Green Shadows (Fleetwood Mac, 2003)

A couple weeks back I foolishly deleted this album from my library (not intentionally) and had to resurrect it from a backup wisely kept on an external hard drive on another computer. Needless to say this collection isn't exactly Rumours, an album you could probably hit was a stone thrown at random into a field of albums. The whole situation was very much on my mind when it was time to pick the next album of the week, and it was a little weird that it should be this one. I even had to double check to confirm it was random.

I'm not sad about this because early Fleetwood Mac is awesome and this was way overdue. Unfortunately, early Mac is really confusing. First, it doesn't sound anything like the radio-friendly stuff of the late 1970's and early 1980's. In fact, with the exception of "Oh Well (Part 1)" getting the occasional live workout, even the band's most devoted fans have likely heard nothing from this era. Second, the control over the catalog from this era was sloppy at best, so much so that an American release (English Rose) was nothing more than an odd mishmash of material from previous and upcoming British albums. Third, no matter how "tormented" the band was at its commercial peak many years later, this was a band the suffered from serious personnel convulsions that would jettison leaders (Green, Spencer, Kirwan, Welch) with a frequency that would have killed any other band. Of the three, point two is what makes this compilation a little hard to follow.

Green Shadows isn't really a "best of" the Peter Green era; it's more of a rarities collection. Most of the songs are either scratchy demo versions, even scratchier live versions (which may predate the first album - there are no helpful liner notes here), and "un-issued" alternate versions of studio tracks. It covers from (probably) just before the first album to 1970's "Green Manalishi" single and Green's departure from the band. For a period of just under three years it shows a lot of change, from blues covers, to blues-inspired originals, to not-even-that-bluesy originals. Although the band was called "Fleetwood Mac", the public secret was that this was Green's band, named in hopes of landing Fleetwood and McVie for his rhythm section, which he ultimately succeeded in doing. All three, along with slide guitarist Jeremy Spencer, carried serious British blues credentials, though the sound was almost entirely directed by Green and Spencer. Like most of the bands of the British blues boom, they soon started to wander into other musical fields. As Spencer was increasingly marginalized, the band got less bluesy, also fueled by the addition of guitarist Danny Kirwan, who ultimately replaced Green completely. Spencer held on a little longer, but was whisked away into a cult and severed his relationship with the band. Bob Weston and Bob Welch joined later than the scope of this compilation, but they are also a part of the extensive "prehistory" of Fleetwood Mac.

I could go on, but, as you might have noticed, I'm running a little behind schedule here!

Rumours (Fleetwood Mac, 1977)

I've chronicled a number of bands that spawned during the British blues boom that would evolve into substantially non-bluesy territory. There was no dominant trend; these artists would move into prog, hard rock, proto-metal, folk, and pop. The usual pattern was that most of these bands earned a little extra success denied to their former purist colleagues, but would quickly destabilize and implode. For example, take a band like the Groundhogs or Jethro Tull, which was rapidly consumed by a single member, rendering the "band" irrelevant. Some, like Pink Floyd or the Moody Blues, would suffer debilitating personality conflicts. Fleetwood Mac, one of many bands born in the cradle built by John Mayall and his Bluesbreakers, took a somewhat different path and soared to startling success, with this album, Rumours, being the apex of the "reborn" band.

By 1974, it was clear the old Fleetwood Mac was tottering on the edge of irrelevancy. Original leader Peter Green was mentally unstable and left the band in 1970. The band then sifted through a number of singers and guitarists, some as edgy as Green, while bassist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood, hardly "leaders" sat in the middle of the vortex. In 1975 they went in a boldly different direction by adding Lindsey Buckingham on guitar, along with his girlfriend Stevie Nicks. And the rest was history. Like its predecessor, Rumours sounds nothing like any of the older Fleetwood Macs since two of the three major contributors were new to the band and given full latitude to write songs in their own style (Christine McVie would continue to serve as the other third of the band's creative outlet, while Fleetwood and John McVie historically wrote little to nothing).

Most (not quite all) of the songs on this album still get regular airplay on the radio and other outlets. "Don't Stop" of course was a huge hit in the 1992 as the official anthem of Bill Clinton's successful presidential campaign, and I think "Go Your Own Way" was in Forrest Gump. I can even remember as a kid hearing these songs on the "modern" radio station, circa 1982 or so, while Buckingham's "Never Going Back Again" was used for some children's programming segment on PBS back in the day. Even more than the previous album, Rumours became the soundtrack of a generation, not bad for a band that started life as a particularly pure vein of British blues. Of course the band around this time was experiencing quite a storm in the media and among themselves, hence the apt title of the album. That's well chronicled elsewhere and I don't have the stamina to dissect all of that.

Rumours was also a high point for the irreversibly changed Fleetwood Mac. In spite of high anticipation for 1979's double-album Tusk, it was clear the band was showing signs of overheating, like everything swirling around this album finally started to catch up with them. The 1980's are better known for Stevie Nicks' solo work than that of Fleetwood Mac and although the band was technically still "together" more than officially disbanded. Aside from 2003's Say You Will, they haven't been much of an active recording unit, though the live The Dance did wonders to resuscitate their image and they have no problem selling out arenas to this day.