A review by lcvanoss
Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album by Steven Stiefel, Ken Caillat

4.0

Anyone else finish Daisy Jones and The Six, turn around and get immediately and fully obsessed with Rumours? Just me? TJR has said the story draws on many different rockstar stories, but the seed for Daisy and Billy came from Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham. I googled, ‘Books about Fleetwood Mac,’ and picked this memoir by Ken Callait, sound engineer turned producer (and Colbie Callait’s dad!) I was hoping for a good balance between personal drama and musical details and It. Did. Not. Disappoint. Let me just give you a taste of page 1:
‘You never know when you’re going to be a part of history. I was driving down to Salsalito in my Audi with my dog Scooter in the passenger seat.’
Now, I recognize that this is one person’s perspective, but I enjoyed it immensely, and am not planning to round it out. Ken is kind of the straight man of the group, always telling everyone to just do ‘a little’ cocaine so as not to mess with the sound. He gets a little too cozy with misogyny talking about how hot the studio girls were in the good ol’ days, but it helps that the women in the band are very good at putting him in his place. The title is very accurate. This is not about tour, and it is not about anything that came before or after Rumours. It is a detailed account of the painstaking work a bunch of extremely talented and very strung out people put into this one record. Hit me up if you ever want to discuss the courvoisier Stevie Nicks drank as a vocal tonic, why you should always add Silver Springs at the end of the track list, or the absolute ICON that is Christine McVie. #obsessed