And Mick could drum. “Playing the piano is probably a more impressive signal that there’s something creative going on,” he said. “I just wanted to beat the shit out of a drum or some cushions on the chair. It’s not exactly the highest form of creative signal. It’s almost, ‘Well, anyone can do that. That’s not clever.’ But I started doing this tapping business, and it turned out to be the make or break for me.”
Mick’s epiphany moment—the point at which the “tapping business” became the driving ambition in his life—came when he visited his sister in London as a boy and went to “some little place in Chelsea with this piano player. There were people playing what I now know was Miles Davis and smoking Gitanes cigarettes. I’d watch them and saw the beginnings of this other world and the atmosphere sucked me in. I felt comfortable. I wasn’t fettered. That was my dream.
“Back at school, I held on to these images and I dreamt my way out of that world. I didn’t even know if I could play with people, but that vision got me out of the morass of this academic bloody nightmare. I had a lot of commitment internally, but I was also incredibly unhappy because everything at school was showing me that I was useless according to the status quo.”
Mick’s school performance continued to confound his teachers. They knew he was bright, but his scores suggested otherwise. And if the scores said otherwise, there was little they could do. The experience proved extremely frustrating for the boy who dreamed of being a drummer. Finally, in his teens, he’d had enough.
“One day, I walked out of school and I sat under a large tree in the grounds. I’m not religious, but with tears pouring down my face, I prayed to God that I wouldn’t be in this place anymore. I wanted to be in London and play in a jazz club. It was totally naive and ridiculous, but I made a firm commitment to myself that I was going to be a drummer.”
Mick’s parents understood that school was not a place for someone with Mick’s kind of intelligence. At sixteen, he approached them about leaving school, and rather than insisting that he press on until graduation, they put him on a train to London with a drum kit and allowed him to pursue his inspiration.
What came next was a series of “breaks” that might never have occurred if Mick had stayed in school. While he was practicing drums in a garage, Mick’s neighbor, a keyboard player named Peter Bardens, knocked on his door. Mick thought Bardens was coming to tell him to be quiet, but instead, the musician invited him to play with him at a gig at a local youth club. This led Mick into the heart of the London music scene in the early 1960s. “As a kid, I had no sense of accomplishment. Now I was starting to get markers that it was okay to be who I was and to do what I was doing.”
His friend Peter Green proposed him as the replacement for the drummer in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, a band that, at various times, included Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce of Cream, and Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones. Later, he joined with Green and another Bluesbreakers alumnus, John McVie, to form Fleetwood Mac. The rest is a history of multiplatinum recordings and sold‐out stadiums. But even as one of the most famous drummers in the world, Mick’s analysis of his talent still bears the marks of his experiences in school.
“My style has no structured math to it. I would go into a complete petrified mess on the floor if someone said, ‘Do you know what a four/eight is?’ Musicians that I work with know that I’m actually like a kid. They might say, ‘You know in the chorus, in the second beat…,’ and I’ll say, ‘No,’ because I don’t know what a chorus is from a verse. I can recognize it if you play the song, because I’ll listen to the words.”
For Mick Fleetwood, getting away from school and the tests that judged only a narrow range of intelligence was the path to a hugely successful career. “My parents saw that the light in this funny little creature certainly wasn’t academics.” It happened because he understood innately that he had a great aptitude for something that a score on a test could never indicate. It happened because he chose not to accept that he was “useless according to the status quo.”
Taking It All for Granted
One of the key principles of the Element is that we need to challenge what we take for granted about our abilities and the abilities of other people. This isn’t as easy as one might imagine. Part of the problem with identifying the things we take for granted is that we don’t know what they are because we take them for granted in the first place. They become basic assumptions that we don’t question, part of the fabric of our logic. We don’t question them because we see them as fundamental, as an integral part of our lives. Like air. Or gravity. Or Oprah.
A good example of something that many people take for granted without knowing it is the number of human senses. When I talk to audiences, I sometimes take them through a simple exercise to illustrate this point. I ask them how many senses they think they have. Most people will answer five—taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. Some will say there’s a sixth sense and suggest intuition. Rarely will anyone offer anything beyond this.
There’s a difference, though, between the first five senses and the sixth. The five all have particular organs associated with them—the nose for smell, the eyes for sight, ears for hearing, and so on. If the organs are injured or compromised in any way, that sense is impaired. It isn’t obvious what does intuition. It’s a kind of spooky sense that girls are supposed to have more of. So, the general assumption among the wide range of people I’ve spoken with over the years is that we have five “hard” senses and a “spooky” one.
There’s a fascinating book by the anthropologist Kathryn Linn Geurts called Culture and the Senses. In it, she writes about her work with the Anlo Ewe people of southeastern Ghana. I have to say that I have a certain degree of sympathy for marginalized ethnic groups these days. It seems as though anthropologists are always stalking them—as if their average family unit includes three children and an anthropologist who sits around asking what they have for breakfast. Still, Geurts’s study was illuminating.
One of the things she learned about the Anlo Ewe is that that they don’t think of the senses in the same way that we do. First, they never thought to count them. That entire notion seemed beside the point. In addition, when Geurts listed our taken‐for‐granted five to them, they asked about the other one. The main one. They weren’t speaking of a “spooky” sense. Nor were they speaking of some residual sense that has survived among the Anlo Ewe but that the rest of us have lost. They were speaking of a sense that we all have, and that is fundamental to our functioning in the world. They were talking about our sense of balance.
The fluids and bones of the inner ear mediate the sense of balance. You only have to think of the impact on your life of damaging your sense of balance—through illness or alcohol—to get some idea of how important it is to our everyday existence. Yet most people never think to include it in their list of senses. This isn’t because they don’t have a sense of balance. It’s because they’ve become so accustomed to the idea that we have five senses (and maybe a spooky one) that they have stopped thinking about it. It’s become a matter of common sense. They just take it for granted.