| Villavic |
05-08-2021 03:36 PM |
More info about the tour, afterwards. Interesting about how he refers about the Tusk album. And contradictory to say They didn't understand how to run a rock band, when in previous pages he admits that Fleetwood Mac is a JOB. By that time there were differente members managers. John, Chris, and Mick were still with Mickey Shapiro, Stevie had signed Irving Azoff, and Lindsey got another one.
The basic complaint, of course, was that we'd been on the road for months and hadn't made much money.
I explained that we'd undertaken this tour in order to sell a difficult record, which by that time was up to five million in sales. Yes, we'd grossed some big numbers, but our overhead was murderous. We spent a fortune on the road, running a fat ship. We decided to be comfortable, and we lost control. If Stevie wanted a hotel suite painted pink with a white piano in it, what are you gonna do? Say no? You can't do that in a Holiday Inn! Pink rooms and pianos cost real money. These were my decisions, because they had to be. There was no management company as a buffer between me and the band. To complain about anything, as musicians love to do, they had to address a band member me. People were honest with their feelings under this system, but they didn't like complaining about money. Even so, early in the tour I tried to change to cheaper hotels. All the others complained and I said the hell with it. From then on we went first-notch. We had everything.
Irving Azoff: "You should've made more money. Why isn't there more money after a year on the road?"
The accountant, meanwhile, was looking over the books and frowning. Impressive amounts of cash were missing, having been spent on various extravagances. The countants and lawyers were not used to this. They didn't understand how to run a rock band. They said to me, "How can you consider yourself a manager when you let this kind of thing happen?" But had they ever tried to say no to friends who also happened to be members of the world's biggest band? But that didn't matter.
John Courage was fired by the band's lawyers right after this meeting.
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. John Courage had been working for Fleetwood Mac for almost ten years, and is one of the most honest people I've ever known. And my end had consisted of taking 10 percent of the band's net, not the gross like most managers. I got paid after expenses and had no publishing, and got to work my brains out.
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 eghteen 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. It was like an Indian Council, everyone seated in a circle, five musicians and the lawyers with their wretched files in their laps.
Irving Azoff made it plain that he was there to clean up the mess and take care of business. "I represent Stevie, and she ain't doing nothing unless . . ."
His basic message was this: "Hey, Mick, it's over. From this point forward, we ain't paying no management commission, no office overhead, legal fees, accounting fees, nothing. We're out for now, goodbye."
Stevie had given Azoff the power to leverage a position in the band, and Azoff had just taken us over. Running through my mind was our ongoing friendly rivalry with the Eagles, the other California glamour band of the 1970s. Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles were like Coke and Pepsi, Hertz and Avis: same age, same look, same demographic. Who is this guy? The Eagles' manager! Does he want to kill Fleetwood Mac? But he wasn't trying to wreck anything. He was one smart tucking guy, that's all. None of the other members of the band said anything.
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.
I just think it was a huge mistake to give the tour management responsibility to an addict. That couldn't work well. Plus, I've never read that he had taken business mgt courses
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