Friday, July 10, 2015

5 Facts About Fleetwood Mac's Eponymous Album


1. On full page ads that ran in both Billboard and Rolling Stone magazines, Warner/Reprise's marketing team misidentified the newcomers to Fleetwood Mac, assuming the woman must be Lindsey Buckingham and the man Stevie Nicks. 


2. Perhaps not realizing what they on their hands, the label released Christine McVie's "Warm Ways" as the first single in the UK. It did not chart. While this would have been a potential single on any of the past five albums released by Fleetwood Mac, the new album also had McVie's eventual US#20 hit "Over My Head", Nicks' US#11 hit "Rhiannon", McVie's US#11 "Say You Love Me" and the timeless "Landslide", a live version of which was released in 1988 as a single.


3. After Bob Welch left Fleetwood Mac in 1974, Mick Fleetwood needed to find a new guitarist. Sound City Studios producer Keith Olsen played Fleetwood a new album he'd produced called Buckingham Nicks. Fleetwood offered Buckingham a role in the band but Buckingham refused unless his romantic and musical parter, Stevie Nicks, could also join. Fleetwood relented and three months later, with Keith Olsen co-producing, they gathered in a studio to record Fleetwood Mac.


4. The band constantly toured, winning over audiences that had come to hear "The Green Manalishi" and "Albatross". Fifteen months after its release, the eponymous Fleetwood Mac topped the Billboard album charts. An amazing accomplishment, considering no previous album had charted higher than #34 in the US and that just a year earlier, a fake Fleetwood Mac, made up of musicians hired by band manager Clifford Davis, had toured the US.


5. That same tour and success brought out tensions that resulted in the end of bassist John and Christine McVie's marriage as well as Buckingham and Nicks' relationship. Fleetwood's marriage had also broken apart. Drugs, money and alcohol added fuel to the fire. But rather than breaking up for good, Fleetwood Mac responded with Rumours, the 1977 album that would sell 40 million copies worldwide. That's eight times the sales figure of the eponymous 1975 album.



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