Inside the disastrous Fleetwood Mac tour of 1974
The Fleetwood Mac that we know today is vastly different from where the group started back in the 1960s. Before Lindsey Buckingham or Stevie Nicks entered the fold, they were already one of the greatest up-and-coming bands of the British blues boom. Although the band rubbed shoulders with fellow rock icons like Eric Clapton, things got a lot more heated when they lost Peter Green.
After spending time on the road working out different lineups, Bob Welch came into the band, where he shared lead vocal duties alongside Christine McVie on some of the band’s first classics like ‘Sentimental Lady’. After Welch left the fold, the band found themselves at the beginning of 1974 with a tour planned when disaster struck.
As the group geared up for their US tour, Mick Fleetwood found out that Bob Weston was having an affair with his wife and abruptly cancelled the run of live dates. It also didn’t help that the band were starting to hit the drugs hard around this time, getting high on cocaine daily and keeping an even keel so they could function when they played. Since Fleetwood was the namesake of the band and the de facto leader, the rest of the band stood by him. However, the band’s manager Clifford Davis had a different plan in mind.
Not wanting to sideline the fans (and the royalties of touring), Davis booked a tour with Fleetwood Mac and sent them out on the road. The only problem was that none of the original members were in the band. Instead of trying to reason with the band back home, Davis decided that he would take a list of random musicians on tour posing as Fleetwood Mac, who entertained the public with the band’s songs while not writing a single one of them.
After the band took their manager to court and went through an ugly legal proceeding, it wasn’t long before another disaster struck. Once Welch decided that he wasn’t going to be in the band anymore, Fleetwood had to look around for another frontman to fill his shoes.
Working out of the famed Sound City Studios, Fleetwood was intrigued by a duo called Buckingham/Nicks, whose album was being worked on in one of the nearby studios. Even though the idea was to bring in Buckingham to sing and play lead guitar, Buckingham wouldn’t accept the invitation if his partner didn’t join him, turning Fleetwood Mac into a five-piece.
Though the band finally seemed like they were on level ground, this wouldn’t be the last time that relationship drama would rear its head. Going into the making of the band’s magnum opus Rumours, every member of the group was having trouble functioning, from John and Christine McVie’s marriage falling apart to Buckingham and Nicks’s relationship coming to an end.
Just like their disastrous tour, the band used their melodrama as a form of fuel, forging ahead and making some of the best music of their career, from radio-ready classics like ‘Go Your Own Way’ and ‘Dreams’.
Aside from the massive amount of drugs and internal tension, Fleetwood Mac always prospered in the face of tension, almost as if their massive rows with each other became their artistic muse. No matter how much they fought amongst themselves, they could always rely on the chain of music to keep them together.
