Harris, Carol Ann

PERSONAL:

Female.

CAREER:

Writer, memoirist, recording engineer, costume designer, and model.

WRITINGS:

Storms: My Life with Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac, Chicago Review Press (Chicago, IL), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Carol Ann Harris is a former model and recording engineer who currently enjoys a career as a sought-after costume designer for television commercials, music videos, movies, and other video projects. In the mid-1970s, Harris was deeply involved with one of the decade's most visible and influential music groups, Fleetwood Mac, as girlfriend to the group's frontman, guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist, Lindsey Buckingham. She tells this story, spanning the years 1977 to 1984, in the memoir, Storms: My Life with Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac.

Harris's story of her years with Buckingham and the group begins in 1977, right after a tumultuous period in the band's history and just before the release of their classic album Rumours. Bassist John McVie and keyboardist/vocalist/songwriter Christine McVie had just divorced. Buckingham and long-time partner and group vocalist Stevie Nicks had just bitterly separated. "During the mixing sessions for Rumours, Buckingham hooked up with Harris and introduced her to the inner world of Fleetwood Mac's dysfunctional family and its fondness for cocaine," commented Richard Vernon in the Baltimore City Paper.

With the tremendous commercial success of Rumours, the band could afford to descend into excess, particularly concerning drugs, Harris reports. Her relationship with Buckingham is portrayed as complex and fraught: in some instances, she served as a muse to a lonely musician and performer who seemed to be losing confidence in his work. In other cases, she describes being physically abused by a raging Buckingham. Yet she also describes the inner workings of the band from a unique perspective, describing the artistic challenges Buckingham and his bandmates faced in following up their success with Rumours, and how they put together the more experimental, and less commercially successful, album Tusk. She describes the band's recording sessions and their desire to expand their talents and musical range with something entirely different from what they had done before. She portrays the band members, other than Buckingham, in terms that confirm what the public has already been told about them, that Mick Fleetwood was a "nice, albeit chaotically lecherous, bloke," John and Christine McVie "decent sorts," and Stevie Nicks a "laughable cliche of New Age Californians," Vernon remarked.

A Publishers Weekly critic called Harris's book "a fascinating if overlong look the megasuccess of Fleetwood Mac in the mid-1970s." Booklist critic Mike Tribby noted, "Serious music fans may be disappointed, but seekers of celebrity dirt will revel in this work."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Harris, Carol Ann, Storms: My Life with Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac, Chicago Review Press (Chicago, IL), 2007.

PERIODICALS

Austin Chronicle, August 17, 2007, Raoul Hernandez, "Phases & Stages," review of Storms.

Baltimore City Paper, October 17, 2007, Richard Vernon, review of Storms.

Booklist, July 1, 2007, Mike Tribby, review of Storms, p. 19.

Publishers Weekly, January 12, 2004, John F. Baker, "Two Pop Music Bios Made Recent Sales," review of Storms, p. 14; May 7, 2007, review of Storms, p. 52.