6 Classic Recordings That Have No Business Existing (Part One)
# 6: Rumors (1977) by Fleetwood Mac
Hey, I know!
Let’s all take tons of drugs, sleep with each other, break up, take more drugs, then lock ourselves in a studio and cut a record about it.
Maybe it’ll even be one of the biggest selling albums of all time!
(As you might imagine, there’s a whole book about that soap opera, too.)
Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors was everything punk rock was rebelling against:
By the time it was made, the personal freedoms endowed by the social upheaval of the 60s had unspooled into unfettered hedonism. As such, it plays like a reaping: a finely polished post-hippie fallout, unaware that the twilight hour of the free love era was fixing and there would be no going back.
In the end, that battle ended in a draw.
Rumors may sound like brontosaurus mating calls to some ears today, but the re-engineered reissue is still selling pretty well.
I was enjoying that column until your latest display of butt-hurt over the Beatles. Get over it already.
BTW, you should read the recently-released Pete Townshend autobiography – if you haven’t already. Thoroughly enjoyable. It doesn’t dish a lot of dirt, and it comes across as honest.
When Townshend wrote “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, I wonder if he realized that he was disowning “My Generation” by doing so.
The Beatles are the single most overrated group in the history of pop music, since the moments of genius often misattributed to Lennon/McCartney actually belong to their producer, George Martin.
As a case in point, compare the much-celebrated “Sgt. Pepper” — George Martin’s meisterwerk — with the actually-not-very-good “Let It Be,” produced by megalomaniac (and future murderer) Phil Spector. One makes the Beatles sound like a full-blown lysergic Da-Glo orchestra; the other reveals them for the mediocre live musicians they in fact were, considering they’d stopped gigging since about 1966. After that point, they existed only as a studio project and were not a functioning rock band (cf: the Rolling Stones) in any meaningful sense of the term.
No business existing? Harsh!
Not harsh. You just don’t get it
When Steve Winwood was recording the album Arc of a Diver, he was reasonably broke (English taxes), and working with crappy recording equipment (he also played all the instruments). He had a fancy introduction for “While you see a chance” which the machine ate. The current synthesizer introduction was improvised at the last minute.
Good addition to the list! Thanks.
Next week comes Part 2…
“Hey, I know! Let’s all take tons of drugs, sleep with each other, break up, take more drugs, then lock ourselves in a studio and cut a record about it.”
If that were a reason for classic recording(s) not to exist, none would. Drugs, sex, break-ups, more drugs & cutting records describes most, if not all, boy/ girl bands that have been together for more than, oh. . . . about a week. Or at least until their first gig.
Exactly. And regardless of the drugs and sex, the rock and rollers were talented. In fact, most are sober now and still touring in their sixties and seventies.
MOAR COWBELL!!!
Not to be totally cynical, but that “Good Vibrations” movie sure has good lighting and a remarkable number of camera angles.