Reprise 2225
Producers: Fleetwood Mac and Keith Olsen
Track listing: Monday Morning Warm Ways / Blue Letter / Rhiannon / Over My Head / Crystal Say You Love Me / Landslide / World Turning / Sugar Daddy / I’m So Afraid
September 4, 1976
1 week
In its nearly decade-long career, Fleetwood Mac had survived numerous lineup changes while enjoying steady but unspectacular album sales. That would change, however, when the group’s co-founder and drummer Mick Fleetwood went searching for a new guitarist to replace Bob Welch in December 1974. By the New Year, Fleetwood had found not only a guitar player in Lindsey Buckingham, but also another vocalist for the band in Buckingham’s musical partner and girlfriend Stevie Nicks.
“It reminded me of how it felt when we first formed Fleetwood Mac,” says Fleetwood of the new lineup. The first incarnation of the group was formed in the summer of 1967 by British singer/guitarist Peter Green, Fleetwood, and bassist John McVie. “There were moments when we got a little lost after Peter left [in 1971 ]. We made some focused music, but we never quite had the focus until we met Stevie and Lindsey.”
The duo of Buckingham and Nicks, formerly of the San Francisco group Fritz, had recorded a self-titled album for Polydor in 1973. Fleetwood discovered them when engineer Keith Olsen played him a few cuts off Buckingham Nicks to demonstrate the sound capabilities of Sound City in Van Nuys, California. Fleetwood was impressed not only by the sound of the studio, but by Olsen and the guitar player.
The latest incarnation of Fleetwood Mac, with new members Buckingham and Nicks, recorded Fleetwood Mac at Sound City, with Olsen serving as co-producer and engineer. The new blood instantly had an effect on the band. “It changed the way we wrote,” says Fleetwood. “We all came from a blues back- ground, and Stevie and Lindsey came from a country background mixed with a little West Coast Janis Joplin stuff.”
Yet there was some tension between the band’s veterans and newcomers. “Lindsey didn’t understand the way that John and I worked,” says Fleetwood. “He had made some demos where he played the bass parts. They were good parts, but they were his parts. He was thinking that was what we were going to use. So John and Lindsey had what we call in the business a friendly musician-to-musician confrontation, and John said, ‘Hey, I’m the bass player and this is the way I’m going to play your songs. I can’t just copy what you have done.’ Lindsey very quickly I realized that we were a band and that was the way we worked.”
Once that misunderstanding was cleared up, the sessions went fairly smoothly. Fleetwood Mac was completed in three months, a flash compared to the band’s future endeavors. The album spawned three top 20 hits: Christine McVie’s “Over My Head” and “Say You Love Me” and Nicks’s “Rhiannon.” Another Nicks composition, “Crystal,” originally included on Buckingham Nicks, was rerecorded and included on Fleetwood Mac.
After 58 weeks on the chart, Fleetwood Mac knocked Frampton Come Alive! from the top spot. The album went on to sell more than 5 million copies. “It was like a pipe dream,” Fleetwood says of the success. “We would sell maybe 200,000 or 300,000 copies at the most of each album. The joke was that Warner Bros. made enough to pay the electricity bill for the east wing.” Yet Fleetwood had a feeling that the new lineup would finally make Fleetwood Mac a hit in America. “I won’t say I knew it was going to be successful because that would be out of line,” he says. “But I had a very, very strong feeling that we did something right.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of September 4, 1976
1. Fleetwood Mac, Fleetwood Mac
2. Frampton Comes Alive!, Peter Frampton
3. Spitfire, Jefferson Starship
4. Breezin’, George Benson
5. Silk Degrees, Boz Scaggs