1999 Mick interview

[ThePenguin]

Never saw this before....? He says some nice stuff about John. Anyway here it is...

-Lis

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Too much booze while playing the blues


ROCK stars can be the most appalling idiots. They’re no good at money, or relationships, or at looking after themselves, and the more famous they become, the less good they are at real life.
As a founder of one of the most successful bands of the past three decades, Mick Fleetwood abandoned his British common sense for the entire book of rock star idiocy: three broken marriages (two of which were to the same woman), booze, drugs, an impossibly profligate lifestyle followed by bankruptcy. Fleetwood Mac, he readily concedes, was "a living soap opera".
Three of the original line up from the 60s either dropped out after nervous breakdowns or went off and joined strange cults. The band’s second incarnation would have kept a whole series of Dallas going with storylines. The group’s two couples ö husband and wife John and Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham ö split up messily at the height of their fame, just as the album Rumours was released. Meanwhile, Mick Fleetwood’s efforts to save his own marriage were somewhat hampered by his on off affair with Nicks, who promptly broke his heart by running off and marrying her dead best friend’s husband. Just like soap characters who continue living in the same house, despite betrayal or bereavement, the warring parties in the band had to face each other every day until finally, in 1987, they could stand it no more and everyone went their separate ways.
Mick Fleetwood is an imposing man: at 52, he is as long and lean as ever. He doesn’t so much stand up from a chair as unfold all 6ft 5ins of himself from it. Considering he used to breakfast on brandy and dine on cocaine, he looks in peak condition. He enjoys being healthy, he says, but then he enjoyed the excesses too. But you won’t hear Mick Fleetwood boring you with tales from "my drink and drugs hell".
"It was crazy, it was great but then it just got boring, so I stopped," Mick says. "A little light eventually comes on and if you don’t see that light, you end up in the obits. I realised I wanted to reach 65 and be healthy."
All water under the bridge now, of course. Rock stars grow older, they grow up. Or, as Fleetwood puts it, because he has lived in California for a long time, they just "grow".
In his case, the unlikely new incarnation Mick has "grown" into is a businessman. He has just become director of a music marketing company whose speciality is taking long established artists and re packaging them for a new market. With such performers, the company, Point Group, sets up partnership deals which allow the performer to retain greater control of intellectual property. The company also has "music detectives" who trawl through archives, unearthing unreleased material which is repackaged for a modern audience.
Last year, they found several live sessions and interviews with Led Zeppelin at the BBC. They also discovered hours of early Fleetwood Mac, which Mick himself was unaware existed. Is this the sort of arrangement Fleetwood Mac could have done with when they started out 30 years ago?
"Oh, no question. I was 16 when I started as a professional drummer. What did I know about the business? Someone says, ‘We’ll give you a Cadillac if you give us your songs’, and you don’t think about copyright. You’d be pushed to count on one hand those from my generation who had any retention of copyright. I was attracted to this because I’ve been burned."
The third child and only son of an RAF officer and a PE teacher, Mick was 10 and at prep school when he first picked up a set of drumsticks.
He was smitten instantly. "I knew that playing the drums was all I wanted to do. Consequently, I was useless at school. Basically I didn’t want to be there. My parents took me out of boarding school when I was about 14 and I rode things out at a day school till I was 15."
His parents never held it against him. "Considering my background ö public school, father a Wing Commander ö they were amazingly go ahead. At 16, they sent me to London, with my toy drum kit in a blanket, to live with my sister Sally, who was an art student. They were fantastic to give me that freedom."
In London, Fleetwood worked at Liberty department store where his duties included keeping track of clients’ accounts. "Someone would ring up to ask if Lady so and so’s account was in order so she could charge something else to it. I ended up saying yes to everyone."
Not surprisingly, he left the store after a few months. While he was practising his drums in Sally’s garage one day, a man from across the street came over and asked him if he was free to play with a band who needed a drummer. That first professional engagement led to a regular spot at the Mandrake Club in Soho, frequented by such stars as Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor. Soon afterwards, he met John McVie, a bassist who was then with John Mayall’s blues band. They went on to form Fleetwood Mac in 1967 with guitarist Peter Green, who played the haunting melody of their mega hit, Albatross.
Through the years and various line ups, the twin threads of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie have remained unbroken. "John’s been my mate and protector right from the beginning. When I replaced a well known drummer in a band and one guy in the audience started booing me, John stepped up to the mike and told him to shut up and give me a chance. That was my first taste of John McVie’s capacity for friendship and it’s never wavered. I was in a terrible mess with my wife and Stevie but John would just be, like, ‘You’ve got yourself in a pickle, haven’t you?’ And I was having a go at him because he was splitting up from Christine, which broke my heart.
"John’s very different from me. He’s very bright, well read, understated. We don’t see that much of each other, but he is like my brother."
In 1997, 20 years after the release of Rumours, Fleetwood Mac reformed for a 42 date sell out tour. Last year, they were inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall Of Fame and given a lifetime achievement award. Performing together again was "a little awkward at first", but says Mick "it was a beautiful thing. It was poignant, bittersweet. We’ve been on a ride together and we’ve all grown. The most important thing is, we’ve always been loyal to our music. We have our credibility."
Music apart, his great joy these days is entertaining his mother at his house in Hawaii and playing with his five year old grandson, Wolf Cassius. Wolf’s mum is Amy, 28, Fleetwood’s elder daughter, a stylist for American Vogue.
Wolf already has a baby drum kit. "He’s got the sense, definitely," says Mick. "I’m not sure I can take credit for it, but nurturing it is one of my on going grandpa duties."

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©The Examiner, 1999

[MacMan]

Thanks Lis.. That was great!

[golddustwoman77]

Thanks for posting that! I haven't seen that before either.