Here are a few photoshoot outtakes from one of the best-selling albums of all time, Grammy Award winner for Album of the Year in 1978, Fleetwood Mac’s most successful release: Rumours.
Taken by the influential rock ‘n’ roll photographer, Herbert Worthington, the front cover of Rumours features a stylised shot of Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks dressed in her “Rhiannon” stage persona. While the balls, proudly hanging between Mick Fleetwoodâs legs on the cover, were already a staple of his stage get-up and were in fact toilet chains half-inched from a club the âMac played in their formative years.
The Rumours saga is one of rockâs most famous soap operas: Stevie Nicks had just split with her longtime lover and musical partner, Lindsey Buckingham, while Christine was in the midst of divorcing her husband, bassist John McVie. Meanwhile, Mick Fleetwoodâs extra-band marriage was on the rocks, leading to an affair with Nicks before the year was out. This inner turmoil surfaced in brutally honest lyrics, transforming the album into a tantalising he-said-she-said romantic confessional. The musiciansâ personal lives permanently fused within the grooves, and all who listened to Rumours become a voyeur to the painful, glamorous mess.
âDrama. Dra-ma,â was how Christine McVie described the recording of Rumours to Rolling Stone shortly after its release on February 4th, 1977. And that wasnât even the half of it. Sessions for Fleetwood Macâs masterwork have all the elements of a meticulously scripted theatrical romanceâelaborate entanglements, enormous amounts of money and mountains of cocaine.
Cocaine indeed played such a major role in the production of Rumours that the band seriously considered thanking their drug dealer in the album credits, until gangland violence apparently put a premature end to the idea. âUnfortunately, he got snuffedâexecuted!âbefore the thing came out,â Fleetwood wrote in his first memoir, 1990âs Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac.
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Sources: Wikipedia and Rolling Stone.
