No band in rock history has survived as much chaos as Fleetwood Mac — and no band has turned that chaos into art quite so profitably. They began as a British blues outfit, lost their founder to mental illness, lost a guitarist to a religious cult, and then, at the exact moment everything fell apart, recorded one of the best-selling albums ever made. This is the story of how five people who could barely stand each other made perfect harmony.
The Blues Band Named as an Insurance Policy
Fleetwood Mac was born in London in 1967, when guitarist Peter Green walked away from John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and formed his own group with drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie. Green was the visionary — a blues guitarist of such expressive power that B.B. King once said he was the only guitarist who ever made him sweat. But Green was also a strange, selfless bandleader. He named the band “Fleetwood Mac” — a mash-up of Mick Fleetwood’s and John McVie’s surnames — partly as an incentive for his rhythm section to stay, even joking that if he ever left, they’d still have a band with their names on it.
It was prophetic. Within three years, Green was gone, and the name outlived him by more than half a century. The early Mac was a very different animal from the hit machine of the seventies: a raw, British blues band fronted by Green’s haunted guitar and, briefly, by the slide-guitar showmanship of Jeremy Spencer, a young rock-and-roll revivalist who joined as the band’s fourth member in 1967.
Peter Green’s Tragic Vanishing Act
Peter Green’s departure remains one of rock’s saddest stories. By 1970, the guitarist who had written the band’s early masterpieces was unraveling. He began giving away his money, growing his hair and fingernails long, talking about charity and spirituality, and experimenting heavily with LSD. Friends watched the brightest blues talent of his generation slip into schizophrenia. He left the band in 1970, and for much of the next decade he drifted through obscurity, working odd jobs and struggling with his mental health.
The cruelest irony is that Green lived long enough to see the band he founded become one of the biggest acts on earth without him. He died in 2020, fondly remembered by musicians but forever frozen in the public mind as the ghost at the feast — the genius who named the band, then disappeared before the fame arrived.
The Guitarist Who Went to Buy a Magazine and Joined a Cult
If Green’s exit was tragic, Jeremy Spencer’s was simply bizarre. In February 1971, Fleetwood Mac was touring America when Spencer told his bandmates he was stepping out to buy a magazine — or, in some accounts, to visit a bookstore. He never came back. The band canceled that night’s show in Los Angeles and searched frantically, eventually discovering that Spencer had been taken in by the Children of God, a controversial religious movement, after chatting with a member on the street.
Spencer insisted for the rest of his life that he joined of his own free will, unhappy with the band’s direction and searching for spiritual meaning. He cut his hair, changed his name, donated the cash in his pocket to the group, and stayed affiliated with the movement — later renamed The Family International — for decades. The band, suddenly guitarist-less mid-tour, had to fly Peter Green back temporarily just to finish the dates. It was the first of many Fleetwood Mac crises solved by sheer improvisation.
Buckingham Nicks: The Couple Discovered by Accident
The band drifted through the early seventies with a rotating cast — American guitarist Bob Welch brought a softer, more melodic sensibility — until Mick Fleetwood stumbled into rock history by accident. In 1974, while checking out Sound City studios in Los Angeles, Fleetwood heard a track by an obscure duo called Buckingham Nicks and was mesmerized by the guitar playing. He invited guitarist Lindsey Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham agreed on one condition: his girlfriend and musical partner, a shawl-wearing twenty-six-year-old singer named Stevie Nicks, came with him.
Neither had ever had a hit. Within two years, they would be two of the most famous people on the planet. The 1975 self-titled album — the band’s tenth, but effectively a debut for the new lineup — sold millions on the strength of Christine McVie’s warm singles and Nicks’ smoky mystique. Nobody, least of all the band, was prepared for what came next.
Rumours: Recording a Breakup Album While Breaking Up
In early 1976, Fleetwood Mac retreated to the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, to record the follow-up. Over nine grueling months, they produced “Rumours” — and they did it while every romantic relationship in the band was detonating simultaneously. John and Christine McVie were divorcing after eight years of marriage. Buckingham and Nicks were ending their long, volatile partnership. Mick Fleetwood’s marriage to Jenny Boyd was collapsing. The studio atmosphere, by all accounts, was a fog of cocaine, tears, and screaming matches, with producers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut trying to keep the tapes rolling.
And yet the music that emerged was impossibly polished. Christine McVie, newly separated from her husband, wrote the buoyant “Don’t Stop” — essentially a pep talk to herself — while secretly carrying on an affair with the band’s lighting director, which inspired another of the album’s hits. Buckingham poured his bitterness into “Go Your Own Way,” a furious kiss-off aimed directly at Nicks, who was standing a few feet away in the vocal booth. She hated the song’s implication that she had been unfaithful, but she sang her harmonies on it anyway, because that’s what professionals did — and because the royalties would be enormous.
“Rumours” has sold more than forty million copies worldwide. It won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1978 and spent thirty-one weeks at number one. It is the rare blockbuster that plays like a group therapy session set to immaculate California harmonies.
Ten Minutes on Sly Stone’s Bed: The Birth of “Dreams”
The album’s most unlikely triumph was its only American number-one single, and it almost didn’t make the record. On a day when Stevie Nicks wasn’t needed in the main studio, she wandered down the hall at the Record Plant and slipped into a spare room that had been built for funk legend Sly Stone — a black-and-red space with a sunken pit, a piano, and a big black velvet bed with Victorian drapes. She brought along a Fender Rhodes electric piano, sat on the bed, found a drum pattern she liked, switched on a little cassette recorder, and wrote “Dreams” in about ten minutes.
When she played the rough demo for the band, Christine McVie sniffed that it was boring — just three chords and one note in the left hand. But Buckingham heard something, building the track’s hypnotic groove around her simple pattern until it became the dreamiest kiss-off in rock history: Nicks’ gentle, elliptical answer to Buckingham’s angry “Go Your Own Way,” recorded while the two ex-lovers were barely speaking. Released in March 1977, it reached number one that June — the only chart-topper of Fleetwood Mac’s entire career.
Tusk: The Million-Dollar Rebellion
How do you follow the best-selling album of the decade? If you’re Lindsey Buckingham, you deliberately try not to. For 1979’s “Tusk,” Buckingham seized control of the sessions and steered the band toward something strange, fragmented, and willfully uncommercial — a sprawling double album full of lo-fi experiments, punky bursts, and oddball percussion recorded in his bathroom. The sessions reportedly cost over a million dollars, an astronomical sum at the time, and the label was horrified.
“Tusk” sold four million copies — a smash by any normal standard, but a fraction of “Rumours,” and it was initially judged a failure. History has been kinder: the album is now regarded as a brave, visionary record, the sound of a band refusing to become its own tribute act. It also marked the moment the classic lineup’s golden run began to fray, as solo careers — Nicks’ especially — started pulling the members in different directions.
“Silver Springs,” “The Chain,” and the Songs That Almost Broke Them
For all its polish, “Rumours” nearly tore itself apart in the editing room. Stevie Nicks’ “Silver Springs” — her anguished answer song to Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way” — was cut from the album at the last minute simply because it made the record too long. Relegated to the B-side of “Go Your Own Way,” it became a cult favorite, and when Nicks finally performed it with the band on the 1997 reunion album “The Dance,” it earned a Grammy nomination and a whole new generation of fans. Nicks has never forgiven Buckingham for the decision to drop it.
Then there’s “The Chain,” the album’s brooding centerpiece and the only Fleetwood Mac song ever credited to all five members. It wasn’t written so much as assembled: the band stitched it together from rejected fragments of different songs, building it around John McVie’s menacing bass line and Buckingham’s explosive closing guitar solo. The lyric — about a bond that can’t be broken even as everything falls apart — became the band’s unofficial anthem, and decades later it still opens their concerts, five voices (or however many remain) locked together in defiance.
And “Tusk” had its own madness. For the title track, Buckingham became obsessed with the idea of a marching band and hired the entire USC Trojan Marching Band — more than a hundred musicians — to blast through the song’s primal riff. It was exactly the kind of glorious excess that made the album cost a fortune and baffled the record company. Only Fleetwood Mac would spend that kind of money to sound like a high school football halftime show.
Firings, Feuds, and Farewell
The eighties brought hits, hiatuses, and Christine McVie’s quiet departure in 1998. She returned triumphantly in 2014, and for a few years the classic five were whole again. Then, in 2018, came the shock: Lindsey Buckingham was fired — or, depending on who you ask, quit over scheduling — just before a tour, replaced by two guitarists. Buckingham sued; the dispute was settled out of court. The band toured on, but the old chemistry was gone.
Then, on November 30, 2022, Christine McVie died at seventy-nine, and something essential left with her. Mick Fleetwood has since spoken of the band in the past tense, suggesting that without Christine, Fleetwood Mac as the world knew it is finished. After fifty-five years, countless lineups, a cult defection, a genius lost to illness, and the most famous breakup album ever recorded, the chain — to borrow the title of the one song credited to all five members — may finally be broken.
What remains is the music, and what music it is: proof that five people falling apart can, for a little while, hold each other together in perfect harmony.
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