[louielouie2000]

Originally Posted by PenguinHead

I couldn't care less about their cocaine days, and whatever indulgences and addictions they had. It's history. I'm just glad they are relatively healthy today and still active.

I can certainly relate to this sentiment. I often worry that the band's drug usage is mythologized to the point where it is glorified. I think the band has been so open about their drug usage so they can use themselves as a cautionary tale to others. Instead, I think some people see glamor in all the drugs & excess.

Originally Posted by PenguinHead

I do too, but the stories have be rehashed over and over and over, and run into the ground like a sordid tabloid story. It's a just a small notation in their vast history and accomplishments. Is it really worthy of a microscopic dissertation?

While I agree too much attention is directed at the band's drug usage (I seriously doubt Fleetwood Mac did considerably more drugs than other '70s & '80s bands), to dismiss it as a small piece of their story is probably even bigger of a mistake. Their drug usage informed absolutely everything they did. It undoubtedly sped up the dissolution of the McVie's marriage & the Buckingham/Nicks relationship. It undoubtedly fueled the affair between Stevie & Mick. There's no doubt in my mind that the band would have been vastly different live without all those drugs coursing through their veins. Each of the singers wrote songs about drug usage, too. Cocaine vastly altered Stevie's voice... and pot altered Lindsey's, to a smaller extent. Mick's drug problems most certainly led to his financial ruin back in the '80s. In other words, to marginalize the impact of drugs upon Fleetwood Mac would be dead wrong. And I'm not even bringing up how drugs hugely impacted the band in the pre 1975 days- that's an entirely different story. You could almost argue drugs were worse to those guys than it was the Rumours crowd.

Originally Posted by peer_gynt10

But didn't she also say at one point that she really disliked the way she was "pushed" into rehab? I think I once read an interview in which she complained about the way management team handled the situation (the same team one she name-checks in "Welcome to the Room..." and fired right after her stay in the Betty Ford Clinic).

Yeah, it's been inferred rather plainly that Frontline (her management company) had an intervention with Stevie and basically forced her into rehab. If that really was the case, it's very surprising to me that Stevie was successful in kicking her coke habit. The addict themself has to decide they have hit bottom and are ready for help. So many times (I speak from vast personal experience with family members) when addicts are intervened upon against their will, they end up resisting sobriety, and spiral back into addiction.

In a way, I guess that's what DID happen. After all, Stevie ended up replacing her cocaine addiction with a Klonopin addiction. She can blame her doctor all she wants, but as an addict who had been through rehab, she had to of known she was replacing coke addiction for a prescription drug addiction. Perhaps she did it as an act of defiance, who knows. Either way, she should have known that being on Klonopin indefinitely wasn't legit.

Originally Posted by FuzzyPlum

I think I recall from Carol Ann Harris' book (and other sources) that Lindsey was never a particularly big coke user. That's not to say he didn't do it- but he was mainly a big, big pot-head. Tusk was weird in places but I don't think coke was the main reason it sounded as it did (not on Lindsey's part at least). Not sure where he was in this regard by 1987.

That's what has been inferred by multiple sources- Lindsey dabbled in coke in the '70s & early '80s, but preferred pot. Thanks to Destiny Rules, we know he was still smoking grass into the 21st Century, as was Stevie. But I'm thinking Lindsey's coke usage probably stopped in the hiatus Fleetwood Mac took in between Mirage & Tango.

Regarding the others, it sounds like the McVie's substance of choice was always alcohol, first and foremost. Again, they seemed to have dabbled in coke back in it's heyday of the late '70s/early '80s, but booze was always their mind alterer of choice.

Mick & Stevie were the "cocanuts," but Stevie was done by Tango In The Night, and it sounds like Mick soldiered on through the Time era.