Together, Together Love: Fleetwood Mac at 50

Before Weezer named six albums after itself, Fleetwood Mac released a second eponymous record in 1975, seven years after their debut, which has since been called Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. The Peter Green LP was mostly blues covers and flimsy originals co-authored with guitarist/pianist Jeremy Spencer. It’s a fine, 12-bar blues project, one of the better products of Great Britain’s late-‘60s “blues boom.” Spencer was very clearly infatuated with a picker like Elmore James (considering that four songs on Mr. Wonderful begin with riffs identical to his), an influence that gave Fleetwood Mac enough edge to foster some kind of identity in an already busy scene. It’s too bad both Green and Spencer went independently mad: Green got hooked on LSD and Spencer joined the Children of God cult.

In those early iterations of the band, which saw players like Dave Walker, Danny Kirwan, Bob Weston, and Bob Welch come and go, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie remained its vital core, before eventually welcoming John’s then-wife Christine into the mix in 1970 and releasing the underloved Future Games the next September. Three years later, Fleetwood Mac disbanded after Weston slept with Mick’s wife Jenny Boyd (the sister of Patty Boyd, George Harrison’s first wife) and the final 26 dates of their ongoing North American tour were cancelled. Faced with show obligations that needed fulfilled, the band’s manager, Clifford Davis, hired members of Legs to tour under the banner “The New Fleetwood Mac,” in a move not unlike the collage of musicians that toured as the Velvet Underground after Lou Reed’s departure.

After a lawsuit over the rights to the “Fleetwood Mac” name, which Fleetwood and McVie won via an out-of-court settlement, and a year-long hiatus, the band moved its home base from London to Los Angeles, California. They would make Heroes Are Hard to Find at Angel City Sound in July 1974 and release it two months later, and it’s an especially great title 51 years later, with the mystique of Christine’s vocals flaunted generously on “Come a Little Bit Closer” and “Prove Your Love.” But Welch was hardly a great counterpart to Christine, and his songs on the record are noticeably weaker than hers. The record arrived to mixed results, failing to crack the Top 30 on the Billboard 200. The material was met with strong criticisms from Robert Christgau but favorable notes from Rolling Stone. Welch’s fatigue set in quickly regardless. “The buzz that the Mystery to Me (1973) band had started to create [was] gone,” he said. “I was totally exhausted by writing, singing, touring, negotiating, moving, and frankly so [were] Mick, John, and Chris. We were all discouraged that Heroes [hadn’t] done better. Something needs to change, but what?”

In late 1974, Mick visited Sound City. The studio’s in-house engineer, Keith Olsen, played a song for him: “Frozen Love,” a cut from an LP called Buckingham Nicks that had come out the year prior. Then, he met one half of the album’s namesake, Lindsey Buckingham, a guitarist from Palo Alto who couldn’t read sheet music and learned to play like the Kingston Trio on a toy Mickey Mouse guitar. Buckingham had spent five years playing bass in his high school band, Fritz, which included vocalist Stevie Nicks, whom he began dating after they both departed the group. The couple started making demo tapes on a 4-track Ampex recorder at Buckingham’s father’s coffee-roasting plant in Daly City, and they eventually fled to Los Angeles to pursue a record deal. Polydor signed them and released Buckingham Nicks, but, after poor sales, dropped the duo. When Lindsey connected with Mick, he’d been making ends meet by singing Phil Everly’s parts in Don Everly’s backing band. In December 1974, Welch finalized his decision to leave Fleetwood Mac and, despite Mick’s invitation for Lindsey to join, the guitarist would only accept if Stevie got hired, too. The drummer obliged.

For the next two months, Fleetwood Mac, guided by Olsen’s contention that pop music was more profitable than the blues, recorded a new album at Sound City while Lindsey and Stevie were on the precipice of breaking up. Lindsey and John butted heads creatively over the application of the latter’s bass parts, to which he said, “The band you’re in is Fleetwood Mac. I’m the Mac. And I play the bass.” Lindsey later claimed that Christine was supportive of his ideas, and they would write “World Turning” together. But most of his and Stevie’s material was written for the second Buckingham Nicks album that never happened, namely “Rhiannon,” “I’m So Afraid,” and “Monday Morning.” They later took a Buckingham Nicks cut, “Crystal,” and reconfigured it with Christine, John, and Mick. Christine wrote four songs by herself, including two of her best-ever efforts, “Over My Head” and “Say You Love Me,” and Lindsey sang lead on the Curtis brothers-penned “Blue Letter,” written for Buckingham Nicks LP2 at the same time as “Seven League Boots,” which Fleetwood Mac rejected but was adapted into “Southern Cross” by Crosby, Stills and Nash seven years later.

Called “the White Album” by some but known to many as Fleetwood Mac, the final recording not only saved the band but introduced its second act. Many before me have said it, and many after me will reiterate it, but Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks gave Christine and John McVie and Mick Fleetwood a relevancy that their previous material wasn’t strong enough to bolster on its own. But everyone leaves out the second part: Christine and John McVie and Mick Fleetwood gave Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks a relevancy that their previous material also wasn’t strong enough to bolster on its own. They were all talented to a remarkable degree, don’t get me wrong, but Stevie was still nearly a decade away from her solo breakthrough. The quintet’s it-factor in 1975 needed to be hooked into collaboration to succeed. “Say You Love Me” and “Over My Head” are two of the greatest pop-rock songs I’ve ever heard—and “Over My Head” is one of the most-inspired lead single choices of its time—but they admittedly flourish best in the company of “Rhiannon,” “Monday Morning,” and “Landslide.”

Fleetwood Mac is, admittedly, an imperfect album—maybe the best imperfect album of the 1970s, and the only 10th album in a band’s discography to sound like a debut—as the last two songs, “Sugar Daddy” and “I’m So Afraid,” peter out rather than climactically resolve. But those first eight chapters, from “Monday Morning” through “Landslide,” are immaculate songcraft. Of course, Rumours is and always will be culturally king (though I remain firm on my position that Tusk is better than both), but some of Fleetwood Mac makes Rumours look underwhelming—and it only took the band nearly a dozen tries to get its shit in order, and all they had to do was slap their full name on the front of it a second time.