Making Rumours with Ken Caillat

Ken Caillat is a music producer who is best known for producing the album Fleetwood Mac Rumours, earning him a Grammy Award.  Rumours is consistently listed on virtually every important ‘best albums of all time’ list and was a massive commercial success.  Caillat also produced four other Fleetwood Mac projects and has worked with many other artists.  He stopped by the SiriusXM studios recently to talk with Ron Bennington about his new memoir, “Making Rumours”, about the time he spent with the band creating the album.  Excerpts of the interview appear below.

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Ron Bennington: Ken, congratulations on the book. It’s an amazing thing to look back at this after so many years now.

Ken Caillat: It is. It’s been a really fun journey for me to revisit myself at 29 years old.

Ron Bennington: And I don’t think young people have any idea how massive albums used to be. That an album could come out and basically take over in the way that this one did.

Ken Caillat: Yeah. I mean it was up, what was it? 40, 50 weeks at number one. It was just everywhere. Everywhere I walked, I would hear somebody in a car playing the music. My music was everywhere. It was an engineer’s dream.

Ron Bennington: And what made you want to tell that tale?

Ken Caillat: Well I see so many TV shows where you see the band walk into the studio and sing to a microphone that wasn’t even plugged in and walk out with a hit record and I thought this is, nobody can really appreciate what a musician does. A musician comes in with a clean slate. They don’t know, are they going to be successful? Are they going to be creative? An actor has a script. He knows what his character’s going to be doing. A director has a storyboard. They all can see who they’re going to be, what their day is going to be like, but a musician, are you going to a genius or are you going to be a flop? And what does it take to be that genius? So sometimes there’s liquids that might be used or other substances, but I always think of the musician as sadly misunderstood because it takes a lot of heart and gut to put everything on the line and say I’m good today.

Ron Bennington: With Fleetwood Mac, you’ve got 3 different really unique writers, 3 unique voices and that’s basically the spot that you started from.

Ken Caillat: Right. I might even take it a step further. I mean I saw it as I had a complete blues band playing. And then I also had these two other people came in as, they saddle up to the band and took them into this pop/rock feel, California. And Christine McVie with her blues and her amazing playing ability and John and Mick just picked up on it and went to the California rock feel, soft rock.

Ron Bennington: Never should have worked, right?

Ken Caillat: Never should have.

Ron Bennington: When you were going up there, you were optimistic about the record as you were headed to Sausalito or just open-minded about it?

Ken Caillat: You know, I don’t even think I thought that seriously about it. It was a gig for me.

Ron Bennington: It was just a job?

Ken Caillat: Yeah. They hired me as an engineer. And I had been wanting to be an engineer for a long time and this was really my big break. I was finally getting a shot to be, to let my horses out of the barn and just show what I could do. So I got up there and I was good engineer. I knew it. I was ready to go and this was going to be it.

Ron Bennington: So when you’re heading into this, at first you have no different feeling than you would no matter what the project was, but then of course, you get attached to these people because a year takes place.

Ken Caillat: Right.

Ron Bennington: A year where you are cut off from everything that you had ever really known before.

Ken Caillat: We were sequestered, really, in this small room for a year with these 5 strangers. And the only thing that I had to bond myself with them is our 3 days in the studio when I was mixing the radio show for them initially. And fortunately we hit it off really well and so they knew that and I knew they wanted me to do what I did then for mixing the “Rhiannon” song again for them. So I was going to Sausalito basically, I can do that. I can handle this pop rock. I know what it is. I going to kill on the sounds. I going to make the sounds really good. I told them at the very beginning, I said I’m going to get a Grammy for us on this, guys.

Ron Bennington: Now what made you, what gave you that background to have that kind of skill that you felt that good about yourself in terms of I can make this sound better than anybody else?

Ken Caillat: I was completely self taught. I sat and second engineered in my growing up as an engineer. I assisted engineered. I’d sit behind all the great engineers. I took a lot of notes and I would look and see what they did. I wouldn’t really understand why they did it. And I had this really great studio, Wally Heider’s, that I worked at that allowed me to go in at night time and work. I would go in and turn every knob, learn what every switch did. I was just eating it all up. I was loving every second of it and I tried everything. I tried every microphone, tried every microphone on every vocal. In fact the first day, I said to Stevie, I’m not going to go with the common practice. I’m going to put out 10 different microphones for you to try. I said every microphone has it’s own characteristic and is fitting for different people. And she walked along this line of microphones and she found one and she says I love this, do you like it Ken? I said that sounds great, so that’s what we used. It was a $400 microphone instead of a $10,000 microphone.

Ron Bennington: And even though like the sound part is so important, but you’re also with these musicians, you’re playing psychologist, you’re playing coach because people either have panic attacks or hit walls or can’t write anymore. So you, no matter what you do technically, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to have a good day either.

Ken Caillat: That’s right. What I found very early on was they wanted someone in the control room who could be their eyes and ears, who could tell them what they needed to know. Like one of the first days, they said we just did two takes, which take did you like the best? And I said well, why don’t you guys come in and listen? And they said, we don’t want to come in and listen. We’re sitting and our headphones are on and we’re all comfortable here, just tell us, did you like the first take or the second take? I said I think I like the second take. Why? I said I’m not sure why. Well they said okay, start paying attention. And they basically said to me, okay, here’s what we want to do, we want you to sit there and we want you to listen every part and she said, what I did was I played keyboard, it was Christine, I played a different part, I went up an octave, did that help? Did that move out of the range of the other guys? You need to start paying attention. Paying attention to all of these things. So in addition to that, we had to pay attention to what time we’re starting tomorrow. We set out the schedule for them. We were like their fathers I mean. I tell you we’re going to need to end at midnight because we want to come in at noon tomorrow. I know you guys are going to want to sleep in a little bit, let’s cut it off now, I know you guys are on a roll, but it’s a good time to take a break. We’ll move on tomorrow. So at 29 years old, I was only interested really in girls. That’s when I had to get on the program.

Ron Bennington: So everything that went into this album whether it’s blood, sweat, tears and there was all that, but it really is important. I mean it really is important to set that place for that unique time too. I mean this sounds like the late 70s when I went back and listened to it. And what I think is interesting in reading your book is that how much subconsciously I just listen to music. I’ve heard these songs a million times, but when I would read different passages and you would talk about dubbing this or having one of the girls harmonize with herself then I would go back and listen to the song and in a lot of ways, hear it for the first time. Because most of us just hear what we think is melody and lyric. But you know that that’s not true. You know that we’re actually judging it on a lot more than that.

Ken Caillat: Yeah. It’s how it’s all put together, right? The reverbs, the delays, the answer vocals, the guitar licks, it’s a beautiful symphony of sounds. It really is and it’s amazing how when a great artist puts all the pieces together, it can do what an orchestra couldn’t.

Ron Bennington: The more I read this and the more I would go back and listen, it would just really dawn on me that I really never gave it much thought. You just either know you like the whole piece, but I don’t know whether the year breaks it down for most of us like it does for you guys.

Ken Caillat: Well see, this funny thing that we didn’t know at the end of the record whether we had a good record or not. Even when we had 10 or 11 radio singles, we didn’t know what we had. All we knew was that our blood was on the tapes, our hearts were there and we’d given everything we could. And would people like it? Don’t know.

Ron Bennington: At that point, you still weren’t sure that you had something.

Ken Caillat: No. I have a close friend who we invited down for the playback party right after we finished mixing. And he came up to, I was standing with Mick and Amanda, and Stevie,and he came up and said “Guys, I just don’t hear a hit. I’m sorry”. And the 4 of us were just devastated at what he said. And I just think it’s hysterical now that we didn’t go what are you crazy? We’ve got hits galore buddy.

Ron Bennington: But you had no belief in it because you were so close to it for so long.

Ken Caillat: We were so close to it. Yeah.

Ron Bennington: Now the other interesting thing is that when you’re over-dubbing and you’re playing with the song, you know time goes by, how do you know you’re not suffocating that song? You take, particularly when you have a guy like Lindsey who wants to keep doing it. How are you sure that you’re not taking something that’s just already done months and months and months before?

Ken Caillat: Well you know you proceed carefully and we had a big democracy there. That everything had to be run through everybody and we felt we were always taking a step forward. Even sometimes when we did some brassy things like changing John McVie’s bass part on “Second Hand News”. I thought that was going to be a disaster, but it turns out to be a pretty brilliant idea of Lindsey’s.

Ron Bennington: And Lindsey had a lot of great ideas.

Ken Caillat: He had a lot of great ideas.

Ron Bennington: And he’s also a really difficult guy.

Ken Caillat: He could be very difficult.

Ron Bennington: Yeah, but now in hindsight, is it worth putting up with that kind of tortured genius? I mean all know a ton of pleasant people and they’re not worth shit when it really comes to getting work done. So here’s this guy and he’s definitely brilliant and he’s definitely troubled, is it worth it?

Ken Caillat: Absolutely. I mean I learned so much from him. The layering of guitars, the playing ability, he was, it was worth all the pain and suffering. I mean it wasn’t that bad. I mean it was a pleasure knowing him. I’d love to have him work on something else I do.

Ron Bennington: You know he came in, well I’ve seen him do this a couple times here, but it wasn’t that long ago he came in and played. It was just him and an acoustic guitar. And I couldn’t believe how much sound can come off of him just sitting there playing. He’s phenomenal. And probably despite the fact that he’s known as a genius, he’s probably still underappreciated when people get together and talk about guitar players.

Ken Caillat: Yeah. He’s amazing. You know he learned that from when he had the flu. No, he had Mono is what he had. He had Mono, I don’t know if you read that. But he had Mono, he was bedridden for 6 months. And so he was trying to learn to pick and the only way he could hold his arm up while playing on his back, was he’s sort of picking with a downstroke, giving it a downstroke, using the back of his fingernails to play the guitar, gave him the ability, using the thumb and his fingers, he could actually play 2 melody lines at once. And it used to blow my mind when he would stand there in front of me, I was sitting in the engineer’s chair, he be standing up in the control room, playing his guitar into the console, we were taking it direct. And I could hear all of the sound coming out of the speakers and I’m watching his fingers and I’m thinking there’s got to be somebody else hiding and playing. It’s just amazing what he can do. But all self taught.

Ron Bennington: One of the things I love about your book is I think you captured that time and what it was like. And particularly when it comes to things like the drinking and the drugs that you left it in that time. That’s there’s not this doom feeling about cocaine because no one had felt it at that point. It took a couple of years of cocaine being around before it stopped being harmless and you left it in that point of like there wasn’t this feeling of we know we’re heading for bad times here. And there was that feeling I think about the music industry in the 70’s that as much excess that there was, excess still felt good then.

Ken Caillat: Well true. And I defend the band, they often say it publicly that “Rumours” was one big party. It certainly was no party like that I ever gone to. I mean it was just all work and we worked 30 days straight. Mick Fleetwood for some reason said no, we’re not getting enough done. We have to work harder. And eventually when people are sequestered for 30 days in a small area, they’re going to sneak off and have a little fun. Somebody’s going to pop a beer. And back at that point, the cocaine was kind of only really a substitute for coffee.

Ron Bennington: Right. It was Red Bull. It was exactly like using Red Bull now.

Ken Caillat: It was Red Bull, yeah. I mean there was a community bag of cocaine that would be just set somewhere out in the open. And anybody who knows drug use, it’s usually, a real user has his own stash so he can go when he wants to, nobody wanted. But this was just like the beer tap in the other room.

Ron Bennington: And it was pre before you thought I need to take the cocaine into my room because I don’t to share it with anyone else. Because there for awhile it wasn’t as dark as it ends up. And I think that’s an amazing thing that you do in the book is that you did capture that one period of time even when you’re out on the road and running sound for them and all, it really did remind me of what that era felt like with just massive shows.

Ken Caillat: That’s what it felt like to me. That’s what I wanted to write.

Ron Bennington: “Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album”. Thanks so much for stopping by Ken. I really appreciate it.

Ken Caillat: Alright. My pleasure.

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Get the book at Amazon.com.

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You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.  Not yet a subscriber?  Click here for a free trial subscription.

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You can learn more about Ron Bennington’s two interview shows, Unmasked and Ron Bennington Interviews at RonBenningtonInterviews.com.

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