Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham made each other miserable while writing and recording together, but a Fleetwood Mac producer said they made everyone else miserable too. He shared that the former couple was endlessly negative while the band recorded the Tusk album. Their behavior made him feel as though he was working with children.
A Fleetwood Mac producer said Stevie Nicks and the rest of the band changed with fame
Producer Ken Caillat began working with Fleetwood Mac while they recorded their Rumours album. This was Nicks and Buckingham’s second album with the band, and it supercharged the group’s popularity. According to Caillat, the experience of attaining so much success so quickly changed the band members.
“Making Rumours was actually an experience of real enjoyment,” he told Smashing Interviews. “The band were not superstars yet. They were still pretty much normal people. They could go out to dinner and not be recognized all the time. But for Tusk, they had already experienced the wealth of Rumours, and they all had their favorite champagne or liqueur or cocaine. And they all had somebody to do their bidding.”
He said that he thought the group would have matured, not become more challenging to work with.
“I thought the band had grown up,” he said. “But I was working with a band with a lot of politics and a lot of problems.”
Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were reportedly very whiney
Caillat shared that Nicks and Buckingham were the most difficult to work with while recording Tusk. The group recorded the album at Château d’Hérouville in France, which Caillat said Nicks and Buckingham hated.
“We got there and Lindsey and Stevie [Nicks] became the biggest babies I’ve ever seen,” he told Tape Op. “It was like, ‘I don’t have any TV. I don’t have anything to do. I’m bored.’ We literally had a cook who would cook whatever you wanted. So they’d say, ‘We want steak. We want orange juice.’ I would walk by their rooms, they had separate rooms, and there would be pitchers of fresh-squeezed orange juice that they just didn’t like. There would be a steak that Lindsey said, ‘I didn’t like the way he cooked it.’ They were just little babies, and I’m like, ‘What is the matter with you guys?’”
Caillat explained that they grew more miserable as time went on.
“Lindsey and Stevie were like, ‘I wanna go home. I wanna go home. Waaah,’” he said. “So we stayed as long as we could, and we finally flew home. Stevie was so miserable.”
Ultimately, he said that the change in the two musicians made him sad.
“It’s sad,” he explained. “Rumours was so … Stevie was still young and innocent. I have a picture of Lindsey, before the Rumours album started, sitting on the floor of an airport playing his guitar, like so many kids you’ve seen. That ain’t ever going to happen again.”
Stevie Nicks believes that Fleetwood Mac did not change her
Nicks would likely disagree with Caillat’s assessment of her. She once shared that she cried at a high school reunion when her old friend said she hadn’t changed a bit.
“It was the nicest thing anybody had said to me, that I’m still the same,” she said per the book Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks by Stephen Davis. “Because I always tried very hard to stay who I was before I joined Fleetwood Mac, and not become a very arrogant and obnoxious, conceited, b****y chick — which many do, and I think I’ve been really successful.”
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