolio, but I have to make sure that Lindsey doesn't need me here while he's recording.”

“What do you mean? He's in his little studio all day long while you sit in that huge house waiting for him to walk out of the maid's quarters at God knows what time every single night. How can you being gone while he's working behind closed doors matter? Doesn't he know your work is important, too? You and I have a lot of plans, remember?”

With a sigh I told him that I'd been doing what I felt I needed to do. But I promised that I'd talk to Lindsey about resuming work on my portfolio. While it was true that I'd been lonely and bored while Lindsey spent hours locked away in his studio, I felt it was a small price to pay for the music that he was creating. His work was going so well that sometimes he didn't come upstairs until midnight, having spent fifteen or sixteen hours recording.
And when he did finally come to bed there was a sense of calm about him now that wasn't there in the beginning. I knew that he'd weathered his creative crisis and come out on the other side of it stronger and with a new depth to his writing.

After discussing it with him, Lindsey told me that he didn't mind if I went back to doing my modeling shoots—as long as I worked during the day. Within a week I was back in the photography studio with Bjorn orchestrating every single look that I needed for my model portfolio. And at home, Lindsey continued to work on the songs that would, months later, appear on the new album.

In May, Lindsey left the sanctuary of his studio and joined Richard Dashut and Ken Caillet in Studio D at Village Recorder studios in West L.A. Perhaps not so much needing as wanting a studio that had state-of-the-art sound for the next album, Fleetwood Mac had built one. Designed exactly to the specifications of Lindsey, Richard, and Ken, the new studio was an amazing accomplishment in sound and acoustics, as well as in comfort. In the outer listening room there were beautiful tiny stars on the domed ceiling hovering over a huge mixing console equipped with soundboards that were the best in the world. Cushy couches lined the walls and the coffee table was glass—perfect for laying out lines of blow.

And it was all being paid for out of Fleetwood Mac's pocket. The final tab: $1.4 million. Of course, there was English beer on tap in the outer waiting room, so the band felt that the money had been well spent. There had been talk of the band actually buying the studio in the beginning, but negotiations had stalled and no one seemed that upset about it. Not one of them worried about spending that much money on a studio that the band didn't even own. It was all for the future album, and anyway Fleetwood Mac had plenty of money and, with the last leg of the American
Rumours
tour only two months away, there soon would be plenty more.

Lindsey had yet to play his songs for anyone but me. And he wouldn't. He was going to tell the band what he was doing and what he wanted for their next album when we went back out on the road. He was hoping, I suppose, that the distraction of the tour would help cushion the shock of his announcement. And it would be even more of a shock than I expected.

Lindsey was so happy with how his songs were turning out that he'd decided that he didn't want the band to have any input whatsoever into
them. No more collaborating, no more jamming in the studio as each member contributed his or her ideas to Lindsey's songs. He didn't want even one note changed in his masterpieces—and if he had to, he told me, he'd play all the instruments himself during the recording of them at Village Recorder. Afraid that their input might dilute—or even destroy—his new songs or, God forbid, give them even a
hint
of the sound on
Rumours
, he abso-fuckin'-lutely wouldn't risk it.

Despite his confident words, I knew that he was nervous and totally dreading the showdown that was sure to come. But I also knew that, true to his word, he wasn't going to change his mind. No matter how ugly and horrific it might get for him, he'd never bow to pressure from the other members of the band. The new creative road he'd taken was far too important and he'd worked too hard to allow
anything
to jeopardize it.