Mick Fleetwood Exclusive Interview: Modern Drummer Magazine

Web Exclusive Interview
Mick Fleetwood

Mick Fleetwood

Mick Fleetwood has lots of reasons to celebrate these days. Fleetwood Mac's legendary drummer has a new drum-loop library, Total Drumming, that in some ways is the most profound culmination of his hugely influential drumming career. He's the recent father of two twin girls, Ruby and Tessa. And he's about to take to the road behind the music of Say You Will, the first new album from the Mac's classic lineup in over a decade. Seems like a good time to reminisce.

by Adam Budofsky

Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac (1968)
I'd played in several groups around London, including John Mayal's Blues Breakers. My tenure with Mayall was fairly short-lived, owing to vast amounts of alcohol. But John's guitarist, Peter Green, later called me up and said he'd heard about Jeremy Spencer, a slide guitar player, and that we should start a band. We asked John McVie to leave Mayal, but he didn't want to because he was making too much money. We debuted at the Windsor Jazz Festival without him, in front of 20,000 people. He stood at the side of the stage watching us. And the band was called Fleetwood Mac [laughs]. It didn't take long for him to jump ship.
For our first album, our show just needed recording. Our goal was to sound like Elmore James and the other artists we worshipped. A lot of the reason we got into those artists was the sound. So we were very intent on getting as near as we could to that wild early recording sound. Basically it was all about mic' placement. Count the band in and play. No overdubbing, no nothin'.

Then Play On (1969)
By this time the art of recording had started to take hold. It became a different animal. Peter was majorly starting to experiment. We were beginning to understand the art of overdubbing and creating a broader musical spectrum. On the first track, "Coming Your Way," you can hear conga overdubs. I've still got those congas. They're actually fiberglass - not very traditional, but in those days I thought they were very flashy. The thing that appealed to me was that they wouldn't get trashed in the back of the van. We didn't have cases in those days.

Kiln House (1970)
Kiln House is a charming album - such a different, unsnobby type of album. Jeremy was great at doing home demos on Revoxes, with multi-tracking harmonies, so we used a lot of those techniques on the album. If you listen to the drums, they're very closed down, very tight. There may be echo on them, but the source sound employed a lot of close miking. I used towels on the drums to keep them very muted, quite Beatle-esque. We had a lot of fun doing things like that.

Mystery To Me (1973)
Mystery To Me was probably our strongest album from this period. Certainly for Christine, John, and me, this period was the beginning of a real partnership in the studio, where a look of the eye would be instantly understood. We had this automatic thing in the rhythm section, and we became an expressive partner to the front line. The studio became increasingly important to our craft.

Rumours (1977)
After Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined the group, I felt excited that we were so in control of our own destiny, and I felt majorly a part of that whole process. We spent an incredible amount of time with Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut getting drum sounds. We had made some money, so that was the beginning of the very extended album projects.
All the stuff about the relationships going on the rocks - it's all true, and everyone's heard it a thousand times. But behind that was the fact that we stayed together because we were having an incredibly fantastic time doing this stuff in the studio. We worked so hard on those tapes, we wore the oxide off them. Actually, Ken and Richard thought at one point that we'd lost some of the high end, and in those days you couldn't just fix it in Pro Tools. But we'd made tape copies, and the only way we could get them in sync was to use the phasing of my cymbals. Well, you could imagine how long that took. But Ken did it, and it earned him a Grammy.

Tusk (1979)
Tusk turned out to be one of the most important albums this band ever made. Then Play On and Tusk are my favorite Fleetwood Mac albums. They're cool and adventurous, and I played some really good stuff on them.
As a percussionist, the thought of hitting a Kleenex box in a bathroom and miking it - to me, if something sounds good, go with it. Early on we did some of the same stuff with Jeremy Spencer. You'd hear something that sounds like a big thick cushion hitting someone over the head, and it was a close-miked pencil hitting the side of a chair. We do that kind of thing endlessly on the new album, lots of little sounds that get put behind the snare drum - they're subliminal, and they're crafted to the nth degree.
I was blessed to be at quite a few of the Beatle sessions when I was young, because I was at the time courting the girl who was to be my wife, Jenny Boyd, who's the sister of Geroge Harrison's wife Patti. We used to hang out with them socially to some extent. But I remember being a fly on the wall at a couple of the major sessions, like "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." They literally had an anvil in the studio. I thought that was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
On "What Makes You Think You're The One," I set about playing very simply. Only Lindsey and I were playing that together, which we quite often do, by the way. But the drum sound on that was Lindsey's old Sony ghetto blaster. We opened the mic's up so that it was recording straight onto tape, and that overload and compression is straight off the ghetto blaster. It gave it that "suck and push" sound.

The Visitor (1981)
The Visitor is the highlight of my musical career in terms of my visualizing something and then executing it. I was familiar with and loved a lot of that kind of music; I had a great professor at UCLA who was Ghanaian, and he was very helpful before I even got into it.
The whole premise was not to try to emulate or become an expert on African music, but rather to put two completely different elements together and have them both survive, meet halfway. I went there to be part of something, and bring whatever I could bring to it as a percussionist.
The album wasn't a huge sales success, but in terms of what I thought I could accomplish, it was a success. And it's often thought of as something that was groundgreaking. Years later, Paul Simon, who did the Graceland album in South Africa, very graciously said to me, "I just want you to know that what you did in Ghana all those years ago didn't go unnoticed." He took note that going physically to another country, allowing the project to pay tribute to another mode of music, was a sort of spunky thing to do.
People joke that I must have African blood in me somewhere, because I so get it, without even knowing what it is. It's about body language. Certainly I've been drawn to a lot of tom-tom work. So it was just a really happy marriage.

Tango In The Night (1987)
I thought that album was fantastic, very modern. A lot of the production skills were representative of where Lindsey was at. And I did many overdubs, so you got a lot of blend of drums and machines - humanizing something that might have been a little bit uninteresting.
Unfortunately, we were all pretty disconnected as people during the making of that album. Lindsey was emotionally spent, and didn't at that point like the restrictions of being in a rock band. We all had our various crosses to bare at that time.

The Dance (1997)
As time went on, my relationship with Lindsey grew again into a really good one. We'd made amends and reconnected. We started working together. Lindsey was working on a solo album and doing a lot of experimenting, and he asked me to play drums on it. We had great time, just the two of us working together for the first time in many years.
Pretty soon it was, Who do you think should play bass on this? We tried a bass player and it didn't work out, so John came and did some bass playing, then Chris came in and did a little keyboard thing - and this was still all for Lindsey's solo album. Then people saw us working together and said things like, Do you realize it's the twentieth anniversary of Rumours After a while, we got nudged by so many people saying, Why don't you all get back together and celebrate your reunion? Eventually Lindsey just said, Screw it, let's just do it.
So he dropped the work on his album and we went into rehearsals for what turned out to be the live album The Dance, which was the beginning of a major resuscitation of the orginal bandmembers. And we played really well on that tour.

Say You Will (2003)
The new album is produced and primarily engineered by Lindsey. All of the sensibilities of being an adventurer are back. He's been given a complete free rein. Stevie probably gave us eighteen songs, some formed, some unformed, while she was on her last tour with Sheryl Crow. So we started working away on her songs. She's been back now for about a year in the studio. The album certainly has elements of Tusk. But it is also acessibile.
We made a decision not to work with someone who was conversant with Pro Tools, because we wanted to do this album in a very personal way, and that meant literally not having other bodies around. At one point Lindsey said, Maybe we need to take a time-out so I can learn how to use all this stuff. But the decision was not to do it. We're certainly open to using any tools during mixing, for instance, though frankly, a lot of it isn't necessary. We play out things we need to fix, or Lindsey will edit with a razor-blade mentality. Having said that, we're already talking about making the next album, and next time there will be more of a marriage of the technological stuff.
With all the ups and downs with this band, we sometimes sit and say, What a chestristry we have. And when you fire it up again, Oh my God, it's still there. And there is humor about what we do now, so we're simply not going to do something that ends up being miserable. There are incredibly deep relationships between these people, unlike any other band that I know.


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