With its 10th album, Fleetwood Mac was making yet another new start in a meandering career. But its 1975 LP, “Fleetwood Mac,” would catapult the band from midlevel FM airplay and modest sales to hit singles, platinum certifications and decades of arena tours. The album gets the 50th-anniversary treatment on Friday, rereleased on deluxe vinyl and with spatial audio Atmos and surround sound remixes on Blu-ray. After half a century, the music still gleams.
“Fleetwood Mac” was made by a British band — Mick Fleetwood on drums, John McVie on bass and his then-wife, Christine McVie, on keyboards, vocals and songwriting — that had relocated to Los Angeles. When its guitarist and frontman left, Fleetwood happened to hear the duo of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. It was serendipitous; it was transformative.
“The way our band works when we write is that we try to stumble towards each other, then work it all out,” Fleetwood wrote in his autobiography, “Play On: Now, Then and Fleetwood Mac.” The newly reconfigured band, with its members still getting to know one another, did more than stumble; it found synergy.
“Fleetwood Mac” is one analog-era album that still sounds current, mainly thanks to the sheer perfectionism that the band and its co-producer, Keith Olsen, brought to every layer of instruments and vocals, long before quantization, digital editing or Auto-Tune. The tempos may fluctuate a little, and the vocals are (rightly) human and not superhuman. But all the tracks still feel flawless.
For decade upon decade, “Fleetwood Mac” and its turbulent, torturously recorded, blockbuster 1977 successor, “Rumours,” have been endlessly imitated. They showed generations of bands and producers how to blend voices and to make guitars sparkle or bite with fastidiously shaped tones. Current country studio production often harks back to Fleetwood Mac for steadfast drumming and a punctilious mix of acoustic and electric guitars. Indie-flavored rockers like Haim and boygenius are clearly disciples.
In 1975, Fleetwood Mac was no one’s winning pop formula. What were journeyman English musicians doing with American strivers whose 1973 debut album, “Buckingham Nicks,” had flopped? (That LP will be rereleased in September.)
During a career that had already been messy enough to break up any less tenacious band — with booze, drugs, cults, mismanagement, lawsuits and infidelity — Fleetwood Mac had evolved from British blues-rock stalwarts into an Anglo-American pop-rock band. The California-born guitarist and songwriter Bob Welch was a frontman from 1970 to 1974. Furthering their Americanization, Fleetwood and the McVies moved to Los Angeles in 1974. When Welch suddenly decided to leave the band, Fleetwood realized he had already heard a successor.
Olsen, the engineer and producer for “Buckingham Nicks,” had played the album for Fleetwood to show what his studio, Sound City, could do. Fleetwood immediately recognized the impressive guitar work on the album’s finale, “Frozen Love.” He wasn’t sure about adding a second female singer and songwriter to a band that already had Christine McVie, but Buckingham and Nicks were, again luckily, a package deal.
Nicks was working as a waitress at a flapper-themed restaurant, and she was still in costume when she and Buckingham met Fleetwood and the McVies at a Mexican restaurant to discuss joining forces. Over margaritas, both camps said yes. Buckingham and Nicks also brought strong new songs that they had been performing live: “Monday Morning” and “Rhiannon.”
No A&R person, bean counter or algorithm could have ordered up the 1975 Fleetwood Mac. It wasn’t just the band’s particular blend of British restraint and American exuberance; it was also a marvel of interlocking musicianship. The new band had a rhythm section that never showed off. Instead, it supported a front line that could be a lone voice or a gorgeous tangle of guitars and harmonies.
On “Fleetwood Mac,” the drum parts are always solidly in place yet rarely call attention to themselves. Fleetwood leans into the muscle of tom-toms rather than the flashiness of snare and cymbals. John McVie’s bass lines stay unobtrusively on the roots of the chords, only occasionally hopping upward to keep things interesting. That rhythm-section reticence leaves ample room for guitars, keyboards and voices: Christine McVie’s understated serenity, Nicks’s scratchy urgency, Buckingham’s nervy eagerness. Somehow, those disparate voices converge.
The songs on “Fleetwood Mac” carom through contradictory feelings and subtle musical feats. Songs by Buckingham bookend the album, bragging and complaining about wanderlust — his own and his lover’s — in “Monday Morning” and sinking into paranoia and despair (with massed guitars to rival Queen) in “I’m So Afraid.” Christine McVie basks in afterglow amid melting guitar lines in “Warm Ways,” then worries over a mercurial but irresistible partner in the determinedly chipper “Over My Head” and “Say You Love Me.”
Nicks conjures a crescendo of witchcraft over gnarled guitars in “Rhiannon,” then ponders aging — she was 27 — in “Landslide.” And Buckingham and Christine McVie trade and share troubled verses over a skein of perpetual-motion guitar picking in “World Turning,” which also glances back at “The World Keep on Turning” from the band’s 1968 debut album. It’s a predigital Easter egg, quietly insisting on Fleetwood Mac’s continuity.
“Fleetwood Mac,” like most albums of the analog era, came from one concentrated stretch of work by a handful of people, an effort of songwriting and arranging and producing that was a combination of honeymoon and marathon. (Fleetwood’s autobiography notes that cocaine fueled long studio hours.) Voices, fingers, minds and hearts all aligned somehow.
The unity didn’t last. Fleetwood Mac’s upheavals have continued for another 50 contentious years, sometimes with superb musical results. The moment captured on “Fleetwood Mac” was more precarious than it seemed. But in all its dexterity, confidence and grace, there’s no denying what’s on those master tapes.