"It was a rough take, just me singing solo and playing piano," Nicks said of the moment. Christine McVie, for one, was not impressed: "It was just three chords and one note in the left hand I thought 'This is really boring.'"Įven though Nicks and Buckingham were in the middle of their bitter breakup, the artist in him had no choice but to agree that the song was good. Nicks knew she had something special, so she presented the demo to the rest of the band. Right away I liked the fact that I was doing something with a dance beat because that made it a little unusual for me." "I found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on and wrote 'Dreams' in about 10 minutes. "It was a black-and-red room, with a sunken pit in the middle where there was a piano, and a big black-velvet bed with Victorian drapes."Īlone in Sly Stone's old space, Nicks went to work: "I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me," she recalled. I'm talking about cocaine in such quantities that, at one point, I thought I was really going insane."įor Stevie Nicks, the chaos would drive her to find peace elsewhere in the Record Plant recording studio: "One day when I wasn't required in the main studio, I took a Fender Rhodes piano and went into another studio that was said to belong to Sly of Sly and the Family Stone," Nicks told Blender in 2005.
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"We went four or five weeks without sleep, doing a lot of drugs. It didn't help that the band was obsessed with consuming hard drugs at a record pace: "It was the craziest period of our lives," Mick Fleetwood admitted to Q in 1997. Those personal power struggles spilled over into the recording process. As if that wasn't enough, drummer Mick Fleetwood-whose own marriage was falling apart-would make things even more volatile by having an affair with Nicks in the middle of the chaos. Both were going through brutal separations during the making of Rumours. Among the five members, there was a pair of couples: singer Stevie Nicks and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, and keyboardist Christine McVie and bassist John McVie. The drama that was tearing Fleetwood Mac apart served as fuel for one of the greatest and best-selling rock albums of all time. It's the Fleetwood Mac meme that perfectly encapsulates the vast dichotomy between what it took to create the band's Rumours album, and the effect all of that internal turmoil has had on its listeners for years: A woman is blissfully listening to music on headphones, completely unaware of the massive brawl that's erupted behind her.