Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
It may have been the most profitable international merger in rock history. In 1974, the long-running British band Fleetwood Mac joined forces with the members of the American folk rock duo Buckingham Nicks, and that combination quickly became enormously popular, surpassing all previous work by either act. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham had released one brilliant but overlooked album in 1974, which was reissued in September after falling out of print for decades. Fleetwood Mac had been respected on the British blues scene, with minor success on the American charts before a string of hits that included Nicks’s “Rhiannon” and “Dreams” and Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way.”
Fleetwood Mac’s first release with the Buckingham Nicks-enhanced lineup, the 1975 self-titled album, recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. And while the tuneful soft rock on that album was fairly different from the Chicago-style blues that Fleetwood Mac had originally made its name on, the band still acknowledged its roots. One track on the album, “World Turning,” was a new song that Buckingham and Christine McVie built on the foundation of one of Fleetwood Mac’s earliest songs. “The World Keep on Turning” was written and sung by the band’s original frontman Peter Green on Fleetwood Mac’s other self-titled album, their 1968 debut.
Green left Fleetwood Mac in 1970 and never rejoined the band, although he did drop in on later lineups in the studio, playing some uncredited guitar on 1973’s Penguin and 1979’s Tusk. And even after Fleetwood Mac became a huge multiplatinum band, they’d frequently tip their hat to Green in concert, usually by playing the 1969 single “Oh Well” or “World Turning,” which is also a staple of Buckingham’s solo tours.
Three more essential Fleetwood Mac deep album cuts:
“The Ghost”
Before Buckingham and Nicks, Hollywood-born singer-guitarist Bob Welch was the first American musician to join Fleetwood Mac in 1971, recording five albums with the band. Welch wrote and sang two songs on 1972’s Bare Trees: the psychedelic rocker “The Ghost” and “Sentimental Lady,” which later became a Top 10 hit when he re-recorded it as a solo artist in 1977.
“Oh Daddy”
Christine McVie had long been a part of Fleetwood Mac, first as a session musician in 1968 and as a full band member in the early-‘70s. And she became part of the band’s trio of hitmaking singer-songwriters on albums like 1977’s Rumours, one of the best-selling albums of all time. McVie’s Rumours track “Oh Daddy” was later covered by Natalie Cole, whose rendition was sampled on the 2005 song of the same name by rapper Beanie Sigel.
“Storms”
Buckingham’s studio experimentation gets most of the attention on the sprawling double album Tusk, but the album also features a lot of Nicks at her most expressive. “Storms” is a beautifully melancholy song about Nicks’s affair with drummer Mick Fleetwood, and her remorse over breaking up her bandmate’s marriage.