Fleetwood Mac

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I didn’t realize it came out before Mystery.

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Lola is the same riff as The Chain

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Heroes Are Hard to Find

Post-Mystery to Me, Fleetwood Mac completely collapses. An affair between Weston and Christine McVie during the tour devolves into Weston getting fired and the band announcing a split. Then their manager gets a bunch of guys together to tour as Fleetwood Mac despite not including any members of the band. Then a lawsuit ensues concerning the ownership of the name of the band. Total drama that is part and parcel of the Fleetwood Mac experience.

They reform without Weston, relocate to California, and release this album. The title track, Bad Loser, and Prove Your Love are all pretty good, but this is ultimately another pedestrian effort, and the catalyst for the most substantial change the band would make.

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Fleetwood Mac

Bob Welch is out. Purportedly after hearing Frozen Love, Mick Fleetwood hires Lindsay Buckingham as the replacement, who joins on the condition that Stevie Nicks also be invited along. And now we have the lineup that will churn out what we’ve been so patiently waiting for.

Appropriately, this self titled album is the new start they’ve been waiting for. Lindsay Buckingham brings a different kind of intensity and friction to the mix, but rather than creating fracturing sounds, the band seems as consistent and coherent as it’s ever been. Monday Morning, Rhiannon, Say You Love Me, and Landslide are immediate classics, Over My Head is great, and I’m So Afraid is an absolute killer of a closing track. While this lineup will never lack for drama and conflict, they have finally seemed to find their footing nearly a decade in.

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Rumours

Never content to let the good times roll, interpersonal drama hits its apex going into this one. Buckingham and Nicks’ relationship collapse may take center stage on this, but add the breakdown of Christine and John McVie’s marriage, Mick Fleetwood’s marriage also breaks down, and this is a band rife with personal turmoil. All of that energy gets channeled into Rumours, a rock pop masterpiece that plays like a greatest hits album. Songs address each other as anguish, heartbreak and anger smoothly juxtapose with perseverance and hope. Dreams and Go Your Own Way, two of their best known songs, are practically the groundwork of Buckingham and Nicks’ struggles. The Chain is on another level, that bridge being possibly my favorite Fleetwood Mac moment of expression without needing a word. Gold Dust Woman is remarkable. And against all that, Christine McVie is somehow bringing some sense of counterbalance with Don’t Stop, Songbird, and You Make Loving Fun. Not a wasted moment on this one. Absolute classic that lives up to its hype.

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Mystery to Me

Only lineup change is that Dave Walker is out. This is a massive step up from Penguin, and really the best Fleetwood Mac album so far - filled with hooks, excellent songs, cohesive, and Christine McVie and Bob Welsch feel like a force to reckon with. Though these are pop songs at their core, the increased pacing serves them so much better and they sound great. Emerald Eyes, Believe Me, Hypnotized, Keep On Going, The City, Miles Away, Somebody, and For Your Love are all top notch Fleetwood Mac to this point. Granted, just like on Then Play On, the band’s finding that elusive combination can only mean they’ll be blowing the whole thing up shortly…

Agreed. This is a wonderful album. Easily the best so far. I’ve heard Hypnotized before and loved it from the very start. For me, the best single track since Oh, Well. The City borrows heavily from Going Down by Freddie King but still fucking grooves. Interesting inclusion of For Your Love, the tune that drove Clapton out of The Yardbirds. Weston plays some VERY nice slide throughout the album. Much more enjoyable than the Spencer albums.

If they’d kept this lineup and continued on, they probably would’ve had some staying power. But alas, it wasn’t meant to be…

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Buckingham Nicks

A little out of order, but just before Mystery to Me came this album - largely Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks delivering classic rock and pop. While some of this seems like they are still developing as songwriters, there’s a lot of really good stuff here, particularly in the second half. I am always a fan of a big epic track so Frozen Love was quite good, along with Races Are Run and Crying in the Night. Most of it seems like a preview of things to come with Fleetwood Mac.

Very easy to hear how Fleetwood heard Frozen Love and felt they’d fit well in his band. Pond Distance Winner is a good track as is Don't Let Me Down Again. Really dig Frozen Love and as I mentioned upthread Lola contains the opening riff to The Chain but that’s really the only good part of it.
Not a terrible album but definitely a freshman album from a pair of up and coming songwriters. (And what a sophomore album!) A few things of interest to me. Waddy Wachtel’s involvement. He’s been with Nicks from the very beginning, looks like. I wonder how much of the lead work is him and how much is Buckingham. Also, I had kinda always assumed that they co-wrote everything on the album. Not the case at all. Frozen Love was the only collaboration on the record.

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Tusk

This one is really a tale of two album’s interspersed with one another. Lindsay Buckingham is intent on not repeating Rumours, and instead channels his inter Talking Heads and maybe some experimental Beach Boys to create the wildest sounding songs in the Fleetwood Mac catalogue to this point. Tusk is the classic in this style towards the end of the album, and maybe most emblematic of this. What Makes You Think You’re the One sounds just like Talking Heads, though the genius of these parts of the album is that Buckingham, unlike his predecessors, sounds like he’s taking inspiration rather than simply making a neutered version of what already exists.

The other piece of this album is more in line with the Fleetwood Mac past with the songs contributed by Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks. Mc Vie comes out hot with Over & Over and Think About Me, though the rest of her contributions seem lost in the shuffle and in line with the pre-Buckingham and Nicks days. Nicks brings in two stellar songs in Sara and Sisters of the Moon - both songs build nicely and have the right amount of space here.

It’s great to hear the disjointed aspects in the start of Over & Over into The Ledge, and this one certainly holds its own with the last two albums, though one certainly gets the sense that they barely shared a room in recording this. Buckingham is clearly off in his own universe, the rest of the band be damned.

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Heroes Are Hard to Find

Post-Mystery to Me, Fleetwood Mac completely collapses. An affair between Weston and Christine McVie during the tour devolves into Weston getting fired and the band announcing a split. Then their manager gets a bunch of guys together to tour as Fleetwood Mac despite not including any members of the band. Then a lawsuit ensues concerning the ownership of the name of the band. Total drama that is part and parcel of the Fleetwood Mac experience.

They reform without Weston, relocate to California, and release this album. The title track, Bad Loser, and Prove Your Love are all pretty good, but this is ultimately another pedestrian effort, and the catalyst for the most substantial change the band would make.

Weston had the affair with Jenny Boyd*, Fleetwood’s wife. The tour manager fired Weston and Fleetwood just couldn’t do it anymore.

After all the other tumult and relocation they come back with this album. For a band that showed such promise just an album prior, this one is a big let down. The title track is ok. With the horn section and all it actually could be a mediocre Tedeschi Trucks Band track. Have a Derek solo in the middle and then jam out on that outro… Would’ve definitely elevated the tune. The only other even slightly enjoyable song is Bad Loser. But it’s not very memorable, really. Everything else is totally lackluster and an album struggling to find something. Anything. I don’t know if the band was listening to Skunk Baxter putting pedal steel on Steely Dan and Doobie Brothers records but they sure thought it was a good idea for this album. It wasn’t. Neither were all the string sections. Were they trying to channel the smooth Nashville sounds with the string/pedal steel combo? Who knows? Welch’s lyric writing is just terrible. He did try and lay down some interesting grooves but anything positive there is overshadowed by the horrible lyrics. HOWEVER, there was one line in Bermuda Triangle that I loved: a fog that won’t let go. Totally dig that line. McVie offers nothing that really stands out either.

Just a bad follow up to an excellent prior record all the way around.

*what is it with these Boyd girls having affairs with everybody? Damn.

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Fleetwood Mac

Bob Welch is out. Purportedly after hearing Frozen Love, Mick Fleetwood hires Lindsay Buckingham as the replacement, who joins on the condition that Stevie Nicks also be invited along. And now we have the lineup that will churn out what we’ve been so patiently waiting for.

Appropriately, this self titled album is the new start they’ve been waiting for. Lindsay Buckingham brings a different kind of intensity and friction to the mix, but rather than creating fracturing sounds, the band seems as consistent and coherent as it’s ever been. Monday Morning, Rhiannon, Say You Love Me, and Landslide are immediate classics, Over My Head is great, and I’m So Afraid is an absolute killer of a closing track. While this lineup will never lack for drama and conflict, they have finally seemed to find their footing nearly a decade in.

You gotta hand it to Fleetwood and McVie for hanging in there and continuing to try and take it to the next level. Supposedly, when Nicks and Buckingham were hired, Welch was still in the band but decided to leave and go solo. That would’ve been a very interesting dynamic, but songwriting-wise I don’t think the mix would’ve worked.

McVie’s songwriting instantly kicks up a notch with instant standards Say You Love Me and Over My ahead. The former her absolutely strongest contribution to date with the latter in the second position. Sugar Daddy is another that became popular, but it’s not one of my favorites.

From Buckingham, the album kicks off with Monday Morning, already signaling a stronger direction for them. It’s another of his contributions that is the real standout for me. Indeed it’s a co-write with McVie, World Turning.

And on to the real highlight. The introduction of Stevie Nicks to the world of Fleetwood Mac. She added three tracks to the album and the two she sang on are two of the band’s most iconic songs. She enters the scene with the fourth track, Rhiannon. Holy shit, what an intro. With just this one track we’ve gone to places never before reached by the band. Instantly the best track since Oh, Well and overall probably the best track they’ve released up to this point. I can only imagine the feeling that fans of the band had at the time when spinning this record for the first time after everything that had come before. I honestly don’t even remember Crystal from the Buckingham Nicks album but I did like it here. Then with Landslide it’s another home run.

While being the 10th studio album they released, it’s also sort of a debut. The level of EVERYTHING is kicked up a notch and this would be the definitive lineup that would surpass all others. A definite tide turner for the career of the band and finally some real success for a band that had been trying for almost 10 years.

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I am on a very short break but can’t wait to hear what you have to say about Rumours and Tusk. I will resume shortly with the live album from 1980.

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I’m making my way thru the big 4-disc deluxe set of Rumours right now. Very interesting to hear some of these demos and early versions.

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Live (1980)

Mixed with hits and some deeper cuts, this live album does an admirable job of putting a time capsule on Fleetwood Mac’s peak years, at least as it pertains to the period from their self-titled album with Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks through Tusk. What’s immediately remarkable is how good Stevie Nicks’s voice sounds on a live recording - she really takes her performances from Landslide to Dreams and Sara to another level. Really though, the moments here that are jaw dropping are Rhiannon and I’m so Afraid, the former really highlighting the musical chemistry between Nicks and Buckingham, and the latter an all timer with Buckingham going completely off in a long solo that kept pushing the song to greater heights.

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Lindsey Buckingham - Law and Order

Apparently after the band decided Buckingham’s oddball additions to Tusk were beyond the purview of Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham decided solo albums would be a good outlet for him. There are moments here, like the hit song Trouble, or I’ll Tell You Now, where it gets interesting. Mostly these seem like half-baked song ideas I am not convinced he listened back to or had any voice editing his ideas. Bwana and That’s How We Do It in LA are examples of that, and Johnny Stew has the bones of a good basically wasted.

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Mock Fleetwood - The Visitor

As if one solo album by this band wasn’t enough, Mick Fleetwood barrels in with a set of cover songs recorded in Ghana. Sadly, this set fares no better, and the best songs here are Fleetwood Mac songs. There could be something also said about Cassiopeia Surrender as being pretty cool, but other than Rattlesnake Shake and Walk a Thin Line, this is largely misguided and in that weird early 80s space where going to a foreign land and being “inspired” by its music is somehow considered a good idea and not at all awkward appropriation. It’s predictably a very awkward fit, and one that probably should have been left to some deluxe reissue of something or other.

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Stevie Nicks - Bella Donna

In the year of the solo album, Nicks finally delivers something worth a repeat listen among the bunch. Bella Donna is a fantastic soft rock album. It sure helps to have some rock star friends, and Tom Petty’s classic duet with her, Stop Dragging My Heart Around, is one of the top highlights here, with Edge of Seventeen, Kind of Woman, and Bella Donna. Leather and Lace is another hit, though it’s basically Landslide with Don Henley and different lyrics.

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Mirage

After the brief hiatus we just experienced, Fleetwood Mac attempts a return to form with Mirage. To my ears, this seems like largely a mediocre affair with the whole album being carried by Stevie Nicks’s contributions of That’s Alright, Gypsy, and Straight Back. Wish You Were Here is also pretty decent and the outtro in Eyes of the World caught my attention for a moment, but I would be lying if I didn’t express the feeling that this band at this moment largely seems creatively bankrupt at least in the studio. There won’t be another album for 5 years from this, and perhaps that was wise.

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Rumours

Never content to let the good times roll, interpersonal drama hits its apex going into this one. Buckingham and Nicks’ relationship collapse may take center stage on this, but add the breakdown of Christine and John McVie’s marriage, Mick Fleetwood’s marriage also breaks down, and this is a band rife with personal turmoil. All of that energy gets channeled into Rumours, a rock pop masterpiece that plays like a greatest hits album. Songs address each other as anguish, heartbreak and anger smoothly juxtapose with perseverance and hope. Dreams and Go Your Own Way, two of their best known songs, are practically the groundwork of Buckingham and Nicks’ struggles. The Chain is on another level, that bridge being possibly my favorite Fleetwood Mac moment of expression without needing a word. Gold Dust Woman is remarkable. And against all that, Christine McVie is somehow bringing some sense of counterbalance with Don’t Stop, Songbird, and You Make Loving Fun. Not a wasted moment on this one. Absolute classic that lives up to its hype.

Conflict leads to drama. Drama leads to artistic output. Artistic output leads to a career-defining, iconic album. For a band that has already experienced its share of interpersonal drama, somehow it’s topped since the last album release. The McVies divorce, Buckingham and Nicks end their relationship. Nicks is boning Fleetwood. Fleetwood is divorcing his wife after discovering yet another affair she was having. And everyone was snorting mountains of cocaine. The subject matter of the songs was well-informed by all the relationships disintegrating and all the chaos surrounding them. And rock ‘n’ roll is the better for it. Some of the tracks that weren’t included or even finished really is another glimpse of the fractures the band is suffering.

Buckingham starts asserting more control over recording and this time, it’s allowed. Reportedly, during the recording of the previous album, he had an idea for a bass line for McVie and was issued the response, “you joined Fleetwood Mac. I’m the Mac. I play the bass.” This time around, Buckingham actually re-recorded his own bass part for Second Hand News after McVie laid one down, and they went with Buckingham’s. Dynamics were definitely shifting.

Honestly, each song on the album is one most everyone would recognize if they heard it on the radio, but there are some I don’t care for as much as others. Never really liked I Don’t Want To Know that much. Don’t Stop was my absolute favorite song when I was a little kid and I’d have my parents play it over and over again. I guess to the point I don’t really like hearing it anymore. All the rest I still enjoy, some more than others. Dreams, Don’t Stop, Go Your Own Way, The Chain, You Make Loving Fun, Gold Dust Woman, all instant classics.

Gold Dust Woman- for me, Nicks’s best Fleetwood Mac track. So haunting and ethereal. From the phaser to the simple drum beat to the lyrical content. Damn near perfect song. Top 5
You Make Loving Fun- written about the dude she was with after splitting with John, Christine’s best song. I’m with Trag. Top 5
The Chain- the only track written by all members of the band. Pieces of Lola from Buckingham Nicks, a new Nicks composition, The Chain and a new McVie composition, Keep Me There. The lyrics to the Nicks song is all that’s pulled from that. From the McVie song, it depends on which version you listen to. One version with vocals has the chord structure from the chorus moved over and they all have the bass line outro. An instrumental version doesn’t have the chorus chords but has 4 bars of the outro in the middle of the song like a mini-bridge or turnaround or something. Seeing how parts of songs are taken to form new one just fascinates me. I’d love to see video or something showing the process of how they decided what from the other tunes would work together to form this all-new piece. Love it. Their magnum opus. The best song by the band. Period.

I know Nicks was upset Silver Springs wasn’t included on the album. Personally, I’m fine with it being left off. It’s not her worst song but I’ve never thought it was super great or anything. Another of her unused tracks resonated much better with me and that was Planets of the Universe. The title is a bit clunky but the lyrics are so raw. Another tune about breaking up with Buckingham, you can feel the emotion dripping from each word.

As mentioned, their best album. The height they always try to reach with all subsequent releases. I can’t even imagine how it felt for them to be writing all these songs that are essentially either about or moving on from each other and then working on them with the people the songs are about. I can’t even see any circumstance in my life that could come close to that kind of work environment. It may have been hell to work through, but it sure made for some damn enjoyable music.

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Tusk

This one is really a tale of two album’s interspersed with one another. Lindsay Buckingham is intent on not repeating Rumours, and instead channels his inter Talking Heads and maybe some experimental Beach Boys to create the wildest sounding songs in the Fleetwood Mac catalogue to this point. Tusk is the classic in this style towards the end of the album, and maybe most emblematic of this. What Makes You Think You’re the One sounds just like Talking Heads, though the genius of these parts of the album is that Buckingham, unlike his predecessors, sounds like he’s taking inspiration rather than simply making a neutered version of what already exists.

The other piece of this album is more in line with the Fleetwood Mac past with the songs contributed by Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks. Mc Vie comes out hot with Over & Over and Think About Me, though the rest of her contributions seem lost in the shuffle and in line with the pre-Buckingham and Nicks days. Nicks brings in two stellar songs in Sara and Sisters of the Moon - both songs build nicely and have the right amount of space here.

It’s great to hear the disjointed aspects in the start of Over & Over into The Ledge, and this one certainly holds its own with the last two albums, though one certainly gets the sense that they barely shared a room in recording this. Buckingham is clearly off in his own universe, the rest of the band be damned.

Oh man. You clearly liked this one a lot more than I did. I could barely make it thru it. Tusk (the song) has always been a favorite but almost all of the rest of it is a let down for me. I’m not against going in different directions or whatever but I just don’t feel any of Buckingham’s selections really landed. Other than the title track. (Which was what they’d play as intro music on the previous tour). I’ve never liked Sara and feel that Beautiful Child and Sisters of the Moon are much stronger. Until Brown Eyes came on, I was sorely disappointed in McVie’s offerings.

Overall, I was disappointed in the whole thing. With only 2-3 tunes out of 20 that I would ever really go back and listen to I’d call this one a dud. And I know I’m in the minority.

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Live (1980)

Mixed with hits and some deeper cuts, this live album does an admirable job of putting a time capsule on Fleetwood Mac’s peak years, at least as it pertains to the period from their self-titled album with Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks through Tusk. What’s immediately remarkable is how good Stevie Nicks’s voice sounds on a live recording - she really takes her performances from Landslide to Dreams and Sara to another level. Really though, the moments here that are jaw dropping are Rhiannon and I’m so Afraid, the former really highlighting the musical chemistry between Nicks and Buckingham, and the latter an all timer with Buckingham going completely off in a long solo that kept pushing the song to greater heights.

Considering I didn’t like Tusk, it’s no surprise I didn’t care for the live album with tracks culled from the supporting tour. Rhiannon and I’m So Afraid, as you mentioned, are the two standouts. All the rest is pretty meh.

If you can find them listen to the live disc included in the Rumours 35 anniversary set and the Nashville show from the Rumours tour. Much more life to the performances.