1Johnson Chelsey JohnsonMr. ReynoldsMGRPJan. 6, 2013 Fleetwood Mac: Nothing but RumoursFleetwood Mac is a British and American rock band that was formed by previous John Mayalls Bluesbreakers, Peter Green, John Mcvie, and Mick Fleetwood, and Jeremy Spencer. The name Fleetwood Mac came from two of the members names put together, Mick Fleetwood, and John Mcvie. Jeremy Spencer did not want to have his name contributed to the name of the band as if to be considered, Spencer is God. Ironically, Spencer and Green had the most impact on the group with their gutsy blues sound, with Fleetwood and Mcvie having less of an impact. McVie had been a charter member of the Bluesbreakers in 1963, Fleetwood had joined in 1965, and Green had replaced Eric Clapton in 1966. With its repertoire of blues classics and Green's blues-style originals, the group's debut at the British Jazz and Blues Festival in August 1967 netted it a record contract. Fleetwood Mac was popular in Britain immediately, and its debut album stayed near the top of the British chart for 13 months. The quartet had hits in the U.K. through 1970, including "Black Magic Woman" and the instrumental "Albatross" (which was Number One in 1968 and reached Number Four when re released in 1973). (Serpick). For awhile the band was equal with sales as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, but then Green took LSD for the first time and started putting all of his money into it. In 1970, Green took LSD for the first time and beginning a catalog of events that would lead him to attempting to give all of his money away and culminating him as a schizophrenic, (Brown). Peter Green had begun to wear crucifixes and long, flowing robes on stage. Green then told the band that they had too much money and that they should donate most of it to charity. The band disagreed, saying that they were hardly scraping by and thought it was just his mind tripping out. John Mcvie said he initially went along with this plan because "there was no reason not to." He soon came to his senses when he realized that the proposition was coming from "a guy who'd just been given lots of acid,"(Adelson). After his bandmates turned him down he wrote the song, The Green Manalishi, which is about the evils of money. In May 1970 Green abruptly left the group to follow his ascetic religious beliefs. He stayed out of the music business until the mid-Seventies, when he made two solo LPs. His departure put an end to Fleetwood Mac's blues leanings. Danny Kirwan and Christine Perfect moved the band toward leaner, more melodic rock. Perfect, who had sung with Spencer Davis in folk and jazz outfits before joining British blues-rockers Chicken Shack in 1968, had performed uncredited on parts of Then Play On, but contractual obligations to Chicken Shack kept her from joining Fleetwood Mac officially until 1971. By then she had married McVie. (Serpick). In Early 1971, Jeremy Spencer left the group and joined a religious cult, The Children of God. Bob Welch joined in, and then Kirwin had a weird episode while the band was tuning up. [H]e went flipped out while the band was tuning up, ran into a bathroom, and smashed his head against a wall before destroying his guitar, (Perpetua). Kirwin was replaced with Bob Weston and Dave Walker. Both did not last long. Bob Weston, was fired after conducting an affair with Mick Fleetwoods wife, (Brown). In 1974, the group relocated to California and after all of this, this is when Fleetwood Mac found its greatest line-up. Producer Keith Olsen played an album he engineered, Buckingham-Nicks, and the Fleetwood Mac hired not only Olsen, but Lindsey Buckingham, and Stevie Nicks. Olsen played Frozen Love from the album Buckingham Nicks to show Fleetwood how the room would sound. Fleetwood not only liked the way the room sounded but loved how the guitarist sounded, Lindsey Buckingham, and he had to have him. So, on New Years Eve, 1974, Fleetwood called up Buckingham and asked if he wanted to join into the band. He said yes, but he would have to take his girlfriend, Stevie with too. Together they racked up five million in sales. In 1976, Fleetwood Mac members were variously losing their minds to LSD, joining religious cults, and a casual affair with a bandmates wife. With the five left that survived the mess, Rumours was their last chance for a success, and all of them were in a heartbroken agony over each other. Bassist John Mcvie and singer Christine Mcvie came into the studio at the point of a divorce, and when Christine started dating one of the lighting directors did not help any of that out. They handled that situation in silence, except Christine wrote the song, Dont Stop, stating over repeatedly, yesterdays gone, yesterdays gone. She also wrote the song You make loving fun, about her new relationship. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks with their relationship no longer intact, would constantly yell at each other, and the only time they would stop, was in the recording studio. But, Buckinghams song, Go your own way, stung even harder.

'Loving youIsn't the right thing to doHow can I ever change thingsThat I feelIf I couldMaybe I would give you my worldHow can IWhen you won't take it from meYou can go your own way'

The studio became a madhouse and time began to vanish, especially after Fleetwood took all the clocks out, and the band became consumed by alcohol, cocaine, and other drugs.In 1977, the Mcvies, married for seven years, divorced, Buckingham and Nicks separated, and Fleetwood was in the midst of divorce with his wife, while conducting an on-off affair with Stevie Nicks. The tensions of the two years between albums helped shape the songs on Rumours (Number One, 1977), which would sell over 17 million copies, win the Grammy for Album of the Year, and spawn the 1977 hits "Go Your Own Way" (Number 10), "Dreams" (Number One), "Don't Stop" (Number Three), and "You Make Loving Fun" (Number Nine), (Serpick). But what added immeasurably to its appeal was the tangled and incestous mess that the album chronicled, (Brown). The song Dreams, wrote by Stevie Nicks, was originally just three chords. Christine thought the whole song was just boring. When Stevie first played it for me on the piano, it was just three chords and one note in the left hand, McVie told Q in 1997. I thought, This is really boring, but the Lindsey genius came into play and he fashioned three sections out of identical chords, making each section sound completely different. He created the impression that theres a thread running through the whole thing, (Perpetua). Dreams became one of their biggest hits.

Its Christmas Eve and we are opening presents over at the Mattisons. Jake opens his present that I gave him to see two tickets to Fleetwood Mac inside of an envelope. Fleetwood Mac is one of his favorite bands of all time. As he sees the two tickets inside, you can tell by the look on his face that he is excited. Are these tickets for you and me? he asks in a rush.Yes of course! My parents will bring us to the cities and just me and you will go to the concert."Sweet, he says looking down at the tickets.

After Rumours, Lindsey Buckingham thought the band needed a change up. They group worked in the studio for 13 months, Lindsey taking the lead on things, trying to come up with a new sound, and not trying to be beat out by the new upcoming bands. Mick Fleetwood suggests that the riff that Buckingham always plays while doing soundcheck could be something, then he added that they should maybe do it with a live brass band. Tusk, which is featured prominently and often in the premiere of FXs The Americans tonight, is a work of strange savagery, overlaid with jungle sounds and a thudding, endlessly repetitive drum riff that drives everything that happens in the song, (VanDerWerff). The studio suggested that they just do another album like Rumours, because it was such a hit. The band was furious, especially Lindsey Buckingham. They do otherwise, and go to the USC marching band and record live there,makes it one of Fleetwood Macs very best, yet also easily its strangest song to hit on the charts, (VanDerWerff). Mirage was released in 1982, it lacked the emotions like there were in Rumours, and didnt have the ambition like in Tusk. The most disappointing thing to me after Tusk was the politics in the band,Buckingham admits today. They said, Were not going to do that again. I felt dead in the water from that. On Mirage, I was treading water, saying, Okay, whatever, and taking a passive role. For me, none of the albums after Tusk quite had it. I think we lost something after that.Christine McVie has no doubt what is was they had mislaid. Mirage was an attempt to get back into the flow that Rumours had. But we missed a vital ingredient. That was the passion, she confesses bluntly,(Williamson). Between their next album, Nicks was extremely addicted to cocaine. Id never felt so tired in my life, she recalls. When I joined the band, the rocknroll life was a shock to my system. Its so intense and so heavy and being like Fleetwood Mac was like being in the Army. I was doing a lot of drugs just to get me through to the next thing. I dont remember how much we did. But we spent an awful lot of money on it, (Williamson). Nicks hit rock bottom and decided to check herself into Betty Ford Clinic before she wasted away. When I walked through those doors at Betty Ford and they searched me and took away all my stuff, it was like, OK Im never doing THAT again because Im never coming back to a place like this, (Williamson). But, nobody believed that she had recovered and strongly suggested she go and see a physiatrist. She went thinking that it was the only way that her friends would believe that she was done with the cocaine. He subscribed her Klonopin, a tranquilizer, two little blue pills. She soon became addicted. He gave me two little blue pills. One at morning and one at night. Within a couple of months that turned into four little blue pills. Then it became 15 blue pills. He kept increasing my dose. I was in there every two weeks for an hour and he watched me grow heavier and the light went out in my eyes. If I started to run out, I would start to shake so hard people would stare at me. I thought I had Parkinsons disease. I was sick and high and miserable and overweight. I knew I was going to die, (Williamson). Finally one day Nicks realized she could not keep going now the way she was. She called her manager and told him to bring her to the hospital, where she was detoxed. Meanwhile, through all of this, Fleetwood Mac was trying to record their new album Tango in the Night in 1987. Nicks had already been addicted to the tranquilizer for a year, and Mick Fleetwoods drug abuse, causing him to always make him fall asleep, made it difficult for the band to record songs. Buckingham was again at the lead and in charge, putting six of his songs that were going to go on his own solo album to help out the band. With Nicks only contributing two songs, and Christine Mcvie three. All of this directly contributed to the showdown in August 1987 when Buckingham walked out of the band, seemingly for good. When I was done with the record, I said, Oh my God. That was the worst recording experience of my life. And compared to making an album, in my experience, going on the road will multiply the craziness by times five. I just wasnt up for that. I needed to pull out of the machine and try to maintain a level of integrity for the work that wasnt about the scale or the sales, (Williamson). To replace Buckingham, the band recruited two guitarists to take his spot, Rick Vito and Billy Burnette. Together they recorded the album Behind the Mask. It was unsuccessful, and after that Christine and Stevie left the band. Mcvie and Nicks were replaced with Bekka Bramlett, and Dave Mason, to record the album Time. This album was even more unsuccessful than Behind the Mask. But, after Bill Clinton was using Dont Stopas his presidential campaign, the Rumours group got back together to perform at his inaugural address. Five years later in 1997, the Rumours group came back together again to record The Dance, a live document of an MTV concert and four additional new songs. They performed their songs from the album Rumours and performed songs, My Little Demon, Bleed to Love Her, and played Tusk, with a live set of trumpeters. The live casting went to cd and dvd.

Why dont you ask him if hes going to stayWhy dont you ask him if he is going awayWhy dont you tell me whats going onWhy dont you tell me who is on the phone

Flash forward a couple months and we are driving down to to the cities, the day after Prom. We leave at 5 in the morning after being up until 2 that same day. Both of us are too excited to sleep in the car and we listen to Fleetwood Macs cd Rumours all the way there. When we get to the Xcel Energy Center, all we see are older people. I expected just that since the band is pretty old, but we were the youngest ones there, and we certainly looked out of place. Especially when we started walking down to the floor seats.Jake and I took our seats only to stand up a few moments later to see Fleetwood Mac come out onto stage. The whole place erupts into screams and applause and I look around.Jake turns to me and says, The place has to be sold out. I shake my head in agreement. All the seats on the floors, you cant see a single seat open. Even the the nosebleeds way at the top. I was surprised.The band starts playing Second Hand News, and the whole crowd seems to get louder with excitement. Everyone on the floor is dancing and the whole place has to be singing. They somehow sound better than they do now than they did on the cd. I dont know if its just because it is live or if it is because they are actually just performing better. And, I think to myself, this has got to be the best concert I will ever go to.

'I know you're hoping to findSomeone who is going to give you a piece of mindWhen times go badWhen times go roughWon't you lay down in the tall grassAnd let me do my stuffI'm just second hand news

They keep playing and playing, Fleetwood going crazy on the drums, Buckingham with those vocals and guitar, and you cant forget Stevie. She will always be my favorite. The way she sings with such emotional and dances around with her black shawls. Her voice so original, no one else can take her place. They play their last encore song, Say Goodbye, after already having an encore and coming out and playing two other songs.I turn to Jake, What was your favorite song?Probably The Chain, what was yours?I smile, I honestly dont know. So how come thats your favorite song?Well the meaning behind it, and they all have a solo. I dont know, its just kinda cool.

The song The Chain, is about the band's commitment to staying together through all of their personal arguments. All five of the bandmates had their own solo in the song and are credited to it with writing it. The song was created by putting together three different songs.

Damn your loveDamn your liesBreak the silenceDamn the darkDamn the lightAnd ifYou don't love me nowYou will never love me againI can still hear you sayingYou would never break the chain

When the band marked its 20th year anniversary of Rumours, it went on a world tour. Although Christine McVie didnt enjoy the touring rigmarole and announced that she had come to the end of the road, the rest of the band found that time had proved a great healer. Looking back, its like listening to war stories, Mick Fleetwood jokes. But you have to remember there were people yelling in pain with their legs shot away. Theres blood and guts and disagreements still to this day. But thats what makes it mean a shit,(Williamson). The band sold 25 million copies of Rumours, making it one of the most popular rock bands in history.

Works CitedAdelson, Martin. Peter Green. N.p.: The Penguin, n.d. Web. 6 Jan. 2014.Brown, Mick. Fleetwood Mac: Sex, Drugs, Fear and Loathing. N.p.: The Telegraph, n.d. N. pag. Web. 6 Jan. 2014.Perpetua, Matthew. 19 Things You Did Not Know About Fleetwood Mac. N.p.: Buzzfeed, 2013. Web. 6 Jan. 2014.Serpick, Evan. Fleetwood Mac Biography. N.p.: Rolling Stones, n.d. Web. 6 Jan. 2014.VanDerWerff, Todd. Fleetwood Macs strangely Savage Tusk was the Bands Weirdest Hit. N.p.: A.V. Club, 2013. Web. 6 Jan. 2014.Williamson, Nigel. Fleetwood Mac: Everybody was Pretty Weirded Out-The Story of Rumours. N.p.: Uncut, 2003. Web. 6 Jan. 2014.