Uncommon People by David Hepworth

Author:David Hepworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

1975 Playlist

10cc: “I’m Not in Love”

Bob Marley and the Wailers: Live!

Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run

Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks

Neil Young: Tonight’s the Night

Patti Smith: Horses

Joni Mitchell: Hissing of Summer Lawns

Led Zeppelin: Physical Graffiti

David Bowie: Young Americans

Dr. Feelgood: Malpractice

July 4, 1976

Tampa, Florida

The x-factor

In 1970 Peter Green left Fleetwood Mac, the group he’d begun in 1967. He turned his back on every aspect of the rock-star life and worked as a gravedigger. He wanted no part of the money that Fleetwood Mac earned. This wasn’t much of a problem in the early seventies because the group were usually in the red. It became more problematic around 1975, when Fleetwood Mac, the first album his old friends Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, and Christine McVie had made with the newly recruited American duo Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, began selling in unprecedented quantities. The first one by the new version of the group, which they called their “white album,” was the biggest seller in the history of Warner Bros. Records. This had the knock-on effect of growing the sales of their back catalog, which meant Green kept receiving royalty checks. He was so bothered by this influx of cash that he visited his accountant’s office to remonstrate. To emphasize his point, he was brandishing a pump-action shotgun. Green was subsequently sent to a mental hospital for his own protection as well as his accountant’s.

In the early seventies it appeared that all the men who had previously stood out front in Fleetwood Mac had suffered misadventures from which they were unlikely to recover. Both Green and fellow guitarist Danny Kirwan suffered from mental illness that some attributed to an incident with bad acid in Munich. The other guitarist, the previously genial Jeremy Spencer, had gone out for a walk before a gig in California in 1971, joined the Children of God, and never came back.

But whereas the men at the front fell out of the fray in different ways, the two men who formed the rhythm section, and had the good fortune to share their names with the band’s, plowed on determinedly, managing the band themselves and engaging different musicians to do the singing and guitar playing. This leadership from the back line was without precedent in a world where the biggest show-offs usually do the leading. Fleetwood and McVie were blessed in their latest recruits. A recording engineer introduced them to Buckingham Nicks, a romantically linked double act who were young, looked good, and could sing and write songs. Before they decided to merge the two acts, they asked Christine McVie whether she was worried about the danger of being upstaged by having the group fronted by a younger woman. She said she wasn’t. The question itself was a hint of what a complex organization the new group was to become. All successful groups have some of the features of a family. In Fleetwood Mac’s case, the complexities within the group were almost royal.

These came to the fore in February 1976 as Fleetwood Mac entered the studio to begin recording the follow-up to their breakthrough album.

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