What a show! Never mind that the solo performer was his own audience, singing in front of a mirror, pretending to play what was in fact a piece of cardboard cut to the shape of a guitar. As a kid, I could do that for hours!

When I was fifteen, a friend lent me his acoustic guitar and I learned a bunch of songs. Then my dad bought me a secondhand Spanish guitar, and I spent most of my spare time learning to play it.

A year later, I went to art college (art was something besides music that interested me), and that's where I played on stage for the first time. After leaving art school, some friends and I formed a band, and we got some gigs in local pubs and clubs. Then I learned to play slide guitar, which gave me a way to sing and echo the lyrics with "answers" on the guitar.

Around this time I also met Fiona, who later became my wife. While we were dating she would talk to me about God and Jesus. I also knew she prayed for me. I had had a Church of England upbringing, but didn't understand why Jesus had died. I didn't even understand what love was, except in romantic terms.

The Music Scene

Coming up on the music scene in England at this time (1966-67), along with the budding flower-power movement, was a renewed interest in blues. Blues bands were popping up all over the place, and a well-established record producer was looking for new musicians. A friend told him about me, and he came to hear our band.

This producer introduced us to Peter Green, who was trying to form his own band but needed another guitarist. Peter asked me to join his new band. I was thrilled! Peter decided to call the band "Fleetwood Mac," after two of the other band members, Mick Fleetwood and John MacVie. After two practice sessions, we were ready to play the 1967 Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival.

I learned that love and inspiration from God and the truth of His Word are essential to produce truly beautiful music, art, or literature.

Then came Fleetwood Mac's first U.S. tour. We arrived in California, where the hippy movement was well underway, and it was here that we were told that drugs had revolutionized the music and artistic creativity of artists such as the Beatles, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Peter Fonda, and others. It was also there that we were introduced to the "hip new drug" LSD.

I took a "trip," and at first it felt really good--blissful, even. I felt like I was finally starting to understand love and began philosophizing about loving people. Then the good feelings stopped and suddenly I felt so alone. I looked at myself in the mirror and freaked out because I looked so sad. I started thinking about death, and sensed a light above me, shining through the darkness. Is that Heaven? I wondered. Does Heaven even exist? That trip left me with three things: belief in the spirit world, awareness that life was short, and the question, "What am I doing with my life?" I turned to spiritual books for answers.

The Search

Our third album, Then Play On, was a big seller in Europe and established Fleetwood Mac in the U.S. The instrumental "Albatross" sold over a million copies. In January '69 we did another tour of major cities in the U.S. The rigors of touring--flying from city to city and keeping irregular hours--were interspersed with "rap sessions" in our marijuana smoke-filled hotel and dressing rooms. It was from these discussions that I started to see the injustices of society and understand the disillusionment of its youth--kids who looked to rock stars like us for answers.

Before a concert in San Francisco, another musician, Glen Schwartz, of a band called "Pacific Gas and Electric," asked me if I believed in Jesus. I said I did--and I guess I actually did, in a mental sort of way. "Then say something about Jesus on stage tonight," Glen said. "It would make Him happy."

So we played number after number and finally, before one song, I said, "I want to say something about Jesus! ...Yes, just read what He has to say." It wasn't much, but I didn't know what else to say. After all, I was still searching myself.

After the concert Glen told me, "You just need to ask Jesus into your heart." I had never heard that before. Something in Glen's eyes convinced me that he had found what I was looking for. That night in my hotel room I prayed for Jesus to come into my heart. From that night, my attitudes about nearly everything started to change.

As we took more drugs, Peter Green and Danny Kirwan's music moved out of the blues framework. It became more inventive, but retained a feeling of brooding hopelessness in both music and lyrics. I was, however, at a loss for inspiration or ideas. I felt completely dried up, so my contributions musically were minimal.

Like other artists at the top, where there is so much competition to get and stay there, it seemed necessary to get in tune with some unseen and sometimes unnamed spiritual force to produce captivating music. Fleetwood Mac made #1 on the New Musical Express polls as the top band of '69, putting The Beatles at #2 for the first time in six years.

About that time, I started to sense that there was something sinister behind it all. God existed, but so did an evil for which I could only find one name that seemed unreasonably simple at the time--the Devil. I tried to pass off such thoughts as superstition or hallucination, but couldn't. I was desperate to find someone to explain it all to me.

The Road

Alone in a hotel room in Switzerland one night, I heard a voice inside me say, "Do you believe that I am risen?" I knew it was Jesus, and I was shocked! I always carried a New Testament, so I read the chapters in the gospels about the Resurrection.

That night I had a vivid dream: I was walking along a road with a heavy ache in my heart. Something inside me said that if I would turn around and go the other way, the burden would be lifted, but I kept walking the same direction until finally I couldn't stand it any longer. I turned around, and immediately I had peace in my heart. As I walked the other way, I felt lighter. Coming towards me were Fiona and Peter. They glanced at me as they passed, so I turned around, and caught up with them. I tapped Fiona on the shoulder and said, "Come on. We're going the other direction now!"

Alone in a hotel room in Switzerland one night, I heard a voice inside me say, "Do you believe that I am risen?" I knew it was Jesus.

I awoke and immediately understood what the dream meant: The road represented my life, and turning to go the other direction meant leaving the band to follow Jesus.

True to my dream, from that night on, life couldn't have seemed harder or heavier. Some of the spiritual books I read only further muddled my mind with an underlying subtlety that denied the power of God and prayer, and the divinity of Jesus. I also checked out a lot of the gurus of the time, but soon found they weren't what I was looking for. Other people told me that the answer was in music, but the music that was coming out then only left me feeling claustrophobic and depressed.

At Last--The Answer!

In January '71 we toured the U.S. again. My body was in Los Angeles, but my mind and heart were elsewhere, still searching. "Please, God," I prayed, "I've got to have an answer soon!"

The next day, as I left a Sunset Boulevard bookstore with yet more books, a young hippy with frizzy blond hair, carrying a guitar, asked me if I'd like to hear a song. He seemed sincere, so I stopped to listen. We sat down in front of a store, and even before he started singing I knew the song was going to be about Jesus.

Afterwards he asked me if I wanted to pray for Jesus to come into my heart. I didn't yet understand that Jesus comes in to stay forever the first time someone asks Him to, so I prayed that prayer again, right there on the street.

The hippy invited me to meet his friends, and even before we got there, I knew I wasn't going to play with Fleetwood Mac again. His friends--a bunch of young hippies like himself who would eventually become The Family--greeted me with happy faces. I felt like I'd met them all before, like I'd known them all my life! The one I had met first, who incidentally hadn't ever heard of Fleetwood Mac and couldn't have cared less that I was a rock star, talked with me for a long time. For each of my questions, he had an answer from the Bible.

"Ours is a spiritual revolution for Jesus," he told me. "We have obeyed Jesus' commandments to forsake all else, follow Him, and preach the Gospel in all the world. Doing this means leaving everything else behind--family, friends, house, and job." That was just what I expected. I had known for a long time that was what Jesus wanted me to do. I just hadn't known how. I joined them then and there.

Four days later, the manager of our band finally tracked me down. "Don't worry about the tour, the money, or recording the next album," he said. "Just take four months off with Fiona. Go anywhere you like--all expenses paid. You're emotionally distraught. Take some time to logically evaluate all this."

But as he saw that I wasn't going for that approach, he became belligerent. In the end, he tried to tell me there was no God, yelled profanities, and stormed out of the building. Fiona wholeheartedly agreed with my decision, and she and our two young children soon joined me in the States.

In the last thirty years, the road has taken us all over the world--the U.S., England, France, Brazil, Italy, Greece, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Japan.

Music? I've continued to play and write songs, and have even performed and recorded some. Over the years--even through painful experiences with a couple of ill-fated recording ventures--I learned (and am still learning!) that love and inspiration from God and the truth of His Word are essential to produce truly beautiful music, art, or literature. I also think there's a need for more of these qualities in the arts today, especially that which gives due credit to the Lord and acknowledges His kingdom.

That is why I am so thankful that He has given me an opportunity to use the musical and artistic talents He gave me to communicate His love to the world. Actually, for the past fifteen years the Lord has used my drawing talent more than my musical talents. And speaking of literature, the Lord recently gave me a new talent--story-writing--which has become a source of great fulfillment and enjoyment for me.

Jesus said, "The harvest is plenteous, but the laborers are few" (Matthew 9:37, KJV). People thought I was crazy to leave Fleetwood Mac, but the rewards and fulfillment of a life for the Lord have far outweighed what I traded away.