July 1975: Fleetwood Mac Release FLEETWOOD MAC
It was one of the most radical reinventions in rock 'n' roll. Just seven years after debuting as a down and dirty British blues band led by guitar legend, Peter Green, Fleetwood Mac released the group's second eponymous album. This time, to announce a new beginning. Out was guitarist Bob Welch; in was a young couple of American singer-songwriters, one of which was a whiz on guitar: Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.
"It's changed what I was doing a lot," Nicks laughed during a 1975 interview when asked how joining Fleetwood Mac had affected her process. "For me, it's very collaborative. I just sort of write a song very, very simply, and then I just sort of have to say, 'here,' because I can't go out and put all the great sounding parts on it, because I just don't have the knowledge to do it. On this particular album that's just gone by, everything they did on all my songs was--I couldn't have done them--if I had the knowledge to do them, I wouldn't have done them better, I think."
"Early on, soon after joining Fleetwood Mac, I realized that we were the kind of group who didn’t – on paper – belong in the same group together," Buckingham told Clash in 2021. "But yet that was the very thing that made us so effective. There was a synergy there, where the whole became more than the sum of its parts. What happens is that you begin to understand that, and accept it as a gift."
Recorded at the famous Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, Fleetwood Mac was released on July 11, 1975. The album's first single, Christine McVie composition, "Over My Head," was a resounding success, peaking at #20 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it the first Fleetwood Mac track to hit the mainstream chart since "Oh Well" in 1970.
The band embarked on the Fleetwood Mac tour in May 1975, with the grueling jaunt extending deep into December of that same year. After a short break, they were right back at it for a summer tour that launched on May 1, 1976. The timing for the summer tour couldn't have been better for the band's trajectory, as the Stevie Nicks-penned single "Rhiannon (Will You Ever Win)" was soaring up the charts, headed for a peak at #11 on the Hot 100 for the week of June 6, 1976.
By the summer of '76, Fleetwood Mac was flying high. The band's third U.S. single from Fleetwood Mac, Christine McVie song, "Say You Love Me," was another radio and chart hit, cruising to a peak of #11 on the Hot 100 for the week of September 18, 1976.
Personally, the hectic whirlwind of being part of Fleetwood Mac took a toll on the Buckingham-Nicks relationship, eventually driving the couple apart: "I mean, I broke up with Lindsey in 1976. We'd only been in Fleetwood Mac for a year and a half, and we were breaking up when we joined Fleetwood Mac," Nicks told The New Yorker in 2022. "So we just put our relationship kind of back together, because I was smart enough to know that, if we had broken up the second month of being in Fleetwood Mac, it would have blown the whole thing.
"I just bided my time, and tried to make everything as easy as possible, tried to be as sweet and nice to Lindsey as I could be. He wasn't happy, either," Nicks continued. "Then something happened that was, you know, 'We're done.' And he knew it. It was time. And the band was solid, by that time, so I could walk away knowing that he was safe. And that the band was safe. And that we could work it out."
Fleetwood Mac was such a big record for the band that it broke through Peter Frampton's epic run at #1 on the Billboard 200 with Frampton Comes Alive! that summer to snatch the top spot for the single week of September 4, 1976. The record's breakout success set the stage for Fleetwood Mac's own epic run at #1 on the US album charts in 1977 with the release of instantly classic 11th studio album, Rumours.