The brutal reason Fleetwood Mac didn’t thank their cocaine dealer for ‘Rumours’
The Grateful Dead have acid. The Velvet Underground have heroin. A metric shit ton of bands from Metallica to the Pogues to AC/DC have alcohol. Every drug has a band most associated with it, and I’m sure with each of them, you could argue until the comedown wears off about who that is, all except cocaine.
Oasis have a decent shout at it. As does David Bowie, and especially Black Sabbath. Not for nothing did they have a song called ‘Snowblind’. Come on now, though, there is only one band in all of pop music that can claim to be the defining artist of cocaine, and that is Fleetwood Mac. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a moment of their 1970s heyday when at least two members of the Mac didn’t have their nose in a bag of chang.
It’s a testament to the power of their music, not to mention how incredibly compelling their whole story is, that it didn’t just take over the entire narrative of the band. It certainly threatened to, ask Stevie Nicks about the rumours surrounding the way she took cocaine. However, the drug is not the first thing people think of when they think of Fleetwood Mac. It’s songs like ‘Dreams’, ‘The Chain’ and ‘Go Your Own Ways’, and stories of their romantic tension.
Even at the time, the band made no real secret of their intake. It was something of an open secret at the time that everyone involved in pop music was doing a line every other hour, and some bands put cheeky little references to this in their work if you knew where to look. For example, Black Sabbath themselves worked out that they’d actually spent more money on cocaine than on the production of their classic album Vol. 4 in 1972.
Thus, in the liner notes for the album, they thanked “the great COKE-cola [sic] company of Los Angeles”. Five years later, when the Mac were getting set to release their masterpiece Rumours, they were in a similar position. The only reason that they hadn’t spent more money on marching powder than the actual record was that Rumours was a copper-bottomed blockbuster, but their coke budget was still completely absurd.
Thus, according to Mick Fleetwood in his 1990 memoir Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac, the band were set to do as Sabbath did and thank their dealer in the album’s liner notes. However, they didn’t go through with it.
Not for the sake of their public image, you understand, but for something much, much darker. According to Fleetwood, they’d written the tribute to him but pulled when “he got snuffed – executed! – before the thing came out”.
Which is nothing if not a sobering reminder that for all the jolly stories of rock ‘n’ roll excess, having a connection to someone who can get you that much cocaine is to have a connection with someone involved in serious gangland activity. Turns out that being a drug dealer on that level is never really a safe bet, even if your clientele are multi-million-selling rock bands.
Fleetwood Mac were made of stern stuff. If a close band associate dying, several crippling drug addictions and several more inter-band affairs couldn’t stop them from becoming the biggest band in the world, nothing could.