LOOKING BACK AT FLEETWOOD MAC

TWO REISSUES SHOW THAT THE BAND WAS GREAT BEFORE IT WAS FAMOUS.

- JOHN SWENSON

I’ve just recently finished reading guitarist/vocalist Walter Lure’s autobiography, To Hell and Back. Walter has a great story about his days in Johnny Thunders’s Heartbreakers and his own Waldos. Until he died in late August, you could still hear him playing with the Waldos and running periodic tributes to Johnny. But he also took some space to write about his first band, a hard-rock dance band called Bloodbath that pounded the risers in the North Bronx at the dawn of the 1970s. I had the extreme pleasure of being the vocalist and master of revels in this two-guitar maelstrom. We covered Fleetwood Mac songs that fit our concept: “Rattlesnake Shake” and “Tell Me All the Things You Do” worked especially well.

Like a lot of other blues fans, we held Fleetwood Mac, and particularly lead guitarist Peter Green, in high esteem. It’s strange to think that this band we thought so much of would seem so alien to the group the vast majority of Fleetwood Mac fans think of when the band’s brand is evoked. That would be the mid-’70s lineup fronted by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, which made two of the best-selling pop-rock albums in history, Fleetwood Mac and Rumours.

But by the time those albums were released, the band already had a rich history: nine albums and an evolving sequence of band members.

Fleetwood Mac 1969-1974 (8CD Warner Records R2 596006) collects the band’s Reprise catalog leading up to the Buckingham/Nicks era. It begins with the last record made with group founder Peter Green,