The book By Clive Young. Ken Caillat recalls every detail behind the creation of Fleetwood Mac's best-known album in his memoir, the aptly titled Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album, according to Mixonline.
Pile on record company pressures, feuds, writer’s block, and jaw-dropping amounts of drugs and alcohol, and it’s easy to see how Rumours should have been a complete trainwreck instead of an unqualified success. On hand for each step of the remarkable journey was co-producer Ken Caillat, who recalls every detail in his new memoir, the aptly titled Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album.
Throughout, Caillat generously spills the beans, recounting the tumultuous sessions with great clarity even after 35 years, kicking things off with the unlikely tale of how he nearly turned down a quickie gig of mixing a radio concert by the semi-known Fleetwood Mac.
Taking the job on a whim, he greatly impressed the band, which was about to record its next album. While you might expect that to lead into him being asked to engineer the record, like the rest of the stories in Making Rumours, this isn’t a fairy tale.
Instead, the group hit the studio with another engineer, whose console automation crashed on the first day. Nervous and finicky, the band abruptly turned to Caillat as a distinctly second choice, but sensing a golden opportunity, he took the offer anyway.
After months of recording, it was Caillat who realized that the master tapes were shedding oxide after hundreds of takes—and more importantly, he figured out a Rube Goldberg-like way to replace their forever lost high-end.
Similarly, when the band sounded lackluster on the road, it was Caillat who discovered that most of the PA was out of phase. These and dozens more stories fill the book—and that’s just the technical side of things. Along the way, there’s drugs, crying jags, one-night stands, Lindsay Buckingham completely blowing his stack, misbehaving dogs, massive fights, a practical joke involving copious amounts of cocaine
The album was recorded during the group’s Rumours Live tour at a concert at The Forum in Los Angeles on August 29, 1977.
FLEETWOOD MAC HAVE shared the unreleased live rendition of their hit “Go Your Own Way” from the upcoming Rumours Live, a double-LP capturing that band’s victory lap at the Forum in Los Angeles following the release of their 1977 masterpiece. Rolling Stone.
Rumours Live will be available on digital, double LP, and double CD, and includes nearly 90 minutes of previously-unreleased music. The setlist from the concert draws almost exclusively from Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, the first two albums recorded by the lineup of Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks, and Lindsey Buckingham. It features performances of hits like “Rhiannon,” “Landslide,” “Songbird,” and “The Chain.”
The Forum concert went unreleased for several decades until 2021, when “Gold Dust Woman” from the show was included as a bonus track on Live: Deluxe Edition, Rhino’s expanded version of Fleetwood Mac’s 1980 concert album. The other 17 songs on the collection have never been released.
During the production process for the album, there were complicated heartbreaks and affairs amongst the five band members. Additionally, an outrageous amount of cocaine and money fueled the band’s creativity, and the music itself is widely considered to be the band’s magnum opus. (Americansongwriter)
Similar to the band’s self-titled album released just two years before, Rumours'cover features only two members of the band—drummer and de facto leader of the band, Mick Fleetwood, and vocalist Stevie Nicks. Both artists appear to be in stage costume and Nicks is embracing her “Rhiannon” character who is, as Nicks describes, “an old Welsh witch.”
3 Balls
Now to get to the part that everyone wonders about but might be a little too embarrassed to ask. 
Fleetwood is sporting two wooden, dangling balls, and no, the crass allusion is not lost on us. However, those balls are actually pieces of “lavatory chains” that Fleetwood ripped from a toilet earlier in his career.
“In truth, I started off as a blues player. The whole ethic of a lot of blues music is slightly suggestive, might I say. And suitably, I walked out on stage with these two lavatory chains with these wooden balls hanging down, and after that, it just stuck,” Fleetwood said. The wooden balls became a perverse good luck token of sorts for Fleetwood, and they became a constant companion to his drum kit in subsequent performances.
And, if you look closely, there is one other ball in the photo. Nicks is holding a crystal ball in her outstretched arm.
It’s undoubtedly one of the strangest album covers of its era, if not all time. The photographer who was behind the masterpiece was Herbert Worthington and the creation which would go down as being his most famous work by some margin. Worthington would provide the concept, inspiration, and even brought along with him the footstool that featured on the Rumours album cover. (Faroutmag)
