(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 20 February 2026 21:45, UK
It took a small miracle for Fleetwood Mac to even come close to making an album like Rumours.
On paper, everything seemed to be going from the moment they walked into the studio, and yet when you listen to the music, you would swear that they are having the time of their lives every single time they stepped up to the microphone. There might have been a little bit of magic involved with creating this perfect storm of heartbreak, but it’s always the little things that ended up bringing everything together.
But even when completing the simplest tasks for the record, there was already tension in the air. Lindsey Buckingham was a perfectionist in every respect whenever he was working on one of his songs, and he wasn’t above walking all over people to get what he wanted, whether that meant screaming at Stevie Nicks in the middle of recording background vocals or attempting to choke out a producer when he ended up recording over one of the takes that the guitarist thought wasn’t usable.
That’s before even getting to the rest of the band members. John and Christine McVie were already falling apart by the time they entered the studio, and even though Stevie Nicks walked away with some of the greatest songs from the record, there were more than a few times when she would disappear because she didn’t like the direction that Buckingham was taking songs like ‘Second Hand News’ and ‘Go Your Own Way’.
Everyone could have at least put their cares aside for the sake of the music, but producers Richard Dashut and Ken Callait each had their own sets of problems. Callait was the one in charge of getting everything sounding perfect, and while he did have the great idea of recording a song like ‘Songbird’ on a massive stage, it didn’t exactly get off to the best start when they began working on the first few tunes.
The first day of any recording session is always going to be about working out the bugs, but the band were already working with a great song called ‘Keep Me There’. We would come to know it as ‘The Chain’, but when they started working on the tune ‘Oh Daddy’, the rest of the band was mortified when the version that ended up on the record nearly got swallowed up in the tape machine by accident.
It’s not like ‘Oh Daddy’ is the most popular song off Rumours by any stretch, but Callait remembered everyone holding their breath the minute that the master tape of the song headed towards the floor, saying, “We were going to do some overdubs, and while rewinding the tape, a portable tape oscillator fell on the machine, sending it into free-wheel – the reels were spinning out of control. I jumped on the machine to stop it – and snapped the tape! We listened back and there it was: ‘Oh ‘addy.’ The ‘D’ part of Christine’s vocal was cut off. My heart sunk. Nobody took my head off over the accident, but I felt terrible.”
Given what they were going through on the rest of the record, the idea of losing one consonant was going to be the least of their worries. Getting everything else sounding perfect was a Herculean task for anyone to pull, and yet when listening to ‘Don’t Stop’ or ‘You Make Loving Fun’, you couldn’t picture any one of the tunes being any more perfect whenever they leapt out of the speakers.
If anything, the fact that they ended up with these kinds of screwups is almost reassuring for any other rock and roll producer. Most people tend to think that some of these producers are superhuman whenever they step behind the board, but sometimes it just requires the right amount of elbow grease to get a song off the ground properly.