| Fleetwood Mac had been a band in name for eight years, but – excepting the nucleus of drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie – it had never been the same band for very long. So, when it was announced in early 1975 that Californian lovers Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks (themselves the makers of a flop album two years earlier) would fill the vacancy left by yet another departed guitarist-frontman, no one was fazed. Nor did anyone expect that it would change the band’s middling success, which consisted of an endless slog of college campuses and small theatres, and U.S. album sales that hovered eternally in the quarter-million range.
By 1977, this new incarnation of Fleetwood Mac would not only elevate the art of commercial pop-rock to new heights of sophistication, but also forever change the notion of what constitutes a blockbuster album.
Fleetwood Mac (1975), one of three of the band’s recently released deluxe reissues, definitively severed the band from its roots as a British neo-blues act. Under the direction of Buckingham – an exceptional songwriter, arranger and guitarist – the album unveiled a sound that epitomized ’70s American soft rock, yet also transcended it. Buckingham’s "Monday Morning" and "I’m So Afraid" unveiled his winning blend of bright folk-rock and Beach Boys harmonies. Nicks, owner of one of the most distinctively nasal voices in all of pop, contributed "Rhiannon" and "Landslide," establishing herself as the decade’s pre-eminent female hippie mystic. Singer and keyboardist Christine McVie, John’s wife and an underused presence in the band’s previous configuration, blossomed as a master of melancholy pop on "Over My Head" and "Warm Ways." The album hit No. 1.
Released in February of ’77, Rumours simply went ballistic: 31 weeks at the top of the Billboard chart, and one of the 10 best-selling albums of all time (over 30 million worldwide to date). The result of organic and drug-fuelled confidence, and the romantic tensions caused by the recent breakups of Buckingham and Nicks, the McVies, and Fleetwood and his wife, it may be, in its own subtle way, the most emotionally loaded No. 1 album this side of In Utero. The unceasing ubiquity of its hit singles – "Dreams," "Don’t Stop," "Go Your Own Way" and "You Make Loving Fun" – has done little to diminish its greatness.
Tusk (1979) is every bit as admirable an achievement, despite still being remembered in most quarters as an epic failure. Fleetwood Mac had carte blanche following Rumours, which Buckingham, in particular, responded to with unrestrained glee and mischief. A native Californian and a recent multimillionaire, he nevertheless envied the creative audacity of the British post-punk bands, who used their relative poverty and lack of commercial pressures to push and pull at the boundaries of sonic acceptability. While his bandmates presented new songs that were among their best yet, but still very much in keeping with FM’s known formula, Buckingham recorded short, frantic, ultra-linear tracks in his bathroom that alternately sounded like polished Talking Heads ("Not That Funny") and speed-hillbilly ("That’s Enough For Me"). For the title track, he recruited a 112-member university marching band and recorded their part live at L.A.’s Dodger Stadium – thus producing possibly the weirdest Top 10 single ever. Extravagantly packaged and sold at an inflated list price, Tusk sold only four million copies and was nicknamed "Lindsey’s folly" by the music industry. Much of it still sounds utterly extraordinary.
The great cautionary tale of Fleetwood Mac is that if they were a new band today, Warner Bros. likely would have dropped them long before they reached this commercial and artistic peak. But it was the mid-’70s, and a logic still prevailed at even the largest labels that good things sometimes take time to reach their potential. That’s how we got the Springsteen that made Born to Run, the Prince that made Purple Rain, and the Fleetwood Mac that made these three good-to-incredible albums. Heaven knows what kind of music we’re missing from the loss of that kind of thinking.
FLEETWOOD MAC 3/5
RUMOURS 5/5
TUSK 5/5
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