 Fleetwood Mac Despite having perhaps the single laziest bootleg cover art I've ever encountered, this disc is massively enjoyable, transporting you to a moment in time when Rumours was not simply an LP you can find by the dozen in thrift shops, but was not yet even finished. How cool must it have been for this band to be working on such a fuckin' great album? Listening to playbacks of rough mixes of songs no one had heard yet, but which soon would take over the airwaves and, in some respects, the world. Of course, none of the Macs were remotely happy at the time … breaking up, cheating on each other, doing massive amounts of cocaine … yet always returning to the studio to forge ahead on what was clearly shaping up to be a truly fucking rare and magical album. Such is great art, solidifying tenuous bonds that should be broken … because the music is more important. I don't even own an actual copy of Rumours anymore (hear me, Warner Brothers, remaster the fuckin' Fleetwood Mac catalog already!), but I put on this disc of rough mixes and outtakes pretty frequently, just for the secretness of its vibe. Sure, I know all the songs by heart, but listening to them being made is like hearing them for the first time, like being let in to eavesdrop on what Fleetwood Mac is up to, circa '76. None of the tracks is radically different – some rougher vocals, fewer guitar overdubs, the occasional alternate lyric – but they're all revealing anyway. High points are a lower-fi mix of Christine McVie's haunting "Oh Daddy," which for some reason sounds like it's coming from beyond the grave, and two takes each of Stevie Nicks's "Gold Dust Woman" and "Silver Springs." In the former, you get much more of the pain of the song, the desperate trapped-ness of it, and "Silver Springs" is just brutal. How that one didn't make the album is one of pop music's greatest cocaine mysteries. The only completely unknown song is a meandering Stevie song called "The Dealer" (do you see a theme?), which is decent, but it's not hard to see why that one didn't make the cut. It's like walking home from the Record Plant some warm summer night in 1976 with a contraband cassette of Fleetwood Mac demos plied into your hand by a sneaky studio rat in exchange for a nickel bag. You go home, kick back, fuck your brain up, and bask in an exclusiveness that's better than any country club membership could ever be.
Review by Janus |