Fleetwood Mac was full of dysfunction and drama long before Stevie Nicks joined

We explore some of Wikipedia’s 6,864,156 oddities in our newly monthly series, Wiki Wormhole.

This month’s entry: Fleetwood Mac

What it’s about: A British pop group as well known for dysfunction and drama as its string of hits in the ’70s and ’80s that includes “Rhiannon,” “Go Your Own Way,” “Dreams,” and “You Make Loving Fun.” At the pinnacle of the band’s success, John and Christine McVie were in the midst of a divorce, and Stevie Nicks was dating Lindsay Buckingham but cheating on him with Mick Fleetwood (who was also going through a divorce). And everyone involved was using lots and lots of cocaine, although Wikipedia charitably doesn’t mention coke, and only uses the word “drugs” twice in the whole article. 

Biggest controversy: Everything about the band’s personal lives is controversial, but we’re going to go with a meta controversy here: There are enough wild stories about Fleetwood Mac that this article is only going to cover the period before Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham joined the group, and even then we might not get to it all. 

Strangest fact: The band lost one original member to drugs, and another to a cult. The core of the original group—guitarist Peter Green, bassist John McVie, and drummer Mick Fleetwood—were the backup band to British blues singer John Mayall, and decided to form their own group in 1967. They recruited slide guitarist Jeremy Spencer to round out the new band, and had a few UK hits, including an instrumental, “Albatross,” that went to number one. (They added another guitarist, Danny Kirwan, in 1968). But in 1969, Green had a bad trip after taking, “very bad, impure LSD.” His mental state quickly deteriorated, and he left the band the following year. McVie’s wife Christine had been a session player on keyboards on their earlier albums; they elevated her to full member in the group to replace Green.

All went well until their 1971 tour, when Spencer said he was going out to “get a magazine” and never returned. He was missing for several days, and the band finally discovered he had joined a religious cult called Children of God and could not be persuaded to rejoin the group. Spencer’s own Wikipedia page explains that he had been in a rough mental state before the tour, having had a bad drug trip of his own (mescaline this time), and rattled by a major earthquake that had hit Los Angeles. He tried to convince the band to cancel the tour, and went along only grudgingly, before his abrupt departure. Later in life, he insisted he had made the right choice, and that his only regret was not giving the band more notice, as they had to cancel several gigs.

Thing we were happiest to learn: The band found an unlikely replacement. In the middle of a tour and short a guitarist, they called the only person who knew their songs well enough to fill in on short notice: Peter Green. Green agreed on the condition that the band not play any of their recorded material and come up with all new songs, to which he would not contribute. Bereft of other options, they agreed.

Green was not interested in rejoining the group, so a friend recommended guitarist Bob Welch, who they hired before they had actually played with him, based on listening to tapes of his playing. But by that point, Danny Kirwan’s drinking was becoming a problem. He smashed his guitar before a show, refused to go on stage, and then criticized the band’s performance when they went on without him. They fired him on the spot.

They replaced him with guitarist Bob Weston and singer Dave Walker. They fired Walker after a year because they didn’t think his vocal style fit with the band. Then two weeks into the 1973 tour, it came out that Weston had been having an affair with Fleetwood’s wife, Jenny Boyd. (Her sister Pattie was in the midst of cheating on her husband George Harrison with Ronnie Wood at the time, but George was also sleeping with Wood’s wife. It was the ’70s.) Fleetwood fired Weston, canceled the tour, and the band decided to break up.

Thing we were unhappiest to learn: Besides the fact that Christine McVie’s maiden name was Perfect and she decided to change it? To no one’s surprise, the band’s manager did them dirty. When the band abruptly split, manager Clifford Davis found himself on the hook for touring commitments, and he was worried leaving a whole string of venues in the lurch would hurt his reputation. He sent the band an angry letter, saying he “hadn’t slaved for years to be brought down by the whims of irresponsible musicians.” So he did the only responsible thing—called up Legs, a less-successful band he also managed, and sent out on tour as “The New Fleetwood Mac.” He told the band Mick Fleetwood was still on board, had approved their use of the name, and would join them on the road. (None of this was true.)

Legs’ first few gigs went well, but then word started getting around that they weren’t the real Fleetwood Mac. Audiences booed, promoters canceled shows, and after fans started throwing bottles on stage, the New Fleetwood Mac also broke up. It took a full year for the real members to wrangle the legal rights to the name back (despite the name simply being made up of Fleetwood and McVie’s names). They fired Davis, decided to manage themselves, moved to Los Angeles, and recorded an album, Heroes Are Hard To Find, with only Welch on guitar. But Welch was exhausted from the extended legal battles and drama, and left to pursue a solo career. They found a replacement guitarist in Lindsey Buckingham, who agreed to join the band if they also brought in his girlfriend and songwriting partner Stevie Nicks. And the band would never experience any drama ever again.

Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: The band discovered Buckingham and Nicks when they were scouting out LA’s Sound City Studios. The studio had recently set up a state-of-the-art recording console, so the studio’s owner played them the first album recorded on the new equipment, Buckingham Nicks. The band was impressed. But that was hardly the most consequential album recorded at Sound City. The studio’s Wikipedia page is a veritable history of LA music, producing landmark albums including After the Gold Rush, Terrapin Station, Appetite For Destruction, Nevermind, Rage Against The Machine, Unchained, and Boygenius. The studio is renowned for its drum sound (according to producer Rick Rubin, “guitars sound pretty much the same everywhere, but drums change from room to room, and the sound at Sound City was among the best”), and when the studio temporarily closed in 2011, Dave Grohl bought their equipment and built his own studio, then directed a documentary, Sound City, in 2013. (The studio re-opened in 2017).

Further down the Wormhole: Besides their ever-changing lineup, Fleetwood Mac has used countless guest musicians over the years, and their 1979 single “Tusk” was backed by the USC Trojan Marching Band. The only college marching band to have two platinum records, the Spirit of Troy have also backed up everyone from Michael Jackson to Radiohead and have performed at the Olympics, the Oscars, in a long list of films (including Forrest Gump, The Music Man, and Amazon Women On The Moon), and for five U.S. presidents. USC plays their football games at the Los Angeles Coliseum (erstwhile home of the NFL’s Raiders), but the university has many athletics facilities, including the Uytengsu Aquatics Center. The 2500-seat venue boasts a long-course swimming pool and a diving well, and was constructed for the 1984 Summer Olympics. It was paid for by perennial Olympics sponsor McDonald’s (and originally named for the fast food chain, before being renamed for an alumni who donated several million dollars for renovations in 2013). McDonald’s is universally known for the Big Mac, Chicken McNuggets, and their perpetually broken ice cream machine, but over the years, they’ve seen some lesser-known menu items come and go. We’ll order from the List of McDonald’s Products next month. (Just so long as they don’t make us download an app.)