Music Banter - View Single Post

Anteater · 01-01-2015, 10:57 PM

Fleetwood Mac - Mystery To Me (1973)

"It's the same kind of story / That seems to come down from long ago / Two friends having coffee together / When something flies by their window / It might be out on that lawn / Which is wide, at least half of a playing field. / Because there's no explaining what your imagination / Can make you see and feel..."

Fleetwood Mac are as famous as famous gets. And for most folks, the journey starts in the mid 70's with their self-titled or at that commercial juggernaut known as Rumours. In retrospect though, Mick Fleetwood's circus act was actually a whole lot more interesting before Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham joined the fray, specifically in that brief period of '71 through '73 when eccentric guitarist Bob Welch was part of the grand equation. Sure, record execs would joke that Fleetwood Mac could expect to cover their electric bills but little else on the middling strength of their album sales based on prior releases, but we all know who had the last laugh in the end.

In any case, Bob had a hard set of shoes to fill: founding frontman Peter Green had left the building and the band was constantly on the verge of falling apart on tour. Despite constant setbacks, Welch and keyboardist/songwriter Christine McVie pulled together for several albums, the best and last of which is the subject of this review. It wasn't a big seller, but of the many albums which laid the bedrock for the yacht rock sound that became popular in the later part of the decade, Mystery To Me is perhaps my favorite. You can already hear hints of the pop superstardom that was to come for these guys, but there's a delicious laidback strangeness on songs like the self-explanatory 'Hypnotized' and the groovy chamber pop of 'Keep On Going' that sounds a million miles away from the sound these guys went for in their platinum years, and I honestly kinda wish they had kept going in this direction on future material.

Perhaps the most surreal moment for me was when I first heard the song 'Somebody'. the vocals and the chord progression sounds like Steely Dan circa The Royal Scam, another classic album that wouldn't be born for a couple years yet. Welch may not have been made for stadiums, but he was one hell of a prescient songwriter.

This particular lineup of the 'Mac would mostly carry over into 1974's Heroes Are Hard To Find, perhaps the band's strangest and darkest album and the last of its "kind" before Welch quit the band and took his knack for blending accessible and experimental with him. He's been dead a few years now too, which means the opportunity for a reunion of a pre-Nicks lineup is effectively impossible. Damn it!

In conclusion though, my main motivation for talking about this album is to demonstrate that there really is a spectrum in all styles, no matter your preference. Whether its post-punk or dubstep or, of course, yacht rock...well, there's the fluffiest of the fluff and there's also stuff that tries to be a lot more than a succession of hooks and pure formula or an adherence to the expectations of the converted. This is one that falls into the second category in most respects, and there are others on my Westocoast-AOR essential listening list that follow suit. 2015 here we come!