The Roots of the Tony-Winning “Stereophonic”

In 1976, Ken Caillat was a twenty-nine-year-old sound engineer in L.A., a shy, long-haired techie in Levi's who loved Steely Dan and had "good ears," as he put it recently. One Thursday, the studio he worked for asked him to mix a session with Fleetwood Mac for the "King Biscuit Flower Hour." He'd never heard the band's music, but he and the musicians hit it off. Soon he got a call from the group, which was about to record a new album in Sausalito with a different sound man. "They said, 'The guy was an idiot. How about you come up?' " Caillat recalled. The album was "Rumours."

Caillat soon realized that he'd walked into a minefield. "One day, one couple was arguing, and then the next day one person threw champagne in the other person's face," he said. In the course of a tense, druggy, exhausting year, Caillat watched as the two couples within the band—Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, and John and Christine McVie—went through breakups, and the fifth member, Mick Fleetwood, got divorced. They wrote their recriminations into songs, which they recorded and rerecorded with agonizing precision. "If I'd been aggressive, they would have fired me," Caillat said. "I went with the flow. I basically wanted to get laid." Midway through, the band made him one of the producers of "Rumours," from which he still gets six-figure royalties; the album has sold more than forty-five million copies.

Caillat worked with Fleetwood Mac on three more records (the cover of "Tusk," from 1979, shows a photograph of his dog Scooter biting his jeans) and in 2012 published a memoir, "Making Rumours," drawing on his detailed tape logs. Earlier this year, he caught wind of the Broadway play "Stereophonic," about a band that strongly resembles Fleetwood Mac recording an album that strongly resembles "Rumours." Maybe they could sell the book in the lobby, he thought. After the play won five Tony Awards, in June, his daughters—Colbie, a singer-songwriter, and Morgan, a sommelier—saw it. "They called up and said, 'It was like your book, Dad,' " Caillat recalled. (The critic Hannah Gold noted the similarities in The New York Review of Books.) So he made a rare trip from his home, near Los Angeles, where he runs an artist-development company, to New York.

"Everyone tells me I'm going to be furious at the end of the play," Caillat said, before a matinée. He is bulky, with a growly voice. It was his first time seeing a Broadway show. At the theatre, he and his girlfriend were joined by Mickey Shapiro, a lawyer who repped Fleetwood Mac during "Rumours." Heading to his seat, Caillat looked at the set, a seventies-style control room. "That's a Studer tape recorder, twenty-four track," he said. "Very nice machine."

David Adjmi, the writer of "Stereophonic," has downplayed its connection to Fleetwood Mac, calling the play a "fantasia" that uses "superficial details" about the band to "build dramatic substratum." But, as Caillat watched, certain plot points struck him as uncanny. Much of the story is told through the eyes of Grover, a bumbling engineer in his late twenties who, yes, gets promoted to producer. In Act I, the Christine McVie character asks Grover for feedback on a take; he suggests that she have a listen in the booth, and she snaps, "You start paying attention to the tempo and the key and the instruments and give us a little fucking help."

"Straight outta the book," Caillat grunted. (Page 76: "We want you guys to start paying attention to tempos and keys and tuning and other important things and help us out here.") Later in the play, the Buckingham character tells Grover to tape over a take, because he thinks he can redo it better; when he suddenly decides he wants the earlier take and realizes it's been erased, he yells, "Are you a fucking idiot?"—then lunges at Grover and chokes him. Caillat recounts the same thing in his book, when Buckingham was recording the guitar solo for "You Make Loving Fun." (Page 264: " 'You're an idiot!' Lindsey screamed at me, his hands tightening around my throat.")

Then there were odd details that repeated odd details in "Making Rumours." Grover has a crush on the studio's front-office girl, as Caillat did. The John McVie character gives a boozy monologue about Sausalito's "houseboat wars," which Caillat describes in the book. A character mentions seeing Tony Orlando out drinking in L.A., as Caillat did—not exactly a name you'd pluck from the air. Before some takes, Grover says, "Wheels up," which was Caillat's studio catchphrase. ("We had airline seats in the control room," he explained.) "I do believe in coincidence, but not that much," Shapiro said at intermission.

Afterward, the group debriefed over pizza. "The entire play is from the perspective of the guy sitting behind the desk making the record!" Shapiro said. He was fired up: "It's a very interesting case." (Bruce Rosen, a First Amendment lawyer, later speculated, "Chances are, there'll be a nasty note sent and maybe some negotiation.")

Presented, last week, with Caillat's reactions to the show, Adjmi, the playwright, responded, "When writing Stereophonic I drew from multiple sources—including autobiographical details from my own life—to create a deeply personal work of fiction. Any similarities to Ken Caillat's excellent book are unintentional."

Caillat said that he had watched the play in a daze. "I feel like kind of a numbnuts," he said. "But, yeah, now I feel ripped off!" He did note a few discrepancies between his book and the play: "Lindsey's a dick, but he's not that big of a dick." Comparing himself with his dorky fictional counterpart, he said, "I was a little bit more of a playboy. I was always saying, hand against the wall, 'How you doing?' " And as an engineer? "I did it better."