Storms (38 page)

So—to make a long story not that much shorter—Sara went home to pack her things to leave Jim for Mick, and when Mick came to pick her up and whisk her away to his castle,
that's
when Mick told Jim that he'd fallen
for Jim's wife and he hoped that everyone could just be civilized about it. And believe it or not, everyone
was
civilized. Jim shook Mick's hand, said farewell to Sara, and in half an hour Sara and Mick were living together in blissful harmony.

Sitting in stunned silence, I had to admit that what Sara had just told me was one of the best stories I'd heard all year. But it was going to take me a little time to get all the details straight in my head. Because damn, that was one twisted circle.

Seeing the confused look on my face, Sara nodded and said, “It's a little much, isn't it? But what could I do, Carol Ann? Mick and I fell in love. It just happened. I love Stevie and I would never intentionally do anything to hurt her. But I fell in love.”

As she stopped to take another line before she completed her story I watched Sara's face and saw her pain playing across it. I reached out and took her hand and held on tight.
Damn. Poor Sara. Poor Mick. Poor Jim. And poor Stevie
, I thought as my head started to ache a little—this story was beyond bizarre, even for Fleetwood Mac.

As happy as she was to be with Mick, Sara said, it had been hard for her. Everyone was angry with her, or seemed to be. All of the fallout from Mick's failed marriage, his breakup with Stevie, and Sara's own breakup with Jim seemed to be landing on
her
slender shoulders, not Mick's. At least half of the members of the Fleetwood Mac clan were friends of Jim and all of them were close to Stevie and Jenny. She told me that Mick's family
also
blamed her for his breakup with Jenny.

I looked at her in shock.
What the hell? What about his affair with Stevie? Did he keep this under wraps from his family and let them think that it was Sara—not Stevie—who was the catalyst for Jenny leaving Mick for the final time? That's really unfair!
I thought indignantly.

But in the world of Fleetwood Mac a band member was
never
blamed when something went wrong. It was
always
someone else's fault, not his or hers. It wasn't the
band
who asked for this absolution, but, asked for or not, it was given as a divine right by the band's inner circle as well as their blood relatives. So Sara was the bad guy in this situation from about fifty different angles—and she'd been feeling pretty damn friendless.

She and I forged a bond that night. I, too, knew what it felt like to be the new girl on the block. And I could easily empathize with her. Caught in the
middle between Stevie and Lindsey, I had few friends in the band's inner circle for the first few months I was with him. It'd been only recently that I'd been able to count Stevie as a friend, and that friendship still felt very tenuous. Of course, I was still only
tolerated
by the girl fans around her.

But the other band members had welcomed me with open arms from the very beginning, and I had no doubt whatsoever that they would do the same with Sara. I told Sara all of this as we sat in front of the fire's dying flames. She smiled gratefully and gave me another hug.

“I hope so, Carol. I just want to be happy with Mick. I'm so glad that you came up tonight. I've really been feeling so, so alone”, she quietly said.

“Just give Stevie some time”, I told her. “Obviously the two of you have a deep bond of friendship—and even though
I
haven't been very close to her, I believe that Stevie will ultimately welcome you back with open arms.”

The phone rang and we almost jumped out of our skin. We had been so engrossed that time had flown by. It was 3
A.M.
and our guys were checking in. Both Mick and Lindsey told us to have fun and to stay up as long as we wanted, because neither of them would be home before 7
A.M.
Sara and I spent the next few hours roaming all over Mick's house, trying to evade the lurking presence of his live-in secretary, and giggling and whispering like teenagers.

By the time I left for home at 6
A.M.
I realized that I'd had more fun than I could remember having in quite a while. Having grown up with six sisters, I'd sorely missed having a girlfriend, and since I'd moved to Los Angeles straight out of high school I had spent my time surrounded by men. First I lived with John and our roommate Mike for five years, and then with Lindsey in his Putney home, with Richard and Bob in their rock ‘n' roll fraternity. It'd been a long, long time since I'd spent a night doing “girlfriend” things with a woman that I had so much in common with. I silently thanked Mick for sending me up to his house to meet my new best friend.

As the weeks and months passed I began to spend more and more time hanging out at Mick's house with Sara, and less in the studio. It was starting to become a little boring for me at Village Recorder. It had also become very uncomfortable. The band was working on both Stevie's and Lindsey's songs and it was a battle scene in Studio D almost every single night.

The pattern was always the same. The sessions began peacefully enough. Everyone trooped through the door anywhere from 6 to 9
P.M.,
got his or her drinks, busted out the blow, and mostly fucked around until about 10
P.M.
Then, when they finally began to get down to the business of recording music, I would get the dubious pleasure of seeing firsthand just how bad things must have been when they were making
Rumours.

And it was not a pretty sight. On a balmy spring evening I decided to go with Lindsey and watch the band record—hoping that
this
night, at least, would be a happy one. But, as I found out again, happy nights in the studio were now few and far between.

Tonight Stevie had brought in one of her songs with melody and lyrics already laid down over a simple basic track. Even though it was obvious that the song needed to be recorded professionally, to me it already sounded great. But not good enough, apparently, for Lindsey.

Stevie, standing in the middle of the room, kept a serene smile on her face as the band listened to her new song, “Storms.” As the last note faded away she looked around the room, waiting for the positive comments and feedback that she obviously felt the song would garner from everyone present. And then it all started to turn ugly.

With a slight twisted smile on his face, Lindsey drew first blood. Going over her new song bit by bit—pointing out how this part was crap, the next part needed to be raised or lowered by two octaves and this section desperately needed a new melody line—he tore it apart. By the time he was finished dissecting everything in detail about what was
wrong
with the song, he smiled serenely and said, “I like it, Stevie. It just needs some work, that's all.”

As Stevie listened to Lindsey's comments you could almost see the steam coming off her. With sarcasm and hurt dripping from every word, she began to lash out at Lindsey and his suggestions. She knew what she wanted for her songs. And while she was more than willing to accept his input and his creative genius, she wouldn't let him take over her musical creations
completely.
She just wouldn't have it. And the end result was always the same: a snarling, vicious battle over her music.

For, without fail, the parts of a song that Lindsey didn't like or outright hated were the parts of that song that Stevie loved. Their angry debates would quickly escalate to a screaming match, with stomping around (by Lindsey) and tears (from Stevie). More cocaine was snorted, the liquor flowed, and, after a couple of hours of soothing talks by the other band members, Stevie headed out to the recording booth and Lindsey sat at the
controls and, before you knew it, peace was restored. But the damage was done. For these fights left their bloody marks, over and over again. Added to the weight of the battle scars from Lindsey's and Stevie's past personal relationship, they made the atmosphere of the studio even uglier with each passing day.

And it got worse when it was time to work on Lindsey's songs. First of all, nobody
ever
said to Lindsey, “That part sucks, it's gotta go”, even if they were right and the part in question sucked big time. There was an aura to Lindsey, a certain look in his eyes and way he walked into a room that screamed, “Don't fuck with me. I know what I want and no one can do this better than I can.” And if some hapless person did disagree—if he or she had the guts to speak out—then that person had better be ready for the hellish fallout. For it would surely come. In sharp words that came fast and furious, Lindsey reduced whoever spoke out to a shell-shocked mass of quivering humanity. He didn't need to threaten to quit the band, for his intrinsic value to Fleetwood Mac was there for all to see. His genius was not disputed. It was
his
artistic input that polished and put the guitar riffs into some of the band's most famous songs. Without him those riffs and harmonies would never have materialized. And everyone knew that there was a very good chance that those songs wouldn't have gone to number one on
Billboard.

Lindsey was a hit maker. His genius at producing was recognized by all, as was his volatile personality. He could be the gentlest, sweetest person in the room and, in a heartbeat, turn into your worst enemy. And when that happened, believe me, you'd give anything not to be on the receiving end of his angry disdain. Lindsey commanded in the studio—and by April he ruled.

On most of his songs he completed almost all of the basic recording in the studio at our house on June Street. There were, of course, parts that needed to be recorded or backtracked in Studio D. And every single note, whether a vocal or a bass or a drum part, was done exactly to Lindsey's specifications. Standing over John as he put down a bass part on a song, Lindsey played the part
for
him and then insisted that he copy every note as closely as was humanly possible. The same happened with Mick and the drum sections on Lindsey's masterpieces.

It was really painful and embarrassing for everyone in the studio to witness two great musicians having their musical input dictated and orchestrated by Lindsey. To say that neither John nor Mick appreciated being told
what and how to play was to put it mildly. The resentment and animosity was so thick that it hung in the air like the black, swirling mists of J. R. R. Tolkien's Mordor. Put all of this together with the fuel of alcohol, cocaine, and exhaustion from the all-night sessions and things were not good.

And none of us was immune to this seething, intense environment. We were all suffering. Unhappy people breed unhappy lives, and the mood of the studio was carried home. Every single member of the Fleetwood Mac family was struggling to survive the sessions with their relationships and sanity intact.

Hanging over it all was the unanswered question: how would the public react to the new sound that Lindsey's avant-garde musical direction had created for the band? It didn't matter that Stevie's and Christine's songs sounded similar to the ones on
Rumours
—it was Lindsey's departure from the Fleetwood Mac sound that had changed the new record radically, so that the Fleetwood Mac album that the public was waiting for was
not being recorded.

What was being recorded, thanks to Lindsey, was a whole new Fleetwood Mac sound. And that made the album an unknown quantity—and an unknown risk. The tension that the entire band was feeling about how the record would be received by the world, and by Warner Bros., had become a living, dangerous presence within Studio D.

Lindsey was waiting to be its first victim. He was just as aware as every other band member of how his new songs had changed the sound of the album. That was his aim. But as positive as he was that he was right in changing his musical direction, it was a heavy burden for him to bear. He knew that if the album failed, it was his head on the cutting block.

It could become known as “Buckingham's Folly” or maybe something far less polite. We spoke of it often when we were home alone, and it took every ounce of support I had to bolster his decision to let his talent take him wherever it needed to go. Not because he didn't know how great his songs were, but because the pressure of doing the album was overwhelming. And when artists are overwhelmed, doubt about their creations is an understandable byproduct.

But it wasn't all bad times. Good things were happening as well. Christine was head over heels in love with Dennis Wilson. He had moved into her home just off Coldwater Canyon, and I didn't believe I'd ever seen her so happy. While she, too, had doubts and worries about the album, she
had Dennis to distract her. And Dennis Wilson was some kind of distraction, that's for sure. He was a party monster. Able to drink and drug just about any member of the Fleetwood Mac family under the table, he did so with regularity and charm.

Before Sara and I knew it, he began to become a normal fixture at Mick's house in Bel-Air on our “girlfriend” nights. He'd chosen to hang out with us instead of in the now-claustrophobic studio with the band, and we welcomed him with open arms. Who wouldn't? We began to call ourselves “The Three Widows” in reference to our mates being otherwise fixated on their music instead of us—and we made the most of it. Which wasn't hard.

As the sun was setting one crisp fall day, Sara and I glanced through her upstairs window to see a gorilla sitting in a black convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche, waving gaily as we stuck our heads outside. With screams of hysterical laughter we watched as Dennis, dressed in a full black-fur gorilla suit, climbed out of his car, gesturing for us to come down and join him. Running barefoot to the front lawn, we climbed into his car and went for a spin through the tony streets of Bel-Air with our gorilla chauffeur alternating grunts and Tarzan yells.