Stevie Nicks Would ‘Bang on a Tambourine’ Because She ‘Didn’t Have a Lot to Do’ in Fleetwood Mac, Says Producer
A former Fleetwood Mac producer opened up about making the Rumours album, and he revealed what it was like behind the scenes working with Stevie Nicks. Here’s what the producer said about Nicks and her tambourine-playing, and how the band put together the hit song “Dreams.”
A Fleetwood Mac producer said Stevie Nicks played tambourine because she ‘didn’t always have a lot to do’
Producer Ken Caillat worked with Fleetwood Mac on the Rumours album and described working with Stevie Nicks. He said the singer had “more free time” than her bandmates.
“Stevie didn’t always have a lot to do,” Caillat told MusicRadar. “If she wasn’t singing, she’d bang on the tambourine, but that was about it. She had a lot more free time than the other band members.”
But Nicks used her “free time” wisely – she wrote several songs for the Rumours album, including “I Don’t Want to Know,” “Gold Dust Woman,” and “Dreams.”
“There was a spare room down the hall called Sly Stone’s Pit, and it had a piano. This was like heaven to Stevie,” the producer said. “She spent hours in that place, just writing simple, three-chord songs. One day she came out [of] the pit with something called ‘Dreams.’”
The Fleetwood Mac producer described how Stevie Nicks and the rest of the band recorded ‘Dreams’
Rumours producer Ken Caillat described the process of recording “Dreams,” and how Stevie Nicks and the rest of Fleetwood Mac perfected the song.
“Once Stevie and Lindsey figured the song out, we had some tempo and groove problems,” he explained. “Things felt fine, but they had to be perfect – the rhythm had to be rock solid. Mick Fleetwood is a great drummer, one of the best, but he’d shift his parts and dynamics around – every drummer does.”
The producer continued, “We made an eight-bar loop of Mick’s playing, which created this fantastic, deep hypnotic effect. It’s funny, but when people talk about the classic rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie and they point to this one song, I’m always amused that they’re talking about a drum loop.”
The singer wrote ‘Dreams’ in Sly Stone’s bed
Although “Dreams” is one of Fleetwood Mac’s most popular songs, many fans don’t know that Stevie Nicks wrote the track in a famous funk musician’s bed.
“Everybody was working on something else in the main studio, and I had this idea,” Nicks said of recording the hit song (per Far Out Magazine). “I was kind of wandering around the studio, looking for somewhere I could curl up with my Fender Rhodes and my lyrics and a little cassette tape recorder.”
The singer came across someone who showed her to a special, secret room – Sly Stone’s bedroom, which was also a mini-studio. “It’s a big studio with a sunken circular shape, actually like a lighthouse, like a circle, and there’s keyboards all around, a bunch of keyboards that went down this tunnel kind of thing,” Nicks said.
Nicks curled up on Stone’s bed, which she described as “this big half-moon circular bed with all black and red velvet. It sounds a little garish, but it was actually beautiful.” That’s where she “just started playing ‘Dreams.’ And within about 20 minutes, it was written and recorded – I mean, super-simply, but I thought, ‘Thank you, Sly Stone and the spirits of Sly Stone and all of your band.’”
