Wild Fleetwood Mac in the 70s

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-631-8
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

Reihe: Decades

Music fans tend to divide into two camps at the mention of Fleetwood Mac - those who think of the multi-million-selling five-piece that formed in the mid-1970s and released the biggest selling album of all time; and those who adopt a self-appointed 'cooler' stance, preferring the late-sixties blues band fronted by the virtuosic guitarist Peter Green. But that's not the whole story. Between May 1970, when Green left his own band to be replaced by the bass player's wife, to the beginning of 1975, when Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac, there were five years of complete turmoil. One by one, talented musicians such as Jeremy Spencer, Danny Kirwan, Bob Weston and Bob Welch joined and left Fleetwood Mac.
While it's impossible to ignore the skill and longevity such classic songs as 'Rhiannon', 'Don't Stop', Go Your Own Way', 'Sara', and 'The Chain' from Fleetwood Mac, Rumours and Tusk, there are an equal number of half-forgotten classic songs from the first half of the 1970s that have been overlooked. Here, then, is the story of Fleetwood Mac in the 1970s - the music, the people, the tours, the rumours, the failures and the successes.
Andrew Wild is an experienced writer, music collector and film buff with many books to his name including recent publications about Queen, Pink Floyd, Dire Straits and Crosby, Stills and Nash. His comprehensive study of every song recorded and performed by the Beatles between 1957 and 1970 was published by Sonicbond in 2019. He lives in Rainow, Cheshire, UK.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wild, Andrew

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Prelude 1967-1969: Coming Your Way

At the beginning of 1970, Fleetwood Mac had existed for two and a half years. They were founded in London in July 1967 by guitarist Peter Green and drummer Mick Fleetwood.

Green had come to rapid prominence in the influential British blues band John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Before joining Mayall, Green had worked with Mick Fleetwood in two short-lived groups in early 1966: Peter B’s Looners and Shotgun Express. He hooked up with Mayall in July that year, aged just nineteen, replacing Eric Clapton, who had just formed Cream. Green’s playing was less aggressive than Clapton’s but otherwise equal in every respect. And at times, better.

The Bluesbreakers line-up at that time was Mayall, Green, drummer Hughie Flint, and bassist John McVie. McVie had joined Mayall, aged seventeen, in 1963. Flint was replaced by Aynsley Dunbar in September 1966 and this line-up recorded the album A Hard Road, released in February 1967. Green’s instrumental, ‘The Supernatural’, is a charged, emotional showcase for his significant skills as a blues guitarist and a template for his subsequent work with Fleetwood Mac. Green’s tone and control on ‘Someday After A While (You’ll Be Sorry)’ is as good as anything Eric Clapton performed with Mayall or anyone else. The obscure B-side, ‘Out of Reach’, sung by Green, is better still: a magnificent, despondent blues classic with a tortured vocal and icy, reverberant guitar tone. Both A Hard Road and its predecessor Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton, achieved top ten chart placings in the UK.

Dunbar left in April 1967, and nineteen-year-old Mick Fleetwood occupied the drum stool for around six weeks in mid-April and May. A number of live recordings of Mayall’s band were made between 1 February and 5 May 1967 at Brixton’s Ram Jam, Hampstead’s Klooks Kleek and Soho’s Marquee, and some of these were released in 2016 as Live in 1967. Although exact recording dates and the extent of Fleetwood’s precise tenure with Mayall’s band cannot be determined, these might include the earliest available recordings of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie playing together.

The genesis of Fleetwood Mac can be definitively pinpointed to 19 April 1967, when Green, McVie and Fleetwood recorded two songs at the Decca Studios in West Hampstead. The session was a gift from John Mayall and followed on from the recording of a new Bluesbreakers single: ‘Double Trouble’ b/w ‘It Hurts Me Too’, released on 2 June.

‘Mayall had bought Greenie a few hours of studio time as a birthday gift so that he could record some songs he had written’, Mick Fleetwood says, although Green had celebrated his twentieth birthday the previous October. ‘We were recorded by Gus Dudgeon, the Decca house engineer who went on to become extremely famous for his work with Elton John.’

The instrumental, ‘Fleetwood Mac’, was named for Fleetwood and McVie. The other song recorded was the astounding ‘First Train Home’. Fleetwood was sacked by Mayall in May 1967. Green left a few weeks later, on 15 June 1967, hooking up once more with Mick Fleetwood. Fleetwood said later:

A few weeks after I’d been ejected from the Bluesbreakers, Peter Green gave in his notice. He’d had enough. His initial plans didn’t involve forming a new band, but his agency persuaded him and he came round to see me… and between us, we got Fleetwood Mac together. At that time, we had no manager, so we did everything ourselves – got the van and equipment sorted out – and Peter did all the negotiation with Blue Horizon Records.

John McVie was not prepared to risk his weekly income; therefore Bob Brunning was the band’s first bass player.

‘I answered an ad in the Melody Maker for a bass player’, he recalled later, ‘and got the job’.

Brunning had recorded three singles with Five’s Company. Other bass players known to have applied, include Dave Ambrose (who’d played with Green and Fleetwood in Shotgun Express), future Family and Blind Faith bassist, Ric Grech (who rehearsed a few times with the band but declined to join), and Bruce Thomas, later of Elvis Costello and the Attractions.

Fleetwood Mac signed with Mike Vernon’s Blue Horizon record label. Vernon had produced John Mayall’s recent albums and the first recordings by a young David Bowie. Uncertain about his skills as a frontman, Green wanted to recruit a second guitarist in Fleetwood Mac to divert some of the spotlight away from him. Nineteen-year-old, Jeremy Spencer, was poached from a band called the Levi Set Blues Band.

In 2015, Tim Sommer of The Observer memorably described Spencer as ‘an elfin devotee of amphetamine rockabilly whose persona seems to presage Dr. Feelgood’.

Green and Vernon had met Spencer during Green’s last days with John Mayall, as Spencer recalls:

In early spring of 1967, the Levi Set – consisting of John Charles on bass, his brother Ian on drums and myself on guitar – received a surprise announcement from a friend, Phil Smith, that we were to be auditioned by none other than Mike Vernon. Phil had written in answer to an advertisement in Melody Maker which said that Mike Vernon was to be scouting the British Isles for blues talent and to contact him if anyone was interested or knew of a band or musicians who would fit the bill. Phil told him about this little fellow in Lichfield who played and sang like Elmore James. Mike travelled up to Wall – a tiny village outside Lichfield – where we had set up in the local hall. We did a thirty-minute set, and Mike was impressed and enthusiastic. He returned a couple of weeks later with a tape recorder to get some of our stuff down. Mike told me that Peter Green was quitting John Mayall in order to form his own band and wanted to find another guitarist. So he arranged for us to play for half an hour between the sets of an upcoming John Mayall gig at Birmingham’s Le Metro club (11 June 1967) so that Pete could see and hear me play. I walked up to Peter and introduced myself: well, I was about to introduce myself. He said ‘Jeremy? Jeremy Spencer?’ before I said anything. ‘Yes’, I said. ‘Do you listen to Elmore James?’ He said, ‘Yes, all the time. Do you listen to B. B. King?’. I said, ‘Yes’, and we chatted until it came time for their set. The Levi Set played for about half an hour (between Mayall’s sets) and Peter played harmonica on the first number: ‘Dust My Broom’. After their second set, Pete asked if I wanted a drink, and we stood by the bar, where he talked as though I was already in the band! He was saying stuff like, ‘Well, you can do a couple of Elmore things and then I do a couple of BB’s and so on like that…’. I finally said, ‘Are you serious? Do you like what I play?’. He said that I was the first guitarist that made him smile since Hendrix! Can you believe it? Then he showed me a page that he had written in his notebook while on his way up to Birmingham. It was like a prayer that said something like, ‘I can’t go on with this music like it is. Please have Jeremy be good, please have him be good’.

‘Mick and I went to see Jeremy play one night’, Peter Green recalled years later, ‘and asked him to join us’.

The Green-Fleetwood-Spencer-Brunning line-up made its debut on 13 August 1967 at the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival. They were billed as ‘Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, featuring Jeremy Spencer’. According to Spencer, Green chose to call his band Fleetwood Mac because he expected McVie to join up before long and that, in the longer term, he could leave and they would still have their names as part of the band’s moniker. John McVie was in attendance at Windsor: John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers were on the bill and McVie watched Fleetwood Mac’s set from the side of the stage.

‘We knew he was there’, Mick Fleetwood recalls. ‘In fact, to me it felt like we were auditioning for him. It was the moment that John more or less decided to join us.’

And that wasn’t all. Also appearing at the festival were Cream featuring Eric Clapton, and Birmingham blues band Chicken Shack, who had a soulful vocalist and piano player called Christine Perfect. Christine remembered in Pete Frame’s Rock Family Trees in 1979:

Mike Vernon wanted to sign (Chicken Shack) to Blue Horizon, but thought they needed a pianist. So I joined as pianist and alternate vocalist (usually when Stan needed to catch his breath). I’d moved down to London because I thought I’d find a lot more fun down there; I certainly had no aspirations as a musician at that time – in fact, I’d forgotten all about it. But all of a sudden, I found myself listening to a pile of Freddie King records, trying to pick up what I could of his piano player’s (Sonny Thompson’s) style. Then we went off and did five sets a night at the Star Club in Hamburg for a month before making our British debut at the Windsor Festival in August 1967… which is where I first ran into Fleetwood Mac.

Bob Brunning played a handful of gigs with Fleetwood Mac before John McVie decided his future lay with Green and Fleetwood, finally joining in September 1967. He told Record World:

I thought that Mayall was getting too jazzy, after he brought about three horns in. We were doing a gig in Norwich, and we...