‘World Turning’: the Fleetwood Mac song that changed everything about the band
Fleetwood Mac was always a band that thrived on dysfunction. As much as most people might not like the idea of pulling their hair out every time they came into work, the idea of someone leaving the group midway through a tour, someone cheating on their significant other with a member of the band, or leaving because they lost part of their sanity, the blues heavyweights always found a way to rise from the ashes. While every one of those things occurred before they had even hit their stride, something celestial happened the minute that a special song began taking shape.
Before the group became a household name, though, they still kicked major ass on the blues circuit. Despite Peter Green’s eclectic lifestyle and bad trips with LSD that led to his departure from the group, his licks were still some of the best of the late 1960s scene, including the massive lick that kicks off ‘Oh Well’ and the massive swirling echo behind ‘Albatross’. Once he left, the band lost their leader, and that meant carrying on with Bob Welch.
While there was nothing inherently wrong with Welch’s playing, it was clear that things were starting to move in a different direction. John McVie’s girlfriend, Christine Perfect, had already begun to move away from typical blues textures, and by the time they started to gain traction off of songs like ‘Sentimental Lady’, it was clear they were inching closer to pop territory.
But when Welch left the band, the group became desperate. They had had one of their biggest changes in momentum, and now they had to grapple with losing another core member. That kind of person feels impossible to replace, but for Mick Fleetwood, all he had to do was move across the hall from where they were recording.
In a separate room, he was knocked out by this folk duo named Buckingham Nicks, featuring guitarist Lindsey Buckingham playing furious leads over the top of their track ‘Frozen Love’. While most people would have auditioned him with the rest of the band, Buckingham was offered the job on the spot, only agreeing if he could bring in his girlfriend, Stevie Nicks, into the group with him.
Despite their pop stylings not gelling with the band’s bluesy roots, one of Fleetwood Mac’s early tunes, ‘The World Keeps on Turning’, became the start of the new era of the group, with Christine remembering, “Lindsey had this lick and didn’t know what to do with it. We knocked around some vocal ideas, and it happened very quickly – about half an hour.”
On the record, what became ‘World Turning’ sounds like a gender-balanced Crosby, Stills, and Nash record, but there was a certain magic underneath everything. Now with three different songwriters at the helm, Fleetwood Mac started to become more of a songwriting team, with Nicks, Christine, and Buckingham all contributing their own songs, whether that was fleshing out Nicks’s emotional exercises like ‘Landslide’ or Buckingham’s pop marvels like ‘Monday Morning’.
While many people point to this moment as the moment that Fleetwood Mac began selling out and making Top 40 music, they had already been slipping away from the blues long before Buckingham and Nicks even joined. This only served as the moment when they started to go from simply a decent rock and roll band to some of the greatest pop geniuses of their time.
