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

devendra's entire shtick is "never going back again" as sung by marc bolan ca. tyrannosaurus rex

The Vatican has produced a 'semi-serious' list of recommended classic pop albums. Which of its choices did it describe as a 'fascinating musical soap opera' ?

Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon 38.57%
Fleetwood Mac - Rumours 16.28%
Michael Jackson - Thriller 21.71%
The Beatles - Revolver 5.54%
Paul Simon - Graceland 17.90%

866 answers so far. It's Fleetwood Mac's 1977 album Rumours. Also making the Vatican's list were Oasis' (What's The Story) Morning Glory, U2's Achtung Baby and Santana's Supernatural. The list was featured in the Pope's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.

um, Duh!?

WTF? No "Sympathy For The Devil" or "Number Of The Beast"???

don't really think 'rumours' was some grand shift - plenty of stuff sounds like this from around then, just most of it is pretty spineless in comparison. 'writing excellent songs and spending a lot of money recording them' isn't a great leap forward, it seems more llike the pinnacle of what was already going on. it doesn't take anything away from the record though, far from it.

I should point out, it's a bbc 'quiz' not a poll. They ask the question, and you pick the answer from the five options given.

Jeez, not everything is a poll, guys!

don't really think 'rumours' was some grand shift - plenty of stuff sounds like this from around then, just most of it is pretty spineless in comparison

You could say the same about the Ramones or Pistols, though. (And lots of what sounded like punk before punk happened actually doesn't sound spineless.) But again, I'm not the one saying that either Fleetwood Mac or punk "shifted paradigms."

Here's my Spin Fiona/One 2 One review that Kevin quotes at the start of this thread:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Jlr1EqbQvLgC&pg=PT86&dq='chuck+eddy'+fiona+'one+2+one'&rview=1&cd=1#v=onepage&q='chuck%20eddy'%20fiona%20'one%202%20one'&f=false

To my ears, "Rumours"-era Fleetwood Mac doesn't sound as boldly original as, for instance, the Ramones do on their debut. I'm too young to remember what it was like when either came out though. But even now, if I listen back to albums preceding 1976-77, it's not too hard to find albums that sound fairly similar to "Rumours" but pretty hard to find something that sounds a lot like the Ramones. But maybe I'm just more attuned to the little things that the Ramones did differently from say the Modern Lovers, New York Dolls or Neu and less attuned to the things that "Rumours" does differently from stuff like The Eagles, Gene Clark's No Other, or Sandy Denny.

Which musicians obviously started a band because they heard both Rumours and Never Mind The Bollocks?

The Bangles
The Go-Gos

Rumours was a paradigm shift for, er, Fleetwood Mac

I saw them in 1971 when they were a real blues band. Then they had a hit with that godawful Albatross and it was all downhill from there.

Well, soundwise, their big shift would've been on their previous album -- the self-titled one from '75, right?

I hear as much "Saturday Night" (Bay City Rollers) and "Ballroom Blitz" (the Sweet) (and maybe early Beach Boys and 1910 Fruitgum Company, not to mention early '70s Detroit rock) in the early Ramones as any of the bands o.nate named. But do agree that they were still a major sonic leap from all that stuff. (Not sure they sounded any more different from the Sweet etc. than late '70s F Mac sounded from the Eagles etc. though.)

There does seem to be a big difference in rhythm section between The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, so I agree with that. Maybe "Rumors" and the '75 album took some of the harmonies and production style of those earlier bands but welded them to more a insistent, forward-moving rhythm.

more like woodleyfool

That Lindstrom & Prins Thomas Essential Mix has an excellent remix of "You Make Loving Fun" on it, and you can hear how the FM influence pervades much of their sound. So yes, maybe it did take the rest of the world, or at least the accessibility of production tools, a while to catch up.

And Kate Bush is their obvious heir in my mind. I also wonder how much Roger Waters listened to Rumours when he was writing The Wall.

Someone mentioned ABBA above as being influenced by "Rumours" but I think you could also see the influence running the other way, esp. in terms of the propulsive rhythms and harmonies.

dumb thread thanks man see u

I think modern country is the scene where most post-Rumours music is flourishing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVisABCk0kI

I read somewhere that S. Reynolds also made the comparison, saying that "Rumours was to the U.S. what punk was to the U.K." so I mean there's something to it...I myself tend to think of disco as the other side of the punk coin...

or perhaps punk and disco are brothers who are both in love with the same girl: Stevie Nicks (though punk vehemently denies it...)

Man, they really only slightly rewrote "The Chain" for that one, didn't they?

Referring to the Little Big Town song.

yes, Dan, they did.

other country stars in the Rumours vein: (obviously) the Dixie Chicks, maybe Sugarland? I don't know...

While I've met no one who hates Rumours, I would never trust anyone who doesn't at least like it.

other country stars in the Rumours vein

Definitely Bering Strait, three-guy/two-girl band from Russia whose debut album hit #17 of the country chart five years back, and had a decent cover of "You Make Lovin' Fun" on it. Possibly Lady Antebellum now, and some younger bands like Jypsi or Glorianna or Coldwater Jane.

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"