Fleetwood – Mick Fleetwood, 1990 ★★

Rock 'n' Roll Sometimes Forgets

How does one spend two decades in one of pop music’s biggest bands, and emerge eight million dollars in debt?

For Mick Fleetwood, drummer and only original member of Fleetwood Mac, it took a score of rotating fellow band members, numerous messy romantic entanglements, and a Tony Montana-sized mountain of cocaine.

No wonder this memoir Fleetwood proves such a disappointing read. How could he possibly have remembered anything!

Vagueness pocks this book like cold sores on a sleazy roadie. Whether talking about a possible physical altercation between fellow Mac members Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, or how he offered help to an ex-bandmate down on his luck, Fleetwood has this disappointing tendency to trail off on the page, not completing whatever thought he starts. His stories often begin well, but after a solid first eighty pages where he lays out the band’s early history in decent detail, they seldom land with any clear certainty.

Sometimes he just seems unable to remember anything. Other times, you wonder if he’s playing coy. An anecdote about his making time with a young groupie serves as a fine example:

“At the time I was seeing a very young blonde named Ginny whom I had met on the road to Texas. Actually, [record engineer Richard] Dashut had met her first, but I had taken a shine to her because she had freckles and reminded me of [his then-wife] Jenny. So [band road manager] John Courage told Richard to hand her over – orders from the Colonel – and I flew her into L. A. from her hometown (on which occasion our crew played a nasty trick on me; someone called and threatened to have me jailed and deported for transporting an underage girl across the state line for immoral purposes!)”

Ginny never appears again in Fleetwood; one is left wondering how she fared as tour plaything. Also, why did that jailbait trick work so well on Fleetwood? Either she was underage and he knew it, or he wasn’t concerned enough to ascertain she wasn’t. Moments like this leave a bad taste.

It’s not as if Fleetwood lacked more worthy material to write about. The story of Fleetwood Mac offers quite a lot. In its first incarnation, as "Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac Featuring Jeremy Spencer," the band was in the vanguard of Britain’s seismic rock-blues movement of the 1960s, finding its way to the top of the pop charts thanks to the beguiling instrumental “Albatross,” a Green composition. By 1970, the band had released their most successful album to that point, Then Play On, and enjoyed such massive attention from the British music press that Green had his own column in Record Mirror, holding forth on his vegetarianism and the band’s new amplifiers.

Then Green bolted the band, for reasons Fleetwood suggests had to do with mixing religion and acid. It’s hard to be sure, or be sure that Fleetwood was ever sure. The important point here is that Green became but the first band casualty of a rock 'n' roll lifestyle which Fleetwood seems to have enjoyed too much to bother getting under control. Two more guitarists followed Green out over the next two years, Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan. Spencer joined a cult, while Kirwan lapsed into drink-addled vagrancy. Meanwhile, Fleetwood Mac lost its grip on the English market, and travelled to the United States, where by the early 1970s they were once again a commercial success, if not a sensation.

Even more modest success was enough to distract Fleetwood from taking proper stock of his devoted model wife, Jenny, and their family, as he explains while detailing the band’s 1973 tour:

“As I’ve already said, it was the days of Roxy Music and the glam people. Fleetwood Mac, more homespun and oriented toward California country rock and blues, couldn’t get arrested in England. But in America it was another story. We went on the road there, and Penguin was selling our usual 300,000 records and eight-track tapes without a hit single. We toured endlessly that spring, and I can’t even remember where I was when Jenny bore our daughter Lucy Fleetwood on April 7. What I do remember was the riot that occurred three weeks later when fifteen thousand kids and Fleetwood Mac were teargassed by the cops at a baseball park in Stockton, California, where we were playing a festival with Elvin Bishop, Canned Heat, and Buddy Miles.”

With an attitude like that, no wonder Jenny left Fleetwood and took up with one of the band’s guitarists.

Fleetwood Mac’s story gets more interesting in 1975, when the band was forced to replace another guitarist. This time it wasn’t from a drug overdose or manic episode or sleeping with the drummer’s wife. Bob Welch just wanted off the rollercoaster the band had become. Enter Lindsay Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, and Fleetwood Mac’s most profitable and remembered era. This time the band was an international sensation, selling millions of records. According to Fleetwood, he converted much of that coin to powdered form.

Fleetwood Mac circa 1977, during their peak of popularity. From left to right, bassist John McVie, singer-keyboardist Christine McVie, drummer Mick Fleetwood, singer Stevie Nicks, and singer-guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. According to Fleetwood, the smiles seen here may not have been genuine. [Image from http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/]

At this point, as he enters the most popular phase of his band’s career, Fleetwood becomes an even less authentic-seeming narrator. He talks about how Fleetwood Mac “was more a way of life than a business” and how he didn’t care how many units the band sold, and then a page or two later regales you with the astronomical sales enjoyed with the band’s biggest album, Rumours, or the keen rivalry he felt with the other California-based hit-making rock band of the era, the Eagles. He intimates having an affair with Nicks, but never explains how it played out or was finally resolved.

There’s a slapdash quality to the whole book that shows up as early as page five. There he writes of his English father’s involvement in a British naval action early in World War II where a German ship carrying British prisoners, the Altmark, was seized in Norwegian waters and the prisoners rescued:

“Hitler protested rigorously – we technically weren’t at war with Germany at the time – and Mike Fleetwood got the DSO for finding the ship.”

Huh? If the United Kingdom wasn’t at war with Germany at the time, why were they holding British prisoners? Fleetwood meant to write “Norway,” the neutral party here, but clearly dropped a stitch. That happens, but where was the editor? And why was the mistake not corrected before it made my paperback edition?

Stories abound that Fleetwood is rife with errors regarding the musical part of the story as well. Buckingham apparently even wrote a song about it, “Wrong,” from his 1992 solo album Out Of The Cradle.

You get the feeling reading Fleetwood that even if the author isn’t consciously lying, and I don’t think he was, he didn’t really bother enough with getting his facts straight. That’s too bad. While he doesn’t write enough about music, the nuggets he does offer are fairly entertaining, whether you happen to love Fleetwood Mac as I do or not. Such as Peter Green’s reaction when he saw guitar rival Eric Clapton on his way to the studio to record his first vocal: “Oh, shit, he can sing, too!” Or Green’s desire to perform not as a “guitar God” like Clapton but as a shy bluesman, “with as much integrity as the system would allow.”

“I’ve never been a 'performing' drummer of the Keith Moon variety,” Fleetwood writes. “I want the effect of my playing to be that people feel the emotion I’m trying to create with rhythms; but there’s not a lot in what I do. I try to keep it to the simplest manner possible. For me the point of the craft is to complement your fellow players and not get frustrated – the drummer’s malady – wanting to show off, wanting to get noticed.”

On the stage, Fleetwood’s great doing just that. On the page, Fleetwood seems less sure of himself, trying to bluff his way through. The result is a disappointing memoir.