Quote:
Originally Posted by Villavic
Probably the members were frustrated with Lindsey because they felt he went too far, making Tusk too different from Rumours, but I'd blame on all 5 members about accepting Mick as manager of the Tusk tour. Who chooses someone with no experience as a manager? And to top it off an addict.
Less man a month after the end of the Tusk tour, I realized I was in trouble with the rest of the band. By this time, other managers began to enter the picture. John, Chris, and I were still with Mickey Shapiro, but Stevie had signed with the tough industry mogul Irving Azoff, who managed the Eagles at the time, to represent her with regard to her looming solo career. Lindsey was with somebody else.
The sh** hit the fan at a business meeting held to overview the Tusk tour with reference to the European leg. This turned into a vitriolic review of my behavior and management skills. The basic complaint, of course, was that we'd been on the road for eight months and hadn't made much money.
The accountant, meanwhile, was looking over the books and frowning. Impressive amounts of cash were missing, having been spent on various extravagances. The accountants and lawyers were not used to this. My turn came a bit later. It was a very shifty scenario. The lawyers didn't say we had done anything wrong, but it was bordering on that. There was an unspoken implication that money was missing. We felt unjustly accused by ignorant laymen. It was most unpleasant. Granted, some kind of split was inevitable, but it was real ugly the way it was done. It was a big meeting. Everybody was there, and all the recriminations of the past eighteen months were played out. We had been pilloried for making the most expensive record in history. Tusk had only gone to number three, where Rumours had been number one. We made no money on tour. Some money was unaccounted for. The end result was that I was off the throne. It was the democratisation of Fleetwood Mac. Ever since, we've had review by committee managers, lawyers, business managers. The Gang of Four.
I was very hurt by all this. I walked outside into my garden and just sat for a long time. Chris, John, Stevie, and Lindsey tried to make it clear that they weren't mad at me, that they considered me to have acted like an over-indulgent father. But I felt humiliated and flogged in front of my community. It was horrible. If that's what they want to do, I thought, Duck it. At that point there wasn't going to be much to manage anyway, since we were all about to devolve into solo projects for a few years.
If I have to choose who pilots the plane I will fly on, I choose the best professional, not the most frequen flyer. This failur was responsiblity of the whole band.
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Thanks for the quotes from Mick’s book. I’ve personally thought there was more to the story. I mean, several times in that passage Mick alluded to money missing. I know he says it was because of the extravagant traveling they were doing, but reading between the lines, it just seems like maybe Mick was caught with his hand in the cookie jar a couple of times, and he blamed it on the tour luxuries but couldn’t prove it with the accountants. I love it when he said accountants can’t understand that sort of thing LOL. No Mick, but they can understands receipts… or lack of receipts, for that matter.
Sounds like Mick had been managing FM since before Lindsey and Stevie joined, and it wasn’t until after the Tusk tour that a problem was noticed, so I can see why, after the White Album and Rumours tours went so well, they would have had no problem with Mick continuing in that role.
The book by Ken Caillat about the making of Tusk pretty much says right in the first chapter the rest of FM was held hostage to Lindsey’s demands for Tusk, for fear that if they said no to anything that he would quit. Like Lindsey performing some of his songs without the rest of the band, for instance.