This is the long(ish)-form response to a post over on the Pacific Gazetteer’s place about the transition from Fleetwood Mac to the Stevie Nicks/Lindsay Buckingham show. Mostly, I like to read this stuff and sigh, then move on, but, even though FM was never my favourite band, I did listen to a lot of their stuff, appreciated most of it (hint: sliding scale saw devotion diminish as they got further from their roots). I was a really hard-core bluzoid as I traipsed off to UBC in the fall of 1968, carrying with me a head full of John Mayall (Crusade, at that point), Cream, Michael Bloomfield, James Cotton and a slough of other older and/or more traditional blues singers/guitarists/harpists/pianists and other assorted hangers-on. So there, on a borrowed record player, was this:

And they made a bit of a pilgrimage to Chicago not too long after:

Some of it started with John McVie appearing on the Beano album, then with Peter Green on A Hard Road. Even then, Green was reaching for the edge of the blues envelope on The Supernatural.

Mac also introduced retro-rock influences into the Kiln House album, and Green drifted off while Jeremy Spencer got Cult-ivated.

More new directions with Bare Trees and Future Games, as Bob Welsh put in an appearance, and Christine Perfect-McVie and Buckingham eventually chased Kirwan and crawled into the hollowed-out corpse of The Mac.

At this point, most of the bluzoids had moved on and the noobs never knew the roots, even that there is, somewhere, a recording of Christine Perfect singing with Stan Webb’s Chicken Shack about how her sweetie “swears like the devil, is shaped like a frog, but when he gets to lovin’…” and leaves the rest to the listener’s imagination.(I haven’t heard this since the summer of 1970 and all efforts to find it have proven fruitless, along with another auditory fave having nothing to do with Mac, Pure Food And Drug Act, Sugarcane Harris and Harvey Mandel with Randy Resnick, Victor Conte and Paul Lagos, singing a modal thing with the lyric “Why don’t you cut that joker loose, and come and fly with me to L.A.” Apparently there is no recording of it other than in my head (sniff!)

Quick update: The Christine Perfect Stan Webb tune was called I See My Baby, from a 1969 album called O.K., Ken?  –it’s on Apple music. Now for PF%DA…