Bekka Bramlett, who had a brief run with Fleetwood Mac in the early nineties, recently joined Rolling Stone and recalled Mick Fleetwood’s secret agenda with Stevie Nicks and the brutal way the drummer fired her.
Bramlett always knew filling in for Nicks in Fleetwood Mac would be challenging, but she took the job anyways. The singer then toured and recorded with the act for a year, ultimately releasing the album, ‘Time.’ However, everything fell apart the moment she thought things were sailing smoothly.
She recalled how Mick fired her over fax, leaving her heartbroken. Bramlett was caught off guard when she received the note, as she had been promoting the band’s upcoming tour and getting ready to hit the road. To make things even more complicated, she’d just bought a house at the time, and Fleetwood never gave her a hint that he considered firing her.
The drummer, however, seemingly had other plans, as only days after Bramlett’s departure, Fleetwood Mac announced that Nicks was reuniting with the band. Bekka wasn’t informed about Stevie’s comeback beforehand, and it felt like a ‘secret agenda’ had been going behind her back.
The rocker on why she was fired from Fleetwood Mac and being caught off guard:
“I felt broken. I thought it would be better said at a lunch. I thought he should fly out and talk to me about it since I’d just bought a house. They were all calling me ‘H.O.’ or ‘Homeowner.’ They were like, ‘Hey, homeowner!’ And then all of a sudden, Stevie was like, ‘I’m better. I want to come back now.’
You have to understand that Mick and I were the guys that did all the radio, promotion, and TV stuff. We did all of it. I was definitely looking forward to the tour we had already just promoted. Evidently, someone said, ‘Get her out of here.’ The only thing he could say to me that was ugly was that it was my fault.
That’s because one time I walked on the bus and went, ‘Goddamn, everyone. Can’t we come off the stage after a show and go ‘Yeah!’ and slap some fives? How come everyone has to pick everything apart?’ Mick would be like, ‘You missed that thing’ to John. And John was like, ‘Well, you keep throwing up in a bucket, motherf*cker.’ He may have been throwing up in a bucket but never missed a beat. It was crazy. It was crazy.
I said, ‘I wish I was with REO Speedwagon!’ Then I slammed the door, crawled into my bunk, and went to bed. On my fax, he said, ‘You wish you were in REO Speedwagon, so I’m going to go ahead and fire you now.’ And then, of course, it was on CNN within ten days. “Stevie Nicks is back with Fleetwood Mac.”
It might be safe to speculate that Mick had been in talks with Nicks for a while as, only days after Bramlett was fired, it was announced that Stevie would come back and reunite with her bandmates. So, this was surely disappointing for the then-young singer, who had just bought a house and planned on touring with Fleetwood Mac, to be fired without a proper heads-up.
