For Mick Fleetwood, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll wasn't a cliche - it was his life.
Mick Fleetwood was born in Redruth, Cornwall, and at a very young age, he had left the country. His
father was a Royal Air Force wing commander, so the whole family would move countries every two
and a half years. As a result of this, Mick grew up in England, Egypt, Norway, then England again.
The Fleetwood family was a tight unit: Mick praises them for imbuing him with a fascination
for discovering the world. But despite feeling grateful for the experience later in life,
young Mick Fleetwood felt like a stranger everywhere he lived. He did however write
about a silver lining to the situation in his autobiography, "Play On," writing -
"It was also a great rock-and-roll training camp for me because I
became used to travel and being a stranger just passing through."
Mick Fleetwood was living in Egypt, as he recalls in his autobiography,
"Play On," when he almost drowned, writing about the experience -
"I'm not sure how or why I got into water too deep for my abilities, but I was pulled
out by a man in a flowing blue cloak and when I looked up at him I thought he was a magician."
"I have a very strong image of breathing underwater,
and it was very lucky that I ever came up."
In a bizarre twist, People reported that in July 2008,
Mick Fleetwood's daughter Ruby was very close to drowning in a Los Angeles pool. Apparently,
she was doing somersaults in the pool and swallowed a big quantity of water. Despite
the scare, Ruby is alive and well, albeit with a story eerily similar to her father's.
The Fleetwood Mac drummer remembers changing a lot of schools because he was not a very good
student — but not the misbehaving kind. Mick Fleetwood suffered from severe dyslexia, but
back in the 1950s, teachers didn't recognize the signs. Talking about it in "Play On," Mick wrote -
"Back then, particularly in the UK, learning disabilities weren't understood or even accepted,
so students like me were simply left behind. My parents only knew I had problems at school."
Nevertheless, Mick managed to turn his dyslexia into something good, thanks in part to his sister
Susan, who also had dyslexia and made it as an actress in London. His unique drumming style comes
precisely from not being based on usual thought or pattern habits. When fellow drummer Jeff Porcaro
asked Mick to reveal the secret behind his last fill in "Go Your Own Way," Mick found himself
at a loss. He couldn't logically explain his drumming method - it was just natural to him.
When Mick Fleetwood was around 8 years old, his family returned to England and decided that he
and his sisters would be attending boarding school. This meant the Fleetwood children
would enter a stable educational system that would see them prepared for college,
while the Fleetwood parents continued to travel the world. But his experience at
boarding school proved to be Fleetwood's worst nightmare.
Not only was dyslexia a massive hindrance to his academic results,
but young Fleetwood would paralyze every time a teacher would ask him to come to the front of the
class and answer a question. He was already way taller than anybody else in the room,
but his confidence was at an all-time low. To some extent, he knew he had a learning disability,
and he simply didn't believe he had the ability to answer things correctly. His constant battle
with his anxiety led him to escape several boarding schools. Finally, when he was 15,
he made a decision, which he recalls in the documentary, "The Mick Fleetwood Story" -
"I sat absolutely in tears, terribly unhappy and made this whole imagination
of where I wanted to be, and I made this complete pledge that I will go to London."
His supportive parents bought him a drum kit and sent him to live in his sister's attic.
Skip a few years and Mick Fleetwood had become a valuable part of the London music
scene. According to the Clarion Ledger, he first joined John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers in 1967,
then formed his own band with Peter Green and John "Mac" McVie. As he details in "Play
On," the combination of Fleetwood and McVie's names produced the band's name.
According to Ultimate Classic Rock, it was during these years that Fleetwood fell in
love with Jenny Boyd, a model and the sister of Pattie Boyd,
who was married to George Harrison at the time. After years of very shy courting,
Fleetwood married Jenny Boyd in 1970, and the pair had two daughters.
But this was happening at the peak of Fleetwood Mac's success,
and the family had zero privacy. They all lived in Kiln House, a giant villa they shared
with the whole band and crew. According to The Guardian, Jenny hated this arrangement, saying -
"I wanted to start a family, not a commune."
Furthermore, months would pass where Fleetwood would barely speak to her — he was either
on tour or busy recording. Jenny ended up having an affair with the band's guitarist,
Bob Weston. Fleetwood found out before they all went on tour together in 1973.
"And I actually thought that I could do it.
Why? To keep Fleetwood Mac together!" "And so that's what broke up the tour.”
Ultimately the tour was cut short, Weston was fired,
and Fleetwood and Jenny got divorced soon after.
Fleetwood Mac had known drama from its very beginning, and a considerable chunk of it was Mick
Fleetwood and John McVie losing several guitarists and lead singers. It all started in 1970,
with the band's founding member, Peter Green. Less than a year after creating Fleetwood Mac,
Green started abusing LSD. It's fairly rare that acid has such a drastic negative effect
on mental health, but large quantities can induce schizophrenia-like psychosis,
and according to Black Bear Rehab, long term use can exacerbate the disorder.
As Louder reports, Green had a three-day LSD binge in early 1970 and emerged convinced that money was
the devil, and that Fleetwood Mac's success was a bad omen. He ordered the band to use all their
money to end world hunger — when they protested, he quit. What followed, according to Rolling
Stone, was a seemingly never ending process of recruiting guitarists that would leave. In 1971,
Jeremy Spencer disappeared. Then Bob Weston had to leave after having an affair with Jenny Boyd.
Finally, Dave Walker and Bob Welch left. Fleetwood was deeply deflated when he went to the United
States talent scouting — but that's also when he found Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
In 1976, Fleetwood Mac had finally reached a stable formation. That year,
they produced the eponymous No. 1 album, and in 1977, they released "Rumours," which
topped the Billboard charts for 31 weeks and won a Grammy. But as Rolling Stone reports,
"Rumours" was only the silver lining of the immense turmoil within the band.
Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks had broken up, and Christine and John McVie were going through a
nasty divorce. Mick Fleetwood had remarried Jenny Boyd in 1976, but their old problems resurfaced.
On top of those, Fleetwood started having an affair with Nicks. Both Buckingham and Nicks
would write songs about their breakup, songs they had to perform even though they often hated it.
Nicks was particularly insulted by the "Go Your Own Way" lyrics, as she once told Rolling Stone -
"Every time those words would come out onstage,
I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that."
During their 1977 "Rumours" tour, Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks realized there
was more than friendship between them. But according to CheatSheet, Fleetwood was again
married to Jenny Boyd, and Nicks was in a relationship with Don Henley of The Eagles.
Nicks told Oprah that the affair might not have happened at all had they not
been under the influence of alcohol and cocaine one night after a party.
"It was a doomed thing, caused a lot of pain for everybody, led to nothing."
For Fleetwood, his takeaway is more bittersweet, noting in his book that
it was crazy and quite the whirlwind. Nicks' and Fleetwood's fairly short love story ended
the latter's marriage for good and put further strains on Lindsey Buckingham's
relationships with the two. In fact, in her own book, "Jennifer Juniper," Jenny
Boyd recounts Fleetwood telling her that he simply couldn't decide between her and Nicks.
According to Cheatsheet, the affair will forever be something along the lines of the one that got
away, as they never tried to make it work as a couple — a sad touch to Fleetwood's love life.
By the mid-1970s, Fleetwood Mac had reached an extreme level of fame and success:
According to The New York Post, they had 14 limos always on call, and Stevie Nicks' hotel
rooms had to be painted pink and contain a white piano. Add cocaine to the mix and you've got a
recipe for potential disaster. As the New York Post reports, Mick Fleetwood was declared "The
King of Toot" backstage, having snorted somewhere around an estimated $60 million worth of cocaine.
But of course, this behavior was much more self-destructive than it
was lavish or extravagant. Fleetwood told NME that there is a two-year gap
in his memory due to cocaine, and in its place were various regrets.
"Part of my crazy behavior was-was, when I look back on it now,
was-was not being the father that I- that I could have been."
Mick Fleetwood's childhood experience of moving to different countries so that his
family could stay together may explain why when he had children of his own, Mick took them with
him on all his Fleetwood Mac tours. While this may sound like a lovely family story,
it wasn't. According to their interviews in the documentary "The Mick Fleetwood
Story," young Amy and Lucy Fleetwood were witnesses to their dad's very worst moments.
Lucy remembers that both sisters felt 24/7 concern for their father. They would watch
him sleep until late afternoons and it would be impossible to move him.
Even though he was passed out from abusing substances, his daughters thought he was
seriously ill. Amy also says she never got the closure she wanted as a child,
as both girls would be ignored by their dad for days on end. As Stevie Nicks adds -
"We all watched Amy and Lucy grow up without any
of us hardly […] you could call in sick to anybody but Fleetwood Mac."
In 1978, Mick Fleetwood lost his father to cancer. Fleetwood had been working hard to
offer his parents beautiful retirement years, but he never expected his father to pass away
so soon. According to his autobiography, he had hoped to build a house for them on
some land in Provence, near a spot his parents had vacationed every summer,
so that they could live out the rest of their years in a place they loved.
Sadly, Mick was on tour in the states when his father died and was unable to say goodbye.
Then, in 1995, tragedy struck again when Mick Fleetwood lost his sister,
Susan Fleetwood, to cancer. Variety reports that she had been diagnosed a
decade earlier but had never abandoned her acting career while undergoing treatment.
In 1989, Mick Fleetwood met his third wife, Lynn Frankel Fleetwood — but they wouldn't get married
until 1995 when Lynn decided Mick was well enough to spend his life with her. Indeed,
Lynn was the catalyst for Mick quitting his alcohol and substance abuse. Mick remembers
one particularly important day, when he was barely recovering from a party on a trip to Maui,
and his wife announced she would be going home. Mick had a long look in the mirror and
what he saw shook him to his core — he went to bed, woke up, and decided to get sober.
Both Mick and his daughter, Amy Fleetwod, praise Lynn for being the catalyst for change. As Star
reports, Mick and Lynn Fleetwood went on to have twin daughters, and everything seemed peachy for
a good while. But in 2013, the couple announced their split, citing irreconcilable differences.