To re-address @jldrueke’s question: Yes, I am including this one in my Christine McVie deep dive, for reasons some fans automatically know while others will learn below. That said, I’m not so sure I’d consider Bob Welch’s solo debut a truly bizarro follow-up to Rumours, as Jeremiah suggests.
Yes, I’m still insisting the alternate versions of Fleetwood Mac’s most popular albums (‘75-‘87) are worthy of individual assessment amid this deep dive into the discography of the late great Christine McVie.
When it comes to the rough-cut mirror-image of Rumours, though, many of the truly illuminating session gems are only bonus bits on the ‘Super Deluxe’ edition of this blockbuster. Fortunately for fans unwilling to splurge or incapable of spending so lavishly, those tracks are streaming as well.
Gawd, not this thing again.
I confess: My deep dive into Christine McVie’s discography that began soon after her death last December has been stalled for far too long by Rumours.
I suspect you may have some questions.
‘Wait … didn’t you just write about this album a month ago?’
Yes. Well … sort of. In a way. But also … no, not really.
‘Is that a different cover? I don’t remember Mick looking like that, or staring directly at the camera.’
Your memory serves you well. This is the ‘alternate’ version of Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled ‘75 breakthrough.
At last: success for Fleetwood Mac!
Finally my sputtering deep dive into the enduring work of the late Christine McVie has reached its crucial turning point, the classic that ushered in new hires Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham for the 10th lineup of this revolving-door talent collective, not even a decade old by the summer of ‘75, when their own self-titled ‘White Album’ debuted. With it came the longest lasting, most influential, scene-shapingly famous form of what remains an endlessly amorphous entity.
Before my slow-drip deep-dive into the career of the late Christine McVie sinks into her most famous and overly analyzed phase, starting with Fleetwood Mac’s transformative breakthrough of ‘75, I think it’s worth taking a two-years-prior detour into this barely buried treasure. Frankly, Buckingham Nicks, a highly accomplished debut that bafflingly bombed and got the duo booted from Polydor, looms almost as large in the Mac legacy as touchstones that came before or after it.
I did say at the close of my last post in this chronicle of the career of Christine McVie that the most beloved version of Fleetwood Mac was just about to emerge.
But not quite yet. First there needed to be a tour behind Heroes Are Hard to Find, their best-charting LP thus far in the States yet still a marginal success they view with some disappointment. All four members — Mick, the McVies and Bob Welch — sense an imminent shakeup.
My parents and their peers had the CBS series ‘Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’ with legend Leonard Bernstein teaching them about dead European masters. My band-geek friends and I had ‘Amadeus.’
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.
Just when I thought I was back on track with my deep dive into Christine McVie’s lengthy discography we got smacked twice with miserable attention-diverting news: first Jeff Beck departed, then David Crosby.
So, again … where were we?
Ah, yes: late ‘73, in full fracturing transition.
