Overlooked Albums #11: Fleetwood Mac - Then Play On

When you think of Fleetwood Mac, which I’m sure you do several times a day, you probably think of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks and Rumours and Bill Clinton and reunion tours and enough already.  In 1977, right before the disco exploded with the release of Saturday Night Fever, the band dominated AM radio with four top ten hits, negating the need for many of us to hear those songs ever again.  In retrospect, their success was hard won and well deserved, since Mick Fleetwood and John McVie had been busking various versions of Fleetwood Mac since 1967, and the Buckingham/Nicks/Christine McVie starting lineup finally achieved a kind of AOR accessibility, not to mention sophistication that has rarely been matched.  But in its first incarnation the group was something else entirely.  With Peter Green, graduate of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, they were quite simply the purest and probably the best British blues band produced by the same scene that gave us Cream and Ten Years After.  The Beatles, who wanted the band signed to Apple but lost out to Warner Bros., paid them the ultimate compliment by nicking the brilliantly atmospheric Albatross (don’t know it? – download immediately) as a basis for Sun King.  With this track, and others like Black Magic Woman from English Rose (a US amalgam of the second and third UK albums), the Mac showed that their palette was wider than the standard Chicago blues they so obviously admired.  English Rose will probably remain their definitive statement on the blues, though Fleetwood Mac In Chicago sticks closer to the tradition, but their next album would explore places only hinted at before.

Then Play On came out in the fall of 1969, a time when the experimentation of progressive rock as well as the complete fragmentation of musical styles we now live with, were just getting underway.  Perhaps I should say Underway, one of the jazzier tracks from the album that mines the same territory as Hendrix’s Third Stone from the Sun from 1967 and Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way, also released in 1969.  This is indicative of the mood of the album, which is somber, ominous, in a word, bluesy, if not the style, which is not at all monolithic.  There are prime slices of hard blues in the rock vein with Rattlesnake Shake and the now classic Oh Well, folky art-rock with Although the Sun is Shining, jammy workouts with the Madge twins, and rumbling Latin-tinged blues with Coming Your Way.  There’s even a precursor of the mellower things to come in the instrumental My Dream, which would not have sounded completely out of place in either the Bob Welch or Buckingham/Nicks incarnations of the band.  The one thing all the songs have in common is open spaces.  The arrangements are all instrumentally sparse and they are not afraid to lapse into near or total silence on a moment’s notice.  Nothing is wasted or superfluous; if they ever considered adding colorful flourishes here and there they eventually thought better of it, because the end result is as close to the direct approach of the delta blues that Rock with a capital R ever got outside of Captain Beefheart.  Don’t expect any four on the floor beats here – we rarely even get to hear Mick Fleetwood’s high hat cymbal.  More typical is Showbiz Blues, which gets as close to the spirit of John Lee Hooker as a bunch of white guys from England could be expected to pull off.  Or take Closing My Eyes, which is almost devoid of a fixed tempo, floating somewhere outside of time as if it were made up on the spot.

Literally every song is compelling on some way, and that puts this record in some very limited company.  It’s just what you want out of band like this – songs that successfully take their home genre a step further while retaining the qualities that made you love the music in the first place.  In this case, Fleetwood Mac took the blues to a whole new place, but they managed to stay waist deep in the swamp.