Fleetwood Mac – "Oh Well (Part 1)" (1969)

But don’t ask me what I think of you

I might not give the answer that you want me to

Fleetwood Mac, whose original members were guitarists Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer, bassist John McVie, and drummer Mick Fleetwood, was formed in 1967.  Shortly after the release of the band’s second studio album, 18-year-old Danny Kirwan joined the group, which played electric blues almost exclusively.

Peter Green left Fleetwood Mac in 1970.  The band’s manager, Clifford Davis, gave this explanation for Green’s departure:

The truth about Peter Green and how he ended up how he did is very simple.  We were touring Europe in late 1969.  When we were in Germany, Peter told me he had been invited to a party.  I knew there were going to be a lot of drugs around and I suggested that he didn’t go.  But he went anyway and I understand from him that he took what turned out to be very bad, impure LSD.  He was never the same again.

Spencer was the next to go.  He went out to buy a magazine one morning while Fleetwood Mac was on tour in the U.S. in 1971 and promptly disappeared.  It turned out that he had joined a religious cult, and he never came back.

Danny Kirwan developed an alcohol dependency and was fired by Fleetwood after freaking out during a 1972 tour of the U.S.

(Not entirely true!)

The band soldiered on with replacement guitarists Bob Welch and Bob Weston.  But during the group’s 1973 U.S. tour, Fleetwood found out that Weston was having an affair with his wife, Jenny Boyd Fleetwood, whose sister Pattie was married to George Harrison, then to Eric Clapton.  Weston got booted and the 1973 tour was cancelled.  

If my math is right, that’s three American tours and three lost guitarists.  (You would have thought that the band would have learned from previous experience and given up on touring the U.S., but they didn’t).  

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Fleetwood Mac got off to a strong start in the UK – their first three albums made the top ten, and “Albatross” was a #1 single in 1968.

But the group’s records sold very poorly in the U.S.  None of the Green-Spencer-Kirwan albums climbed higher than #69 on the American album charts, and Fleetwood Mac never had a top 40 single.

That’s partly because Fleetwood Mac didn’t seem all that interested in commercial success.  (They all had started out as blues purists, and blues purists don’t sell a lot of records in this country.)

Another problem might have been a certain inconsistency in style – it was hard to pin down Fleetwood Mac.  (The songs Green wrote didn’t sound much like the songs Spencer wrote, which were quite different from the songs Kirwan or Bob Welch wrote.)

I once owned three of Fleetwood Mac’s early albums.  I had to listen to them quite a few times before I started to get into them.  (Obviously most Americans weren’t as patient as I was.)

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Later, Fleetwood Mac revamped their lineup, adding guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and his girlfriend, singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks, and giving Christine McVie – John McVie’s wife – a more prominent role in the group.

The “new” Fleetwood Mac’s music couldn’t have been more different than that featured on the group’s early albums – original Coca-Cola and new Coke were a lot more alike than the original Fleetwood Mac and the new Fleetwood Mac.  The change in direction was a big hit with the public, and Fleetwood Mac became one of the most successful recording artists in the world.

You certainly can’t say the new Fleetwood Mac is underrated.  But I think the old Fleetwood Mac was – not as underrated as many of the other underrated artists featured previously in this year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days,” but underrated nonetheless.

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Click here to listen to “Oh Well (Part 1),” which is a major stick of dynamite.

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