Fleetwood Mac's Period of Transition..And Its Guardian Angel

Two things recently pushed me towards a return to the Mac these days. One was, after moving a couple of months ago, the first CDs I could get my hands on working in one of the rooms was this home-made box set of Fleetwood Mac I had made a couple of years ago. It was a great rush sitting through a disc running through the California Mac glory years. Say what you will about the Lindsey Buckingham-led band what you will, but they sure knew how to write and arrange tunes. Hearing the contributions of Buckingham to the standard Christine McVie ballad alone convinced me that Liddy Buck is staying underrated as hell. But another disc caught even more of my attention. It is the basis of the One Buck Record of the day. Subtitled 'A Period Of Transition', it covers the troubled middle years in between the distinct Peter Green-led blues phase of the Mac and the mainstream pop phase following the recruitment of Nicks & Buckingham. I had forgotten how much I liked that compilation of tunes from Kiln House through Heroes Are Hard To Find. The other thing that really pushed me to give this another look was a chat with an old friend from college around Christmas who had just gotten introduced recently to these often 'lost' years via a studio compilation. So I polished off A Period of Transition and that's what you get here. Polishing off in this case means tweaking the sequencing and making one or two additions or substitutions to the line-up. For some songs I used the single versions to better keep the momentum going. 

Selection of tracks is strictly personal. It does include some of their best known songs from the period, including Bob Welsh's first take on "Sentimental Lady". But really, what A Period Of Transition is mostly about is the genius of Danny Kirwan. Kirwan was the Mac's guardian and guiding angel through these troubled times, even if Bob Welch held out longer. But the creative genius and the greatest moments of this period of transition were almost all Kirwan's. So Danny the boy wonder gets most of the juiciest moments here, as he should. Nine tracks here, almost half, are Kirwan's, including what might be Fleetwood Mac's most beautiful song, "Dust", killer outtake "Trinity", the spellbinding "Woman Of A 1.000 Years" and "Sands Of Time" and hard rocker "Jewel-Eyed Judy", which opens proceedings. Seriously, listen to "Dust", all two and a half minutes of it. Has there ever been a more beautiful tremolo guitar? Kirwan stole the words from First World War poet Rupert Brooke (and yes, he outright stole them, no "adapted from..." stuff), but the way he sings them, ably assisted by McVie on ghostly backing vocals..goosebumps, man. 

A Period Of Transition of course also shows the immense variety of those middle years. There is only one remnant of the tail end of the Jeremy Spencer era, "I Am The Rock" is one of his better Rock'n'Roll/Buddy Holly parodies/homages/thefts. Spencer's rock'n'roll pastiches had outlived their usefulness once Green left and most of the standard blues with him, not to mention that now with Kirwan they actually had someone who could write uptempo songs. But yeah, let's have one reminder of Spencer's particular brand of Fleetwood Mac on there. The compilation also makes place for one Dave Walker, shortlived show man the band hired to have a traditional front man, before deciding that finally that's not what they wanted. He's remembered only for contributing a lackluster version of "(I'm A) Roadrunner to Penguin, but the real highlight of his short tenure was his other song, "The Derelict", which sees the Mac dipping a toe into country rock, and doing it surprisingly well. 

Christine McVie is represented with some of her best and sprightliest moments, including the horn-driven "Heroes Are Hard To Find", "Remember Me" and "Dissatisfied". I mostly stuck with uptempo songs for McVie because I always considered that her sweet spot in the Mac, when her pure ballads could sometimes wander into sticky, even yawnworthy territory. "Did You Ever Love Me" widens the palette of the middle Mac even more with its calypso elements. The Mac tried a bit of everything during these years, and did almost all of it pretty well. 

I was ready to say that Bob Welch got the short end of the stick here, since I'm not a huge fan of Bob's jazz fusion noodlings, even going so far as to call him Boring Bob behind his back, but I find that with three lead vocals and an (almost) instrumental to his name he isn't as underrepresented as I would have thought when I started compiling. "The Ghost" off the secret classic Bare Trees was a late addition to the line-up, possibly my favorite Welsh Mac track. 

So, 21 tracks and 75 minutes of the finest the Mac had to offer between 1970 and 1974. If you're familiar with this, have a nice stroll down memory lane. If you're not, hidden treasures await you. Even during some of their most troubled times - too long to recount here, but there's always Wikipedia - they often were able to produce wonderful music and A Period Of Transition goes a long way to proving that.