I can understand why even ardent Fleetwood Mac fans find it difficult to say they genuinely like this ninth album, the fourth and last to feature Bob Welch — and the first recorded as a quartet, since Bob Weston got the boot after boinking Jenny Boyd. She was Mick’s wife at the time, after all.
They wouldn’t be a foursome again for almost 30 years, until this ever-mutating musical monster cut ‘Say You Will’ in 2003. That time, a few years after FM’s blockbuster quintet reunited for all of the touring money, they reentered the studio without the subject of this ongoing deep dive: Christine McVie.
What’s so unappealing about Heroes Are Hard to Find apart from yet another unwanted glance at Fleetwood’s rib cage?
I think it’s a case of identity crisis: this record has no clue what it wants to be.
In retrospect, that seems unavoidably inevitable, given how the group had just temporarily disbanded, then reteamed after Welch lured them to L.A. despite having one foot out the door, eager to shed the pressures of keeping this ship afloat with little success to show for it.
Half of Heroes is a very good start to what might’ve been a memorable McVie solo album, capped by the horn-zapped title track and one of her loveliest pieces, ‘Come a Little Bit Closer,’ a stately high point enlivened by pedal steel from Pete Kleinow of the Flying Burrito Brothers. The slow burn of ‘Prove Your Love’ and the rollicking rocker ‘Bad Loser’ further indicate how much impactful greatness is about to burst out of Christine.
But Welch’s half is hit-and-miss, split between almost-catchy uptempo bits and rarely-intoxicating prog-adjacent grooves, with Side 2’s ‘Born Enchanter’ and the ‘Albatross’ update ‘Safe Harbour’ faring better than Side 1’s meandering moods. Still possessing talent to burn, he nonetheless sounds enervated much of the time.
For all the talk of pre-‘75 transitions in this band’s history — often as if the entirety of the five preceding years were one long drought yielding measly morsels — THIS is that true midway point, verging on inflection.
Fleetwood Mac as anyone ever understood it was over.
The most beloved version was just about to emerge.
One more thought: If you’re looking for increasingly vivid clues that Christine’s rocky marriage to John McVie is really starting to falter — the causes and fallout of which informs her most meaningful material, still ahead on the next two smash LPs — you needn’t search much further than the title cut’s opening verses.