THE READING ROOM: New Fleetwood Mac Book Tells Story Beyond ‘Rumours’

For millions of fans who bought their eponymous 1975 album and their 1977 Rumours, the only Fleetwood Mac they’ll ever know was the band that churned out light rock hits. They’ll know it was fronted by guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks, a dysfunctional couple that fueled, well, rumors about their on-again, off-again romance. Many of those fans never knew—and perhaps didn’t stop dancing long enough to “Monday Morning” or “Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow”—that guitarist Peter Green founded Fleetwood Mac in 1967 and that it was originally a blues band. Among those who know that history, there are still conversations about which of the band’s incarnations was the best Fleetwood Mac and which is their best album: Then Play On, Kiln House, Mystery to Me, Bare Trees.

Now, music journalist Mark Blake — who’s written about Queen, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin — gives us the most complete history of the many ups and downs, twists and turns in Fleetwood Mac’s story. Dreams: The Many Lives of Fleetwood Mac (Pegasus/Simon & Schuster; October 1, 2024) draws on interviews with band members Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, the late Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, and the late Peter Green. Blake proceeds chronologically through the history of the band from its earliest days in 1967 through its monumental successes with 1975’s Fleetwood Mac and 1977’s Rumours, to its demise in 2003, after Christine McVie’s death. He weaves mini-biographies of the band’s many members with extensive album-by-album and song-by-song analyses to produce an entertaining, if overstuffed and plodding, portrait of the band’s history that fans of any incarnation will appreciate.

Virtuoso guitarist Peter Green left his short-lived stay with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers – the band that kickstarted the careers of Green, Eric Clapton, Mick Taylor, and Mick Fleetwood, among others — to start Fleetwood Mac. He soon asked Mick Fleetwood and John McVie to join the band — though McVie succeeded the band’s original bassist, Bob Brunning, who left to join the British blues band Savoy Brown. According to Blake, “Green was arguably the greatest guitarist of his generation, and then he wasn’t. But he didn’t die young or fade into commercial obsolescence; he became ill, rejected the music business for a long time, and never quite found his way back.” Those early Fleetwood Mac albums are marked by Green’s precise, never-waste-a-note playing. As Blake writes of Green, he was an “instinctive musician who eschewed the flash and braggadocio of some of his contemporaries. Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Ten Years After’s Alvin Lee ushered in the era of the lightning-fingered guitar god, but Green condemned the craze for what he called, ‘7,541 notes a minute’.”

In some ways, the history of Fleetwood Mac is the history of its lead guitarists, each producing a distinctive sound that defines the band’s albums. Jeremy Spencer joined for a very short time in the late 1960s and wrote three songs on the band’s first album Dog and Dustbin. Spencer departed after their fourth album, Kiln House. In the meantime, Danny Kirwan joined the band and contributed some of the group’s most memorable grooves.

Writes Blake, “Danny and Peter gelled so well. Danny had that very precise, piercing vibrato – a unique sound. Christine was so enamoured she recorded Kirwan’s song ‘When You Say’ for her 1970 solo LP, with Danny arranging the strings. Peter Green later said Fleetwood Mac’s number-one hit ‘Albatross’ wouldn’t have ‘been possible without Danny.’ … Danny was a fantastic musician and a fantastic writer.’”

Guitarist Bob Welch wrote and played on four albums, including what would become “Sentimental Lady,” which appeared on Future Games. Mick Fleetwood told Blake, “‘People forget. Bob became part of a band that could have drifted into oblivion and was hugely important in keeping us going.’” Even so, the albums that Fleetwood Mac made in the early 1970s, as Blake points out, languished in bins in used record shops. Fleetwood Mac receded from view until Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined in ’75.

The Nicks and Buckingham incarnation of the band, of course, won the hearts of millions with their songwriting and delivery, and their stage shows. The pair drove the mystic songwriting, the melancholy tunes of regret, and the angry rock fueled by breakups and drugs.

As Blake observes, “Listening to Fleetwood Mac’s previous albums, Stevie spotted a common thread: mysticism. She traced a line from ‘Oh Well’ to ‘Woman of 1000 Years’ to ‘Future Games’ and now on to her own ‘Rhiannon’, about the Welsh witch in author Mary Bartlet Leader’s Triad: A Novel of the Supernatural. Buckingham closed the album with the ominous-sounding ‘I’m So Afraid’, which signposted the sadness to come. The group’s two romantic relationships were already unravelling, as examined in excoriating detail on 1977’s Rumours. In the meantime, this was the sound of the band enjoying a fleeting honeymoon period. Fleetwood Mac was released in July 1975. The title suggested a new beginning, and its plain sleeve background inspired the nickname the White Album.”

Blake’s Dreams: The Many Lives of Fleetwood Mac could serve as a useful introduction to the many phases of the band’s life for those who are otherwise unfamiliar. The book, finally, gives earlier versions of the band their due, recalling the work of Green, Spencer, Kirwan, and Welch. This fact is the book’s most important contribution. Fans will love this detailed treatment, and it provides some fascinating moments from one of the most tangled chapters in rock music history.