In February 1976, Fleetwood Mac began work on the follow-up to their self-titled tenth album at the Record Planet studio in Sausalito, California. Six months earlier, Fleetwood Mac, their first record to feature vocalist Stevie Nicks and guitarist/vocalist Lindsey Buckingham, had reached the top of the Billboard chart, giving the Anglo-American band their first US number one album. Since then, however, the band had been beset by personal problems, and relationship difficulties, and studio engineers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut could hardly fail to notice the tension as they commenced work.
“I thought I was going to be making a regular album,” Ken Caillat told MOJO magazine writer Mark Blake when discussing the making of Rumours in 2013. “Then I heard this yelling, and saw Chris [McVie] throw a glass of champagne in [former husband's] John's face. Then Stevie and Lindsey started having an argument over the microphone. Then Mick [Fleetwood] walked in with tears in his eyes as he'd just got off the phone to his wife [who had confessed to an affair with his best friend]. I started to think it was contagious.”
Caillat has now written a book - Making Rumours: The Inside Story of how Fleetwood Mac Made a Masterpiece -about his experience making the 40-million-selling album, and, as you might expect, it's a fascinating read, laying bare the drama and magic at the heart of the record. The sessions were challenging for all involved, not least the then 29-year-old Caillat, who was promoted from engineer to co-producer during the recording.
At one point in the book, he reveals that, during the tracking of Go Your Own Way, Lindsey Buckingham was frustrated by his own attempts to record a guitar solo, and requests that Caillat and Dashut tape over his first run at the solo. He's equally unimpressed with his second take, however, and asks that Caillat replays his first attempt, at which point the engineer reveals that he has taped over it as requested. A distinctly unimpressed Buckingham then storms into the studio control room and starts strangling Caillat.
"'You’re an idiot!' Lindsey screamed at me, his hands tightening around my throat," the engineer writes.
"His veins were popping out of his neck," Caillat recalls in a new interview with The Times newspaper. "Christine goes, 'Lindsey, you told him to erase it!' Of course he was coked and stoned and everything else. He used to roll joints all the time. He’s a very nervous man."
Caillat also reveals to The Times that band members would schedule their arguments, so that they didn’t eat into recording time.
"They had to figure out when they would have their fighting meetings," he remembers. "I would say, Who feels like fighting today, and who feels like working? Then we might do some keyboards, or some vocals, while the others went outside to yell at each other."
"There were fights, breakups, drinking, drugs..." he once recalled to Music Radar in 2012. "We all indulged in substances. But I had to be a therapist and record producer. When everything was insane, I had to be sane. If there was a rule book, nobody gave me one."
Making Rumours: The Inside Story of how Fleetwood Mac Made a Masterpiece by Ken Caillat and Steve Stiefel is out now, on Monoray.
