Album a Day #1: Rumors

January 31, 2018 by loriyannucci 2 Comments

Year of release: 1977

I never noticed Mick Fleetwood’s balls on the album cover

I’ve been a Fleetwood Mac fan since I was a kid. After reading a Rolling Stone article about the 40^th anniversary of the band’s legendary album, I realized I had never listened to it all the way through. Sure, I heard all of Rumor’s big hits: “Go Your Own Way”, “Dreams”, “Don’t Stop” but I never listened to the album all the way through. Maybe I thought that since pretty much every song on the album was a hit I had heard the entire album. Close, but not entirely true. Since I somehow managed to not listen to one of the biggest albums ever recorded, I chose Rumors as the first selection for my Album a Day project.

 

Thoughts:

Let’s face it: I’m a Fleetwood Mac fan because I love Stevie Nicks. My favorite Mac songs are the ones where Stevie sings lead. So the biggest surprise about Rumors for me is how little Stevie Nicks is actually on the record. Sure, there’s “Dreams” and her distinctive voice is clear in much of the backing vocals. Of course, she figures prominently as the subject of Lindsay Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way”. But despite the lack of Stevie Nicks, it’s still an amazing album.

The 1980s and a lot of cocaine had a lot to do with these fashion choices

There was an interesting anecdote about the making of the album the Rolling Stone article mentioned above. Stevie actually contributed another song to the album – “Silver Springs”, a gentle ballad about her breakup with Buckingham. But the song was bumped from the album because there just wasn’t enough room on the album for it. Back in the days before digital albums, track selection was an art form…with limited space on an LP, producers had to carefully consider factors like the number of tracks, their length and the balance between the two sides of the LP. And when the band was putting Rumors together, there just wasn’t room for “Silver Springs”. Stevie Nicks was devastated and fans were robbed of a great song. A few take-aways from this story:

• Imagine an album so stacked with great songs from top to bottom, that a song as good “Silver Springs” didn’t make the cut.
• Despite not making the album, “Silver Springs” became an enduring fan favorite and gained the wider release it deserved when it was featured on the 1997 live album “The Dance”. It was a dumb decision to keep the song off the album but the song was so good, it managed to live on and become a Mac classic anyway.
• Man, Lindsay Buckingham is a prick. You know he kept that song off the record because he knew what it meant to Stevie.

Fun fact:

The band did so much cocaine during the album recording that they were going to thank their drug dealer in the liner notes. But then he was murdered and they figured that was a bad idea.

Final thoughts:

Despite the relative absence of Stevie Nicks, Rumors deserves its status as one of the great rock albums. It deserved to sell 20-some million copies. It’s an all-time classic and if you’ve managed not to hear the whole album yet, like I had, you should definitely give it a listen.