How Tango was born

[Villavic]

So I was hooked since monday re-reading my Mick bio book. This is how he describes the early days of Tango in the Night.

Most of 1985 was spent trying to regroup and reorder my life after the bankruptcy...
...But as much as I love the Zoo, my main concern was the revivification of Fleetwood Mac. The problem was how to make it happen. Stevie had a booming career of her own now. Her second solo album, The Wild Heart, had sold in the millions, and now she was working on her third, Rock a Little. It would be hard to persuade her management that she should come back to us for a while. Lindsey was also working on his third solo project, and Christine was enjoying a huge solo hit with "Got a Hold on Me." John McVie seemed quite happy in semiretirement, sailing his boat and playing occasional gigs with John Mayall and Mick Taylor in a reformed Bluesbreakers.

I was the only member of the band desperate to see it back together.
...As it happened, it was really Christine McVie who reunited Fleetwood Mac.

It started when she called John Courage out of his Hawaiian exile to help her make an album in Switzerland, and eventually to manage her career. Christine had been asked to record Elvis's "Can't Help Falling in Love" for the soundtrack of the film A Fine Mess. She called in Richard Dashut to produce, who in turn said that Lindsey was a real Elvis fan and might like to get involved. Then John Courage called me and John McVie, and in August 1985 four-fifths of Fleetwood Mac found themselves in the studio, cutting this record. This was fun, and the seed that eventually grew into Tango in the Night.

But it was far from easy. Our natural group chemistry was still pretty weak at that point, and it was really the lawyers and managers the Gang of Four who tried to work out a structure in which we could create together. I have to say that from the outset, Stevie's people were great. Mick's in a jam, they said. How can we help him? John McVie said he would be there. Christine said she was in. Lindsey Buckingham alone was fairly reticent about Fleetwood Mac. He was enjoying his hard-won independence and deep into his own album with Richard Dashut.

Eventually we worked to build enough momentum that we were able to convince Lindsey that it might go off without him. When Lindsey said he was in, things went forward.

...It took us eighteen months, working under completely different conditions from what we were used to. We had started out at Rumbo Sound in the Valley, where the basic tracks were cut. We then moved production to the studio Lindsey built in the garage of his house, called the Slope, where we would mix and do the overdubs. It wasn't really a proper studio per se; everything was recorded right in the control room. The acoustics were the wooden floor, the bathroom, the carpet, the hallway. To minimise wear and tear to the property, John Courage brought in a trailer with phones and a TV and a place to hang out.

... Christine McVie came through too, with some of her most wonderful songs "Everywhere," which glistened like gemstone even in Chris's original demo; "Little Lies," destined to be a hit single on both sides of the Atlantic; and "Isn't It Midnight," which she cowrote with Lindsey and her new husband, Eddie Quintela (who Chris married in October 1986).

Lindsey Buckingham dipped into his postponed solo album for four new songs for Fleetwood Mac: "Big Love," "Caroline," "Tango in the Night" (which originated in the live versions of "So Afraid"), and "Family Man." Lindsey and Christine also cowrote two more album tracks: "Mystified" and "You and I," which came in two parts. We used Part II to close the album, and Part I appeared on the reverse of the first single, "Big Love."

Through all this, Stevie Nicks had been working and touring to promote her third solo album, Rock a Little. She had spent a million to make it, and Frontline kept her away from us while they were selling it. I went on part of her long 1986 tour, playing percussion in a hot band that included Waddy Wachtel on guitar, and I could see that Stevie was running herself right into the ground. She was drinking and doing a lot of cocaine.

...Stevie finally showed up in January 1987; we'd been working six months, and it was the only time the whole band was in the studio together. We had been sending copies of our working tapes to Stevie's home in Arizona. On her part, she was dreading that Lindsey, in his producing capacity, would be sarcastic toward her, but he made an effort not to be as much of a martinet as he was with the rest of us. He was under some strain with this project, and lost his patience occasionally, but with Stevie we wanted him to be more objective and professional. He tried to make her feel great in the studio, and they got on well. (The love-hate saga between those two will never end.)

Complicating matters slightly in the spring of 1987 was Stevie's admission to the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs to get her life under control. This was done through an "intervention" by friends, members of her family, and the management company. Stevie spent twenty-eight days in a successful treatment for alcohol problems, but she didn't like being coerced into entering this facility, and Frontline was fired shortly thereafter...

So the little time we had with Stevie was somewhat disoriented, but she did come through with good songs. `'Seven Wonders" was written by songwriter Sandy Stewart and augmented with new words by Stevie in the studio. "Welcome to the Room, Sara" was a graphic depiction of her experience at the Betty Ford Center, where she had checked in under the pseudonym Sara Anderson. (This song is extremely moving when understood in that context.) "When I See You Again" continued Stevie's string of touching songs of farewell, and was used on Tango in favor of a fourth up-tempo number that Stevie brought in called "What Has Rock ~ Roll Ever Done for You?"

We did have one blowout with Stevie when she came to the studio to listen to the mixes before Tango in the Night was released. After the playback was finished, she began to storm around the studio like a tornado. "It's like I'm not even on this record," she complained. "I can't hear myself at all." I knew Stevie pretty well, and could tell she was angry. Then she threatened us. "All right, maybe I wasn't able to get to the studio that much, but how is it going to look when the record comes out and I might have to tell Rolling Stone that I didn't work on it?"

Christine McVie's eyes narrowed. She'd had a couple of glasses of wine, and wasn't about to be trifled with. "OK, Stevie," she said, "what are you so upset about?"
"I should be singing on 'Everywhere,'" Stevie said. "You should hear me singing harmony on that song."
"I wanted you to sing on it too," Chris said in measured tones that signaled she was furious, "but you weren't here. In fact, we've been working for a year and you were only with us for a couple of days. Now why don't you just say you're sorry and we'll work it out?" Omits gracefully, Stevie capitulated in front of the whole band, and we gleefully layered her vocals into the mix of the album, which now sounded indeed more like Fleetwood Mac. Stevie had been right after all, and so had Christine.

Tango in the Night was released in the spring of 1987 amid much hoopla. We spent a quarter million dollars on the totally surreal video for "Big Love," the single of which quickly jumped into the Top Ten. Who, the media wanted to know, was responsible for the song's carnal love grunts? Stevie Nicks? Lindsey's girlfriend Shari? (Actually it was Lindsey's voice sampled through a variable-speed oscillator.) ....." Tango quickly became a Top Ten album in America and reached number one twice in England, selling more than eight million records, tapes, and compact disks to date. Fleetwood Mac was back!

Then he tells about the following tour and how Lindsey quits, a topic we have already discussed and belongs to another thread. This thread is to talk about how Mick saw the album.