This article first appeared in the July 1995 issue of Mix
To mainstream America, it must have seemed that Fleetwood Mac came out of nowhere when they started landing songs on the charts in 1975. Relatively few knew that the band had been through eight years and as many lineup changes before founders Mick Fleetwood and John McVie hired two unknowns from the San Francisco Bay Area to join them and Christine Mc Vie. The story is well-known: Fleetwood was in a studio called Sound City checking out the facility and the work of up-and-coming producer Keith Olsen, when Olsen put on a new tape by a duo he’d made an album with in 1973 called Buckingham Nicks. Fleetwood flipped over the tape and shortly thereafter hired the charismatic and talented Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to join his band. Olsen got the nod to produce the new quintet’s first album, and a few months later, Fleetwood Mac came out and slowly but surely began insinuating itself on the American public.
McVie’s “Over My Head” became the group’s first Top 20 single in November ’75, followed the next spring by Stevie Nicks’ “Rhiannon” (which made it to Number 11) and Mc Vie’s “Say You Love Me” (also Number 11) in the summer. The album went on to sell more than 4 million copies, establishing Fleetwood Mac as one of the biggest bands in America, and Olsen as a top producer.
As that album was making its slow, steady rise up the charts, the band was already beginning work on a follow-up. The group had a falling out of some sort with Olsen, and two other choices—Deke Richards and Kelly Coteras—didn’t work out, either. So they looked in-house, as it were, and tagged their live sound engineer, Richard Dashut, to produce and engineer the new record. Dashut’s background was actually in studio engineering rather than live sound; in fact, he cut his chops at Olsen’s side and was working on the second Buckingham Nicks album when Buckingham and Nicks (who were even Dashut’s roommates) abruptly dropped the project to join Fleetwood Mac.
“After they joined Fleetwood Mac,” Dashut remembers, “I went through a period of minor bitterness, only because I was so into doing the next [Buckingham Nicks] album, and that was kind of taken away from us all of a sudden. At that point, I separated from Keith and went off—it was that scary moment when you go from second engineer and cut the umbilical cord.
“One night, Lindsey called me and asked if I wanted to do their live sound, which I’d never done before. So that’s what happened, and it was a great experience. In those days, they were mainly playing theaters, and their road manager and myself were driving them around in two Avis rented station wagons. To me, that was the best time; nothing will ever beat that. Things kind of went south when success came, as far as the limos and the entourages and all the things that remove you from what it is you’re there for in the first place. For a while there, they were the biggest group in the world, so everything came in excess.”
DASHUT IS DRAFTED
The way he got the job on the album that became Rumours is, “Mick put his arm around my shoulder one day and said, ‘You’re producing the album. The funny thing was I never really wanted to be a producer. I thought engineering was the best thing to do because you didn’t have all the responsibility of a producer. You could get in and just do it. It was nothing but fun. It was like painting with frequencies instead of paints. The producer was the one who had to worry about all these decisions. I just had to make it sound good.”
Dashut, in turn, brought in an engineer from Wally Heider Recording named Ken Caillat to handle the primary engineering on the disc. The duo, who worked on a pair of remixes for songs on Fleetwood Mac, ended up sharing a production credit with the group, though Dashut says, “Just to set the record straight, Lindsey and I did most of the production. That’s not to take anything away from Ken or the others in the band— they were all very involved. But Lindsey and myself really produced that record, and he should’ve gotten [individual] credit for it.”
Whereas Fleetwood Mac had been recorded in Los Angeles, “Mick thought that if he took us out of our homes, we’d all have to hang out together with very few distractions,” Dashut says. So the band went to the Record Plant in Sausalito, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. But as Fleetwood wrote in his memoirs two years ago, “As word spread around the Bay Area that glamorous Fleetwood Mac was recording, the studio’s lounges began to fill up with strangers tapping razors on mirrors.” And as their previous album continued to sell so well, the pressure was off to deliver the album quickly, and the pressure was on to deliver a disc that would top that album in every way. In fact, during a joint interview with Recording Engineer/Producer magazine in 1977, Dashut and Caillat admitted that they had set a goal to win Grammys for themselves.
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Easier said than done, of course. Certainly, the three songwriters in the band seemed to be coming up with great material. But they were songs born of painful experience. As Buckingham told an interviewer last year, “There was this rather unusual situation in the workings of the band where you had the couples that were in the process of breaking up during the making of the album, so you had all this cross-dialog going in the songs. Lou had John and Christine Mc Vie breaking up, and Stevie and myself breaking up. ‘Go Your Own Way’ was a song basically directed at Stevie.”
Added Fleetwood, ‘”Go Your Own Way’ was Lindsey talking to Stevie, or not talking to Stevie. It was basically, ‘On your bike, girl!’ [i.e., get out!] Whenever that song was at its peak, that was Stevie and Lindsey playing out whatever roles they were playing out. I mean, some heavy stuff went on there with that song.”
Dashut’s memory is that in the case of this song, “I think that Lindsey had a few lyric ideas when he brought it in [to record], but not much. He would usually start with a guitar idea, and from that would come a chorus and a verse structure and an arrangement. Then from the arrangement would come the way to do the arrangement properly, which would take days, or it might take months. It wasn’t usually preplanned in his head. It was hard work, trial and error. Then, toward the end, the lyrics would come, and they’d usually be more subservient to the melody line and the track he’d developed, rather than starting with the words and developing the track around that.
“In those days, [the track] always started with John and Mick and Lindsey out there in the studio laying down the basics. Our main concern when we tracked were the drum tracks, because once you get the solid drum tracks and the timing right, then everything else can be overdubbed, which is what we did on Rumours. In fact, the only two instruments that were played live on that entire record—in other words, the only two instruments that were actually played together—was the guitar solo and drum track on ‘The Chain.’ Everything else was done at different times as an overdub. We replaced everything many times until it got to the point where [the song] didn’t feel like it was completely overdubbed.”
A chart in the ’77 RE/P shows that working in Record Plant Studio B, the drums on “Go Your Own Way,” which were put on plywood flooring right in front of a wooden wall, were miked as follows: Neumann U87s on the four toms, a Beyer M88 on the kick, a Neumann KM84 on the hi-hat, AKG 45 ls on the snare and overheads, and then one Neumann 47 about seven feet over the kick. Typically, Dashut would begin each day spending two-and-a-half hours tuning the drums, because, “If you want a good drum sound, you go out there and make the drums sound good because you can only do so much with the board,” he said in ’77. “We spent a tremendous amount of time, at the cost of a lot of studio time.”
FLEETWOOD’S MAGIC
Fleetwood’s odd, counter-rhythm drum track is definitely one of the key elements that makes “Go Your Own Way” such a raging rocker, so the time spent was worth it. “Mick has an exquisite sense of rhythm,” Buckingham told me in 1981. “He has no idea what he’s doing, technically. But he’s been playing drums since he was 10, and his drumming is totally instinctive at this point. [The beat on ‘Go Your Own Way’] was my idea, but the point is, Mick couldn’t do the beat I wanted for the song, so he did it his own way.”
Mc Vie was set up at The Plant next to Fleetwood, in front of the bass trap. All the bass on the song is DI, though at the time, they also miked his amp with a U87. For Buckingham’s guitars, “We generally took a direct, sometimes with a mic on the split track,” Caillat said in the interview. “We usually used two or three mics; usually a 56 up close, a 451 a foot away and another mic back 10 feet. We also used Leslies [in a separate area, miked with two 87s].”
According to Caillat, Mick Fleetwood had originally estimated that the album would take five weeks to record and one to mix. But after working 18 hours a day, for nine weeks in two different rooms at the Record Plant (where besides spending endless hours tuning drums, days were spent tuning pianos and trying to salvage tapes eaten by a faulty recorder the engineers nicknamed “Jaws”), the band went on the road for six weeks. Then the action shifted to Southern California for more tracking and overdub sessions at Wally Heider Recording (where most of the vocal and guitar parts were cut), the Record Plant (L.A.) and Davlen Recording. On tour, the band also stopped in at Criteria Studios in Miami, where more guitar overdubs were recorded
“We knew right from the start that ‘Go Your Own Way’ was going to be the rocker of the album,” Dashut says. “It had the high energy, and it probably was the most fun to work on. It probably went through fewer changes than a lot of the songs.” The guitar solo part at the end—”probably one of the classic solos of all time,” Dashut says—was triple-tracked and edited together from different performances, as was the album as a whole. “We used over 110 reels of 2-inch tape,” Caillat said in ’77. “On a lot of songs, we had 30 or 40 takes and might have edited parts of five different takes to get a master take.” The final mix took place at Producer’s Workshop in L.A., using the studio’s transformer-less custom console and Stephens tape machines.
With so much tape being used and so many changes being made up to the last minute during the 11 months it took to record Rumours, it’s not surprising to learn that “we wore out our original 24-track master,” according to Caillat. “We figured that we had 3,000 hours on it and were losing high end, transients and much of the clarity. We made a safety master, but much of the safety master wasn’t valid anymore because we had overdubbed new parts onto it. The drums were valid, and maybe a couple of guitar parts. We ended up using 24 tracks and transferring all the overdubs on the original master to the safety master.” Adds Dashut, “We had no sync pulse to lock the two machines together. So we’re talking about something that’s really hard to do. Ten tracks, by ear, using headphones, during 12-hour sessions, manually synching the two machines…People thought we were crazy, but it turned out really good. We saved our bass sounds and our drum sounds.”
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Nineteen years later, Dashut says, “We spent a year making Rumours and that was almost unprecedented. And most of it was hard work—trial and re-trial, re-cutting the songs. It was the right way to go with that record. It would not have been the record you hear today if it had taken a month or two months or three months or however long people think a record should take. There was no compromising. It’s not like we’re geniuses or anything. Nobody had this in their heads and knew it was going to turn out like this. Music is not like accounting, where you can take two plus two and get four, then pat yourself on the back and say, ‘Hey, I did it right.’ There is no right answer in music. So the question becomes, when do you quit?”
The answer for Fleetwood Mac was December 1976. The first single, “Go Your Own Way,” was released in January ’77 and was an out-of-the-box smash, making it to Number 10. (The second single, “Dreams,” became the group’s first Number One.) The album, too, was an instant hit, eventually rocketing into the top spot on the Billboard 200 for 31 weeks. In all, it was on the charts for nearly three years and sold more than 18 million copies in the U.S.—the best-selling album of all time until Michael Jackson’s Thriller eclipsed it in 1984.
Dashut and Caillat continued working with Fleetwood Mac on subsequent releases, including the even more ambitious, costly and time-consuming Tusk, the greatly underrated Mirage and Tango in the Night (the last Mac disk with Buckingham and Nicks). Dashut, who continues to produce and also now runs his own record company, Orchard Music Group, has been part of Buckingham’s solo records (though not Lindsey’s forthcoming disc), and the two remain close friends. Caillat now works at a multimedia company called Highway One.
Dashut, Caillat and the group did win a Grammy for Album of the Year in 1977, but the engineering trophy went to Roger Nichols, Elliot Scheiner, Al Schmitt and Bill Schnee for Steely Dan’s Aja, another album loaded with classic tracks.
