Mick Fleetwood feels that the infamous tales of Fleetwood Mac's cocaine use seem to take on a life of their own. While chatting with Classic Rock, the legendary drummer admitted, “There's no doubt we were well equipped with the marching powder. That's a well-worn fairytale that gets more like a war story, that gets more and more aggrandized. I'm not minimalizing the fact that we were definitely partaking in that lifestyle. But these weren't a bunch of people crawling across the floor with green froth coming out of their mouths. We were working, y'know?”
He went on to explain, “It got out of hand way after the making of Rumours. I remember not working for two years. I can't even remember what I did. I was the party animal in the band, for sure. I would venture to say Stevie (Nicks) was a close second.”
During a recent very lighthearted video chart with Pitchfork, Lindsey Buckingham gave his thoughts on Mickey Mouse, drum solos, the TV show Alf, among other subjects. When quizzed about cocaine, the ousted Fleetwood Mac guitarist gave a pretty honest answer: “Cocaine. Well, you gotta remember, I grew up — I came up — in a subculture in the '70s, in which everyone was doing what they thought they had to do to be creative and that turned out to be a complete myth. And, uh. . . a lot of people got in trouble for not knowing when to stop. A lot of people I know.”
Stevie Nicks said that the emotional trauma of every one in the band suffering through a romantic breakup during the sessions for 1977's Rumours pushed the group towards cocaine — which kick-started a decade-long addiction that nearly killed her. As cocaine took over the industry, Nicks says that most people believed it was entirely non-addictive: “Y'know, I thought as I was going through the '70s and cocaine was introduced into everybody's life, and told that it was recreational, and that it was not dangerous. But, y'know, that's what we were told, really. On the other side of that, we were also told, 'Don't ever do heroin, because if you do it once, you'll have to do it every day, because you'll never feel that good again, and you'll be chasing that, that high for the rest of your life.' So, it was like, I was told not to do heroin and told why and didn't. But cocaine, we were all told was cool — that's why we did it. Of course, then we all got extremely addicted to it.”