Around the same time Mick Fleetwood was introduced to the work of local duo, Buckingham Nicks, who'd just been dropped by Polydor.
Not long after the band's British faction had relocated, Welch quit the band. The quartet was then helmed by their fifth and least-dazzling guitarist, the American Bob Welch.
In order to re-establish the group's flagging stateside reputation, in early 1974 Fleetwood Mac's drummer and band patriarch, Mick Fleetwood, keyboardist/singer Christine McVie, and her husband, bassist John McVie, moved from England to Los Angeles. Two years prior to recording Rumours, though, Fleetwood Mac was approximately nowhere. Anyone could find a piece of themselves within these songs of love and loss. When you make an album this big, your craft is, by default, accessibility. Records with singles that never go away tend to evoke nostalgia for the time when the music soundtracked your life in this case, you could've never owned a copy of it and still know almost every song. Setting aside the weight of history, listening to Rumours is an easy pleasure. Rumours set a template for pop with a gleaming surface that has something complicated, desperate, and dark resonating underneath. Though it was seen as punk's very inverse, Rumours has enjoyed a long trickle-down of influence starting from the alt-rock-era embrace via Billy Corgan and Courtney Love to the harmonies and choogling of Bonnie "Prince" Billy and the earthier end of Beach House. Rumours is a product of that moment and it serves as a yardstick by which we measure just how 70s the 70s were.Īnd then there's the album's influence. In 1976, there was no knowledge of AIDS, Reagan had just left the governor's manse, and people still thought of cocaine as non-addictive and strictly recreational.
#Fleetwood mac albums in order free#
As such, it plays like a reaping: a finely polished post-hippie fallout, unaware that the twilight hour of the free love era was fixing and there would be no going back. By the time it was made, the personal freedoms endowed by the social upheaval of the 60s had unspooled into unfettered hedonism. It was also a bellwether of glimmering Californian possibility, the permissiveness and entitlement of the 70s done up in heavy harmonies. The million-dollar record that took a year and untold grams to complete became a totem of 1970s excess, rock'n'roll at its most gloriously indulgent. Upon its release in 1977, it became the fastest-selling LP of all time, moving 800,000 copies per week at its height, and its success made Fleetwood Mac a cultural phenomenon. Fleetwood Mac's Rumours would never be just an album.
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