If someone wasn’t around to experience it, describing to them just how all-encompassing Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours was in 1977 can be a daunting task.
Numbers may help:
- To date it has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.
- It spent 31 weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 200 album chart.
- Its four singles all cracked the Top 10,
And for most of that year, pretty much anytime the radio was on, it wouldn’t take long to hear one of them.
For me, I didn’t even have to leave my own home to be fully immersed in it.
My brother Greg played the album constantly, and simultaneously filled me in on all the background information on the band, each member, and the inspiration behind the songs. As an 11-year-old, I was in awe of all of it, and became just as hooked as he was.
While other kids were playing ball on the playground at recess, I remember walking around on the blacktop with my classmate Todd, naming each song off the album.
My sister Patty was on the Rumours train as well. There was a story I heard about her going to a bar one night, wearing a Fleetwood Mac concert t-shirt. A guy walked up to her and said, “Cool shirt! Were you at the Fleetwood Mac concert?”
Her response was, “Yes, I was. And you can go your own way.”
I always thought that was such a sick burn.
I was too young to understand the vast majority of the lyrical content of Rumours.
But thanks to Greg, I got the gist of it.
I recall bubbling over with excitement and telling my mother, “This album is amazing. All the band members were going through break-ups and divorce, so they wrote songs about each other.”
“That sounds awful,” was my mother’s less than impressed response.
I felt bad that she didn’t approve, but even if she had tried to keep me from further exposure to it, that wasn’t going to happen in that house.
After hearing those songs countless times, it would have been nearly impossible to be enamored forever and for quite some time, I didn’t feel a strong need to revisit Rumours.
In reality, it never really went away, as I would hear tracks from it in the wild pretty much non-stop in the ensuing years and they just became part of the landscape.
Then, for no particular reason, I recently began listening to some of the songs with different ears.
Almost as if I hadn’t been hearing them forever and they were still somewhat fresh. On “Go Your Own Way,” the tighter than tight vocal harmonies on the chorus, Lindsey’s blistering guitar leads, and Mick’s steady, driving beat and dugga-dugga snare fills hit me more vividly than perhaps they ever had.
No wonder this thing popped out of the radio and grabbed people the way it did when it dropped.
This is the sound of a band using its inner tension to come together when it should have been ripped apart, in a way that borders on the miraculous.
“Gold Dust Woman” always had an unsettling edge to it from the get-go, but I never really keyed in on just how intense and unhinged Stevie’s vocals become at the end, accompanied by the high-pitched ghost-like wailing of the guitar.
Umm, did anything or anyone else sound like this in ’77?
I also found myself marveling anew at how “The Chain” has three seemingly disparate parts to it that all tie together perfectly:
Culminating in a protracted, double time rocker of an ending that steadily grows out of that that menacing, fatter-than-fat bass line from John McVie.
Christine McVie’s songs serve as a sweeter respite from the inner turmoil of the rest of the album, providing a much-needed balance. Though firmly planted in middle-of-the-road pop, “Don’t Stop” and “You Make Loving Fun” uniquely stand out from the typical radio fare of the day by building on the foundation of her blues background and her adept, always-in-the-pocket keyboard skills, with Lindsey’s guitar lines adding the right amount of punch.
And “Songbird” is just gorgeous in a way I did not appreciate as a kid.
Stevie Nicks’ “Dreams” was the most successful of the singles:
The only one by Fleetwood Mac to ever top the Hot 100.
The song is elegantly poetic and deceptively laid back musically, but what she is really doing here is gently twisting the knife into a man’s heart (the same man providing the excellent guitar work on the song) for turning his back on the love that they had, by letting him know he’s going to live to regret it.
As much as “Dreams” encapsulates the fallout of a broken relationship, a theme that is central to Rumours, Stevie had another song that did so in a far more devastating manner.
Like “Dreams”, “Silver Springs” (named after a road sign for the town of Silver Spring, Maryland) is directed at Lindsey and is about what could have been.
The song starts out as a gentle ballad, using images from the beauty of nature to describe what this couple could be for each other. After only two lines of this, it takes a darker turn into grim reality, never to return to the idyllic metaphor.
By the end of the song, Stevie has unleashed the full force of her hurt and anger over what has been lost and is hammering home these lines with increasing emotional ferocity:
“Time casts its spell on you
“Silver Springs” by Fleetwood Mac -1977 – Songwriter: Stephanie Nicks
But you won’t forget me
I know I could have loved you
But you would not let me
I’ll follow you down
’Til the sound of my voice
Will haunt you
You’ll never get away
From the sound
Of the woman that loves you”
The song eventually fades out, but one gets the feeling it never actually goes away, and somewhere, Stevie is still singing it, as an ominous specter in Lindsey’s dreams, or perhaps nightmares.
It was fully intended for “Silver Springs” to be on Rumours.
But late in the sessions, the decision was made to leave it off the album for reasons that are thorny and complicated – and depend upon who is doing the talking.
It’s Fleetwood Mac, after all.
The main issues that were expressed seemed to be the overall run time of the album, being that LPs were limited in space, along with a concern of there being too many slow songs on the album. The solution was to replace “Silver Springs” with “I Don’t Want to Know,” a song Stevie had written when she and Lindsey recorded and performed as a duo, before joining Fleetwood Mac. It was shorter in length and more up tempo.
The rest of the band recorded the song without her, and she was eventually told that they wanted her to add her vocal to it and that the song would replace “Silver Springs” on the album.
Stevie was angry and heartbroken, and was vehemently opposed to the idea, but eventually relented.
Just speculating here, but in my mind:
it would have made more sense to cut “O Daddy”, which was also slower in tempo. While not a bad song, to my ears, it’s not of the same quality as the rest of the album, but it was a Christine song, and cutting it and replacing it with “I Don’t Want to Know,.” a Stevie song, could have potentially caused a different set of issues.
“Silver Springs” ended up as a B-side to the “Go Your Own Way” single.
So it was technically out there, but I don’t remember ever hearing it talked about back then.
It seemed to go virtually unnoticed in popular culture. Stevie remarked at one point that her beautiful song just disappeared. Years later, engineer and co-producer Richard Dashut called it “the best song that never made it to a record album.”
I first learned of the song’s fate in the early 90s when I read Mick Fleetwood’s autobiography, My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac.”
(… A surprisingly candid and detailed oral history that gets kind of harrowing and gross…) where he talks about having to break the news to Stevie Nicks that the song was being cut from the album and that she basically went ballistic. I still didn’t know what the song sounded like.
In 1997, “Silver Springs” got an unexpected second life when it was included in the set of the band’s live recording and video, The Dance, where Stevie and Lindsey are staring each other down and singing the chorus at each other on stage with a raw, fiery intensity that took the song to an even higher level.
It was as if the two of them were musically reenacting the tortured end of their relationship 20 years prior, or at least Stevie’s version of it, in front of the whole world.
Most people were hearing the song for the first time, and it for sure resonated. That live version cracked several charts in the U.S., including #5 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and was nominated for a Grammy.
I don’t recall being aware of any of this at the time.
A few years ago, I came across a 2017 Rolling Stone article that went in depth about “Silver Springs” and all of the drama behind it. I finally made a conscious choice to sit down and listen to the song. I immediately recognized it as something I had heard somewhere before but had somehow forgotten. This time I was really attentive to it and found myself utterly captivated by it throughout, and then those final choruses just tore me apart.
Since then, I can’t think about Rumours without including “Silver Springs.”
It still wrecks me more than just about anything I’ve ever heard, and to me, it’s the slow building force that is at the heart of the story that unfolds throughout the album.
Rumours stands as one of the greatest albums ever made.
But like Stevie imagines what could have been as opposed to what was not to be, in my mind:
All is made right when I picture this song at the end of the album, perfectly bringing it to a close.
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Great piece, RB. As I was too young to experience the Beatles’ albums as album releases, “Rumours” was among my first exposures to albums where the non-single cuts were as memorable as the singles. (For me, “The Chain” and “Second Hand News” were as dominant as the four hits.)
Prior to that, the only album I heard whose non-single tracks registered that strongly with me was “Main Course” by The Bee Gees. (“Wind of Change” and “Baby As You Turn Away” grab me as much as the singles.) Interestingly, both it and “Rumours” have tracks called “Songbird.”
Thank you, Chuck. I strongly resonate with your first paragraph. To me there was no difference between the singles and the album tracks on Rumours. All equally great.
My brother had Main Course. I remember liking “Wind of Change.” I think the album after Rumours that grabbed me start to finish was Aja by Steely Dan. Not a weak track on it, unless one is not a fan of the Dan.
Here’s where I confess that I’ve never listened to Fleetwood Mac, or any Stevie Nicks beyond “Landslide” (great song).
My parents were into 60s stuff, CCM, and country. Fleetwood Mac never once played in our homes. Well, perhaps some song happened to play on the radio, but I never knew it.
Listening to Rumors now, but it seems like music that takes a while for its power to sink in. And I admit that 70s soft rock is not a language I speak very well!
“Dreams” reminds me of a song on Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs (“No One Will Ever Love You”), which was very likely written as a pastiche of Stevie Nicks.
Update: I definitely heard “Don’t Stop” on the radio. Had no idea who it was.
“Don’t Stop” was an early example of a co-opted song for a Presidential political campaign.
The candidate’s staff objected to its use, feeling that it was dated and not cool enough. But the candidate like the tune’s positive messaging and insisted on making it his “theme song.” He has since used it regularly, (and it would seem with the song publisher’s endorsement) for years.
https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1840981_1840998_1840923,00.html
It’s no Cat Scratch Fever. But, hey, what is?
My humble advice is to keep listening and add Silver Springs to the list. If it helps, Courtney Love, Tori Amos, Lorde, Florence and the Machine and many others have covered it or been very inspired by it.
Sorry, rb. I would never, ever tamper with an album’s official track list. 😀
Ha!
Fail
I missed the boat on Rumours, too. I first heard it on my college’s radio station, and the DJ hyped up how good it was. I listened while studying, which means I didn’t do either very well, and just didn’t get it. I remember thinking it’d never be a hit. Boy, was I wrong.
Though the songs were everywhere in the atmosphere, I didn’t purposefully listen to the entire album until the 2000s, and I got it. It’s still not a go-to album for me (I prefer Tusk) but I appreciate it on its own terms now. Strange how romantic break ups brought them together musically.
I didn’t grow up with Rumours, but by the time I became a huge pop music fan around 10 years old, I was a sponge soaking up music and music trivia. I remember finding the Rumours album at my Grandmother’s house…left there by foster children that she had hosted years before. I dropped the needle on all of the tracks and was amazed that I knew the four singles very well. I had no idea those songs were all by the same band! At least 7 of those songs, in my perception, get regular rotation on classic rock radio. There is a VERY short list of albums that can make a claim like that.
On any given day a different song might be the one I want to listen to from that album, but I always claim “You Make Lovin’ Fun” to be my favorite of the bunch. (I remember before listening to the album that first time I thought the song was by Jefferson Starship. I guess I got my miracles confused).
I remember the juggernaut that was Rumours very well. But the single sharpest memory that I have of hearing any of it on the radio was Dreams with the “thunder only happens when it’s raining” lyric coming on while driving through one of the worst storms that I have ever experienced. When we got to my house, a tornado had hit it. That song will always be tied to that moment in my mind.
It’s always interesting, and sometimes scary, when music literally soundtracks our lives. Was your house badly damaged?
A huge, ancient hickory tree which I still mourn was uprooted and laid on the roof. The garage was wiped out entirely, one vehicle was destroyed (parked outside the garage naturally since my father kept the garage too full of tools and equipment to ever fit a car inside), and significant damage was done to the roof of the house.
However, and this is the important part, everyone home at the time was safe in the basement so none of them were hurt all.
That’s not a small amount of damage. That’s good news that no one was hurt.
As a National Weather Service employee, I’m glad to hear that folks were prepared and in the basement. Sounds like it worked out about as well as it could have, given the circumstances.
It’s that Midwest training!
My introduction to Fleetwood Mac was Tango In The Night, specifically the singles Everywhere and Little Lies. In my mid to late teens as I got really into music I went back to the start and got into the muscular blues of Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac with Oh Well, The Green Manalishi and the lush counterpoint of Albatross.
I knew Rumours was a touchstone album but the bits I heard didn’t grab me.
The Chain was my way in. Turns out I knew that one from an early age, one of the sections anyway. The one that grows out of John McVie’s bass, culminating in the riffing guitar was the theme tune to Formula One coverage from the late 70s to 2015 (with a gap from ’96 to ’09 when it was replaced by Jamiroquai and Moby amongst others).
It was the perfect accompaniment to footage of cars being driven fast, accelerating away as the bass gets going and screaming round bends as the guitar lets loose. Whereas the vegan, animal rights supporter Moby and fast cars just does not compute.
Think I was in my late teens or even 20s when I realised that was Fleetwood Mac. The Chain is an all time greatest song contender for me. With maturity I finally got the rest of the album.
That is cool about The Chain. That is a perfect gateway drug to the rest of the album. I had a similar experience with Fire On High by ELO. It was used as a theme for CBS Sports Spectacular here and it was quite some time before I knew where it came from.
Rumours was the first album I bought with my own money. I definitely remember hearing “Silver Springs” on the radio (not often) and thinking it was a great track. I don’t think I knew then that it was available as a B-side. I agree that “Oh Daddy” is the track it should have replaced. That was the only track on the album that I didn’t much care for, although I was lukewarm on “Songbird.”
I was also surprised to eventually find out that “Second Hand News” had not been a single. Philly radio seemed to play that one a lot. Until I saw the lyric sheet I thought it was “I’m no second-hand dude.”
Spot on, roboo. ‘Silver Springs’ is the very definition of a lost classic, and it’s great that it’s finally getting its due. Next, we need to revive a couple of other of Stevie’s less-than-well-known gems, these two buried at the bottom of their respective soundtracks: ‘Sleeping Angel’ from Fast Times at Ridgemont High and ‘Blue Lamp’ from Heavy Metal.
Have not heard either of those. Listened to both. I particularly liked Sleeping Angel.
Everything you wrote here is true. Man after my own heart.
Rumours was the first album I bought with my own money. I also remember hearing “Silver Spring” on occasion and liking it, but I didn’t know at the time that it was a B-side. I agree that it should have replaced “Oh Daddy.” That was really the only track I didn’t care for much, although I was a little indifferent toward “Songbird.”
I was surprised later to find that “Second Hand News” was not one of the singles. I definitely recall hearing it a lot on Philly radio.
Eventually I got quite into Fleetwood Mac. The pre-Buckingham/Nicks album Bare Trees is as much of a favorite as Tusk and the 1975 self-titled album.
The main thing I remember about Rumours when I was a preteen (Lord help me) was the fact that it was among the first if not THE FIRST album to have 4 top 10 hits. That just didn’t happen. It probably would’ve with the Beatles had their music been distributed the way it is today, and maybe it did with a couple of their albums, I don’t know. All I know is that to me, any album that had 4 top 10 hits thereafter had to be great, right?
That’s a good point. I looked up a few albums by popular 70s artists, and I couldn’t find another one from before Rumours that had 4 top ten hits on it.
Eagles and Captain and Tennille both had 3. The Beatles’ singles discography is not easy to follow. There is a chance one of those albums had at least 4 top ten hits on it, but I didn’t see it.
Wow! You absolutely killed it once again Bro! This is probably the best review of one of the greatest albums ever recorded! I’m so glad I was fortunate enough to be the one that first introduced you to Rumors! Thanks for the shout out! the Rumors album is still at the top of my playlists I listen to the most! I totally agree that Silver Springs should have been on the album. As much as I love Stevie Nicks voice, I have to say I have a soft spot for Christy McVie’s beautiful songbird voice! The two of them together with Lindsey Buckingham create the most incredible harmonies!
Aw, bro, thanks. This doesn’t happen without ya! And I totally agree that the 3 of them harmonizing together is just pure magic. Just so powerful.
I am not surprised you are still listening!