Why a Former Fleetwood Mac Producer Said He Had to Be the Band’s ‘Therapist’ While Recording ‘Rumours’
A former Fleetwood Mac producer opened up about making the Rumours album and said he was like a “therapist” to the band. The wildly successful album was made amid great personal turmoil for each member of Fleetwood Mac, inspiring some of their best songs. Here’s what the producer said went on behind the scenes while working on the record, and what bandmates Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie have said about therapy.
Stevie Nicks said being in Fleetwood Mac during the recording of the ‘Rumours’ album was like being part of a ‘scandalous soap opera’
After Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac, the band released some of their best work. Their 1977 album Rumours launched the group to new heights of fame and is widely considered one of the greatest records of all time.
The album was inspired by the band’s personal drama. Nicks and Buckingham were going through a tense breakup, as were married couple John and Christine McVie.
Before Buckingham and Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac, drummer Mick Fleetwood’s wife, Jenny Boyd, had an affair with lead guitarist Bob Weston, leading to the guitarist’s exit from the group. And after Nicks and Buckingham broke up, the singer had an affair with Fleetwood. Nicks was dating the Eagles’ Don Henley at the time, while the drummer was working things out with Boyd.
Nicks opened up about all the scandals in a 1990 interview with Us Magazine and compared the relationship drama to a “soap opera.”
“Oh, I’ve been close to leaving Fleetwood Mac since I joined Fleetwood Mac. But so has everybody else,” she shared. “To be in Fleetwood Mac is to live in a soap opera. And it has been pretty scandalous and pretty incestuous, and pretty wonderful in a lot of ways.”
A former Fleetwood Mac producer said he was the band’s ‘therapist’ while recording the ‘Rumours’ album
Ken Caillat, who helped create the Rumours album, said he was Fleetwood Mac’s “therapist” as well as their producer.
“There were fights, breakups, drinking, drugs… We all indulged in substances. But I had to be a therapist and record producer,” Caillat told MusicRadar in 2012. “When everything was insane, I had to be sane. If there was a rule book, nobody gave me one.”
He detailed how the bandmates, specifically Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, could go from screaming matches to harmonizing like “angels” in a matter of seconds. “I remember when we were doing background vocals, Stevie and Lindsey were having an argument,” the producer described. “Vicious name-calling – ‘you motherf***er’ this, ‘you f***ing bastard’ that. Back and forth it went. The tape would start rolling and they’d sing, ‘Yooooooou make loving fun,’ just beautiful, two little angels. The tape would stop and they’d be calling each other names again. They didn’t miss a beat.”
Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie have openly shared their therapy experiences
While producer Ken Caillat may have served as an unofficial therapist for Fleetwood Mac while recording Rumours, bandmates Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie have been open about their experiences with therapy.
Nicks, who claims she’s “nocturnal,” has insomnia and said she needs a therapist to sleep. “It used to be I could sleep from 5 am to 1 pm; now I don’t go to sleep until 8 am,” the singer told British Vogue in October 2020. “I need therapy, or I need someone to hit me on the head with a hammer.” Nicks also went to rehab twice for her addiction to cocaine and her dependence on the prescription drug Klonopin.
In 1998, keyboardist Christine McVie dropped out of Fleetwood Mac after nearly 30 years of playing with the band. She cited panic attacks and her flying phobia as the main reasons for taking a hiatus, and she sought the help of a therapist to work through her fears. After a few sessions, the therapist asked her where she would go if she could fly anywhere.
“I said Maui because that’s where Mick [Fleetwood] was living at the time,” the keyboardist told Harper’s Bazaar. “So, the therapist said, ‘Why don’t you just buy a ticket. You don’t have to get on the plane, just buy the ticket.’”
Coincidentally, Fleetwood had just booked a flight to see McVie. “Then as irony would have it, Mick called me just after and said, ‘Look, I’m coming to London, are you around?’ I told him that I’d just bought a ticket to see him and he said, ‘Well I’ll meet you in London then and we’ll fly back together.’ So that’s what I did.”
