It won album of the year at the Grammys, went 20 times platinum in the US alone, and sits alongside Kind of Blue and The Rite of Spring in the Library of Congress’s registry of historically significant recordings.
Shrouded in a rock & roll mystique rivaled by few albums, Rumours’ infamous and extensively documented backstory is notable for many reasons. First, the album followed—and eventually eclipsed—the success of its immediate precursor, 1975’s Fleetwood Mac.
What’s truly remarkable, though, is how it continues to sell new physical copies, despite being available to stream and in secondhand form in every high-street charity shop. According to the UK’s Official Charts Company, Rumours sold 34,593 vinyl copies in 2021, third only to new albums by Adele and Abba, and besting new records by Ed Sheeran and Lana Del Rey. It sold 32,508 copies the previous year. (Guardian)
It is currently at No 29 in its 926th week on the UK album chart – up five places from the week before – while in the US, Rumours sold 6,000 vinyl copies in the last week of January, reaching No 1 on the vinyl albums chart. It sold 169,000 vinyl copies in the US in 2021 (according to MRC Data).
A breakthrough album in its own right, the band’s self-titled long player formally introduced the aspiring and remarkably adept songwriting duo of Buckingham and Nicks. The pair’s energy and compositions (Nicks’ “Rhiannon” and “Landslide,” Buckingham’s “Monday Morning”) fundamentally reconfigured Fleetwood Mac’s sound and revived the band’s career, which had been gradually declining after nine, largely blues-rock imbued studio albums and the group’s late ‘60s, Peter Green indebted heyday. (Albumism)
“I didn’t want someone that was going to mimic what we’d done before,” drummer and co-founder Mick Fleetwood told Mojo magazine back in 2013. “That would have been hokey. Lindsey and Stevie came to us fully formed. It worked right from the start. Chris, Lindsey and Stevie’s voices created these wonderful harmonies.” Indeed, the creative and seemingly instant chemistry that the American Buckingham and Nicks so gloriously cultivated with Brits Fleetwood, keyboardist/vocalist Christine McVie, and bassist John McVie transformed Fleetwood Mac from a cult favorite with a modest track record of success in their native UK to international megastars many times over.
“Drama. Dra-ma,” was how Christine McVie described the recording of Rumours to Rolling Stone shortly after its release on February 4th, 1977. And that wasn’t even the half of it. Sessions for Fleetwood Mac‘s masterwork have all the elements of a meticulously scripted theatrical romance – elaborate entanglements, enormous amounts of money and mountains of cocaine. (TO read the full article appeared on Rolling Stone, click here)
The Rumours saga is one of rock’s most famous soap operas, but here’s a refresher course on the dramatis personae: Stevie Nicks had just split with her longtime lover and musical partner, Lindsey Buckingham, while Christine was in the midst of divorcing her husband, bassist John McVie. Meanwhile, Mick Fleetwood’s extra-band marriage was on the rocks, leading to an affair with Nicks before the year was out. This inner turmoil surfaced in brutally honest lyrics, transforming the album into a tantalizing he-said-she-said romantic confessional. The musicians’ personal lives permanently fused within the grooves, and all who listened to Rumours become a voyeur to the painful, glamorous mess.
Drama aside, Rumours is among the finest work the band ever produced. “We refused to let our feelings derail our commitment to the music, no matter how complicated or intertwined they became,” Fleetwood later wrote in his 2014 memoir. “It was hard to do, but no matter what, we played through the hurt.”
On You Can Go Your Own Way
While driving into the Record Plant one morning, Buckingham and co-producer Richard Dashut began to discuss how much they admired the syncopated drum fills played by Charlie Watts on the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man.” Considering the matter further, Buckingham decided that a similar pattern would be well suited for his new song “Go Your Own Way.” He passed the idea on to Fleetwood, who did his best to mimic what he heard, but the result was a disorienting, unsettled beat. Though very different from what Buckingham (and Watts) had played, the unlikely arrangement proved to be but a perfect fit for the track.
“[The] rhythm was a tom-tom structure that Lindsey demoed by hitting Kleenex boxes or something,” Fleetwood said in Classic Albums. “I never quite got to grips with what he wanted, so the end result was my mutated interpretation. It became a major part of the song, a completely back-to-front approach that came, I’m ashamed to say, from capitalizing on my own ineptness.”
Rumours is ultimately an unhappy love story with a happy ending. In the end, the excruciating emotional pressure yielded a diamond of opulent late Seventies rock. The RIAA agreed, later certifying the album as such. To date, the LP has moved more than 45 million copies worldwide, making it one of the highest-selling albums of all time.
. “The Chain” has its basis in an unreleased Christine McVie song.
The second side of Rumours kicks off with Fleetwood Mac’s very own Frankenstein’s monster. Built from a handful of disparate musical fragments, “The Chain” has the distinction of being the only song credited to all five members of the late Seventies lineup. At its core is the Christine McVie composition “Keep Me There” (also known as “Butter Cookie”), a tense, keyboard-driven track that remained incomplete during the early album sessions in February 1976.
“We decided it needed a bridge, so we cut a bridge and edited it into the rest of the song,” Buckingham told Rolling Stone in 1977. They settled on an ominous 10-note bass passage played by John McVie over a slow crescendo of Fleetwood’s drums. “We didn’t get a vocal and left it for a long time in a bunch of pieces. It almost went off the album. Then we listened back and decided we liked the bridge, but didn’t like the rest of the song. So I wrote verses for that bridge, which was originally not in the song and edited those in.”
Lindsey’s ex-wife Stevie Nicks claimed that he was fired over a tour dispute, however Lindsey firmly blamed Stevie for his very rancorous departure.
Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood has had a change of heart regarding former guitarist Lindsey Buckingham rejoining the outfit. Last January Fleetwood said that Buckingham would never reunite with the classic rock outfit, but according to a new interview, he’s reconciled with the guitarist and would like to see him tour again.
