When Fleetwood Mac embarked upon the Rumours Tour in February 1977, they were rock stars. By the time they wrapped up the tour in August 1978, they were a phenomenon.
In the intervening months, the band’s 11th studio album, Rumours, had exceeded all expectations, selling over ten million copies worldwide in its first 13 months of release, and staying at the top of the US Billboard 200 for 31 non-consecutive weeks.
In February 1978, the band and co-producers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut won the Grammy for Album Of The Year.
The album’s success far eclipsed anything that any of the group had previously experienced, and had the effect of multiplying the troubles that had been brewing internally for the previous few years.
Relationships that were already strained became dysfunctional, and yet the show went on – even the behind-the-scenes drama couldn’t derail the juggernaut that Fleetwood Mac had become. In fact, if anything, the soap-opera-like happenings only heightened the intensity of their live shows.
'Guaranteed fireworks'
Drummer Mick Fleetwood took a philosophical approach to the hedonistic madness that surrounded the group on tour, as he told Rolling Stone in 1977: "I could have never planned any of this. I don’t even believe in making plans. They only create an atmosphere of disappointment.
"So it’s not a day-to-day situation with us, but there’s always full potential of either great things happening or totally disastrous things happening… Fleetwood Mac, from point one, has been like that. We’ll always be able to move without breaking a leg."
By the time the second North American leg of the Rumours Tour began, in May 1977, audiences were guaranteed fireworks.
The version of ‘Go Your Own Way’, Lindsey Buckingham’s kiss-off to Stevie Nicks, performed at the Fabulous Forum, Inglewood, California, on 29 August 1977, and released on the Rumours Live album, is a case in point.
The studio sheen of the Rumours original is replaced by a gutsy and volatile-sounding take of the song, with Buckingham’s ragged vocals complemented by a wild, distortion drenched guitar solo.
Nicks gave back as good as she got, most emphatically when it came time to perform ‘Dreams’ – the song she wrote after hearing ‘Go Your Own Way’.
Nicks would later tell Mojo, "’Dreams’ and ‘Go Your Own Way’ are what I call the ‘twin songs’. They’re the same song written by two people about the same relationship."
While Buckingham’s anger feels palpable on his song, on the Rumours Live version of Dreams, Nicks’ vocals are relatively measured and cool, so when she spits out such pointed lyrics as "Women they will come and they will go", it feels especially damning.
The tension is heightened by Buckingham’s sizzling guitar playing – his way of responding to Nicks’ words.
'I cried every time I heard it'
The audience reaction to this volatile drama was ecstatic – much as you’d expect from fans desperate to witness the hottest show in town.
But when the Rumours Tour began it was a different story, as Nicks told Billboard in 2001: "I learned an important lesson back during the first Rumours tour with Fleetwood Mac. You can’t shove new songs down your audience’s throat.
"You can do three or four at the most… They want familiarity. They want the comfort of songs that feel like old friends."
By the time the second leg of the tour started, however, fans knew the Rumours material inside out – though the group cannily included a nod to their past.
A gritty version of their 1969 single ‘Oh Well (Pt 1)’, written by original guitarist and founding member of the band, Peter Green, became a highlight of the set, giving Buckingham a chance to unleash some quicksilver blues licks while the original rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie laid down a suitably heavy backing.
In stark comparison to the rollicking blues of ‘Oh Well’ was the song that became the Rumours Tour set closer – Christine McVie’s 'Songbird'.
The performance captured on Rumours Live is a thing of bittersweet beauty, McVie’s masterful vocals and piano complemented by Buckingham’s subtle acoustic guitar, just as on the Rumours studio version.
The crowd’s adoring reaction underlines how far the band had come since the tour started, and just how much power the songs had come to assume on stage.
For McVie’s ex-husband, John – the couple had divorced during the making of Rumours – the song became an altogether more painful experience, "I cried every time I heard it," he later said.
'We all went beserk'
The Mac were already living the high life, but when the Rumours cash really started rolling in, the extravagant spending truly began.
McVie told The Independent in 2017: "You don’t see any money for a year after the album’s released, so when the first cheques started coming in, we all went berserk and went out and bought Porsches and Rolls-Royces."
Though all the band were enjoying the perks of fame, Nicks took it to another level. A whirlwind romance with Don Henley of the Eagles had given her a taste for grand, money-no-object gestures.
Henley once sent a cranberry-coloured private Learjet to fly Nicks to Atlanta where the Eagles had a day off; she was smitten. "I learnt from the best. Once you learn to live like that there’s no going back," Nicks later told Uncut.
'We'd get pianos craned into our bedrooms'
"It’s like, 'Gimme a Learjet, I need to go to LA, I don’t care if it costs 15 thousand dollars. I need to go now.'"
The decadence continued on tour, with money no object when it came to satisfying the band’s whims.
"We used to get grand pianos craned into our bedrooms," Christine McVie later admitted, adding, "Stevie couldn’t play it. So she’d have me come down and play for her."
And that wasn’t the end of Nicks’ hotel room modifications. When asked by accountants how the band had racked up such massive bills, Mick Fleetwood quipped, "If they knew how much it cost to find a hotel room that allowed you to paint their suite pink."
The band’s anything-goes approach to spending carried over to their approach for recreational drug use. Copious amounts of cocaine had fuelled the recording of Rumours and the tour was no different.
Christine McVie told the Times in 2013 that the men in the band would help themselves to "blooming great rails" of cocaine, while her and Nicks carried jewelled buckles around their necks with silver spoons inside and would take "ladylike" portions. "It was the 1970s," she said.
'It couldn't possibly work out. And it didn't'
"There was a lot going around. The truth is, I had a good time," Mick Fleetwood added. "But then, without realising it, you’re getting too out of it. You’re sleeping for three days, or you’re up for nine days or whatever. And eventually you don’t feel good at any time."
Add the wild amounts of cash and drugs to an already volatile set of relationships and, unsurprisingly, drama followed. Nicks and Fleetwood began an affair, threatening the band’s continued existence.
"Never in a million years could you have told me that would happen. That was the biggest surprise," Nicks later told Uncut.
"That really wasn’t good for anybody. Everybody was angry, because Mick was married to a wonderful girl and had two wonderful children. I was horrified. I loved these people. I loved his family. So it couldn’t possibly work out. And it didn’t. It just couldn’t."
Somehow, this line-up of Fleetwood Mac remained together for another decade, through the Tusk, Mirage and Tango In The Night albums, but, after the Rumours Tour wrapped, things would never be the same for the band again.
"There’s a picture of the five of us back in the day and I always look at it and we’re laughing away, and we didn’t have any idea what was going to happen," Fleetwood reflected. "No one could have imagined the success and the hardship and the torment."
All pics Getty Images
Top image Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks perform at The Omni Coliseum in Atlanta Georgia June 1, 1977
