Trivia / Fleetwood Mac

• Breakthrough Hit: "Albatross" in England, "Over My Head" in America.
• Career Resurrection: After years of bad albums and lineup changes in the early '90s, The Dance brought back the Rumours-era lineup to massive success.
  • Likewise, not many band reunions start by presidential request, but Bill Clinton wanted "Don't Stop" played at his inauguration.
• Celebrity Break-Up Song: "Go Your Own Way" written by Buckingham about his break-up with Nicks. Nicks responded with "Silver Springs".
• Colbert Bump:
  • A most unlikely one—they regained prominence and reunited after Bill Clinton used "Don't Stop" as the theme song to his campaign in 1992. And, as mention above, he was able to get them back together for his victory party.
  • In October 2020, a TikTok video of a skateboarding man lip-synching the song "Dreams" became a global phenomenon and helped resurge the song and band's popularity.
• Creator Breakdown: The story of Rumours creation.
  • Peter Green had a pretty epic one too, which led to him him growing his fingernails, giving away his guitars, refusing royalty payments ("It's Satan") and going to work as a gravedigger. Green was so freaked out by the royalty checks, in fact, that he even stormed into the record company's offices at one point with an air rifle to demand they cease and desist sending said checks to him (he ended up getting arrested for his pains, and still got the checks).
• Creator Couple: The McVies, and Buckingham and Nicks, though both couples had broken up by the time Rumours was released. In the '80s and '90s, Christine's second husband Eddy Quintela was a frequent songwriting partner.
• Creator Killer: It looked like Time was going to be one. Indeed, the band actually broke up shortly after its release, but not too long afterward, the classic lineup reunited, leading to The Dance.
• Hostility on the Set: During their notoriously volatile period when everyone was breaking up with and/or cheating on everyone else in the band, the music videos for "Hold Me" and "Gypsy" were both filmed when various band members couldn't stand to be around each other. The latter especially since Stevie Nicks was at one point made to dance with Lindsey Buckingham, who she didn't want to be in the same room with, and she looks visibly uncomfortable doing so.
  • Live videos from the early 80s demonstrate the mood the best. This infamous recording of "The Chain" from the Mirage tour shows Stevie and Lindsey looking like they're about 5 seconds away from starting a brawl, and Christine only partially hiding how she felt about it.
• Limey Goes to Hollywood: The band moved to L.A. in the '70s to capitalize on their growing American audience and to be closer to their record label in the wake of the "Fake Mac" incident, with Mick Fleetwood and John McVie later becoming U.S. citizens.
• The Pete Best: It's probably safest to say everybody who was in the band but left before 1975 (with the exceptions of Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer and Bob Welch), and everyone who joined the band but left between 1987-1997.
  • The person who most fits the "Pete Best" mantle in their history was bass guitarist Bob Brunning. Founding member Peter Green had named his new band after his former Bluesbreakers bandmates Mick Fleetwood and John McVie to entice them to join him. Fleetwood accepted, but McVie opted to stay on with the Bluesbreakers. Brunning was hired instead, and joined the band with full understanding that he was out if McVie changed his mind...which he did. Two weeks later. Brunning had a more fruitful career as a writer, and authored two biographies about Fleetwood Mac.
• Promoted Fangirl: Christine already admired the Peter Green-era of Fleetwood Mac during her time in Chicken Shack, and after she left Chicken Shack and released an unsuccessful solo album under her maiden name, had the opportunity to join Fleetwood Mac after Peter Green left in 1970.
• Throw It In!:
  • A couple memorable bits of chatter from the marching band recording session ended up in the final mix of "Tusk": "How are the tenors, Tony?" at the beginning, and "Real savage-like!" right before the closing section.
  • Stevie's writing credit on "Seven Wonders" actually comes from her mishearing the lyrics of the demo version by Sandy Stewart. The final version of the song uses her first vocal take, so the flubbed lyrics became the official ones.
    • The line "You touched my hand / All the way, all the way down to Emmeline" was originally "all the way down, you held the line".
    • The words "the rainbow's end" are repeated throughout the song, but at points you can clearly hear Stevie sing "the rainbow's edge" instead.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Veteran L.A. session guitarist Waddy Wachtel was considered as a replacement for Bob Welch before Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks came into the picture. He did appear on the 1975 self-titled album, playing rhythm guitar on "Sugar Daddy". Wachtel subsequently became a mainstay of Nicks' touring band and played on many of her solo tracks. The two were romantically linked for a while as well.
  • The Tusk tour would have had stops in the Soviet Union, but then the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan happened.
  • John McVie has been trying to get the original Fleetwood Mac lineup of himself, Fleetwood, Danny Kirwan, Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer to reunite since 2004. He said that he and Fleetwood would love to do it, but it's been a tough sell for the other three, especially Kirwan. With Kirwan's death in 2018, it looks like a full reunion will never happen. Peter Green's death in 2020 ended the possibility of a reunion for good.