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Fleetwood Mac · S8 E7
Why They Still Matter
Seventeen members, fifty-five years, 120 million records, and a TikTok that proved some songs outlive everything. The season finale
A skateboard, a bottle of cranberry juice, and a highway in Idaho, October 2020. Nathan Apodaca posts a sixty-second TikTok set to "Dreams," and within a week, a forty-three-year-old Fleetwood Mac song is back on the Billboard Hot 100.
"Out in the Fields" (Gary Moore & Phil Lynott, official music video, 1985). Gary Moore carried Peter Green's 1959 Les Paul. Phil Lynott led Thin Lizzy. Both men are dead now. But this track, explosive and alive, is proof that the musical bloodline Peter Green started in 1967 kept pumping long after he walked away from Fleetwood Mac.
The Band That Shouldn't Exist
Fleetwood Mac has had more than fifteen members across fifty-five years. The band survived its founder losing his mind, two divorces within the lineup, a bankruptcy, two firings, cocaine addiction, a cult abduction, and the death of its emotional center. By any reasonable standard, they should have broken up in 1971. They never did.
Sources
Fleetwood, Mick. "Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac." Little, Brown, 2014.
Rolling Stone. "Fleetwood Mac: The Complete History." 2018.
“We are the most dysfunctional family in rock and roll. But we are a family. And the music is always bigger than the argument.”
— Lindsey Buckingham, Rolling Stone, 2003
Out in the Fields, Gary Moore & Phil Lynott (1985)
Gary Moore plays Peter Green's 1959 Les Paul on this track, and you can hear the lineage: that same warm, overdriven tone that made "Albatross" and "Need Your Love So Bad" unforgettable, now pushed through a wall of 1980s rock production. Phil Lynott's vocal is urgent and political, raging against sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. The song reached number five in the UK and became Moore's biggest hit. Two men connected to Fleetwood Mac through Peter Green's guitar and its legacy, both gone too soon, both proof that the music keeps traveling.
Sources
Guitar World. "Gary Moore: The Peter Green Connection." 2010.
Official Charts Company. "Gary Moore Chart History." UK Singles.
TAP TO REVEAL: How many musicians have been members of Fleetwood Mac?
Why It Works
What makes Fleetwood Mac different from every other classic rock band is that the tension is the point. The breakups, the betrayals, the two firings of Lindsey Buckingham, Christine's sixteen-year exile: all of it feeds back into the music. They wrote about each other, sang to each other's faces on stage, and then drove to the next city as if nothing had happened.
Sources
Davis, Stephen. "Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks." St. Martin's Press, 2017.
Rolling Stone. "The Eternal Soap Opera of Fleetwood Mac." 2014.
Windsor Racecourse, Windsor
The site of the Windsor Jazz & Blues Festival, where Fleetwood Mac played their very first gig on August 12, 1967. Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood, Jeremy Spencer, and temporary bassist Bob Brunning performed a set of blues covers in a field in Berkshire. Everything that followed started here.
The Legacy
Wish You Were Here, Fleetwood Mac (1982)
Christine McVie wrote this for Mirage in 1982, a quiet ballad about missing someone who isn't there. Forty years later, with Christine herself gone, the title carries a weight she never intended. John McVie's bass hums underneath her piano like a conversation between two people who don't need words. It is, in the end, the sound of a band that knew each other so well they could break your heart without raising their voices.
Wish You Were Here, Fleetwood Mac (1982)
Christine's lyrics are simple in the way that only the best songwriting can be: direct, unguarded, nothing clever getting in the way of the feeling. She wrote about absence before she became one. In November 2022, Stevie Nicks wrote a handwritten tribute to Christine that ended: "See you on the other side, my love. Don't forget me." These lyrics read differently now.
In what year did Fleetwood Mac play their very first gig?
Fleetwood Mac was five people who couldn't stay together and couldn't stay apart, and the music they made in between is why we're still here. Their story started in a field in Windsor in 1967. It will never really end.
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To be continued
Season 9: Still Fleetwood Mac
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