Fleetwood Mac's almost forgotten masterpiece...fully (master) pieced together

That's right, I'm not quite done with the middle-period Mac (and not with David Lynch either, but that's another matter...stay tuned), so here what is easily the best album of those uncertain middle years I recently covered. And yet, and yet, Bare Trees could have been better, pushing the album from really good into greatness territory. But egos and band politics prevented that from happening, years before the Lindsey & Stevie soap opera started. Those things were always in play in the Mac, fitting for a band who had already lost two guitar players, including the founder of the band, under odd circumstances and were just about to lose a third one (and soon afterwards a fourth, and then a fifth). If you think about it, being a guitar player in Fleetwod Mac is like being a drummer in Spinal Tap. With less early and odd deaths, thankfully, but still, the band's penchant from 1969 onwards for losing their guitar players in rapid and often utterly weird fashion was quite the sight: drug-related burn out, being recruited to a religious sect while going out to buy a magazine, fired for being a drunken asshole one too many times, fired for cuckolding the drummer, quit due to the proverbial musical differences. If you look at the list only two of these would seem like normal circumstances, and that's already relative due to being in a rock'n'roll context. I guess It's fine then that the band proudly upheld their tradition, when Lindsey Buckingham got fired in 2018 for smirking. But I digress.

Back to Bare Trees, masterpiece of middle period Mac, yet sabotaged for no good reason. What am I talking about? "Trinity", that is what I'm talking about. If you downloaded A Period Of Transition then you've already heard this outtake from Bare Trees: Great, memorable melody, awesome guitar riffs, typically emotive vocal from Danny Kirwan. So, with all the qualites that the track has, why wasn't it on the album? It's pure conjuncture, and no one will probably readily admit to it, but I think petty politics got in the way of making the album better. Unlike the Rumours scenario and the controversial - at least to Stevie Nicks - decision to leave off "Silver Springs", this wasn't a question of time constraints and exceeding vinyl length. As a matter of fact, Bare Trees' original LP release showed a weird imbalance, with side b being more than five minutes longer than side a. Guess which great four-minute-and-change track could have thus found a place on the a-side? 

Danny Kirwan was firing on all cylinders going into the Bare Trees sessions, and the record stands as the best testament to his talents. I've already talked about the brillance of "Dust" in my Period Of Transition write-up, but that's not to discount the beauty of "Child Of Mine", the beautiful reverie of "Sunny Side Of Heaven", the driving title track or "Danny's Chant" which starts with a honest to goodness heavy metal riff before settling into a more relaxed groove and Kirwan's wordless vocalizing.  

What's more, the other two composing members of Fleetwood Mac more than held up their part of the bargain. Bob Welch contributes what I personally think is his best Mac song, "The Ghost" and "Sentimental Lady", which is less maudlin then the full soft rock remake he cut as a solo single a couple of years later. Cristine McVie also brought two sprightly, lovely songs to the sessions, so that even when the number of their contributions was dwarfed by Kirwan's, the quality wasn't. 

Add to all these "Trinity" and you've got a small masterpiece by itself. And yet, for the band, something didn't add up, notably Kirwan's writing credits. Having already half of the album's songs to himself, the inclusion of "Trinity" would have given him six and essentially made the album look like a Kirwan solo venture with occasional cameos from Chistine McVie and Bob Welsh. I think this is the single reason why the song was kept off the album. What makes this especially hard to accept is that while a great song lay dormant in the vaults for twenty years, Mick Fleetwood had no problem 'redressing the balance' by including what is essentially a stoner's humour one-note joke, disguising his voice to impersonate an old lady reciting poetry, instead of having the real Mrs. Scarott reading her poem which probably would have only been marginally better. Either way, thanks, Mick, but no thanks. So, this version of Bare Trees obviously gets rid of Mick's 'Mrs. Scarott' crap that never should have made the album and reinstates "Trinity" to its rightful place. 

Bare Trees was the end for Danny Kirwan in Fleetwood Mac, as he was, as mentioned above, being fired for being a drunk and belligerent asshole one too many times, and unfortunately it was also the end for him as a composer of great songs. For whatever reasons - his encroacing alcoholism, the lack of competition, real and imagined, from within the Mac - his solo albums never came close to aspiring to the quality of compositions he did for Fleetwood Mac, often choosing much simpler strutures and banal lyrics. So let this reconfigured version of Bare Trees then stand as the testimonial to Danny Kirwan's underappreciated genius, more than ably assisted by the rest of the band. The trees on the cover might be bare, but the Mac's treasure trove of good songs was overflowing here.

Meanwhile, somewhere on the West Coast...

While Fleetwood Mac were busy transitioning from one type of band to another to another to another, across the big pond and  continent inbetween two young aspiring musicians were trying to make ends meet. Stephanie, dite Stevie, Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, were trying to make a living on music, something that had hit something of a snag. After leaving Bay area bar band Fritz who for years had try to break through but never did, Nicks and Buckingham in the early 70s were not quite ready to take over the music world. Nicks famously worked as a cocktail waitress and a cleaning woman, while Buckingham infamously stayed at home honing his guitar-playing skills. And also, uh, getting stoned on eleven pounds of opiated hash with other music friends/hanger ons/stoners, including a pre-fame Warren Zevon. Like Warren, he went out on the road with Don Everly, albeit on a short club tour. Like Nicks, he finally had to join the working population before Fleetwood Mac came calling, working in a PR Agency. 

But in between these periods of odd jobs and busy-doing-nothing, there was Buckingham Nicks. Nicks had met enginer Keith Olsen in 1971 while cleaning his house, and with him the band cut their album for Polydor. Assisting Olsen was Richard Dashut, one of the architects of the California Mac sound later in the decade. Drums were manned by Elvis' backing band member Ronnie Tutt and pro's pro Jim Keltner, future Warren Zevon collaborators Jorge Calderon (percussion) and studio pro Waddy Wachtel (guitar) filled out the sound. Buckingham Nicks is a lush-sounding album that presages a lot of the million-sellers Fleetwood Mac would produce just a couple years later. But in 1973, with the record being more or less completely ignored by the Polydor PR team, no one would buy an album featuring virtual unknowns Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, despite the added attraction of Stevie being topless on the cover. So Polydor quickly deleted Buckingham Nicks from their catalogue. 

You would think considering the success of Fleetwood Mac and Nicks solo that Buckingham Nicks never got officially rereleased. Weird from Polydor that as soon as Fleetwood Mac or at least Rumours became hits they wouldn't run out to release this. And then for years Lindsey talked about the possibility of officially releasing it, giving it its first digital release, but alas...and considering the terms on which Buckingham and Nicks left things between them a couple of years ago, I think there is little hope that we will ever get an official release from this. The version I have is, I believe, a high-quality vinyl rip. 

This is a carefully curated version of Buckingham Nicks. You can get a bunch more of periphelia from places like Paul's Albums That Should Exist blog, but not every outtake is worth hearing, or hearing more than once. So for this edition I kept only the best and best-sounding outtakes/demos, on par with the album itself. Basically you won't hear a difference when the album segues from closing track "Frozen Love" into first outtake "Garbo". On top of the five top outtakes you'll also get five live tracks from a concert in Tuscaloosa, one of the last to feature Buckingham Nicks under that banner after they had already joined the Mac and wrapped up contractual obligations. They run through early versions of "Monday Morning", "I Don't Wanna Know" and "Blue Letter", plus another unreleased Buckingham original, "Heartbreaker" and the only mini-classic to come out of this album, the propulsive "Don't Let Me Down Again". For an album which sold, like, a couple of hundred copies, it must have at least ended up in the hands of some musicians, yielding cover versions of that song from Richard Torrance and Eureka (coming up on an All Pearls, No Swine comp in a couple of weeks) and Rusty Wier (probably also coming up in some form on this blog in the near future).  

Oh well, if you have some love for the Cal Mac and the Buckingham Nicks duo, you owe it to yourself to check this out. Liddy Buck has two instrumental fingerpicking showpieces, and generally speaking these songs are about as well constructed as most of their Mac stuff. Buckingham Nicks deserves better than being a half-forgotten juvenilia curiosity, with this version of the album hopefully doing its humble part to remedy that situation.

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, 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. 

Big Macs? That depends on who's cooking them...

Tribute albums by various artists are notoriously difficult to get right. Seeing how every artist is more or less left to their own devices, there is no unifying concept other than the songs itself. Maybe the sound and style of the original artist, but that wields its own set of problems, namely : if you ape that sound or style too closely, what is even the point ? Many a tribute compilation has slid into second-rate karaoke like that. And then there is the problem of variety. Deviating from the original’s template can bring variety and true re-imaginings of the originals, but is a buying audience even willing to have that in spades ? After all, we buy the tribute album to get songs that we know and love, preferably in versions we can recognize as being those beloved songs. So, subtle tweaks and variations are probably a good idea, but be too radical in your reworking and the exercise – at least to a lot of listeners – loses its purpose. Be too close to the orginals, when you can easily have those instead, and it leads to a different kind of pointlessness.

Only a few compilations have gotten this right, and those paying tribute to Fleetwood Mac aren’t among them. Legacy – A Tribute To Fleetwood Mac's Rumours is a case of artists being too reverential to the originals and slipping into second-rate karaoke. It doesn’t help that the roster is a murderer’s row of middle of the road mainstream artists, bordering on adult contemporary mainstays, that more or less exemplify mainstream pop rock radio in the mid-90s. Put unimaginative karaoke in the hands of these folks, and it’s a total snoozefest. A second compilation, from which my version borrows its title and most of its tracks has a much higher hit rate, probably due to it coming out about fifteen years later and being done by a more diverse roster of artists, including a who's who of hip indie artists, from Antony and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy to St. Vincent and Tame Impala. It does get very heavy on electronics at times, and some songs from the original comp went too heavy into re-make/re-model-territory for my personal taste, but the keepers really are keepers. Just Tell Me That You Want Me also had – as a nod to tradition, maybe? - some inclusions of old warhorses on the artist roster that left me baffled (Billy Gibbons?), but I kept Marianne Faithful's version of “Angel” and the Lee Ranaldo/J.Mascis collaboration on “Albatross”.

                                When none of the band or artist pictures talk to you...

So, all in all, I retained about two thirds of the original Just Tell Me That You Want Me : A Tribute To Fleetwood Mac comp, added a mere two tracks from the aforementioned Legacy (“Second Hand News” from the now all-but-forgotten Tonic and Jewel's “You Make Loving Fun”) and then added two other Mac covers I had lying around. One is the excellent version of "Dreams" by Whiskeytown, circa Stranger's Almanac. Plus a rowdy punk version of "Go Your Own Way" by Seaweed to close out proceedings. This leaves us with an album whose more electronic-based numbers give it a fresher edge, while being more balanced and a little more kick ass with the contributions from the 1990s roster.

Say what you will (ha!) about the Mac after Buckingham and Nicks joined, but they sure as hell had the songs with which you can't argue. This One Buck records version of Just Tell Me That You Want Me : A Tribute To Fleetwood Mac will remind you of what was great about that run, in a number of different voices and styles.

So, go and tell me that you want 'em....

...but no one would listen, he walked a thin line.

Tusk probably wasn't what the millions and millions of people who bought Rumours were hoping for, and it seems fair to say that about 4/5th of the band might've felt the same way. Now that its reputation has been restored, the story within Fleetwood Mac is that they were a hundred percent on board with Lindsey Buckingham's weird experiments all along. But that isn't true. When Tusk didn't come close to making the numbers Rumours did (and how could it have?), the rest of the group was quick to put the blame on Buckingham's folly, then urged him for the follow-up Mirage to please go back to writing nice, conventional (or at least conventional-ish) pop songs which he resigned himself to. But during the lead-up to Tusk, while the rest of the Mac were relatively risk-averse and the two lady songwriters plowed their respective fields of established songwriting, coke fiend Liddy Buck heard something different, something new. We don't know for sure what post-punk and new wave records he listened to, if any, but Buckingham was the only one not to be complacent in their multi-million SoCal soft rock paradise. There's something else, something maniacal, that wanted out. 

So, what if the band and the label had panicked a little more and a little earlier? What if their request to Lindsey to go back to writing 'normal' songs came in the middle of the recording for what would become Tusk? What if, to appease Buckingham, the label promised him that none of his work so far would be lost and that they would bring these recordings out as his first solo album, no questions asked? And what, yeah, what if Buckingham had actually agreed to this? 

Then we might've ended up with something like Not That Funny. You could make a point that Tusk needed Buckingham's crazy little vignettes to balance the stately, typically elegant balladry from Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks, but there was still an enormous  whiplash going from Buckingham's songs to everyone else's. They might be better served, I thought, by being put together to form Liddy Buck's own little madcap adventure. Enter Not That Funny. 

Not That Funny isn't simply the Tusk tracks all thrown together, none of the tracks as such were on the Tusk album. For almost all tracks I preferred the rougher demo versions sourced from the Tusk box set. If we imagine Buckingham going all DIY /punk /new wave on our asses, it would make sense to keep some of the edges that the band would then sand off as much as possible. So I tried to keep the big, sometimes cheesy-sounding synths, the akward drums or in the case of "That's Enough For Me" his trademark fingerpicking in as raw a state as possible. So, tracks 1 - 9 are alternate versions, track ten and eleven are the remixed single versions. 

A word on the two 'new' songs: "Out On The Road" with its near wordless vocalising is an early version of "That's Enough For Me", but really different enough to stand as its own track. And "Let The Fall Wind Blow" is a very early version of "That's All For Everyone", but in reality it is an almost completely different song with entirely different lyrics and major musical differences. It's also an interesting look into Buckingham's psyche. In this early form "Fall Wind" is still very much in the Rumours vein, a song about being left and feeling terrible and vulnerable. That last part especially comes out very clearly ("don't let 'em know...don't let it show"), whereas the new lyrics for "That's All For Everyone" have no trace of this, or really anything particularly personal. Maybe Buckingam's experiments would have fallen on more graceful and voluntary ears if he kept that kind of emotional content. His songs always seemed to keep you at a distance, which is of course quite the opposite of what Stevie Nicks' songs were about. And we know how that dichotomy turned out. 

Lindsey Buckingham's solo work probably deserved better than the attention it received. Maybe Not That Funny wll do its very small part to get people to tune into his very peculiar way of seeing things, again. And even if it doesn't reach such lofty goals, it is above else an interesting listen. And now, ladies and gentlemen, Liddy Buck...