How were Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac as paradigm-shifting as punk?

Rumours was a paradigm shift for, er, Fleetwood Mac

The band went through a bunch of paradigm shifts. At one point their manager with the connivance of Mick Fleetwood, who later chickened out, put a bunch of ringers on the road who weren't discovered until a few shows in on a tour. The band of ringers was Stretch, an obscure Brit hard rock band, hired to imitate Bob Weston and Bob Welch-era Fleetwood Mac. Strange story, and it almost sunk 'em permanently.

Fleetwood Mac came an album after the re-emergence, which didn't do so well. It was the first with Buckingham-Nicks, and it sold very well, setting the stage for Rumours. When I was a freshman in college, Fleetwood Mac was getting play on every floor of the dorm.

Here's the wiki thing on it. It neglects to mention Mick Fleetwood's role in the affair, which Stretch later put into a song called "Why Did You Do It," which was a semi-hit in Europe. As the guys that wuld be Stretch saw it, they -thought- they were joining a Fleetwood Mac plagued by personnel departures.

In what would be one of the most bizarre events in rock history, the band's manager, Clifford Davis, claimed that he owned the name Fleetwood Mac and put out a "fake Mac". Nobody in the "fake Mac" was ever officially in the real band, although some of them later acted as Danny Kirwan's studio band. Fans were told that Bob Welch and John McVie had quit the group, and that Mick Fleetwood and Christine McVie would be joining the band at a later date, after getting some rest. Fleetwood Mac's road manager, John Courage, worked one show before he realised that the line being used was a lie. Courage ended up hiding the real Fleetwood Mac's equipment, which helped shorten the tour by the fake band. But the lawsuit that followed put the real Fleetwood Mac out of commission for almost a year

omg - that is awesome!

Anecdotes like that show Mick Fleetwood is a "survivor" in the most risible sense: he'll do anything, anything at all to keep the project going.

I read somewhere that S. Reynolds also made the comparison

Here it is:

A soft-rock masterpiece (gorgeous melodicism charged with the emotional carnage wreaked by the inter-band tangle of break-ups and infidelities), Rumours was also an unprecedented blockbuster, selling a staggering 21 million copies worldwide. In America (where FM were just made for FM radio), the LP was even huger: 31 weeks at Numero Uno in the Billboard Charts (that's two-thirds of a YEAR!) and total sales that, at 14 million, still make it America's second best-selling LP ever. In the USA, Rumours was what happened instead of punk; even in Britain, where FM radio barely existed, it was the album in every suburban hi-fi cabinet, right next to Dark Side Of The Moon.

http://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2007/10/fleetwood-mac-tusk-from-unknown.html

I think there was a trend in the mid-'70s of disco-inspired rhythms being incorporated into pop-rock. ABBA's 1974 global smash "Waterloo" was an early example. The Bee Gees went disco for the first time in 1975. This helped disco cross over to a mainstream audience. More dance-inspired, uptempo beats started to crop up in pop-rock music. In 1976, besides "Rumours", Electric Light Orchestra had a hit with "Livin' Thing" which is a similar blend of disco-rhythms and Beatles-esque harmonies. So what "Rumours" was doing with the California soft-rock style was similar to what was happening in other rock variants around that time.

hmm anyone up for helping me hear the disco element in Rumours? kinda missed that on my first 75 zillion listens.

I'm just thinking of the more up-tempo tracks like "Go Your Own Way", "Don't Stop", and "Second-Hand News" (which according to Wikipedia was inspired by Buckingham hearing the Bee Gees' disco hit "Jive Talkin"). I hear some disco shuffle in those rhythms.

not to be a pedant but the disco beat by definition does not shuffle

Not sure what you mean. Surely there's an element of shuffle or swing in a lot of disco music.

four on the floor = no shuffle. shuffle beat by definition is an unequal emphasis on beats of the same duration (i.e., emphasizing the one and the three beat in a four beat sequence)

the basic disco beat emphasizes all four beats equally

But the four-on-the-floor drum beat is usually combined with other elements that are swung rhythmically (uneven durations) in lots of disco songs.

I don't think swing or shuffle is so much a question of emphasis as of duration. Four on the floor means all four beats are emphasized equally, unlike rock beats where the 2nd and 4th or 1st and 3rd are accented. This doesn't really have anything to do with swing or shuffle.

disco routinely incorporated syncopated elements (primarily of a caribbean/afro-cuban naure) that were more about dividing the standard 4/4 beat into varying 16th note patterns. but it doesn't change the fact that the underlying beat is not a shuffle.

where's Jordan? surely we can get one of ILM's resident drummers to settle this

verrrrrry rudimentary definition:

rock = 4/4
disco = off-beat, where the beat is on the bass-drum (I guess similar to classic country)?

ok, i just re-listened and i can ~kinda~ see how you can loosely (ie, c.eddy-ly) define "don't stop" and "2nd hand news" as disco-inspired rhythmically, but "go your own way" is a straight up 4/4 rock.

The drummer may insist there's no shuffle in disco - but I'm thinking more of the way other instruments play off the steady drum beat. For instance the "triple step" rhythmic feel of "Don't Stop" has uneven rhythms played on top of a steady even rhythm (3 beats of uneven duration played against 2 even ones).

oh hi.

i listened to "don't stop" and it's absolutely a shuffle. 4/4, with triplet subdivisions between the quarter notes, accented like this: ONE and UH TWO and UH THREE and UH FOUR and UH.

as for disco, i don't think of it as ever being explicitly triplet-based or using shuffle grooves, but it can still swing within that 4/4, duple-meter context (and swinging always at least references the triplet at some level of the beat).

incidentally, i was just listening to this, which has to be in the top 5 funkiest shuffles ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRMTaeoQw2Y

I don't think the swing feel is part of disco per se - just something that was sometimes implied particularly in '70s disco, which to my ears distinguishes it from later '80s dance music.

"The Hustle" was a popular '70s disco dance which involved dancing in a swing rhythm against the steady 4/4 disco pulse.

Also I think perhaps when rock bands adopted rhythmic ideas from disco in the '70s, it was more of that syncopation that is more noticeable, because they didn't take the 4 on the floor itself, but rather the trappings.

Also, this may be a bit of speculation at this point, but I suspect that another element rock may have taken from disco in the mid-70s was a somewhat faster tempo. It would be interesting to see what typical BPMs were for disco vs. rock in the early to mid-70s.

"You Make Loving Fun" seems to be the song on Rumours which doesn't exactly sound like disco but seems to have the most latent disco potential...

(actually, I'm not sure what I mean, except that I think that maybe instead of pining away for Stevie Nicks like punk, it's possible that disco was actually trying to nail Christine McVie)

Well, of course! She's the only one of the bunch who's not a recovering alky.

I think maybe John McVie is the most underrated of the Macsters. His bass playing is huge on "Rumours".

^love the bass-playing on "Dreams"

Yeah, it's great - really makes the song.

"Rumours was to the U.S. what punk was to the U.K."

it was funny reading that hotel california book about the whole elektra/asylum/laurel canyon era and the shot heard round the world for EVERYONE out there from the eagles guys and jackson and linda and everyone in between was sweet baby james! that was the album they all wanted to make and was the template for the whole cali sound. it was their sex pistols moment.

"Steamroller Blues" is kind of a jam.

i was primed and ready as early as 1974 to embrace the buck/nicks mac line-up. linda was my goddess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI9FMwzgY-k

and so, so hott

linda rondstadt seems like such a nice killer lady in "hotel california".. far too sweet to be hanging around those depraved unwashed eagles boys

far too SMART, you mean.

yeah that too

linda, and surprisingly, jackson browne were pretty much the only people who came out of that book unscathed.

frey and stills though, man, they were like the ultimate evil.

which Hotel California book are you referring to, scott?

oh wait: the Hoskyns book.

http://altefritz.com/Images/linda.jpg

que linda

Hey, look! It's our once and future governor. You shoulda captioned that skot.

I hadda read Mick Fleetwood's autobiography once. The only worse was Bill Wyman's. But anyway, the only thing I remember about it because it was so icky was Fleetwood retelling this tale of how he'd started this telephone romance with a fan who'd written him a letter. And he became very smitten with her, he alleged, seemingly on the basis of her telephone voice and what she told him. And he kept wanting to meet her and she kept putting it off. And he became more sexually obsessed with her and when she finally consented to meet him he was bummed because she turned out to be a fat girl. So he wrote that he had been wronged and tried to scold her into admitting she had tricked him. Unsuccessfully.

I have a hard time imagining why anyone would publish a story about themselves like that unless
that person has an IQ of about 70, has lucked into vast fame and fortune by being in the right place with the right people at the right times, and became used to being surrounded by people who never said "boo" to whatever stupid thing entered his mind.

Doesn't stop me from liking Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac though.

Ten possible reasons.

Marcello, that's fantastic. Although I still don't own the 2004 edition with the restored "Silver Springs," it's true that an inessential gap has been filled.

I recently tried to supplement my itunes-bought copy of Rumours with an itunes-bought copy of Silver Springs, which is only available on a Stevie Nicks best-of. The problem is that the version on the Nicks comp sounds so much better than the version of Rumours that I have.

The two-disc 2002 "Very Best of Fleetwood Mac" has a (remixed?) version of "Silver Springs" on it, as well as a nice selection of Peter Green stuff and random rarities/alternates.

I downloaded my version from that comp.

so when is the hollywood biopic about FM and the making and success of RUMOURS gonna happen???