“The King of the Shuffles”: The album Mick Fleetwood said had his favourite drumming
The very nature of drumming is to act as the sonic constant to a bands sound. While melodic parts flourish, drums anchor any given song and provide with the necessary rhythm and consistency. Perhaps it’s a job role Mick Fleetwood took to heart, as throughout the ever-changing and always tumultuous Fleetwood Mac line-up, he and his rhythm section partner John McVie have acted as the only constant.
While he sits at the top table of classic rock gods, Fleetwood’s early influences straddled the lines between jazz and blues rock. But like so many of his contemporaries, the Mississippi Delta played host to some of their biggest influences:
“When we started, Peter [Green] and John [McVie] were so into Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters,” he once said. “You can hear the influence in Peter’s playing. That album would epitomize the style of the world that I was going into, with the early days of Fleetwood Mac. No matter what you do or don’t do, you have ups and downs, the good and the bad, but no matter what, you gotta swing. If you don’t take it to the bank on that level, go home.”
Before Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks thrust the band into the world of psych-pop mega-stardom, Fleetwood Mac was playing a more unbridled style of rock under the stewardship of Peter Green. Together, they built upon the sounds forged by the legends of the Mississippi Delta, particularly BB King.
But while Green wrote stomping guitar riffs that emulated the soulful feel of BB King, Fleetwood was dedicated to understanding his art better and watched every detail of King’s masterful drummer Sonny Freeman.
In a 2003 interview with Record Collector magazine, Fleetwood was asked to name his favourite drummer to which he simply replied: “I have to pick a drummer who played with BB King for many years: Sonny Freeman. If you ever get to hear BB King Live At The Regal – which is a theatre in New York – that’s Sonny Freeman, the King of the Shuffles”.
Thanks to Freeman, Fleetwood dedicated his time to similarly mastering the art shuffling and polyrhythms which would of course serve the early works of Fleetwood Mac, but it was when Buckingham and Nicks joined the band that his role began to flourish.
As the band explored a psych-pop soundscape that regularly fluctuated between melodic tempos, his role in the engine room along with McVie became even more important to ensure there was a sonic throughline. And on their seminal album Rumours he delivered, providing the necessary groove to make an album of tragic heart ache and betrayal a psych-pop masterpiece.]
