Buckingham starts whisper-singing some weird shit with, I think, Christine McVie singing behind him. Some looped crowd noise swirls around, then Mick Fleetwood opens with a heavy, vaguely Native American-costume-party drum beat.

“Tusk” is a short rhythmic walk directly into the heart of Lindsey Buckingham’s fortress of musical solitude. He was a control freak whose noodly prog-rocking needed to be reined in a bit, making it all the more surprising that he co-wrote “World Turning” with Christine McVie.Īll five members of the band fully collaborated on 1977’s “The Chain,” but other than that, McVie is the only bandmate Buckingham collaborated with on any Fleetwood Mac song to this day. Honestly, Lindsey Buckingham sounds like a strange, fussy jerk in every behind-the-scenes account I’ve ever read, so the fact that he insisted the band take both himself and Nicks is a surprising bit of serendipity. (Keep this in your pocket for anytime someone tells you new pop music is too prefabricated or calculated or whatever.) When they needed to replace Welch, Mick Fleetwood basically asked for some resumes and hired someone. And I didn’t realize this before but the band found Welch through a traditional open audition process. Yes, by 1975, Bob Welch became the, I dunno, the seventh or eighth person to leave Fleetwood Mac. For “World Turning,” we have a rare songwriting duo of Buckingham and Christine McVie - the band’s most noodly, inscrutable songwriter and its most melodic, straightforwardly pretty one. If Stevie Nicks is the widely accepted official witch of Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham is the widely accepted official progressive rock enthusiast. Jeremy Spencer was just an early adopter. And the empty-feeling fallout from this time paved the way for the wave of cults that came to prominence in the late '70s. In a slightly different context, drug-fueled paranoia led followers of Charles Manson to band together to murder Sharon Tate.Ī general pursuit of the fifth dimension led a lot of people into a lot of their own personal deserts. In reality, there was just as much grimy, dark, and unpleasant stuff during this time as there was good. If you grew up then, you’re likely to turn your critical eye on the greasers, at least in the U.S. The '60s are often swept under a smiling umbrella of fun hippie times, probably propelled by personal Baby Boomer revisionism. and the druggy desert of the western U.S.

But from “Black Magic Woman” to losing two members to bad drug trips to Welch-era songs like “Hypnotized” and “The Ghost,” Fleetwood Mac’s interest in the dark and spooky side of both the U.K. Stevie Nicks is the official witch of Fleetwood Mac and we all know that and I’m not saying otherwise here.

Fleetwood mac keyboard player