Maybe, as Stevie warns in “Gold Dust Woman,” rulers make bad lovers – but these two are just so damn great at being bad lovers.

After all the tantrums and breakdowns and crying fits, the album ends with Stevie Nicks asking you point blank: “Is it over now? Do you know how to pick up the pieces and go home?” If the answers are “no” and “no,” you flip the record and play it again. But Rumours remains so powerful because it’s so ruthlessly clear-eyed about the crisis, instead of smoothing it over. Let’s be mature about this, sort it out.’ Somehow we waded through it.” You know things are desperate when the voice of maturity is Mick Fleetwood. “Somehow Mick was there, the figurehead: ‘We must carry on. “Everybody was pretty weirded out,” Christine McVie told Rolling Stone. People have always gravitated to Rumours in hard times – it’s the sound of five rock stars trying to plant their feet in the middle of a landslide, looking for strength amid all the emotional carnage. It’s an album that has eerie soothing powers when you hear it in the midst of a crisis, which might be why it hits home right now, with our minute-by-minute deluge of apocalyptic news, the rottenest month to be an American since FDR died.

As John McVie put it, “About the only people in the band who haven’t had an affair are me and Lindsey.” Mick Fleetwood left his wife Jenny Boyd and fell for Nicks. Christine McVie divorced the bassist and moved in with the lighting director, shifting John’s wedding ring to a different finger. As Lindsey Buckingham confided to Rolling Stone at the time, “Being in this band really fucks up relationships with chicks.” Buckingham split with Stevie Nicks. The emotional trauma behind Rumours is the stuff of legend. Human beings had been mating and separating for several dozen thousand years before Fleetwood Mac existed, but this band walked out of Rumours basically owning the whole concept of breaking up. Happy birthday to Fleetwood Mac‘s masterpiece Rumours, released 40 years ago this week, on February 4th, 1977.

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