The studio [Wally Heider’s] and all the recording rooms, physically, had private entrances and they actually worked down the street from the main building. So, when they came to Wally Heider’s, there were all alone down the street and worked all night.

I heard Rumours in a few raw stages, and then it got added to and built upon. It always sounded good and it was developed from there. I was a Fleetwood Mac fan, and it sounded more approachable, commercial and pop-oriented then previous Fleetwood Mac albums had. It sounded less like a blues band and a lot like Buckingham-Nicks.

I was a radio TV major in college and went to Heider’s as a summer job, answering phones and delivering coffee to studios. There wasn’t a clearly defined apprenticed program back then—there were no schools for being a recording engineer. Basically, it was loosely defined. It was like that in England, too. You’d sweep the floors, deliver coffee, running errands, doing grunt work, and then some day you’re filling in for someone who’s sick running a tape recorder. Then, eventually, it would evolve into learning the technical aspects from the people who were around you like a mentoring situation. Then, one day you’d find yourself sitting behind a console.

I think it was kind of laughable around the business. People could understand why because you had two relationships that were breaking or broken up, so emotionally I think they had trouble working. But everyone around the music business and songwriters know that a lot of times that spawns great work, that frustration and pain. And technically, they had trouble literally with the tapes falling apart, as the project got longer and extended they had problems with the master tapes losing sound quality and had to go back and use safeties and lock up some of the safeties and relay redoing some of the tracks. So they had some technical problems and they had some emotional problems, and plus they had a huge album to follow up and they had commercial pressure from the record company and no one wanted to turn in anything that was sub par. I think they wanted to make it great and they knew everyone was waiting for it, and that added to the that whole anxiety of wanting to make it perfect.

I thought it was great, so it wasn’t a shock. I thought it was a really good product. It sounded great; the songs were good. I remember the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac were neck and neck with all that stuff.

The record business was a very huge then. There was a lot of money, so there were a lot of social events in terms of parties and after-parties and concerts. The club scene in those days you saw bands coming through town, if they played two nights at the Roxy or Whiskey, that could effectively become four shows. The record companies were putting a lot of money into promotion, so there were a lot of those perks.

Bigger studio bills, wanting the artist happy in the studio, going the extra length to make sure they comfortable where they were working, changing scenery sometimes in the studio, especially for Fleetwood Mac, when it took so long, they needed to move around to a lot of different studios, and I think they needed to. Now it’s different, that’s all changed.

The engineer was the one that couldn’t party with the band, especially if you’re working for a client like a record company or a producer, but usually it wasn’t non-stop and it would typically be Friday night when the six packs or the bottles of wine or the joints would come out just like any work situation after a long, hard week of working. And those weeks were long, 50-60- hours weeks late into the night. It was the same kind of decompression as any work place. And it wasn’t all frivolous. You’d have your record company guy who’d stop by with two bottles of wine or champagne to reward their artist or client. It wasn’t non-stop because then nobody wouldn’t get any work done. Rumours didn’t begin the blockbuster album era, but albums by the Bee Gees and Michael Jackson that were big sellers did change things, but that was the nature of the beast with FM radio, too. It’s totally different today. The studio business has changed radically with all the home recording. You still have a few top-end rooms for tracking and for mixing for the final mastering process, but the middle studios are all gone—the demo rooms, the publishing rooms, the places where people went to make commercials and sound for TV and movies. With hard disk recording and how small everything is, people can do it themselves, and bands have started doing it themselves. It’s become much easier to become educated with recording schools. You can record live much easier. The studios aren’t as necessary as they used to be. You still have major rooms for major artists and big releases, but there are fewer of them. FM radio was huge the way the Internet is now. People were turning on late-night FM radio shows to find new stuff. You had album cuts that were big.