| 33 Things You Should Know About Fleetwood Mac Fleetwood Mac They used to travel on Hitler's train. They toured with a 70-foot inflatable penguin. But first, dizzied by sex and drugs, they had to make one of rock's landmark albums. "We were," Mick Fleetwood admits, "crazy..." By Adam Higginbotham 1. Fleetwood Mac were named for their rhythm section. Lengendary (and legendarily nutty) British blues guitarist Peter Green formed the band in 1967 around drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie. "None of us would be here without Peter Green," Fleetwood says. 2. Green, the band's first guitarist, left after taking too much LSD. After a 1970 show in Munich, Green went to an acid party thrown by a group of rich German hippies. "I just sat around thinking and thought about everything," he said. "I was thinking so fast; I couldn't believe how fast I was thinking! And I ran out of thoughts. I must have been thinking solid for about an hour." After, Green announced that he wanted to join a commune, and insisted that the band donate all of its earnings to charity. 3.The star of early Fleetwood Mac shows was a dildo. A pink, 16-inch rubber dildo named Harold. "Our roadie would bring out Harold on a big platter, as if he were the butler delivering tea," Fleetwood says. "Harold would be attached to my bass drum by way of a suction cup at his base and would spend the evening quivering and vibrating in an erect position at the ladies in our audience." 4. Mick Fleetwood never plays without his balls. Two wooden balls hanging from his belt. "My drum solo consisted of me stepping out in front of the kit and dancing while clacking my balls together. I still have these wooden balls, and I never play without them. If I didn't have them, I'd be very loath to play at all." 5. John McVie is fascinated by penguins. When he lived near the London zoo, he spent hours watching the flightless birds. On the Mac's 1972 album, Future Games, there's a photograph of a penguin where McVie should be. The following year, the band named an album Penguin. Fleetwood Mac's publishing company was named after a species of penguin, as was McVie's yacht. Finally, McVie went out one night, got extremely drunk and had a penguin tatooed on one of his forearms. 6. They lost their second guitarist to a freakish Christian sect. The day before a gig in Los Angeles in 1971, Jeremy Spencer said he was going out to a bookstore and never returned. Road managers combed the streets for him; the FBI, Interpol and a renowned psychic were involved in a lengthy search. Eventually, the band's manager found Spencer in a warehouse with the Children of God. He had shaved his head, renounced his possessions and taken the name Jonathan. 7. Their third lead guitarist left because nobody would talk to him. In 1972, the band was touring America in a pair of station wagons, but everyone had stopped speaking to Danny Kirwan. Five minutes before one show, he went into the bathroom and repeatedly smashed his head against the wall, spattering blood everywhere. He then destroyed his guitar and refused to go onstage. Instead, he watched from the audience as the band struggled to play without him. He gave Mick Fleetwood a critique of the performance afterward. Then Fleetwood fired him. 8. And the fourth guitarist was fired for having an affair with Mick Fleetwood's wife. On tour, "I couldn't take it," Fleetwood says, "mentally." 9. Next up: The phony Fleetwood Mac. After yet another tour disaster, their manager, Clifford Davis, announced he was fed up: "I fucking own Fleetwood Mac," he explained, and with the real band scattered around the world, he promptly assembled his own version to tour the U.S.: the New Fleetwood Mac. Nobody was fooled. "At a few gigs," recalls road manager John Courage, "people threw shit at the musicians." 10. Meanwhile, Peter Green told the manager to stop sending him royalty checks - or he'd shoot him. The manager reported the threat. British police arrested Green, who was committed. "I don't think it was a real gun," Fleetwood says. "But he made quite a bold statement." 11. Before they joined the band, L.A. folkies Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks released an album of their own. They were both topless on the cover. Nicks bought a new blouse for the shoot, but Buckingham didn't like it, so he made her pose with nothing on. "I spent my last $111 on that blouse," Nicks says. "I didn't eat for days. I was crying when we took that picture." 12. Success did not make them happy. The 1975 album Fleetwood Mac made them millionaires. But by the time they began to record Rumours, the couples - John and Christine McVie, Nicks and Buckingham - had to split up. Fleetwood, too, was getting divorced. The band spent 18 hours a day in the studio but didn't speak. "Making Rumours was an exercise in denial," Buckingham says. "Trying to get the music done, minimizing the distress of having to produce songs for Stevie when I didn't even want to see her." 13. Drugs made recording Rumours a rather painstaking process.For instance, the band required four days, nine pianos and three tuners to find Christine McVie a keyboard that "sounded right." They enlisted the help of a blind man and someone known only as the "Looner Tuner." We felt that the piano was not holding tune," Fleetwood says. "Whether the piano was wrong, or whether we had lost our marbles - " Buckingham cuts in: "That's what it was." 14. They can't remember how or why they started taking cocaine. "Everbody across the board was indulging in cocaine at that time," Buckingham says. Notes Fleetwood: "I wandered into it - and then I turned around and I was in the middle of a train wreck. It was in my life for a long, long, long time. About 25 years." 15. Fleetwood wanted to give his coke dealer a credit on the album. "Unfortunately," he says, "he got snuffed - executed! - before the thing came out." 16. "The Chain" is the only song ever written by all five members of the band. "John does not write," Buckingham says of McVie. "His contribution to that was so fundamental: The riff that starts the whole tag - boom da-dad-doo-da-da-doo-doo-doo - was so thematic and dramatic." 17. Without all the relationship drama, Rumours would not have been nearly so successful. Buckingham: "A great deal of the appeal was that people could look at the whole soap-opera aspect. It's like being a voyeur and looking into people's bedrooms." 18. And it made Fleetwood Mac the "Soap-Opera Band." "We were pigeonholed into a cliched way of being looked at," Buckingham recalls. "Two couples: two chicks, two guys, breaking up, writing songs to one another." |