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Peter Green had replaced Eric Clapton in John Mayall’s Blues Breakers and recruited drummer Mick Fleetwood, with whom he’d played in a band called Shotgun Express with Rod Stewart. The band emerged from an insular world, where prolific, highly skilled British musicians rotated heavily among different bands whose craft, while sophisticated, failed to make them mainstream.
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This is in stark contrast to the strictness with which the band operated when they made Rumors, when “Silver Springs” (eventually one of the most well-loved Stevie Nicks songs) was cut because other members were adamant that it went off-course.īut there’s still plenty to love about all the Fleetwood Mac albums that came before they were Fleetwood Mac, the band whose drug-fueled soap opera drove them to pen a enormous number of hallmark hits of the 1970s.Īlso known as Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, this first record is a mix of blues covers and originals. Writing a hit song seemed to be an afterthought, with many tracks skewing experimental and long. Also, after Nicks and Buckingham joined the band and rabid affairs between members ensued, the albums became autobiographical and personal as the love triangles were aired out in some of their biggest hits like “Got Your Own Way” and “Dreams.” The earlier records are concerned with a different kind of craft. The distinction is between the early records’ style of album-oriented rock and the later records’ focus on singles (of which there were many, many hugely successful ones like “Rhiannon,” “Don’t Stop,” “The Chain,” and “Landslide,” to name a few).
It’s not hard to see why some would think that Fleetwood Mac is Nicks’s and Buckingham’s band if Fleetwood Mac didn’t get much attention without them, and that what precedes their tenure was only a primitive, “figuring things out” phase. The band’s compilation records endorse the idea that the pre-Nicks/Buckingham years don’t bleed into what fans know and love, with records like Vintage Years and The Original Fleetwood Mac sectioned off from the best-of albums that begin with music recorded after 1974. Why might fans of Fleetwood Mac have so little interest in the albums that predate Nicks and Buckingham? Perhaps it would be like listening to the two Doors albums recorded after Jim Morrison’s death. charts during the prolific period between the their first record in 1968 and their 1975 megahit, but received little to modest attention from American audiences, and just somewhat more today. Prior to this, Fleetwood Mac had made the U.K. Mick Fleetwood was shopping around for a guitar player when his producer Keith Olsen played him Buckingham Nicks, an acoustic, singer-songwriter album that had just flopped. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks - romantic and musical partners - joined the band in 1974. Among its many listeners, it was a common belief that Fleetwood Mac was the band’s first record. The album spent 37 weeks floating around the top ten, was the second biggest album of 1976 (behind Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive!), and the tenth biggest album of 1977.
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Its path to becoming a colossal record fixed within the pop-music canon took the better part of a year, when, propelled by hits like “Rhiannon,” it would reach number one on the Billboard charts.
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When Fleetwood Mac was released in 1975, its success was not immediate.
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