Producer/Engineer Ken Caillat Sues Broadway’s ‘Stereophonic’

New York, NY (October 2, 2024)—Recording industry icon Ken Caillat has filed a lawsuit against the playwright and producers of the Broadway hit, Stereophonic. In a complaint filed yesterday in New York, Caillat and writer Steven Stiefel allege that the David Adjmi drama, which won five Tony Awards this year including Best Play, is “an unauthorized adaptation” of Caillat’s 2012 memoir, Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album, co-written with Stiefel.

A veteran producer and recording engineer, Caillat is best known for his work on numerous Fleetwood Mac albums, including 1977’s 45-million-selling Rumours. The storied record and its fractious gestation is the stuff of rock legend; as Pro Sound News recounted in its 2012 review of Caillat’s book, the album “took a year to make, during which everyone in the band broke up with his significant other—which in four out of five cases, was someone else in the band. Pile on record company pressures, feuds, writer’s block, and jaw-dropping amounts of drugs and alcohol, and it’s easy to see how Rumours should have been a complete trainwreck instead of an unqualified success. On hand for each step of the remarkable journey was co-producer Ken Caillat, who recalls every detail in his new memoir.”

Many of those details wound up in Stereophonic, according to the lawsuit. The play follows a similarly structured U.K./U.S. band and its production team as they spend a year in the mid-1970s recording their magnum opus while facing numerous interpersonal crises. The play, which Mix reviewed during its off-Broadway run last fall (obliquely noting extensive templating off a famous band’s tale), follows the production team as it ingratiates itself with the band, becoming sounding boards, confidants and occasionally punching bags in the process.

Particular incidents that happen onstage, such as an engineer being promoted to co-producer, a guitarist choking that engineer in fury, another band member dressing down the production team for not paying close attention to takes, an extended sequence recounting difficulty recording drums, and more arguably appear in the book. The full 29-page legal complaint lists numerous other potential similarities and extensively cites both works, remarking on everything from studio design and architecture to specific dialogue and conversations that it claims were lifted from the tome’s pages.

Adjmi has noted in numerous interviews since the play’s debut that he took elements from a variety of sources, citing Fleetwood Mac but also Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin and other classic rock acts. While the playwright has not commented publicly on the lawsuit at press time, he told The New Yorker just last week, “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.”

As it happens, this is not the first time Adjmi’s work has led to a lawsuit. In 2014, DLT Entertainment, which created and owns the 1970s sitcom Three’s Company, threatened to sue for his play 3C, claiming copyright infringement. However, the play was deemed “a highly transformative parody” by the court the following year and was thus protected under fair use doctrine.

Caillat and Stiefel’s Stereophonic lawsuit seeks unspecified damages, and estimates that the play has grossed more than $20 million since it moved to Broadway in April this year.