Britain’s most successful blues band only formed in the summer of 1967, when the blues boom seemed to be a thing of the past. London was pop-crazy, music and millinery were gaudy, the passe-partout was called Psychedelia. The pull of the new sounds was so powerful that even the most important protagonists of the British R&B scene had long since renounced blues black and white and discovered the color palette of pop for themselves.
The Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann, Pretty Things, Animals, Moody Blues, Yardbirds and Zombies were infected with pop, but only a few bands proved immune, above all John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. More blues school than a solid group structure, Mayell’s fluctuating bunch served as a talent factory and instantaneous heater for higher orders. Eric CIapton and Mick Taylor learned here, and Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Peter Green played together for the first time, even if only for a few months.
Mayall’s strict regime – alcohol was frowned upon even more than pop – led to the split after Fleetwood and McVie were fired by Mayall for showing up drunk. At the same time, Decca house producer Mike Vernon formed his own label, Blue Horizon, and introduced guitarists Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer. They got along right away, got together and called the new formation Fleetwood Mac.
The first single released in November was the not very promising “I Believe My Time Ain’t Long” penned by Elmore James, Spencer’s great role model. An influence that can hardly be overheard on the debut LP. It’s simply called “Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac” (★★★★), appears in February 1968 and contrasts Spencer’s agile runs with Green’s calmer, more lyrical licks. Most of the material comes from old, almost dead sources like Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf.
Nonetheless, the album became a bestseller, reaching number 4 in the UK charts. The second Mac LP was released in August ’68, hot on the heels of two small single hits: “Black Magic Woman” and “Need Your Love So Bad”, the former the template for later Santana dalliance, the latter the blueprint for more soulful blues derivatives. The album “Mr. Wonderful” (★★★1/2) once again reaches the top ten and, in addition to Spencer’s delta slide and greens, offers poetic and sinister playing as well as wind instruments and a keyboard lady named Christine Perfect.
At the end of 1968, Mac scaled a peak that no one had thought they could do: “Albatross” led the singles charts and sold four million copies worldwide, followed in April ’69 by an even better, just as successful hit: “Man Of.” The World”. In the meantime, a third lead guitarist, Danny Kirwan, had been recruited, making the ensemble playing even more multifaceted.
Fleetwood Mac switch to Reprise, while Blue Horizon releases a patchwork LP with “Pious Bird Of Good Omen” (★★★), similarly superfluous as the “English Rose” (★★★) designed for the US market. . The first reprise album is “Then Play On”(★★★★), appears in autumn ’69 and marks a creative push, innovative, introspectively multi-layered and culminating in the thoroughly progressive rock epic “Oh Well”.
In May 1970, Peter Green left his band, emotionally broken. The single “The Green Manalishi” is a final proof of achievement for the old Mac line-up, while the LP “Kiln House” (★★★1/2 ) is already recorded without Green and is stylistically coherent, but falls by the wayside commercially.
Jeremy Spencer drops out and is replaced by the American Bob Welch, Christine McVie moves into a more central, song-delivering position and the following albums Future Games (1971, ★★1/2) and Bare Trees (1972, ★ ★★) help to finally establish the band in the USA with their West Coast feel and soft rock flair, while the UK records are almost completely ignored. A process hastened by the sacking of Danny Kirwan and the temporary employment of rock vocalist Dave Walker.
The resulting albums “Penguin” (1973, ★★) and “Mystery To Me” (1973, ★★) show reasonable sales in America, but show the band at their artistic low point. “Heroes Are Hard To Find” (1974, ★★1/2) is somewhat better, after which Bob Welch leaves the band after four years, demoralized by personal emergencies and melodramatic quarrels, Fleetwood Mac are on hold. Until Mick Fleetwood hears an LP called “Buckingham Nicks” and the California chapter is opened…
Where did the blues go? Was he swept out like a dead pack rat before the albatross flew to the warm west and Fleetwood Mac moved to Los Angeles? This trivial equation would be all too nice, but of course it isn’t true, because – as I said – pop had gradually arrived in London after Peter Green’s departure.
For the artist couple, the newcomers Nicks and Buckingham, blues was at most a cool word, and only sometimes do you think you can still hear it later, from afar: in Christine Mc Vie’s contributions to songs such as “Sugar Daddy” and “Don’t Stop ‘, in the lyrics (‘Been down one time/ Been down two times’), in Stevie Nicks’ ‘Gold Dust Woman’, in the one Lindsey Buckingham trademark guitar-picking character he’s always remembered to this day firmly back into his tracks (heard most unequivocally in the live performance of “Big Love” on “The Dance”).
A cuddly blues, as predicted by thumb. The blues that every pop group indulges in from time to time. If you say today that the post-Green Fleetwood Mac were the band with the most drama, you also have to ask: Why has this drama never found its way into music?
Already in the pastoral “Landslide” from “Fleetwood Mac” (1975, ★★★1/2), the first album without Welch, with Nicks and Buckingham, Stevie Nicks sings about her love problem: “I’ve been afraid of changin’/ ‘Cause l’ve built my life around you/ But time makes you bolder/ And children grow older/ And I’m getting older, too.’ And yet it sounds so wise and radiantly beautiful and unharmed.
Her “Rhiannon” was the blueprint for the chilled sensuality she brought to the band, perfectly orchestrated by boyfriend Lindsey with an easy-to-understand guitar hook. The first co-product of songwriters Nicks, Buckingham and Christine McVie, an unprecedented guild at the time, feels like a singles collection of West Coast boogie and Sixties sunshine, with unspeakable hits, also with Rhodes piano kitsch (“Crystal ‘) and a solo for twin guitars (‘I’m So Afraid’). A homogenous album, a real group effort, Fleetwood Mac Mark II didn’t succeed even when they were a real group.
Nevertheless, “Rumours” (1977, ★★★★1/2) cannot be explained. A record on which an unimaginably large number of people can agree on, as otherwise only on soft drinks or built-in shelves. Feelgood music that only documents its agonizing process of creation in the lyrics and that sounds so plausibly composed on the second and fiftieth listen – despite the mentioned limitation – with the stirring first and the hungover second side and only selected fantastic melodies.
There’s no tooting here, even Buckingham’s solo at the end of “Go Your Own Way” is unavoidable and the record’s most emotionally immediate moment. Wonderful: how the harmony vocals burst in after the retarding “You Make Loving Fun” in “I Don’t Wanna Know”, how “Don’t Stop” really stops shortly before the end and yet continues. The tense bass in the break of “The Chain”. The line “Pick up the pieces and go home!” in “Gold Dust Woman”. A lonely pinnacle of popular pop literature.
The only Fleetwood Mac work in which the insanity had its due is “Tusk” (1979, ★★★★), later fully covered by Camper Van Beethoven and credited with the credit flourish “Produced by Fleetwood Mac (special thanks from the band to Lindsey Buckingham). The fact that Buckingham, left alone as music director, only realized his own pieces (9 out of 20) as noise-free, noble lo-fi and psychedelic, cocaine-white home recordings with manipulated guitars and homemade drum sounds can be seen as a gesture of politeness, too as pandering to the new wavers.
In any case, for a rich man, he had understood an awful lot. It’s amazing that McVie and Nicks still managed to get such excellent songs ready given the conditions at that time. Due to the extent and the confusion, of course, heavier than “Rumours”. Definitely needs to be rediscovered.
“Fleetwood Mac Live” (1980, ★★1/2) does not. After the commercially disappointing “Tusk”, products were to be produced that even idiots could buy. With “Mirage” (1982, ★★) and “Tango In The Night” (1987, ★★) they succeeded brilliantly, but artistically it was the step into exactly the abyss that Fleetwood Mac had danced along elegantly for so long: What on What was already soppy in the songs was now also arranged in a cheesy way, with the synthesizers of the day that had been on the recipe card in adult-oriented rock since the early eighties.
It’s puzzling, but plain fact, that everything lovely faded so quickly and irrevocably from the band’s work. Gypsy was Stevie Nicks’ last velvet-and-silk performance on the Mirage album before she went insane. On “Behind The Mask” (1990, ★1/2), she was still physically present (unlike Buckingham), but not on “Time” (1995, ★), which the band even removed from their official discography.
The uninvited reunion in the borders of 1975 brought both better and worse interpretations of old favorites and some half-baked new performances on the live unplugged album “The Dance” (1997, ★★1/2), the so far last studio album “Say You Will (2003, ★★) with everyone but Christine McVie is longer than “Tusk” at 76 minutes, has not half as many songs worth mentioning, tries mindless sound clichés that make all body hairs stand on end, and sounds in at least a few of Producer Buckingham’s best moments like the kind of radio throwaway stuff that at least still soaps you up in the right places.
If that’s enough consolation.
An article from the RS archive