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Fleetwood Mac · S2 E3
Bob Welch
An American joins a British blues band and pulls them toward something new: California, melody, pop
April 1971. A 25-year-old American guitarist from Los Angeles walks into a London rehearsal room full of shellshocked British musicians, plugs in, and starts playing something that sounds nothing like the blues.
Bob Welch, "Sentimental Lady" (1977). Originally a Fleetwood Mac track from Bare Trees, re-recorded solo with Christine McVie singing the same backing vocals five years later. It reached #8 on the Billboard Hot 100, proving that the songs Welch wrote inside Fleetwood Mac were hit material all along.
“Bob walked in and within five minutes we knew. He wasn't Peter, he wasn't Jeremy, he was something else entirely. And that was exactly what we needed.”
— Mick Fleetwood, "Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac," 1990
The California Shift
Bob Welch is everything Peter Green was not: sunny, optimistic, Californian to the bone. He listens to the Grateful Dead, writes songs about women and sunshine, and has zero interest in the blues. For a band that lost its founder to a nightmare about money and its slide guitarist to a religious cult, Welch's easygoing warmth feels like oxygen.
Bob Welch: The File
Which Bob Welch composition later became a top-10 solo hit when he re-recorded it in 1977?
TAP TO REVEAL: Why is the Bob Welch era the most underrated chapter in Fleetwood Mac's history?
Woman of 1000 Years (Fleetwood Mac)
A Bob Welch composition from Future Games that captures his dreamy, California-drifting style at its purest. The guitar shimmers, Christine's piano drifts in and out, and the whole track floats in a haze of reverb. It sounds like nothing the Peter Green band ever recorded, and that is exactly why it matters.
Woman of 1000 Years, Fleetwood Mac (1971)
Read the lyrics while you listen. Welch's California dreaminess turned into words, drifting between romance and something more cosmic.
The new lineup has a new sound. But Danny Kirwan is unraveling fast, and what happens next on a tour stop in 1972 will be the most violent moment in the band's history.
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