"Dreams"

Writing for Literary Hub last November, Tom Breihan documented the creation of Fleetwood Mac’s only #1 hit, the Stevie Nicks number “Dreams.”  Here’s an excerpt.

The group put in long, expensive hours working on Rumours—playing songs over and over, then getting their producers to manually splice together tapes of their best parts.  That left Stevie Nicks, the one non-perfectionist in the band, with nothing to do.

In his book Making “Rumours,” the album’s co-producer Ken Caillat writes that Nicks “was foremost a singer-songwriter; she wasn’t into the technical end of the music.  So while all this experimentation was going on in the studio with the other members of the band, she was frustrated and pretty much bored out of her mind.”

Fleetwood Mac spent the first few months of 1976 working on Rumours at the Record Plant, a sprawling compound in the Bay Area city of Sausalito.  Using the Record Plant had a lot of perks:  two limos on call, a speedboat, a staff of cooks who could whip up hash cookies whenever necessary.  One of the office rooms had a floor made entirely out of waterbed.  Another had been turned into the Pit.

Sly Stone, leader of Sly and the Family Stone, designed the Pit while recording the 1973 album Fresh.  The Pit was a functional recording studio, but Stone had vibes in mind when he conceptualized it.  The room’s floors, walls, and ceilings were covered in red shag carpet.  At the center of the room was a black-velvet four-poster bed; you had to climb through a giant pair of fuzzy lips to get into it.

During the Rumours sessions, the Pit was a hangout spot; Mick Fleetwood later said that the room “was usually occupied by people we didn’t know, tapping razors on mirrors.” Sometimes, though, it was where Stevie Nicks went to get away from the rest of her band.

Talking to Blender in 2005, Nicks remembered, “I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me. I found a drum pattern, switched on my little cassette player, and wrote ‘Dreams’ in about 10 minutes.”