My Twenty-five Years In Fleetwood Mac – Mick Fleetwood, 1992 ★★½

Looking Back at "Twenty-five Years," 25 Years Later

Windsor, England is home to Great Britain’s Royal Family; half a century ago it spawned rock royalty, too. Sunday, August 13, 2017 will mark the 50^th anniversary of the debut on a Windsor stage of a blues quartet that became a pop sensation and finally a cultural institution.

Let’s jump back halfway from that auspicious day to 1992, and the publication of this scrapbook-style memoir marking the 25^th anniversary of that band, Fleetwood Mac.

Mick Fleetwood, drummer and Fleetwood Mac’s last original member, is the credited author of this coffee-table tome. It is clear he produced little more than some scrawled endnotes that overuse words like “forever” and “magic,” along with his blessings for someone else to write the main text without attribution. A fulsome array of arresting, vintage photos showcase the band at various points in their history, though this is somewhat undone by the minimal accompanying captions and too much non-chronological placement.

Whatever its failures in construction, My Twenty-five Years In Fleetwood Mac is never dull. Too much was always going on in and around the band, as the sometimes breathy text makes clear:

Great musicians were lost to madness, drugs, religious mania, jealousy, and exhaustion. At the same time, Fleetwood Mac made some of the most sublime music of its generation, sounds that swayed and inspired millions of fans and eventually reached one of the biggest audiences in history. Fleetwood Mac was the architype glamour band of the 1970s, that lost, rocket-fueled era of lusty excess and great music.

The book takes us through what were – at its 25-year point – four distinct phases of Fleetwood Mac’s existence:

In the late 1960s, they were a blues band who found themselves in the unlikely role of U. K. hitmakers, thanks to a left-field instrumental single which became a pop smash, “Albatross.” They were led by Peter Green, a. k. a. “The Green God” seen then as the next coming of Eric Clapton. Fellow guitarists Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan also sang and wrote songs, many around mystic and/or psychedelic themes. All three eventually fell victim to various forms of religious mania and/or madness, leaving the band to Fleetwood and bassist John McVie:

Racked by self-doubt, dabbling heavily in LSD, tormented by royalty statements most musicians would have killed for, Pete went to pieces. He would harangue the other musicians about becoming a charity band, playing in order to give all their money away.

By the early 1970s, the Mac had reestablished themselves as transatlantic hippies, complete with their very own English commune centered by denim-clad earth mother Christine McVie, John’s wife and a singer-pianist, who had a knack for molding simple melodies into arresting pop hooks. British audiences and pop success had moved elsewhere, but Americans filled the void. California’s Bob Welch became the first non-Brit to join the band, bringing with him more cosmic inscrutability that somehow connected with U. S. album-rock audiences. Eventually, Welch left, too.

This period was Mac’s most chaotic and perversely entertaining, especially when Fleetwood discovers his wife sleeping with one of the band’s new guitarists, Bob Weston:

…the one thing Fleetwood Mac had going for it was their audience – loyal, consistent, and ever faithful, ever sure.

Then came Big Mac of the late 1970s, a radio and chart juggernaut powered by two more Californians, studio/guitar whiz Lindsay Buckingham and wonder-witch/singer Stevie Nicks. A troubled couple, Buckingham and Nicks brought their own complex emotions into the band’s already combustible mix. Yet musically they fit in with Fleetwood and the McVies so perfectly a new fan might have thought they had been together all along. This was the version of the band with the hits, the Grammies, and the Behind-The-Music documentaries:

Fleetwood Mac as they were in their mid-1970s heyday. From left to right, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, John McVie, Christine McVie, and Lindsay Buckingham. Image from http://theroundplaceinthemiddle.com/?tag=fleetwood-mac.

As word spread around the Bay area that glamourous Fleetwood Mac was recording, the studio’s lounges began to fill up with strangers tapping razors on mirrors. It was like a constant cocktail party, with the actual musicians barely speaking to each other.

Finally, there was After Mac, which tried to make do with Buckingham’s 1987 departure by replacing him with guitarists Rick Zito and Billy Burnette. This version was short-lived, around for only one studio album, Behind The Mask, and a greatest-hits compilation, by which time Nicks had left, too.

It’s here where Twenty-Five Years concludes, just short of an American comeback powered by the use of one of its songs, “Don’t Stop,” in Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. The book misses that, but sad to say, little else, though Buckingham and Nicks would rejoin the band, as did Christine McVie after a long separation. Since 1992, there has only been two studio albums and one digital-only Extended Play in the way of new material; like so many leading rock bands of the previous century, Fleetwood Mac exists now as a jukebox act.

Enjoying the Fleetwood Mac story as I obviously do helped me work through a thin, patchy narrative. The uncredited author claims the band was already outselling The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in Europe by 1969, and that the Beatles even wrote the song “Sun King” in honor of Green. [It was certainly inspired by “Albatross;” George Harrison said as much in a 1987 interview, but the song’s subject wasn’t Green any more than Louis XIV.] Obvious errors riddle the text, such as the band’s performance at the “U. S. Festival” [umm, it was called US Festival, after the magazine]. Few songs other than the big hits garner any attention; at least one is wrongly titled.

The text keeps jumping far ahead of the photos, so that you would still be looking at photos of Kirwan while the surrounding text is already deep into the departures of those who replaced him. And the text ODs on wacky hyperbole – a bitter fight with their former manager that led him to briefly stage shows featuring an impostor band becomes “one of the most sordid and depraved episodes in the history of popular music” and “the ultimate artistic nightmare any band ever had to endure.” Kind of puts Altamont and Badfinger in their place, no?

But as annoyed as I was by the odd flights of rhetoric and the cloudiness about what exactly was happening most of the time, it was hard to be too put out. For one thing, the photographs are lovely and plentiful. For another, when the narrative does light on a particular episode at some length, the results are usually quite good.

Take for example that first Windsor show, the one that’s coming up on the big 5-0. Fleetwood details how the band came together, even without one of the players after whom the act had been named. John McVie had doubts about the idea, so “Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac Featuring Jeremy Spencer” appeared at the Windsor Jazz And Blues Festival that day with journeyman Bob Brunning playing bass on a standby basis.

Fleetwood Brun? Not a lot of potential perhaps. But the sound was good:

Fleetwood Mac as they appeared at their first gig, the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival on August 13, 1967. The band at the time constituted, from left to right, leader Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, Mick Fleetwood, and for a limited time only, Bob Brunning. Image from http://www.soundonsound.com/people/charlie-watkins. 

Liberated by Jeremy’s act, [Peter Green] had the freedom to craft globular, pulsating runs that communicated intense feeling to the audience, who in turn responded with waves of applause and cheers. Fleetwood Mac’s set only lasted twenty minutes. Halfway through, Mick Fleetwood knew he was in something ready to explode.

Three weeks after that Windsor triumph, Brunning was out and McVie was in, the first of more than two dozen personnel changes Fleetwood Mac would experience, though the only one thus far affecting the rhythm section.

The book comes with a CD, which contains two previously unreleased songs and a spoken introduction by Fleetwood at his most grandly unctuous. He really should play the Butler if they ever make a musical version of Clue. At least the songs are good, especially “You Made A Hit,” an uncommonly rocking Mac number featuring Jeremy Spencer.

Even better, the best thing by far here, is a very extensive chronology/discography of the band and its members. Given the amount of people who had been in and out of Mac by 1992, it’s quite a feat. The full-page reproductions of all the major studio album covers are a nice touch, even if they, like all the many other illustrations, are in black and white.

If you are like me and love Fleetwood Mac, there’s a lot to treasure about My Twenty-five Years. It’s a shame about the main text not being rigorous or engaging on its own, but there’s enough stickiness left in the story itself, and the way it comes across through images, to keep you flipping, which after all is what coffee-table books like this are for.