To download this album via iTunes, click here:
To buy this album from Amazon.com, click here: Rumours
______________________________________________________________

Fleetwood Mac
Rumours
Warner Bros. Records
R2 73882
_________________________________________________

Disc One:

1. Second Hand News
(Lindsey Buckingham)

2. Dreams
(Stevie Nicks)
Also issued as Warner Bros. single #WBS-8371 (3/24/77); Pop #1, AC#11

3. Never Going Back Again
(Lindsey Buckingham)
Also issued as Warner Bros. single #WBS-8413 (7/6/77)

4. Don't Stop
(Christine McVie)
Also issued as Warner Bros. single #WBS-8413 (7/6/77); Pop #3, AC#22

5. Go Your Own Way
(Lindsey Buckingham)
Also issued as Warner Bros. single #WBS-8304 (12/20/76); Pop #10, AC#45

6. Songbird
(Christine McVie)
Also issued as Warner Bros. single #WBS-8371 (3/24/77)

7. Silver Springs
(Stevie Nicks)
Warner Bros. single #WBS-8304 (12/20/76)
(Originally issued on single only)

8. The Chain
(Lindsey Buckingham/Mick Fleetwood/
Christine McVie/John McVie/Stevie Nicks)

9. You Make Loving Fun
(Christine McVie)
Also issued as Warner Bros. single #WBS-8483 (10/5/77); Pop#9, AC#28

10. I Don't Want To Know
(Stevie Nicks)

11. Oh Daddy
(Christine McVie)

12. Gold Dust Woman
(Stevie Nicks)
Also issued as Warner Bros. single #WBS-8483 (10/5/77)
_____________________________________________

Disc 2: Bonus Material
Roughs and Outtakes

1. Second Hand News
(Lindsey Buckingham)

2. Dreams
(Stevie Nicks)

3. Brushes (Never Going Back Again)
(Lindsey Buckingham)

4. Don't Stop
(Christine McVie)

5. Go Your Own Way
(Lindsey Buckingham)

6. Songbird
(Christine McVie)

7. Silver Springs
(Stevie Nicks)

8. You Make Loving Fun
(Christine McVie)

9. Gold Dust Woman #1
(Stevie Nicks)

10. Oh Daddy
(Christine McVie)

11. Think About It
(Roy Bittan/Stevie Nicks)
______________________________________________

Early Demos

12. Never Going Back Again
(Lindsey Buckingham)

13. Planets Of The Universe
(Stevie Nicks)

14. Butter Cookie (Keep Me There)
(Christine McVie)

15. Gold Dust Woman
(Stevie Nicks)

16. Doesn't Anything Last
(Lindsey Buckingham)
______________________________________________

Jam Sessions

17. Mic The Screecher
(Mick Fleetwood)

18. For Duster (The Blues)
(Lindsey Buckingham / Christine McVie / John McVie / Mick Fleetwood)

Note: This album was originally issued as Warner Bros. #BSK-3010 (2/4/77); LPs#1. Numbers in italics (following original release information) denote peak positions attained by singles on Billboard's "Hot 100" and "Easy Listening" charts, respectively, and by this album on Billboard's "Top LP's and Tapes" chart - courtesy of BPI Communications and Joel Whitburn's Record Research Publications. All recordings on Disc 2 are previously unreleased.

John McVie: Bass
Lindsey Buckingham: Guitars, Vocals
Stevie Nicks: Vocals
Mick Fleetwood: Drums, Percussion
Christine McVie: Keyboards, Synthesizers, Vocals

Recorded at:

Record Plant, Sausalito and Los Angeles, California
Wally Heider Recording, Hollywood, California
Criteria Studios, Miami, Florida
Davlen Recording Studio, North Hollywood, California
"Songbird" Recorded at Zellerback Auditorium,
U.C. Berkeley, Berkeley, California, March 3rd, 1976.

Mixed at:

Sound City, Van Nuys, California
and Record Plant, Los Angeles, California

Engineers:

Ken Caillat, Richard Dashut, Assisted by Chris Moore

Produced by: Fleetwood Mac
with Richard Dashut and Ken Caillat

Fleetwood Mac Studio Crew:

Ryhno, Ray Lindsey, Jeff Jacobs

Album Design: Desmond Strobel
Photography: Herbert Worthington
Concept: Fleetwood Mac and Herbert Worthington
Hand Lettering: Larry Vigon/Vigon Nahas Vigon

Love and Thanks To:

Rick Turner and Alembic; Larry Comara (for this Fat Boxes); Aphex Systems, Ltd.; Merce and all the people at Record Plant, Sausalito; Gary Lubo, Sound City; and David LaBarre, Producer's Workshop.
______________________________________________

Rumours
by Dave DiMartino

You hold in your hands one of the very few albums in pop history deserving of the adjective phenomenal. The word has lately been overused, largely because of the music industry of the new millennium defines a phenomenon mostly in terms of sales and mass appeal and little more. And Fleetwood Mac's Rumours certainly fits that bill: Since it's February 1977 release, the album has sold more than 18 million copies in the United States and more than 30 million copies worldwide. But sales alone are hardly the point here; impact - on nearly every level imaginable - is. And Rumours has had a profound impact indeed.

Consider the way the disc, its songs, its creators, and even its very name deeply insinuated themselves into our culture. Ask any grammer teacher of the era how an entire generation of American students unknowingly took to spelling the word rumor with two U's for years thereafter. For that matter, ask an entire generation of American citizens why their mental picture of the 1992 inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton is inextricably linked to Rumours' "Don't Stop." And musically, in an era when nearly every major rock and roll band was accorded the honor of having a "tribute album" recorded for them, 1998 saw such artists such as Elton John, Matchbox Twenty, and The Corrs queuing up to record tracks for an actual tribute to - never mind the band - Rumours itself.

No, the most phenomenal aspect of Rumours is twofold: 1) It is an extraordinarily good, rich album featuring a superb rock 'n' roll band at their very best; 2) in retrospect, it's remarkable that it was even made in the first place. One of only a handful of records that seamlessly blend real-life experience and art, the album that defined an era for so many people was an emotionally harrowing affair for each of the band members who made it - a document of a group professionally staying together while personally falling apart.

"There were break-ups and realignments which had a tremendous effect of their music," recalled Rumours coengineer Richard Dashut in Modern Recording in 1979.

"Defenses were wearing thin, and they were quick to open up their feelings. Instead of going to friends to talk it out, their feelings were vented through their music. It created a certaiin sensitivity. Our personal lives were in shambles, and the album was about the only thing we had left."

Consider the opening and closing lines of the record, which alone signal the subject matter contained within. "I know there's nothing to say/Someone has taken my place," sings guitarist Lindsey Buckingham on the first track, "Second Hand News"; "Is it over now-do you know how/Pick up the pieces and go home," sings Stevie Nicks on Rumours final track, "Gold Dust Woman." It would be vapid to reduce the complexity of the making of Rumours to a cliche incorporating the words "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll," but it would be missing a vital point to not even mention it. Or the cover of Rolling Stone, which accompanied its release, featuring a picture of the band's five members in bed with each other. The band had settled on bassist John McVie's suggest album title of Rumours because, essentially, everyone and anyone in the music industry - informed or otherwise - was talking about Fleetwood Mac.

So how in Earth did it get to this?

The story has been told and retold so often one need only be reminded of the particulars. In 1974 workmanlike and fairly successful former Brit blues band Fleetwood Mac needed a new guitarist to replace departing member Bob Welch; engineer Keith Olsen suggested guitarist Lindsay Buckingham, who with singer Stevie Nicks had recorded a 1973 album title Buckingham Nicks. The pair was both personally and professionally attached, which meant that by January 1975, Fleetwood Mac had not one but two new members working alongside Mac stalwarts John McVie, drummer Mick Fleetwood, and singer/keyboardist Christine McVie. Suffice to say this was not a bad move for all concerned parties. Their first collaboration, Fleetwood Mac, recorded in just three months, spawned three hit singles: "Over My Head" and "Say You Love Me," both penned by Christine McVie, and Nicks' own "Rhiannon." And with this, a band that typically had sold albums in the 200,000-to-300,000 range almost like clockwork began its ascent into the stratosphere. Entering the Billboard Album chart and consistently moving upward, the eponymous disc finally hit the #1 position in September 1976 after 58 weeks - knocking no less an historical artifact than guitarist Peter Frampton's own sales phenomenon Frampton Comes Alive, out of the top slot and going on to sell many millions.

Logically, then, 1976 should have been a banner year for the five members of Fleetwood Mac. Were it only so. In fact, each and every band member's relationship with his/her significant other was in the shredder: John and Christine McVie had split and were barely speaking to each other; newcomers Buckingham and Nicks had likewise broken up, and drummer Fleetwood and his wife Jenny saw their marriage - which had produced two young daughters - also come to an end.

Escaping from the emotionally charged madness of their Los Angeles home to the more neutral environs of Sausalito, California, in early 1976, the band would spend nine weeks at the Record Pland attempting to record their new album; Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie rented separate condos in a marina nearby, while the newly single "boys" were berthed in a house in the hill managed by the recording studio. Much of the madness of those Sausalito moments is eloquently detailed by Mick Fleetwood in his 1990 autobiography, but perhaps the most telling is the simple fact that at one point the band - teetering on the abyss of complete sonic obsession - spent a total of four expensive days in the studio merely attempting to tune a piano.

The quest for perfection would not quit; where its predecessor took a mere three months to record, Rumours took very much longer. After the nine weeks in Sausalito, the band took a brief break and found, upon returning, that all the work they'd done somehow sounded unsatisfactory. The result? Taking the master tapes to Los Angeles, they began the depressing task of stripping out everything but the drum tracks and laying down instruments all over again. Still, the process reaped some unexpected rewards at times.

"There's one track on the album that started out as one song in Sausalito," Lindsey Buckingham later told Rolling Stone. "We decided it needed a bridge, so we cut a bridge and edited it into the rest of the song. We didn't get a vocal and left it for a long time in a bunch of pieces. It almost went off the album. Then we listened back and decided we liked the bridge, but didn't like the rest of the song. So I wrote verses for that bridge, which was originally not in the songs and edit those in. We saved the ending. The ending was the only thing left from the original track. We ended up calling it "The Chain" because it was a bunch of pieces."

To further complicate the record-making process, the success of Fleetwood Mac meant that the band was a much in-demand touring attraction; taking a break midway through the sessions, the group spent the entire summer on the road watching their previous album rise to the top of the charts. As their newly enthused lable exerted the expected pressure for the band to finish their new album - right around the time Fleetwood Mac was at #1 - there was still considerable work to be done. Not just done, but redone - as the multiple overdubbing upon overdubbing that became the norm actually began to adversely affect the master tapes, which, horrifyingly, were thinning due to the constant playback. Still, the band persevered, and by year-end songs were being sequenced and Rumours was nearly ready to go.

And what an album it was. Impeccably balanced, Rumours displayed all of the innate strengths of the band without flaw. The beauty of this "new" version of Fleetwood Mac was the seamless way that each member played to their strengths of th others, how each of its three principal songwriteres - Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, and Stevie Nicks - wrote and sang material that contrasted with that of the others but never at the expense of what had inarguably become a near-perfect band with as distinctive a style as any in pop history. Further, the well-oiled rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie - together at this same band since 1967 - provided a rock-solid foundation around which Rumours' marvelous textures could flow unencumbered.

And it wasn't as if there wasn't an audience for it. In the last weeks of December 1976, the first single, "Go Your Own Way," offered a taste of what was to come: the song soared to the Top 10, and the band's enthusiastic label would ship a record 800,000 copies to retail outlets. Need it be said that wasn't nearly enough? Within six weeks Rumours was perched atop the Pop Album chart - this time displacing the Eagles' Hotel California - and would generate three additional Top 10 hits, including "Don't Stop," "You Make Loving Fun," and the #1 "Dreams." That each of the band's songwriters had penned a hit - in Christine McVie's case, two - only illustrated the innate strength at the core of this new Fleetwood Mac. In all, Rumours would spend 31 weeks as America's #1 album and win the 1977 Grammy for Album of the Year.

What happened to Fleetwood Mac after Rumours has of course been documented on such marvelous records as Tusk and Tango In The Night, not to mention in countless books and magazine articles. Guitarist Lindsey Buckingham departed in 1987 but rejoined the band ten years later for a tour resulting in the live album and video The Dance. In 1997 I found myself at a rehearsal studio in Hollywood discussing the reunion with all five members of the band; their perspective on those earlier days was refreshingly candid and illuminating. Particularly memorable was Stevie Nicks, who recalled her past with a compelling mixture of sentiment and practicality. For she and Lindsey Buckingham, joining Fleetwood Mac in 1975 changed things forever.

"We were really young, you know," she said, "27 years old, and this was all so big and so heavy around us. People expected so much from us, and all of a sudden we went from barely having enough money to pay for a small apartment to being rich overnight. And how do you deal with that when you're 27 years old? You kind of don't deal with it very well. And nobody dealt with it very well.

"But all of those problems, and all of those drugs, and all of the fun, and all of the craziness all made for writing all those songs. If we'd been a big healthy great group of guys and gals, none of those great songs would've been written, you know? The fact that when we are onstage, there's a lot of tension - you're never going to take away the fact that there are two ex-couples on that stage, you know? And you're never going to take back the fact that a lot of those songs were written about each other."

It would be tempting to call Rumours a happy accident, but clearly it was neither. It was - and remains - a pinnacle in pop music that gets better with every hearing. It is a triumph of spirit, joyous proof again that sometimes the very best art is the product of adversity, whether emotional or otherwise. It is a damn fine listen and every inch the classic it is purported to be and more. If you called it phenomenal, you wouldn't be wrong. Or alone, for that matter.