META-REVIEWS: Fleetwood Mac, Foghat

I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of the canon. From my experience, it’s not a word that a lot of people regularly use. But canon is everywhere. It defines culture.

William Shakespeare is an excellent example of a canonical figure. High school English class? You read Shakespeare. Because, that’s what you do. Shakespeare = Canon. Chaucer = Canon. Dickens = Canon. American writers? It’s Hemingway, it’s Fitzgerald, it’s Irving. Hey, they’re all white men, what’s up with that? Oh, right… well, we’ll come back to that some day.

The canon that continues to fascinate me, though, is the classic rock canon, as exhibited by the songs which keep getting played on the radio - and, by extension, the songs which don’t get played on the radio. And, by extension, when a song is in the canon, the album it came from is in the canon. And yet, in how many of these cases do we intimately know a song, without having heard the album?

So this experimental set of posts is my way of investigating the canon, especially classic rock, but also pop and other genres, with an emphasis on songs everybody knows, and especially albums which were huge sellers. The rule is simple: I’ve never heard the full album before (or, if I have, it was so long ago that I’ve forgotten.)

For the first installation, I’ve chosen three albums, one of which is one of the hugest, greatest selling albums of all time. You all know it. But, do you know it?

And since it’s me, I’m going to go off on whatever tangent I might go off of.

Welcome to the first installment of META-REVIEWS.

Fleetwood Mac

Fleetwood Mac (Reprise 1975) & Rumours (Reprise 1977)

First, a little history. Fleetwood Mac started as a British blues band, releasing 9 albums across their first 7 years. They went through multiple guitarists - and in the process multiple chief songwriters. By 1975, the only remaining original members were drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie. The other holdover was Christine McVie: keyboardist, the only remaining songwriter, John’s wife. 1975 rolled around and they needed a new guitarist. Fleetwood got a tip to a guy named Lindsey Buckingham, who had a band with his girlfriend Stevie Nicks. Fleetwood hired them both.

The self-titled 1975 album, then, is the first album with the best-known lineup of Fleetwood Mac. And then came Rumours, the monolith which has sold more than 45,000,000 copies worldwide, including 10,000,000 copies the first month after release. That number is absolutely staggering. It’ll never happen again.

So, yeah, we know a lot of these songs. But, no, I’d never listened to either album. And, yes, these are the two that gave me the initial idea for this whole crazy endeavor. And, yes, I am getting spousal grief for this. But that is okay. I deserve it.

So what did I find?

Let’s start with the self-titled album. It’s… a mess. This was a band which did not really know what they were. Buckingham and Nicks joined when the rest of the band had already started the album creation process. The old British blues band was still in the band’s DNA, but the holdover songwriter was a popsmith, and the two new songwriters were very different and had already worked out songs they brought to the table.

What I found is that Christine McVie was the clear center of the band. I think, today, she’s the least recognized member of the classic lineup, and this is a real shame. The lead song on side two is “Say You Love Me”. It’s a fairly simple pop song, has a nice little bounce... and it’s pretty much perfect, one of the great pop rock songs of the decade. It bridges the gap between what the band had been and what the band was just starting to try to be and it works exceedingly well.

The best known songs on the album both belong to Nicks. “Landslide” is just Nicks with Buckingham accompanying. It does not sound remotely like the rest of the album. It’s probably worthy of more consideration on its own, but there are tomes out there about it already. And then there's “Rhiannon”. It's the most fully realized full band song on the album, and the one that lays the groundwork for much of what’s to come. I prefer “Landslide” and think “Say You Love Me” is the best song on the album, but “Rhiannon” is definitely the most important.

Buckingham also has a few songs on the album, but they’re mostly duds. The exception is the last track on the album, “I’m so Afraid”, which I have no recollection of ever having heard before. It is the most out of place song on the entire album. It reminds, strangely, of Leonard Cohen’s “The Law”, a song that emerged eight years later. “I'm so Afraid” tries to be a lot of things at once, and it’s not fully realized, and I’m really not sure how the hell it got onto the album, but it’s very intriguing. Maybe it helps provide insight as to why Buckingham is a revered figure on his own… because nothing else on the album does.

Overall, the album is interesting, in part because it’s kind of schizophrenic, in part because it portends what’s to come. But as a coherent piece, well, I guess sometimes there’s a reason why we only listen to the singles.

The band toured this album pretty hard. Along the way they refined themselves as a cohesive five piece, and apparently came up with a better idea of what they thought they were.

That leads us to Rumours.

The opener, “Second Hand News”, is a Buckingham song. It is weird and kind of silly, and I have no idea how this could be the opener on an album which sold so well, except it does do one thing well: It leads in nicely to the second song.

That would be “Dreams”. This is a Stevie Nicks composition, and more recently this song is a TikTok phenomenon. Like her songs from the previous album, there’s an out-of-time quality here, not something screaming 1977. The band is locked in, and the delivery is propulsive but incredibly smooth. It’s got all the elements needed to go viral 40+ years later.

“Dreams” is also the song with the line “players only love you when they’re playin’”. Rumours, as is famously known, is the album where everyone was breaking up and sleeping with one another, or at least that’s how the story goes. Whatever exactly informed all of that, or whatever exactly all of that might have informed, the attitude, the aura about it, on this song in particular, transcends the musicality. It’s not “the Laurel Canyon sound” but rather the attitude which hits the zeitgeist. This was 1977. Disco was king. Punk was revving up. Arena rock was still dominant. I was three months old when the album came out, and in my mind, this was a time of profound national confusion, the beginning of the Carter years. I can only guess as to what “Dreams” was conveying to people then, but the band definitely seemed to have hit upon something… something which has stuck around for a long time.

Christine McVie has a couple of songs which really stretch the limits of pop. “Songbird” feels musically out of place, though it fits the theme of the record. “Oh Daddy” is... a song named “Oh Daddy”, which I think kind of tells you everything. McVie’s range as a songwriter and singer are not very well appreciated (a theme I keep coming back around to.)

McVie’s standout, and another one most people know, is “You Make Loving Fun”. It’s another breezy pop song, but she injects just the right dose of sultriness. This is also, interestingly, the closest the album gets to full on disco. Rumours is not a disco album! But neither is, oh, Some Girls, and that didn’t stop the Stones from recording “Miss You”. To me, “You Make Loving Fun” is neither the best nor the most important song on the album, but I think it’s the most Fleetwood Mac song on the album, the real center of the action. Sometimes when they stray from that it works, and sometimes they just go completely off the rails. But hey, more about cocaine later.

The song that’s actually designed to be the center of action is “The Chain”, the only song on the album where the entire band shares writing credits. It feels carefully constructed for grandeur, for some kind of epic outro when played live. To my ears, it’s a good fit for the album, and an understandably popular song, but it’s not really that epic. It reeks of excess, of being too on the nose. But hey, more about cocaine later.

Ahh, but now, we get to the masterwork, the song which must be the true basis of the cult of Lindsey Buckingham. “Go Your Own Way” is aspirational, the song that at once regrounds the band as still being a real rock band, but also moves beyond that. If it were arranged and played as a hard rock song, it would still work. If it were arranged and played as a new age song, it would still work. It’s not that the song is terribly complicated or that it touches on some kind of obscure theme. I think it’s just that epic rock trope: you’ll never create anything better than your best break up song. (Greg Kihn knows of what I speak.)

It’s still a little hard to understand Rumours as a cohesive whole. There are three songwriters, three lead vocalists who sound nothing alike, and the instrumentation drifts from what’s essentially lite rock to what’s more or less arena rock. I’ll assert that this album would have gone nowhere had it been released 10 years later, would have been unmentionable 20 years later, and would have been absurd released 40 years later, and yet you can still take something like “Dreams” and turn it into a viral phenomenon anyway. Even though much of the album has a certain timeless quality sonically, it simply had to come out in 1977, which I think was an era in America when times were rough and people were disillusioned, and yet people were also still sort of aspirationally optimistic anyway. Nixon was gone. Vietnam was over. Nobody could still pretend it was the ‘60s anymore. The country saw fit to elect a man like Carter, and yet it was moving in the direction of electing a man like Reagan. People came to terms with all of this in a lot of different ways. Rumours, I suspect, managed to strike more chords with more people than most any other album. 1977 was a time when America could have tried to come to terms with itself, but instead it did something different: it reached one way, reached another, tried to convince itself that it was something more or less than it was, and did it all to a certain excess, but not an excess-for-the-sake-of-excess like what would come in the ‘80s. Rumours emodies all of that.

As a cohesive album, I’m a little dubious that Rumours truly holds up as an all-time great; it’s still a little schizophrenic and still an uneven work. But if you take the high points from these two albums and make them the core of an over-the-top arena concert, and you also factor in what else was happening with popular music at the time, it makes sense that they’ve endured like they have.

Foghat

Fool for the City (Bearsville 1975)

For some reason, this was the album that first came to my dad’s mind in talking about this ridiculous idea of mine. He had other ideas, too, and they’ll come up in subsequent weeks. But he said Foghat. So, Foghat.

We know this album through its two huge songs - “Slow Ride” and “Fool for the City”. Have you ever listened to it? Of course you haven’t. Why on earth would you listen to a Foghat album when I can do it for you?

Get this: Fool for the City is Foghat’s fifth album. And Foghat is from England! Did you know that? I didn't know that. How did I not know this? Ahh, well, read on.

Foghat is the band that formed when Savoy Brown broke up. Savoy Brown was one of those British blues bands that guys like my dad still talk about, the most famous of which being… Fleetwood Mac. Do you people know how many times over the course of the past 30+ years I’ve heard how great a band Fleetwood Mac was when Peter Green was still in the band? Well, Savoy Brown was from a similar crop of bands. And so in turn was Foghat.

Now, I’m not sure where exactly the line is, but my pronouncement is a simple one. “Fool for the City” and “Slow Ride” don’t sound like British blues. They’re hard rock. They fit in with the rest of the album - which does sound like British blues - but as it gets harder, it seems to get a little less overtly English. And I think herein a little light shines on how the classic rock canon has formed.

Let’s say there’s a period which starts at about 1969 where the next crop of British bands came into ascendence. Some of them became incredibly huge - Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd - and are the bedrocks of the canon. Some others at another tier also made it firmly into the canon - think Bad Company here. But others mostly just get talked about by dads today.

Hard rock is not the same thing as arena rock. Fleetwood Mac, after all, became arena rock without becoming hard rock. But one thing about hard rock, to my ears at least, is that most English bands just don’t sound very English. Now, is it because they don’t sound so English, or is that the harder sound really is the key? I’m still tussling with that. But that hard sound is key. So too is the move away from what’s an identifiably blues sound.

Fool for the City actually does have all of that. A fair chunk of the album really does sound English, and bluesy, and both at the same time. But “Slow Ride” is straight out of the arena, amps to 11, let it fly. I mean, for the longest time, I thought this song was from years later and was from a heavier, sillier version of Grand Funk Railroad. But “Slow Ride” and “Fool for the City” were really crossover songs, from one subgenre of rock to another.

As a whole this is a perfectly fine rock album. The songs I hadn’t heard before, it’s not hard to imagine a slightly different classic rock radio world where stuff like this was more common, where early Fleetwood Mac was played, where The Faces were played, where early Jethro Tull was played. (For that matter, it’s not hard to imagine something like Jethro Tull’s “To Cry You a Song” from Benefit and it having been produced as a hard rock song, more like “Locomotive Breath” was. After all, we all know Jethro Tull was a metal band at heart. Right, Grammys?)

It is interesting to consider that Fool for the City and Fleetwood Mac are from the same year, centrally involve musicians who came up in the British blues scene together years earlier, and yet involve very different kinds of creative moves which resulted in canonical rock songs. They’re sort of different side of the hedonist coin. Look, I don’t have any idea what substances any members of Foghat were putting into their bodies at any point in time. But the album at hand here is literally named Fool for the City. I can take a flying leap there. It’s not like this is some sort of deep spiritual awakening going on. And even if you want to believe that, say, “Rhiannon” is, well, no, that isn’t either. It’s just the difference between sneaking in the back door instead of stomping through the front door to score your coke.

See, if the end result is sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, well, that’s the end result, whether you take a magical mystery train, a slow ride, or just go your own way.