The Story of the "Lost" Fleetwood Mac Albums

Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.

Like I said last week, thanks to our analytics, we know certain things about you—the royal you, as in, everyone receiving this email-- if you’re reading this. Beyond the fact that you’re likely reading this on your phone, the main thing we know is this: You really, really love Fleetwood Mac. By some insane ratio, you buy more Fleetwood Mac vinyl from us than any other artist. I’m talking more than T. Swift, Kendrick, the Eagles: You name ‘em, you guys like Fleetwood Mac better.

And we’re not here to judge, and in fact, are not even surprised: Fleetwood Mac’s legendary, flawless Rumours album tops the vinyl charts basically every year, as a new generation of 19-year-olds discovers the love Rhombus that enveloped the album’s creation, and how hard that album still goes, nearly 50 years on.

Let’s listen to it now, for funsies:

But what you might not know is that Rumours was not the second Fleetwood Mac album: in fact, it was the band’s ELEVENTH. It’s hard to conceive of, as a member of a generation raised entirely on the other side of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s joining of the band for 1975’s Fleetwood Mac, that the band has a “lost” catalog bigger than other bands’ entire studio history that is basically memory-holed. Yet nearly all discussions of the band center around the five albums they made between 1975 and 1987 (S/T, Rumours, Tusk, Mirage, and Tango in the Night). Their catalog is nearly 200% bigger than most people realize.

So, this edition of All the Music of the World is devoted to the first nine albums by what is maybe the most famous band in vinyl history.

Everyone knows how Fleetwood Mac got their nom de legend: the combination of members John McVie and Mick Fleetwood’s names became the banner under which the band sailed. However, it wasn’t McVie and Fleetwood who named the band that: That was the band’s original superstar guitarist, Peter Green. Green was a member of the second wave of great British guitarists, picking up where Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck had left off, leaving blues for the pop charts. Green has the same credentials as those guys—stint in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, B.B. King loved him—but came a couple years later than those Mt. Rushmore names, and as such, isn’t as well known.

The first Fleetwood Mac album—now retroactively often called Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac—is a blues-lovers paradise, a record that is thick in grooves, wronged women, and rave-ups and come downs. You can hear the echo in Green’s approach in someone like Jack White—not so many frills, just a clear, sturdy tone and incredible flair and technique.

On their second album, Mr. Wonderful, the group was augmented in the studio on keys by McVie’s wife, Christine, who’d be more or less with Fleetwood Mac from 1968 until she passed away in 2022. But it wasn’t until their third album, 1969’s Then Play On, that the unfocused image of the later Mac would come into view. It’s more adventurous sonically and in genre, as the band played with psychedelia, pop, hard rock and other genres. It was Green’s last album with the band, as he suffered from mental issues for much of the ‘70s, which kept him off the road and out of the studio all together.

Fleetwood Mac’s sixth album, Bare Trees, is probably their first non-blues capitol g Great album: It’s a mix of pop and rock that wisely puts Christine McVie out front in a more substantial way. She’d be Fleetwood Mac’s secret weapon for most of her career, and it’s on tracks like “Homeward Bound” where her songs become lowkey the best on the band’s albums.  

If you’re a latter period Fleetwood Mac fan, and want just one pre-Buckingham-Nicks album to try, Mystery to Me should be your destination. It’s an album that basically just has a Stevie and Lindsey-sized hole in it, but is still packed with upbeat pop-rock, and beautiful production.

It was following that album that the band had another biopic-level event happen to them. Long term member Bob Weston was revealed to be cheating with Mick Fleetwood’s wife, causing the band to temporarily break up on the tour for Mystery to Me. When the band disbanded, their manager assembled an entirely new “Fleetwood Mac” to play their remaining tour dates in the U.S. Their manager never told any promoters the band was different, and after three dates and many complaints, the McVies and Fleetwood were able to file a lawsuit that prevented the fake Fleetwood Mac from playing, while at the same time their manager sued claiming he was the one who actually controlled the name “Fleetwood Mac.”

The group moved to Los Angeles during this period, and recorded what would be, until then, their biggest U.S. hit album: Heroes Are Hard to Find, not their best, but maybe their worst album cover, hit the top 70 on the Billboard charts. It was at the end of their touring and promotional cycle for that album that the band met Buckingham and Nicks, and asked them to join, setting off everything that came next. It turned out the heroes Fleetwood Mac needed were another commercially underperforming band in California.

And since we spent the previous chunk of this edition talking about Fleetwood Mac’s time pre-Buckingham-Nicks, it’s important for us to take a detour into what rock’s most notorious former couple was up to pre-Mac. Stevie met Lindsey in high school, when she was a senior and he was a junior. They collaborated in a psych-rock band during the peak of the Summer of Love, San Francisco wear a flower in your hair era, but they never had the success of bands like Jefferson Airplane. A record producer caught the band in San Jose—where Nicks was going to San Jose State—and persuaded Nicks and Buckingham to quit the psych rock and make a demo as a duo. They did and eventually were signed to make what would become Buckingham-Nicks, a sterling pop record that feels like seeing the evolution of man chart leading to what would become the upright man of Rumours. Their debut was like the crawling ape; the broad strokes of what they’d become are there, but not ready for world domination. The album would become a collectors item when they joined Fleetwood Mac, but would remain out of print and hard to hear until September of 2025, when the album was reissued and put on streaming services for the first time.

The previous editions of this column have covered smaller slices of musical history, certainly not anything with as much commercial power as Fleetwood Mac. But that’s kind of the point of All the Music of All the World: Even when you think you know a band as big as Fleetwood Mac, there’s probably music by them you haven’t heard, haven’t given as much attention to, or haven’t considered. Now that might change. 

--Andrew Winistorfer