Record Plant Sausalito — 'Rumours' Sessions, Fleetwood Mac

The Record Plant in Sausalito, California, was one of the primary studios used to record 'Rumours' (1977) — the Fleetwood Mac album that became one of the best-selling records in history and that was made under conditions of extraordinary personal chaos. John and Christine McVie were divorcing. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were ending their relationship. Mick Fleetwood's marriage was collapsing. All five members were processing their disintegrating personal lives in the same studio, recording songs that were explicitly about each other, while attempting to maintain the professional cohesion required to make an album of commercial pop music. The result was one of the most emotionally transparent records ever to reach a mainstream audience at that scale.

The Sausalito Record Plant was a significant facility for West Coast recording in the 1970s — its location across the bay from San Francisco in the houseboat community of Sausalito gave it a particular atmosphere, and it attracted major artists throughout the decade. The 'Rumours' sessions, which also used the Village Recorder in Los Angeles and other facilities, were long, expensive, and emotionally gruelling: Buckingham has described the recording process as requiring enormous discipline to sustain given the personal circumstances, and the album's production — clean, layered, FM-friendly — conceals the turbulence beneath it almost entirely.

'Rumours' was released in February 1977 and spent 31 weeks at number one in the United States, eventually selling over 40 million copies worldwide. 'Go Your Own Way,' 'The Chain,' 'Dreams,' 'Gold Dust Woman,' and 'Don't Stop' are among the songs it contains — a collection of individually identifiable hits embedded in an album-length narrative of romantic dissolution that listeners recognised and responded to with extraordinary fervour. The Sausalito Record Plant no longer operates in its original form; the building has been converted to other uses.