The agony, the ecstasy, and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours

Plus other ecstatic links from around the net

Witchy woman Stevie Nicks in 1976

We have another free online peer support group for anyone experiencing post-psychedelic difficulties this Sunday at 6pm UK time, details here.

There are various routes to ecstatic experience, various types of experience, and various sorts of figures who typically have them or inspire them in others - the mystic, the madman, the lover, the warrior and the artist, to name a few.

The ecstatic artist, according to Plato, channels inspiration from beyond without entirely knowing how or what they’re channelling. They then connect their audience to the spirit world as well, like a magnetic chain, ionizing or zapping them.

It’s a dangerous process, in Plato’s view, as the artist doesn’t consciously know what they’re doing or what they’re connecting people to – it could be a downward transcendence into irrationalism, violence, madness, evil spirits. This was why Plato banned poets from his Republic.

The ecstatic ritual can be bad for the artist too. The muse uses them up then departs as suddenly as they arrived, leaving them broken. The fans also use the artist as a channel to their own temporary self-transcendence, worship them, devour them, and then drop them.

For a few decades, from the 1920s to the 2000s, pop music was the most widely-used route to ecstatic transcendence, and pop stars were our prophets. Then the internet replaced rock and roll as our church, everyone became famous for five minutes, and Elon Musk lost his mind.

Stereophonic

This week, I saw a new play in New York about rock and roll, called Stereophonic. It’s loosely based on the story of Fleetwood Mac recording Rumours, one of the best-selling albums of all time, by a band that has become the second-most-popular rock band ever, after the Beatles (according to YouGov).

In the play, there’s a British band that’s been going for years but is in a slump, then an American couple joins the band, they make an album, it does OK, and they go to Sausalito to record another album. The play is set in the recording studio as they record this album, fight, get high, rock out, and sit around exhausted.

A scene from Stereophonic

While they’re recording, their previous album starts to climb the charts, thanks to a particular song (in Fleetwood Mac’s case, it was Rihannon, Stevie Nicks’ song about a Welsh witch). Suddenly, the previous album makes number one in the charts, and the pressure is on. Holed away in their little recording studio, the band realize they are about to become mega-famous.

One of them says: ‘I had a dream last night and I was wearing a mask, and I couldn’t take it off’.

In the ecstatic ritual of pop music, the artist creates a persona or mask, and the audience channels all their longing and projection and transference towards the mask. The psychic risk is that the artist identifies with the mask or persona, becomes ego-inflated, and starts to think they’re a golden god. They can’t take the mask off - or maybe their audience doesn’t let them.

This happens a lot to psychedelic facilitators, they run some ceremonies and start thinking they’re the Messiah. They are unprepared for the transference-counter-transference feedback loop, and it goes straight to their empty pretty heads. I heard about yet another wannabe-shaman who decided they were Jesus yesterday…I’ll tell you about it next week.

Well, imagine being a pop star. Imagine thousands or millions of people worshipping your persona, hurling themselves at your feet, literally wetting themselves at the sound of your voice. Imagine that power. It’s no surprise so many of the big pop stars lost it, the miracle is some of them didn’t.

"Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face." -- John Updike

Stereophonic is given a certain piquancy by the fact the songs in it are written by Will Butler of Arcade Fire, who to my mind are the last great rock band.

The band had that ecstatic church-like feel in the early days, but seem to have fallen out of love with fame by the time they made Reflektor (2013), which is about the phony religion of rock and roll and the transference-countertransference feedback loop of fame:

Trapped in a prison, in a prism of light
Alone in the darkness, darkness of white
We fell in love, alone on a stage
In the reflective age…

If this is heaven
I need something more

Thought you were praying to the resurrector
Turns out it was just a Reflektor

By this point they were performing inside giant papier mache heads of themselves, as if commenting on the inflated personae that the cult of rock had made of them.

To complete the cycle of disillusionment, frontman Win Butler was cancelled in 2022, when it emerged he routinely picked up 18-22-year-old female fans for casual sex. That sort of sketchiness was perfectly normal in the 1950s-1970s, but unacceptable in 2022. Following the news, the other bands on the tour pulled out, and that was it for Arcade Fire. However, Win’s brother, Will, is still writing music, and won a Tony award for Stereophonic.

The play explores how, just as they are becoming huge, the band’s relationships are all falling apart. That’s what happened during the making of Rumours – Stevie Nicks was breaking up with Lindsay Buckingham, Christine and John McVie were divorcing, Mick Fleetwood was breaking up from his wife too. Sometimes the band members couldn’t even talk to each other or be in the same room in between takes. Meanwhile, they were doing a lot of coke. One sound engineer estimated the band snorted seven miles of cocaine over the years.

The entire months-long recording process was ‘trauma’ , according to Christine McVie. The studio co-owner Chris Stone later said: ‘The band would come in at 7 at night, have a big feast, party till 1 or 2 in the morning, and then when they were so whacked-out they couldn't do anything, they'd start recording.’

Out of this agony came the ecstasy of Rumours. Stevie Nicks said that Fleetwood Mac made the best music when they were in the worst moods. ‘Thunder only happens when it’s raining’, as she sang on Dreams.

This is meteorologically inaccurate, but we get her point. Great art sometimes rises from really shitty situations. But nothing is less predictable than artistic inspiration, despite a whole industry trying to sell you the secret to creativity. As Plato said, the artists themselves don’t know how they do it, why the muse arrives and then departs.

It’s a sort of conjuring – Stevie Nicks used to dress like a witch and perform shamanic exorcisms on stage, according to her bandmates, channelling the muse and inspiring her fans to dress up like witches as well. But it’s a very imprecise sort of magic. You never quite know when the spirits will descend. This is Stevie Nicks getting her make-up done for a shoot in 1981, and suddenly, impromptu, the muse descends. Luckily someone was recording it.

More on the ecstasy of rock & roll in this little podcast I made nine years ago while writing The Art of Losing Control.

And, seeing as its Burning Man week, here’s an interview I did with author Geoff Dyer about the transcendence of raving.

After the paywall, some psychedelic links for you, including a new scale to measure side effects, and an FDA insider on why Lykos’ bid failed and what Lykos needs to do to get over the line.