Mick Fleetwood and Nicole Atkins Bond Over Blues, Tequila and, Yes, Dildos

It didn't take Mick Fleetwood and Nicole Atkins very long to figure out they had a connection. While sharing a bottle of tequila and bonding over a love of the blues, Atkins managed to impress the Fleetwood Mac drummer with some obscure facts about his legendary band's early, debauched years.

"She definitely was aware of some things that most people aren't aware of," Fleetwood tells Spinner. "Fleetwood Mac, without going into the gory details, was a very pornographically wild bunch of lads in our show. We had accouterments that would appear on stage, such as dildos and things, and we were so not about that as far as the reputation of being a serious blues band. We actually had a lot of crazy fun, and I have to say, she is very much aware of that other side of Fleetwood Mac that never was reported, never went on a live album. The Sex Pistols didn't have too much on us, and yet, no one ever really knows that. She's very well informed. I'm going to be paying her vast amounts of money to keep quiet."

The pairing came about thanks to Off the Record, a new musician-on-musician interview series sponsored by Sammy Hagar and Cabo Wabo Tequila. For the series' kickoff episode, Fleetwood and Atkins met up in Maui, where the drummer lives and is opening a restaurant, Fleetwood's on Front Street. As Atkins tells us, she wasn't intimidated by the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer.

"[It's] very casual," she says. "We have a lot of musical influences that are shared. All me and my friends do in Brooklyn is get drunk and talk about Fleetwood Mac and Bobby "Blue" Bland and B.B. King and Derek and the Dominoes, so now it's just nice to do it with Fleetwood Mac [laughs]. And I've never been to Maui. I've been on tour in a 15-passenger van since October, and I literally just ended touring a day before I left for Maui, so I was like, 'Wow, this really paid off.'"

Watch Mick Fleetwood and Nicole Atkins' 'Off the Record' Chat

While Atkins obviously knew plenty about Fleetwood, the drummer admits he didn't know about her at all beforehand. "I had some ideas [for participating artists], in truth, but it would have been a little nepotistic," he says. "I like the fact that it was someone coming to me and me being turned on by something that I was not readily aware of, which to me is really what this program is all about. [It's] somewhat the handing of the baton in terms of Nicole being someone fresh on a journey and someone who's been doing it for donkey's years, being me. I'm hoping that it will be thought provoking and inspiring to anyone watching it."
To that end, Atkins sought Fleetwood's advice on how he's dealt with professional struggles, especially when it came to tumultuous periods in Fleetwood Mac. The Brooklyn, N.Y.-based singer-songwriter is no stranger to sudden career changes, as she went through breakups with her boyfriend, her band and her label during the summer of 2010.

"The thing that drew me to him is that he's gone through so many incantations of Fleetwood Mac, so many lineup changes, but he has kept going, like, 'This is what's important to me and this is what I do, no matter what,'" she says. "I've gone through a lot of lineup changes in a short amount of time, and even with the label, [but] it's never been a question of, 'What do I do next?' It's, 'How do I move this forward?' because it's what I love to do, and it's the only thing I've ever wanted to do since I was like 7. I have to find people to play with that I'm inspired by. We have that in common, in that the different people that join our band, they become our muses."
Fleetwood, for his part, believes Atkins has the perfect mindset to have a long, successful career.

"I'm not worried for her, because she's not that person, when you become a living cartoon of something you're not, like, say, Keith Moon," he says. "Fantastic drummer, but people don't remember his drumming. They remember him driving a car into a swimming pool or attacking a hotel room with a chainsaw. It's somewhat of a drag because he was an incredible musician. That was his fault, really, and I'm sure he was sort of OK with it, but I do know that he created a monster that was actually sort of a distraction from his true talent.

"I can't stop saying, 'Believe in the passion of what you're doing,'" he adds. "She is about that and will have fun. I can tell you this right now: She will not get lost. It won't eat her up and spit her out."

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