Fleetwood Mac - The Paramount, Seattle, WA, 3-10-1972

Recently, I've been working on getting more stuff from the Peter Green era of Fleetwood Mac ready to be posted here. I'll be posting that soon, but while I was looking around for that stuff, I stumbled across this bootleg concert, from 1972.

Basically, Fleetwood Mac is best known for two eras: the blues era from 1967 to 1971, dominated by Peter Green, and the pop era from 1975 onward dominated by Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, and Christine McVie. But there are those in-between years, the largely forgotten years, 1972 to 1974. Commercially, the band was at a low point during those years. Yet, in hindsight, we can see that the band kept putting out lots of good music, even though there was a lot of personnel turnover.

I've posted one concert from 1974 here that has excellent sound quality. But I didn't think there were any well recorded concerts from 1972 or 1973. It turns out there is, this one here. By luck, this concert happened to be recorded and broadcast by a Seattle radio station, so it sounds much better than the audience bootlegs of the time.

The performance is also excellent, with lots of songs from the "forgotten years" that otherwise were never played in concert. Three songs are played from "Bare Trees," which was released just a few weeks after this concert. Christine McVie and Bob Welch sing most of the songs. Guitarist Danny Kirwan was still in the band, but he wouldn't be for long.

Here's some information from a text file about the concert, slightly edited:

"Danny Kirwan was by all accounts falling-down drunk. At this point in his career he had taken to excessive consumption of alcohol and was on his way to being sacked one month later. He can be heard tripping over equipment and causing feedback during this performance, shocking his bandmates enough for them to remark about it. During this show, Kirwan managed to finish the vocals on "Child of Mine", but the band struggled to keep up with the uneven pace he set for them. Bob Welch took over lead guitar from him during the song. Then Kirwan tried to sing "Black Magic Woman", but was unable to and Welch had to finish it for him. Even with all of that going on, the band still managed a fine performance."

I have to agree with that last comment. Based on that text, it sounds like the concert was a disaster. But you'd never know the problem just by listening, because the other band members ably covered for Kirwan's failures. In particular, Welch did a really fine job playing lead guitar.

I had to make a few sound edits for the concert. The problem was that the radio station cut in sometimes to announce their call letters. A couple of times, this happened between songs, so it was easy to edit them out. But one time, it was done right in the middle of "Black Magic Woman." Luckily, the DJ only spoke for a few seconds, and it was during an instrumental section, so I was able to remove it by patching in some music from elsewhere in the song.

Although I haven't found any good concert recordings of the band from 1973, I did find two songs they played live on the Midnight Special TV show in 1973. Luckily, neither of them are songs played in this concert. So I've added those to the end as quasi bonus tracks. Including those two songs, this album is slightly over an hour long.

UPDATE: On November 14, 2021, I updated the mp3 download file. My musical friend Lilpanda used the relatively new sound editing program X-Minus to boost the volume of the lead vocals. I think that's a definite improvement, so I've used his latest versions of all the songs.

01 Tell Me All the Things You Do (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Future Games (Fleetwood Mac)
03 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Get like You Used to Be (Fleetwood Mac)
05 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Child of Mine (Fleetwood Mac)
07 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
08 Spare Me a Little (Fleetwood Mac)
09 Homeward Bound (Fleetwood Mac)
10 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
11 Black Magic Woman (Fleetwood Mac)
12 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
13 Oh Well, Part 1 (Fleetwood Mac)
14 Miles Away (Fleetwood Mac)
15 Believe Me (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15291544/FleetwodMc_1972a_ThePramountSeattleWA__3-10-1972_atse.zip.html

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any good color photos of the band playing in concert in 1972. That's a sign of their lack of popularity at that time. But I did find a publicity photo of the band from that time, with the same five band members who played in this show, so I used that. To frame it, I used some artwork I found from a concert poster for the band dating to the late 1970s.