The Fleetwood Mac song that channels the Grateful Dead
It might seem somewhat ridiculous to think of nowadays, but for most of their respective glory years, Fleetwood Mac and the Grateful Dead were chasing each other’s tails. While one started out as a pure British blues band and the other became the preeminent American psychedelic rock band, the Mac and the Dead found common ground as their love of jamming and musical improvisation began to bleed into their respective live sets.
In fact, the Mac and the Dead even jammed together. On February 11th, 1970, the Dead were sharing a bill with the Allman Brothers Band and Love at the Fillmore East in New York when the members of Fleetwood Mac found themselves in the same place at the same time. That’s how Duane Allman, Gregg Allman, Butch Trucks, Peter Green, Danny Kirwin, and Mick Fleetwood all found themselves onstage improvising on a raucous version of ‘Turn On Your Love Light’.
Fleetwood himself allegedly got dosed with LSD that night, leaving him shaking his head and muttering to himself as the night’s festivities came to a close. The wild jam from that night would represent the closing chapter for the first version of Fleetwood Mac. Just a few months later, Green would leave the band, causing their first of many turnovers across the decades to come.
A full year before Fleetwood Mac and the Grateful Dead eventually occupied the same stage, Fleetwood Mac would tap into their own variation of the Dead’s musical style with ‘Rattlesnake Shake’. A bluesy rock number with cheeky lyrics alluding to masturbation, ‘Rattlesnake Shake’ also features an improvised coda section that Fleetwood felt was directly indebted to bands like the Grateful Dead.
“On this song, you hear structure, yes, but you also hear me being incredibly free to break into the shuffle at the end, which was not supposed to happen, but it did, and we went, ‘Oh my God, we really like that,” Fleetwood told Music Radar in 2012. “I really loved that because it was my way of participating in creating the character of the song.”
“It incorporated the freedom to go off on a tangent, to jam – the classic ‘Do you jam, dude?’ We learned that as players,” Fleetwood added. “You hear that alive and well in the double-time structure that I put in at the end, which on stage could last half an hour. It was our way of being in the Grateful Dead.”
Check out ‘Rattlesnake Shake’ down below.
