To cut it short, one big happy dysfunctional family. Meanwhile, cocaine and booze were available (and in use) in obscene quantities. However, little had changed surrounding the recordings of Tusk: Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood had a secret relationship, Mick Fleetwood’s wife had an affair with former band member Bob Weston, Christine McVie with a lighting designer followed by Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson and Mick Fleetwood hooked up with Stevie Nicks’ best friend (who happened to be married at the time). Rumours had been a record with the troubling story of the collapse of the couples Christine McVie/John McVie and Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks, played out in public. and costs escalated to over $ 1 Million, which made it the most expensive record of all time (according to Buckingham because “we happened to be in a studio that was charging a fuck of a lot of money”).
During that time no-one in the band had any contact whatsoever with Warner Bros.
The band would practically live there for 14 months. refused to pay for a Fleetwood Mac owned (new) studio, but gave the go-ahead for rebuilding/remodeling Studio D at the The Village Recorder in Los Angeles. So when the band went to work on the successor in the beginning of 1978, the band could do whatever they wanted. Warner Bros., the company the band had signed a deal with, was okay with everything, as long as money kept rolling in, which it did, truckload after truckload. Maybe more importantly, the band had earned their freedom. With success came money, money and more money, immediately followed by (it was the 1970s after all) drugs and booze. The album was immensely beautiful, immaculately produced and filled with beautiful, moving and real songs about the loss of a partner, relationship and solid ground. Rumours smashed every record and catapulted Fleetwood Mac straight into the heart of the pop music landscape. The divorce record of the 1970s, soft-rock, that sold over 10 million copies with a year in the US alone. The first, titled Fleetwood Mac served as a template for what was about to come in 1977. The Fleetwood Mac line-up consisting of Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood had released two albums since 1975. Tusk was the successor, a double album no less. A story about innovation after Rumours, the bestselling album at the end of the 1970s. To Lindsey Buckingham, things weren’t that simple. Bank accounts, record company, management, everybody’s happy. What can a band do when its last album is still in the charts selling millions of copies? Make another, of course.