Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 8: December 1969 to February 1970

Here's the seventh volume of the episodes I compiled of the "Playboy After Dark" TV show. It's the third volume of the show's second season.

I'll only mention some things about a couple of the performances. The rest should be evident just by listening. 

This episode features a previously unknown chapter of Lesley Gore's music career. She'd had a string of hits from 1963 to 1967, but her music went out of style. She continued to release some singles, but they all flopped. In 1972, she put out an album for the first time since 1967, "Someplace Else Now," that recast her in a singer-songwriter mode, similar to Carole King and her seminal 1971 album "Tapestry." In her Playboy TV appearance, she sang two songs that were moving into that mode. Neither of them were officially released by her anywhere, as far as I could tell. One of them, "Didn't We," is a Jimmy Webb song that was covered by many musical artists in this time period. 

Another bit of lost history are the two songs by Joanne Vent and Muscatel. Vent was an attractive White woman with a soulful, bluesy voice, who seemed to have potential for a big music career, a la Janis Joplin. She put out a solo album in 1969, called, "The Black and White of It Is Blues." Unfortunately, as one review I read put it, "Great voice, but not such a great album." At the time of this show, she was getting ready to release a second album with a new backing band, called Muscatel. I found a web link of someone selling a test pressing of it on eBay. But somehow that album never came out. The two songs she sang here suggest what her second album could have sounded like. She also was part of a duet in Volume 5, and shows up again in Volumes 10 and 11.

It's great that Fleetwood Mac is included here. But unfortunately, their performance was badly edited down. Their one song, "Rattlesnake Shake," is only two and a half minutes long. It's clear the performance was longer, since the song both fades in and fades out. They also did a second song, "Coming Your Way," but it only showed up for half a minute at the very end of that particular episode, under an overdubbed advertisement for T.W.A. Airlines. So I didn't bother to include that.

I've mentioned that each episode ended with talking over the music. But, by chance, that only impacted one song in this volume,  "The Category Stomp by John Hartford. That's why that one has "[Edit]" in its title.

This album is an hour and eight minutes long. 

01 Something (Dolores Hall)
02 Just Because of You (Dolores Hall)
03 A Simple Thing as Love (John Hartford)
04 Natural to Be Gone (John Hartford)
05 The Category Stomp [Edit] (John Hartford)
06 Let's Get Together (Jack Jones)
07 If You Want Me To (Chambers Brothers)
08 Love, Love, Love (Chambers Brothers)
09 Georgia on My Mind (James Brown)
10 Yesterday (Vicki Anderson)
11 By the Time I Get to Phoenix (James Brown)
12 God Bless the Child (Jack Jones)
13 The More I See You (Jack Jones)
14 Rattlesnake Shake (Fleetwood Mac)
15 Hello Young Lovers (Lesley Gore)
16 Didn't We (Lesley Gore)
17 High Sheriff of Calhoun Parrish (Tony Joe White)
18 Groupy Girl (Tony Joe White)
19 Slow Train (Joanne Vent & Muscatel)
20 Long Walk to D.C. (Joanne Vent & Muscatel)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/JdGHbzj8

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/HAcJNqwRYyI9p09/file

The cover image shows Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac. It's a screenshot I took from one of these episodes.

Fleetwood Mac - Cue Club, Gothenburg, Sweden, 11-2-1969

I've delved very deeply into early Fleetwood Mac, posting 36 albums of their music from 1967 to 1971, so I don't know how I missed this one until now. This is peak Peter Green-era, with fantastic sound quality.

(A couple of years ago, I actually put one song "Gothenberg Improv" (which is just a guess at a title) from this exact concert on the album "Live and Rare, Volume 2," and yet I missed the whole concert somehow. Maybe I got that from some compilation and failed to find the rest of it, until a few days ago.)

This is a complete concert that either is a soundboard or was broadcast on Swedish radio at the time. Either way, the sound quality is as good as it gets for the era. Better still, the band was firing on all cylinders. Peter Green, the band's main singer, songwriter, and lead guitarist at the time, was at the height of his creative powers. (He would have increasing troubles in early 1970 and leave the band in the middle of that year.) At the time, the band had another lead guitarist, Danny Kirwan, and their guitar interplay was peaking here as well.

The band had released the hit album "Then Play On" a couple of months earlier, as well as the hit song "Oh Well, Part 1." But this concert also includes the hit song "The Green Manalishi (With the Two-Prong Crown)," which wouldn't be released until May 1970. It's possible this was the first time it was performed in concert. (Setlist.fm lists the first performance later in November, but it sometimes is incomplete.)

There was only one problem with this concert, and that has to do with the last song, "The Green Manalishi." The entire first three minutes were missing. The recording began right as the vocals part of the song ended, and a long instrumental jam began. I used another version (from the Warehouse in New Orleans in January 1970) for those three minutes. The last minute or so was missing as well. I used the same source to fix that also. So that's why that one song has "[Edit]" in its title.

This album is an hour and 21 minutes long. 

01 Rattlesnake Shake (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Underway [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
03 World in Harmony [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Red Hot Mama (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Got to Move (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Gothenburg Improv [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Coming Your Way (Fleetwood Mac)
08 Stranger Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
09 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
10 Albatross [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
11 Oh Well, Part 1 (Fleetwood Mac)
12 The Green Manalishi [With the Two-Prong Crown] [Edit] (Fleetwood Mac) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/jqYAECRo

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/NXXZ9uK3jSWqeVZ/file

The cover photo of Peter Green is from an appearance on the "Top of the Pops" BBC TV show (not to be confused with the radio show of the same name) at Lime Grove Studios, in London, on October 23, 1969. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program.

John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: 1967-1968

A few days ago, I posted the first of three albums of John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers performing for the BBC. That one largely dealt with the time Eric Clapton was the band's lead guitarist. 

For this volume, Peter Green was the lead guitarist for the first 7 songs. After leaving this band, he would help form Fleetwood Mac and become a big star. Note that bassist John McVie had been a member of the Bluesbreakers since the band formed around 1963, but he too left to form Fleetwood Mac. Drummer Mick Fleetwood was briefly a member right around when Green left, and also left to with the other two to start Fleetwood Mac (named after Fleetwood and McVie).

Green was replaced on lead guitar by Mick Taylor. He is featured on all of the rest of the songs here, including the two bonus tracks. Taylor only stayed with the Bluesbreakers for about a year, then left to become a member of the Rolling Stones for a few years. There are more songs featuring him in Volume 3 of this series.

All the songs here come from the 2021 mega-box set "First Generation." The sound quality is generally excellent. However, on some of the songs, I felt Mayall's lead vocals were too low in the mix. I'm not a fan of Mayall's singing, but I felt he should either be heard properly or not at all. So I used the X-Minus audio editing program to boost his vocals on the songs marked with "[Edit]." It's possible that some of those songs had BBC DJs talking over some of the music, and I fixed that again, or maybe it was both problems. It's been a while since I fixed these, so I don't remember.

There are two versions of the instrumental song "Curly" here. Since it was a showpiece for Green's guitar work, I've kept both.

Getting back to the sound quality issue, some of the songs with Taylor don't sound as good as the others. Generally speaking, I thought they were fine, and worthy of inclusion. But two of them, "Jenny" and "The Last Time," were far worse than the rest, so those two got demoted to bonus track status.

01 Leaping Christine (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
02 Sitting in the Rain (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
03 Curly [Instrumental] (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
04 Riding on the L and N (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
05 Dust My Blues [Edit] (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
06 No More Tears (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
07 Curly [Instrumental] (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
08 Suspicions [Edit] (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Mick Taylor)
09 Worried Love [Edit] (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Mick Taylor)
10 Supermarket Day [Edit] (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Mick Taylor)
11 Snowy Wood [Instrumental] [Edit] (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Mick Taylor)
12 Sweet Sixteen (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Mick Taylor)
13 Another Man's Land (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Mick Taylor)

Jenny (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Mick Taylor)
The Last Time (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Mick Taylor)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16693369/JOHNMYLL1967-1968_BBSssonsVlum2_atse.zip.html

The cover photo shows Mayall in concert in 1968. I would have liked to use a good color photo showing Mayall and either Green or Taylor, but I couldn't find any.

Fleetwood Mac - Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2-28-1969

I thought I was all done posting material from the Peter Green era of Fleetwood Mac. In terms of live material, there are only so many concerts that haven't been officially released yet still have high sound quality. But I found one more that's worthy, and anything featuring Peter Green in his prime is worth hearing, so here it is.

This is a strange one, because it's made up of two concerts that were performed in different cities in the Netherlands on the exact same night. Fleetwood Mac played at a venue called the Concertgebouw in The Hague around 6 P.M. Then they played another concert in Amsterdam at a venue with the exact same name later that same evening. (It seems they didn't go on stage until around midnight.) I don't know if it was by chance or what, but over the next few months, about half an hour of the Hague concert was played on Dutch radio or TV, from a longer show, then about half an hour of the Amsterdam concert was played on Dutch radio or TV, also from a longer show. The two broadcast portions were bootlegged over the years, while the rest of both concerts seem to have gotten lost.

This album consists of the broadcast portions from those two concerts. However, I've organized it so that most of the second concert comes first. That's because we have the ending of the first concert but not the ending of the second one, so it makes sense to end with an ending.

Generally speaking, the sound quality is excellent, since this was professionally recorded for either radio or TV. That said, some parts sound better than others. Some songs sound fantastic and some sound merely good. That's probably because the bootlegs were cobbled together from different sources. I worked with my musical associate MZ on improving the sound quality. He made some nice improvements, but sometimes one can only do so much. A few of the talking bits between songs come from worse sources, but that doesn't matter much since it's only a little bit of banter.

I cut a few songs for various reasons. There were two versions of "One Sided Love," so I only used one of them. A short snippet of "Teenage Darlin'" was played, but it really was only the bass line while the audience was cheering. That led into "Twist and Shout," but less than a minute of that was recorded. So I didn't include either of those.

Note that two of the exact performances here, "One Sided Love" and "Greeny Alone," were used on the stray tracks album I made called "One Sided Love."

The entire album is 59 minutes long. The Amsterdam portion is 35 minutes long and the Hague portion is 24 minutes long. The Hague portion includes the very first track (which is only a few seconds of an MC introducing the band in Dutch), then from track 13 to the end.

By the way, for the very delicate types out there, there are some X-rated improvised lyrics to the "Blue Suede Shoes" medley.

01 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
02 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Merry Go Round (Fleetwood Mac)
04 One Sided Love (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Dust My Broom (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Got to Move (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Greeny Alone [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
08 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
09 Sugar Mama (Fleetwood Mac)
10 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
11 I Can't Hold Out (Fleetwood Mac)
12 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
13 Stop Messin' Round (Fleetwood Mac)
14 San-Ho-Zay [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
15 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
16 Albatross [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
17 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
18 Tallahassee Lassie (Fleetwood Mac)
19 Blue Suede Shoes - Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On - Blue Suede Shoes (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15291491/FleetwodMc_1969a_ConcertgbouwAmsterdmNetherlands__2-28-1969_atse.zip.html

What a nice lucky break! I've had a hard time finding any good photos of the band on stage in 1969. But I happened to find the concert poster for the exact Amsterdam concert featured here. I didn't change a thing, so I hope your Dutch is good if you want to read all of it. :) But concert posters are rectangular. To make it fit, I cut out the portion of it below the band name. That portion mainly mentioned the name of the supporting bands, which were Cuby + Buzzards, and Livin' Blues.

Fleetwood Mac - Live and Rare, Volume 2 (1968-1970)

Yesterday, I posted "Live and Rare, Volume 1." This is more of the same. It's the second and final album dealing with songs Fleetwood Mac played in concert during the Peter Green years that are officially unreleased and were only recorded on rough sounding bootlegs.

As I wrote for that previous volume, beware that the sound is far from perfect. That said, it's very listenable. I make these albums mainly for myself, and I'm not going to put up with something that sounds like crap. Like I wrote yesterday, these often are good sounding songs from otherwise rough sounding bootlegs.

How is that possible? One way is that it often is harder to record vocals well than the instrumentation. And four of the songs this time around are instrumentals. As I explained with that earlier volume, many of these instrumentals have no easily identifiable name. It's likely for at least some of them that they were spontaneous blues jams with no name at all. So I came up with my own names, using the town names. (I had to add the year for two of them, since there are two from Stockholm, Sweden in different years.)

This album ends in early 1970 because that's when Peter Green left the group. Also, when he left, the variety of songs the band played in concert was drastically reduced. I think the live improv instrumentals came to a halt as well.

Both this volume and the previous one are about 50 minutes long.

01 Goin' Down Slow (Fleetwood Mac)
02 San-Ho-Zay [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Stockholm '69 Improv [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Gothenburg Improv [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
05 If You Let Me Love You (Fleetwood Mac)
06 All Over Again [I've Got a Mind to Give Up Living] (Fleetwood Mac)
07 It Takes Time (Fleetwood Mac)
08 Stockholm '70 Improv [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15115838/FleetwodMc_1968i-1970_LiveandRreVolume2_atse.zip.html

As with the cover art for Volume 1, I didn't have a lot of great photos of the entire Fleetwood Mac band, so I decided to use one of lead guitarist Peter Green, at a further tribute to his recent passing (which happened a few days ago as I write this).

Fleetwood Mac - Live and Rare, Volume 1 (1967-1968)

As I wrote yesterday, legendary guitarist Peter Green died just a few days ago. To further commemorate his passing, I have some more music to post from the time he led Fleetwood Mac.

Be warned that this album isn't for everyone. It contains interesting rare songs performed live that didn't fit anywhere else in my music collection. All of them are officially unreleased. But generally speaking, these songs come from audience bootlegs, so the sound quality isn't up to my usual standards. Some are rougher than others. That said, all of them pass my listenability test, or I wouldn't bother including them.

It's truly remarkable how many different songs Fleetwood Mac performed in concert back in their Peter Green-led years. All of these, I believe, never appeared on any official albums, and most of them only show up on one or a couple of different bootlegged concerts. (There are even more that I wish I could have included, but the sound quality was too poor, or they didn't get bootlegged at all.)

In some cases here, these songs happened to be the best from some fairly bad sounding bootlegs. For instance, there might have been a bootleg where the vocals were recorded badly, but an instrumental from it sounds just fine. The first three songs are all like that. They come from 1967, a year of no decent sounding Fleetwood Mac bootlegs, but for some reason these songs stood out in terms of sounding listenable.

I'll follow this with a second and final "Live and Rare" volume. I have to admit that there are some instrumentals on them with names that I can't identify. It could be they were just blues jams that never had a name in the first place. In such cases, I came up with my own name, using the town they were performed in. There's only one such case here, the song I call "Windsor Improv."

The last song, "All Over Again (I've Got a Mind to Give Up Living)," is kind of a bonus track. I have a different version on "Live and Rare, Volume 2." This one is from 1969, so it doesn't fit with the other songs here from 1967 and 1968. But Peter Green's slow blues guitar playing on "All Over Again" is always amazing, so I want to have every decent sounding version the band did in my collection. Thus, I've stuck one on here, instead of having two versions on "Volume 2."

Finally, thanks to my musical associate MZ for his assistance with this album. He helped me find some of the rare versions here, and also used his sound editing skills to make them more listenable.

01 Evil Woman Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Windsor Improv [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
03 I'm Goin' Home (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Bleeding Heart [Edit] (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Don't Know Which Way to Go (Fleetwood Mac)
06 The Sky Is Crying (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Too Late to Cry (Fleetwood Mac)
08 Crossroads (Fleetwood Mac)
09 Call It Stormy Monday (Fleetwood Mac)
10 All Over Again [I've Got a Mind to Give Up Living] (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15115676/FleetwodMc_1967f-1968_LiveandRreVolume1_atse.zip.html

Good photos of Fleetwood Mac from 1967 or 1968 are very rare, and I've used just about all of the decent ones I could find. Since Peter Green died recently, and he was the leader of the band back then, I decided to honor him by featuring him on this cover. I don't know when or where this photo is from exactly, but I'm guessing it's from around 1968.

Fleetwood Mac - BBC Sessions, Volume 4: 1969

First off, sadly, I have to report that Peter Green died a few days ago, on July 25, 2020, of natural causes. He was 73 years old. He was a true musical giant in my opinion, one of the greatest lead guitar players of all time. He will be missed, even though most of his musical reputation rests on his years with Fleetwood Mac, from 1967 to 1970.

Only four of the 12 songs on it are officially released. Three more are from "On Air," but that's a dubious "grey market" release. However, I think you'll find there's very little sound quality difference between the released ones and the rest. 

 

The three "On Air" sourced songs are by Chicken Shack, the blues band Christine McVie was in shortly before she joined Fleetwood Mac. I've only included songs from this band where McVie was the lead vocalist.  

 

All of the BBC performances come from just three sessions, and probably the released and unreleased versions ultimately come from the same recorded versions.

There are four songs not from the BBC. Two of these ("San-Ho-Zay" and the "Blue Suede Shoes" medley) come from a Dutch radio show. I'm not a stickler that all songs on a BBC compilation have to actually come from the BBC - I figure other radio or TV show appearances are fair game as well. 

There's nothing wrong sonically with the bonus track, "Albatross." The only reason it's a bonus track is because I have another version of the band playing the song on an earlier album in this BBC series. There are remarkably few instances of the band playing the same song twice on the BBC, so any duplicates are downgraded to bonus tracks.

This album is 40 minutes long, not including the bonus track.

 

UPDATE: On September 26, 2025, I redid the mp3 download file. I'm not sure why, but I had a couple of songs out of chronological order between this album and Volume 4. So I moved some songs from here to there, and from there to here.  

 

01 San-Ho-Zay [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Blue Suede Shoes - Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On - Blue Suede Shoes (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Can't Believe You Wanna Leave (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Blues with a Feeling (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Tallahassee Lassie (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Early Morning Come (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Heavenly (Fleetwood Mac)
08 I'd Rather Go Blind (Christine McVie & Chicken Shack)
09 Hey Baby (Christine McVie & Chicken Shack)
10 Get like You Used to Be [Edit] (Christine McVie & Chicken Shack)
11 Man of the World (Fleetwood Mac)
12 Jumping at Shadows (Fleetwood Mac)
13 Linda [Edit] (Fleetwood Mac)

Albatross [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)

 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/N1MxEjZV

 

alternate:  

 

https://bestfile.io/en/mW0PYTajKJFlKOo/file

I'm not sure exactly when or where the cover art photo is from. But given their appearance, and especially the inclusion of Danny Kirwan (who joined in 1968), I think it's likely it's from 1969.

 

In 2025, I improved the detail of the image with the use of the Krea AI program. 

Fleetwood Mac - The Warehouse, New Orleans, LA, 1-31-1970

I just posted the Fleetwood Mac concert played at the Warehouse in New Orleans on January 30, 1970. While I'm at it, here's their concert from the next night at the same venue.

I had a long explanation to go with the January 30th concert. Most of what I said there also applies here, minus the colorful story from drummer Mick Fleetwood about driving a car from the backseat with his feet and so forth. I'll just focus on what's different with this one.

Both the January 30th and 31st concert recordings are soundboards done by the Grateful Dead's talented sound engineer Owsley Stanley. But for whatever reason, the 30th recording had an extreme stereo mix that required a lot of tweaking, while the 31th recording had a more normal, narrow stereo mix. Also, the vocals and instruments had a better balance. So while I had to do a lot of tinkering for the 30th show, I had to do very little here. One note is that the song "Tiger" is the only one in mono, because it comes from a different source. But in my opinion, it sounds just as good as the rest.

In terms of musical content, this show is a little bit longer, at an hour and two minutes, compared to 54 minutes for January 30th. And that's after I removed four songs: "Only You," "World in Harmony," "Stranger Blues,"  and "Twist and Shout." I removed those for several reasons. One, the first three are the only songs repeated from the 30th. I like listening to these two shows back to back, and I almost posted them as one big album instead of two shorter ones. I don't like repeats. "Twist and Shout" wasn't repeated, but there was something wrong with the vocals that bugged me and wasn't fixable. I can't explain it well, but it sounds as if his vocals were going "into the red," overwhelming the microphone, much of the time. So I removed it to keep the overall sound quality of the concert very high.

But also, three out of four of those are Jeremy Spencer-sung songs, and I have limited tolerance for his material anyway. With those songs removed, this concert becomes much more of a Peter Green showcase, whereas the 30th show is more dominated by Spencer's songs. Personally, I prefer this concert because of that Green emphasis. He really stretches out on the longer songs.

Speaking of Green stretching out, maybe the highlight of this show is the slow blues song "All Over Again." I've included this exact version on one of my stray tracks compilations, "The Green Manalishi," because it's the best recorded version available. So don't mind the minor duplication with that one.

Fleetwood Mac went on to record one more concert at the Warehouse the next day, February 1st. An excellent recording of that one exists as well. I've elected not to post that one here because the set list is almost exactly the same as this one, but I felt the performance here was better. Two different songs were played, but both of them were the typical Jeremy Spencer imitating Elmore James songs, which are my least favorite aspect of the band's music in the Peter Green era, by far. So I didn't even include those as bonus tracks. But if you want that concert, it's available at Wolfgang's Vault, and at various other Internet locations.

01 Sandy Mary (Fleetwood Mac)
02 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
03 All Over Again [I've Got a Mind to Give Up Living] (Fleetwood Mac)
04 I Can't Hold Out (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Oh Well, Part 1 (Fleetwood Mac)
06 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Rattlesnake Shake - Searching for Madge (Fleetwood Mac)
08 Coming Your Way (Fleetwood Mac)
09 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
10 Tiger (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15211918/FleetwodMc_1970b_ThWrehouseNwOrleansLA__LA__1-31-1970_atse.zip.html

I had a rather detailed explanation on how I made the cover art for the January 30th show. I used the exact same art here, except I selected a different photo of Peter Green for the middle of it. And, of course, I changed the text slightly to show the different date. By the way, both photos of Green are from a TV appearance in late 1969, but I don't know what TV show it was. These concerts were about six weeks after that, so I think it's likely he still had that same bearded appearance.

Fleetwood Mac - The Warehouse, New Orleans, LA, 1-30-1970

Last week, I posted a Fleetwood Mac concert at the Carousel Ballroom in 1968. I thought that was the last posting of a full concert from the Peter Green era of the band that I was going to do. I'm keen to move on to posting more from the "Rumours" era of the band.

But then bk left a comment in the comments section, stating that the band's January 30, 1970 concert at the Warehouse in New Orleans was their most inspired of the Peter Green era. I'd heard that before, but I gave it another listen. I have to respectfully disagree, I don't think it's their best. In fact, I like the concert from a night later, also at the Warehouse, even better. But I was struck by the remarkable sound quality of that show and the next one, on January 31st. I also realized I could improve the sound even more with some sound editing. So I'm posting them here.

Furthermore, I want to post this as part of my continued beef against the abomination that is the 2019 officially released album "Before the Beginning." A big chunk of that consists of the Carousel Ballroom concert from 1968. The other main chunk comes from these Warehouse concerts in 1970. But, as I've mentioned before, fake crowd noise was slathered over the entire thing for no apparent reason, degrading the sound. The release also inexplicably claimed it was a mystery which concerts these recordings were from, even though bootlegs of the shows have widely circulated for decades.  Furthermore, it only included some of the Warehouse concerts when all of them are worth releasing. Even the title of the album, "Before the Beginning," is an insult, implying the entire Peter Green era of the band was just a warm-up before they really got going with the "Rumours" era line-up. Sadly, the fact that came out last year strongly implies that a correct official release of these shows isn't going to happen, at least not any time soon.

These concerts came at a historically interesting musical moment. Fleetwood Mac opened for the Grateful Dead on both nights, so their concerts are shorter than when they were the main act.  Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood later recounted what happened on the night of January 30th:

"That Dead song with the line 'busted down on Bourbon Street' ["Truckin'," from the "American Beauty" album], that was the night that Fleetwood Mac played with them at The Warehouse in New Orleans. [Grateful Dead sound engineer and LSD enthusiast Owsley Stanley] had spiked the water fountains [with LSD] and after our set, [our bassist] John McVie was out of it, and couldn't handle the fact that the Dead were going to get up and play! So he stood in the audience while the rest of us jammed with the Dead. The audience loved it - a massive freak-out."

"That was what caused Owsley eventually to go to jail. We were nearly there [where the arrest happened]. We were following their car back to the hotel, absolutely out of it on acid.  I drove the car from the back seat with my feet while somebody else worked the pedals from the side - nobody was in the driver's seat. We got lost, and by the time we arrived, they'd been busted."

So when you listen to this show, keep in mind that the band and most of the audience was tripping on LSD!

Anyway, getting to the sound quality issue, the Grateful Dead often recorded their concerts in those days, and Owsley was an excellent sound engineer for the era. Sometimes, the opening act got recorded using the same equipment, and this happens to be one of those times. But the recording for January 30th has unusually extreme stereo separation, with nearly all the vocals and guitar on one side, and mostly the drums and bass on the other side. The vocals also were rather low in the mix, especially Peter Green's. So this allowed me to improve the recording, by boosting the vocals. For some songs, I increased the volume of one entire channel relative to the other one. For other songs, I selectively boosted just the bits of the song where Green was singing, adjusting it line by line.

So that improved things considerably, I think. But I also got my musical associate MZ to help out again. As he did with the Carousel Ballroom recording, once I had made the adjustments to the stereo channels, MZ reduced the amount of stereo separation by about 30 percent, just as he did for the Carousel Ballroom show. That allows for a more normal listening experience, since extreme stereo separation has long been out of favor, after some experimentation with it in the late 1960s, when stereo first became widely popular.

I also did what I usually do to concert recordings, which is putting the between song banter on their own tracks and increasing the volume to make those parts easier to hear. I also got rid of some dead air and guitar tuning between songs. Someone named "M" did extensive work on these concerts already, fixing minor drop outs and other problems. This builds on that version, so hopefully it sounds better than ever before.

The concert is only 54 minutes long. That may be entirely due to the fact that they were only an opening act that night. But I also strongly suspect that the recording is incomplete. In this era, the band pretty much always closed with covers of lively and famous rock songs, like "Twist and Shout" or "Tiger." They did that the next two nights in the same run of Warehouse shows. But still, what is here is pretty great, and deserves a worthy, non-butchered official release.

01 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Before the Beginning (Fleetwood Mac)
03 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
04 It Takes Time (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Like It This Way (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Only You (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Madison Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
08 Oh Baby (Fleetwood Mac)
09 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
10 Albatross [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
11 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
12 The Green Manalishi [With the Two-Prong Crown] (Fleetwood Mac)
13 World in Harmony [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
14 Stranger Blues (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15211913/FleetwodMc_1970a_ThWrehouseNwOrleansLA__1-30-1970_atse.zip.html

I put some extra effort into making the album cover art. I couldn't find any photos from the Warehouse concerts, or even any good color photos of the band in concert in 1970, period. But I found a concert poster for the band playing at the Fillmore East in November 1969 that I liked a lot. I made some major edits to it in order to get it to fit into a square shape. I had to remove the central artwork, because it wouldn't fit into the square space, nice though it was. I put a photo of Peter Green from late 1969 in there instead. The band name up top was kept from the original poster. I added some text at the bottom using the same font and color.

Fleetwood Mac - Carousel Ballroom, San Francisco, CA, 6-9-1968

Here's a really killer album. If you're into the Peter Green era of Fleetwood Mac whatsoever, this is a must have! It's a great performance with jaw-droppingly great sound for an unreleased 1968 concert.

Technically, this has been released. Just last year, an album came out called "Before the Beginning." But as I complained in another blog post, it's one of the worst official releases from a major band in decades. The biggest problem is they added fake crowd noise all the way through every song! But there are so many other things wrong with it. For instance, although they included most of this concert, they claimed not to know the date or the location, and acted like they were newly recovered mystery recordings. Even the title of the album is offensive, with "Before the Beginning" implying that the entire Peter Green era was just a warm-up before the "real" "Rumours" band line-up became big stars in the 1970s.

So let's just pretend that abomination of an album doesn't exist. Needless to say, I'm not using the botched recording from that album. This is a much better version.

I'm not sure how or why this recording exists. It's so good that I presume it had to have been professionally recorded. But there are some flaws. At a few points, the recording started or stopped in the middle of a song. Some times, I was able to fix that. For instance, the first few seconds of the first song was missing, but I was able to patch that up. It could be there were more songs from before that that were lost though. The rest of the first set is intact, with "Lazy Poker Blues" announced as the last song of that set. The second set begins with special guest Paul Butterfield sitting in and playing harmonica. But only about one minutes of the first song with him, "Stop Messin' Round," exists, so I didn't include that.

Later, "Ready Teddy," probably the last song of the second set, gets cut off, so I didn't include that either. Then the last few songs are actually from probably two nights earlier at the same location. That appears to be the very end of the second set in that concert. Luckily, the "Ready Teddy" finale for that show is complete, and included here. This other night's recording begins with only about a minute of "I Need Your Love So Bad," so I didn't include that. It also has a full version of "I Believe My Time Ain't Long," but I didn't include that either, since there's a good full version of that earlier in the recording. Thus, when it comes to that other show, I've only included "Shake Your Moneymaker" and "Ready Teddy," plus some between song banter. But that little bit is very helpful, because it's the end of a concert, and the end to the other concert is cut off.

Anyway, I know that sounds confusing, but the bottom line is that after I've trimmed out some partial songs and one duplicate, what's left is a remarkable concert that's an hour and forty minutes long. It has to be the best live recording of the band in their first couple of years, officially released or not.

Now, I need to discuss the edits made to this recording, because I did some things to make this sound even better than the usual bootleg versions floating around the Internet. It so happens that the recording has an extreme stereo mix. For instance, nearly all of the vocals are in one channel and nearly all of the lead guitar is in the other channel. To my ears, the vocals were often too low and the guitar was too loud. So I carefully went through each song and raised or lowered the volume of the channels to get a better mix.

Then, once I was done with that, I sent the whole recording to my musical associate MZ. I asked him if he could reduce the extreme nature of the stereo separation, and he did. No music was lost, but he essentially moved the stereo mix towards the center by about 30 percent. That means most of the vocals are still on one side and most of the guitars are still on the other, but it's not quite as extreme as before. That makes for a better listening experience, in my opinion (and MZ's as well).

As a minor note, the eighth song here is normally just listed as "Instrumental," including on that terrible "Before the Beginning" album. But when I heard the song, I recognized the main riff as the one from "I Wish You Would," a blues song originally by Billy Boy Arnold. I knew it because it was covered by the Yardbirds. But it would be more accurate to say it's an instrumental jam loosely based on the "I Wish You Would" riff.

This album is an hour and forty minutes long.

01 Madison Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
02 My Baby's Gone (Fleetwood Mac)
03 The Woman I Love [My Baby's Skinny] (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Worried Dream (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Dust My Broom (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Got to Move (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Trying So Hard to Forget (Fleetwood Mac)
08 I Wish You Would [Instrumental Version] (Fleetwood Mac)
09 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
10 Have You Ever Loved a Woman (Fleetwood Mac)
11 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
12 Lazy Poker Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
13 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
14 I Loved Another Woman (Fleetwood Mac with Paul Butterfield)
15 talk (Fleetwood Mac with Paul Butterfield)
16 I Believe My Time Ain't Long (Fleetwood Mac with Paul Butterfield)
17 The Sun Is Shining (Fleetwood Mac with Paul Butterfield)
18 talk (Fleetwood Mac with Paul Butterfield)
19 Long Tall Sally (Fleetwood Mac with Paul Butterfield)
20 Willie and the Hand Jive (Fleetwood Mac)
21 Tutti Frutti (Fleetwood Mac)
22 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
23 Shake Your Moneymaker (Fleetwood Mac)
24 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
25 Ready Teddy (Fleetwood Mac)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/njjZ2GRV

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/4hmEARirkmn7QHi/file

For the album cover, I wanted a photo of Fleetwood Mac in concert in 1968. It turns out there are very few good ones like that. After some digging, I did find a good one, from a concert in Copenhagen, Denmark, in November 1968. From left to right, it shows Jeremy Spencer, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, and Peter Green. But there were two problems with Green. For one, he was way off to the side, far from the other band members. So, using Photoshop, I moved him (and his shadow) back towards the others, so I could have a more concise photo. The second problem was that, due to the lighting, his body looked good, but his head was essentially missing, because it was hidden in the darkness. So I found another photo of Green in 1968 with his head at the correct angle, and pasted it in. Hopefully I've adjusted the lighting on his head enough so the addition blends in correctly.

Since someone commented on it, I've added in a portion of the original photo, so you can see the "headless" Peter Green, as well as how far he actually was from the rest of the band. 

In 2025, I improved the detail of the image with the use of the Krea AI program.

Fleetwood Mac - BBC Sessions, Volume 6: In Concert, Paris Theatre, London, Britain, 4-9-1970

Here is "Volume 6" of Fleetwood Mac's BBC Sessions. This contains all of a single show the band did for the BBC in April 1970. 

But there's a complication. It turns out that this full show actually has been officially released, as part of the archival double album "Show-Biz Blues." It makes up all of the second disc of that album, except for the first two songs from it. I didn't realize this at first because that album is so poorly annotated. It merely stated that the songs on the second disc were from a "London Concert, 1970." And while the official version included all the songs from it, in the correct order, they left out all the talking between songs. Instead, they added fake audience noise to cover for the lack of talking. They have the cheering continue onto the start of each subsequent song to make it seem as if the band kept playing with barely a pause between songs, when the bootleg version makes clear that isn't what happened at all.

I'm not sure, but I suspect the vagueness in the "Show-Biz Blues" liner notes is deliberate. It turns out there are a bunch of BBC performances on the first disc of that album as well, and they're all mislabeled as studio versions. For some reason, whoever put that together didn't want it known that many songs from it were from BBC sources. Maybe they didn't want to pay the BBC a share of the album profits? Had they kept the talking between songs, it would have been obvious that they were BBC tracks, since most of the talking was done by a BBC DJ.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that it turns out the bootleg version sounds great, almost as good as the "Show-Biz Blues" version. Plus, it's more complete with the talking, and doesn't have the fake audience noise at the start of each song. So I've used the bootleg version as my source here. But the "Show-Biz Blues" version was properly mixed and the bootleg version was raw. So I asked a friend named MZ, who has better sound editing skills than I do, to edit the files and improve the mix. He did, and his version is a definite improvement. That's what I'm posting here.

This concert was part of a weekly hour-long series hosted by BBC DJ John Peel called "In Concert." In ran every week in 1970 and 1971, and then less often for a few years after that. I've already posted a bunch of other concerts from that series, for instance concerts by Traffic, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, and so on. For this particular week, Peel was absent and was replaced by another BBC DJ, David Symonds. As I mentioned above, he did nearly all the talking between songs, acting like an MC and announcing nearly every song. 

Unfortunately, this is the last album in the Fleetwood Mac BBC series to feature guitarist Peter Green. Personally, I think his era of the band was most interesting towards the end, when they widened their repertoire beyond the blues. Luckily, this concert was recorded only about a month before he left the band. Some say he started to mentally deteriorate starting in early 1970 after taking too much LSD. Whether that's true or not, his lead guitar playing was still very sharp for this concert, and his singing was perfectly fine as well.

This album is an hour and three minutes long. 

01 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Rattlesnake Shake (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Underway [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
04 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Stranger Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
06 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
07 World in Harmony [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
08 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
09 Tiger (Fleetwood Mac)
10 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
11 The Green Manalishi [With the Two Prong Crown] (Fleetwood Mac)
12 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
13 Coming Your Way (Fleetwood Mac)
14 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
15 Great Balls of Fire (Fleetwood Mac)
16 Twist and Shout (Fleetwood Mac)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/KBg1xrpC

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/AxNL4YGytkXfOQc/file

I have no idea when or where the cover art photo is from. I believe I took it from the liner notes to the "Live at the BBC" album. But it does seem to show the band's early 1970 line-up, including Peter Green. The coloring was a bit off. I did my best to fix in in Photoshop, but it still may be slightly off.

In 2025, I improved the detail of the image with the use of the Krea AI program.

Fleetwood Mac - BBC Sessions, Volume 5: 1969-1970

Here's another album of Fleetwood Mac performing for the BBC. 1969 and 1970 are two of my favorite years of the band's music, because they still were heavily into the blues, but they also showed more variety with rock and pop.

This time around, ten of the 13 songs are officially unreleased. The sound quality is consistently high for both the officially released and unreleased tracks. Everything here is from the BBC except for the first three tracks, which are from a Finnish radio show, and "I'm Worried," which comes from a Norwegian TV show.

Guitarist Peter Green left the band in May 1970. All but the last four songs are from April 1970 or earlier, so they still feature him. The remaining Fleetwood Mac songs are from a brief time when the band was mainly led by Danny Kirwan and Jeremy Spencer, before Christine McVie joined.

The song "No Road Is the Right Road" is by McVie when she was a solo artist right before joining the band. The song was clearly incomplete, fading out after about a minute and a half, right in the middle of the second chorus. To give it a better finish, I completed the second chorus by patching in the missing part from the first chorus. So at least the song comes to a good conclusion now, even though it's still short and incomplete. That's why it has "[Edit]" in the title. By the way, no studio version of the song ever appears to have been released, either by Chicken Shack, Christine McVie solo, or Fleetwood Mac.

On a different note, many of the BBC performances have also appeared on my various stray tracks albums for the band. I hope you don't mind the duplication, but I figure it makes sense to have all the BBC performances together, as well as separately highlighting the songs that were ONLY performed (or at least properly recorded) at the BBC on the stray tracks albums.

 

This album is 51 minutes long.

 

UPDATE: On September 26, 2025, I redid the mp3 download file. I'm not sure why, but I had a couple of songs out of chronological order between this album and Volume 4. So I moved some songs from here to there, and from there to here. 

 

01 Shake Your Moneymaker (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Like It This Way [Edit] (Fleetwood Mac)
03 All Over Again [I've Got a Mind to Give Up Living] (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Although the Sun Is Shining (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Oh Well, Part 1 (Fleetwood Mac)
06 No Road Is the Right Road [Edit] (Christine McVie)
07 I'm Worried (Fleetwood Mac)
08 Tell Me You Need Me (Christine McVie)
09 Sandy Mary (Fleetwood Mac)
10 Only You (Fleetwood Mac)
11 Tiger (Fleetwood Mac)
12 Leaving Town Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
13 World in Harmony [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)

 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/MedpiyMM 

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/1yz1olcNKG5pT7A/file

The cover art photo is of the band playing on the set of some TV show. But I don't know the show or the date. But the fact that Peter Green was dressed in a white robe like a prophet is a sign it was probably near the end of his time in the band.

Fleetwood Mac - BBC Sessions, Volume 3: 1968-1969

This is the next album in the Fleetwood Mac BBC series. Please see the post of the first album in the series for a general explanation.

For this album, Fleetwood Mac was still neck deep in the blues. As with the previous two albums in this series, I've included BBC performances by Chicken Shack, so long as the lead singer is soon-to-be Fleetwood Mac member Christine McVie. There's only one case of that here, "Mean Old World." Fleetwood Mac did their own version of that song on the first volume in this series.

For the previous album in this series, the vast majority of the performances were unreleased. This time, seven of the 15 are unreleased. But the sound quality of those are just as good as the rest.

Although this series is mainly about Fleetwood Mac at the BBC, I figure if there are performances of them on other radio or TV shows, those are fair game too. Those are few and far between for this era, but on this album I did include one song, "Homework," that comes from the band playing for a French TV show.

The one bonus track this time, "Evenin' Boogie," sounds particularly bad, in my opinion. But I've included it as a bonus track since it was done at the BBC. There's a version on the "Mr. Wonderful" album with much better sound quality.

 

This album is 45 minutes long, not including the bonus track. 

01 Mind of My Own (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Talk with You (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Bo Diddley (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Lazy Poker Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Love That Burns (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Stop Messin' Around (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Need Your Love So Bad (Fleetwood Mac)
08 Mean Old World (Chicken Shack with Duster Bennett)
09 Albatross [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
10 Like Crying (Fleetwood Mac)
11 Hang On to a Dream (Fleetwood Mac)
12 Sweet Home Chicago (Fleetwood Mac)
13 Homework (Fleetwood Mac)
14 You Never Know What You're Missing (Fleetwood Mac)

Evenin' Boogie [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/DkKZTX1f

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/ROwXWI0Cv1MgLCB/file

I don't know when or where this photo for the album cover was taken exactly, but it's said to be from 1968. It has Danny Kirwan in it I believe (wearing the red shirt) and he joined the band in 1968.

In 2025, I improved the detail of the image with the use of the Krea AI program.

Fleetwood Mac - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: 1968

Here's the second album of Fleetwood Mac performing for the BBC. If you want to know more about this series of albums in general, I suggest you read the post for the first album.

In 1968, Fleetwood Mac was all about the blues, and especially Peter Green's bluesy lead guitar work. If you like that, you'll love this. As with the last album in this series, I've included any Chicken Shack songs that they played at the BBC too, so long as they were sung by future Fleetwood Mac star Christine McVie (then still known by her maiden name Christine Perfect). For this album, there is only one such song - "Strange Things Happening." It's just as bluesy as the rest.

For the previous album in the series, most of the songs were officially released. On this one, all but six of them are unreleased. I think, though, some of those were released, but I found better sounding unreleased versions, surprisingly enough. All the songs here have very good sound quality, because I've been highly selective. There are a bunch of bonus tracks this time, due to performances that didn't make the grade.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I bumped "Long Grey Mare" to a bonus track because I included a different version of that song performed at the BBC on the last album in this series, and I only have one performance per song for the whole series. Luckily for me, the band almost never played the same song twice at the BBC, at least for the recordings of the sessions that have survived, so there are only a few more cases like that. ("Wine, Whiskey and Women" is also a bonus track, simply because the sound quality is poor.)

"Intergalactic Magicians Walking through Pools of Velvet Darkness" is an interesting original by band member Jeremy Spencer that parodies the psychedelic songs that were all the rage at the time, such as "I Am the Walrus." (It even has a specific poke at that song with one lyric.) That song was never officially released in any format. It has been given a variety of names on various bootlegs, but a book on Fleetwood Mac claims to know the real title, so that's the one I've used.

"Dead Shrimp Blues" is one of the album tracks because of a helper named MZ. "Dead Shrimp Blues" actually has been officially released, in 2019, on a limited release for that year's Record Store Day. But it still sounded pretty bad in spots, with bursts of loud crackling. So it didn't make the cut for me. However, MZ largely eliminated the crackling and sent the improved version to me. By eliminating the crackling, some brief sections of the song had been sonically reduced to a very quiet level. I then largely managed to repair those spots by patching in sections from other parts of the song. Furthermore, I felt the officially released version was slow and low pitched. MZ also found a bootlegged version that was about 5% faster and about half a step higher pitched. I think that's how it was originally. It certainly sounds better. So I've adjusted the version to be like that as well. The end result still has some issues, but I think it's vastly improved, mostly thanks to the work of MZ.

This album is 57 minutes long. 

01 How Blue Can You Get (Fleetwood Mac)
02 My Baby's Sweeter (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Buzz Me Baby (Fleetwood Mac)
04 I'm So Lonely and Blue (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Strange Things Happening [Love Me or Leave Me] (Christine McVie & Chicken Shack)
06 Mean Mistreatin' Mama (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Sheila [Edit] (Fleetwood Mac)
08 I Have to Laugh (Fleetwood Mac)
09 If You Be My Baby (Fleetwood Mac)
10 You're the One (Fleetwood Mac)
11 Preachin' Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
12 I Need Your Love [That Ain't It] (Fleetwood Mac)
13 You Need Love (Fleetwood Mac)

14 Without You (Fleetwood Mac)

15 Intergalactic Magicians Walking through Pools of Velvet Darkness (Fleetwood Mac)

16 Look on Yonder Wall (Fleetwood Mac)

17 Dead Shrimp Blues [Edit] (Fleetwood Mac)

Long Grey Mare (Fleetwood Mac)
Wine, Whiskey and Women (Fleetwood Mac)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/c9uxApae

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/2U408NepwUFOkIj/file

The cover art shows the band playing on some TV show in 1968, but I don't know which one.

Fleetwood Mac - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1967-1968

Fleetwood Mac performed for the BBC many times from 1967 to 1971. I've compiled seven albums of this BBC material. This is the first one. If you're a fan of their Peter Green-led blues era, you really should listen to these.

The official release of Fleetwood Mac's BBC performances over the years has been very frustrating. In 1995, a double album called "Live at the BBC" was released. That was very good, except for the fact that it was a mere double album, and I've compiled six albums. (Plus, there are even more performances available only via low quality bootleg recordings, or haven't been made public at all.) Some other performances trickled out over the years, a couple of this archival album, a few more on another one, etc...

Then, in 2019, there were two new releases that promised more. The album "BBC Sessions 1968" was released. That one also is good, except it is only a single album that merely deals with some of their performances from 1968. Worse, it was only a Record Store Day limited release, and it's very hard to find. It took me nearly a year before I could find a copy.

The other 2019 release, "Before the Beginning," is a travesty, and I don't use that word lightly. Even the very title is an insult, implying that all the great Fleetwood Mac music before their highly successful pop phase starting in 1975 hardly counts, and thus is "before the beginning." Most of it comes from two concerts which the liner notes claim are from unknown sources, but bootleggers know which shows those were. Then the record company layered a loop of audience noise over the entire thing! That was a dumb practice that went out of fashion around 1966, and for good reason. It makes everything sound worse, definitely worse than the bootleg versions of the exact same material. But they weren't done yet. They also included some vaguely dated "studio demos" that in fact were BBC performances. The whole thing was a joke and an insult.

Sadly, that release shows how little the band's curators think of the Peter Green era. So I'm highly doubtful that a proper and comprehensive official release of the BBC performances will be seen any time soon. Luckily, we have bootlegs. A majority of the takes in my series are from bootlegs, yet their sound is generally very good. (The ones that aren't have been demoted to bonus tracks.)

For this first volume, only four of the songs are officially unreleased. For two of those, some people might argue they don't belong here, because they're not Fleetwood Mac at all. I've found some BBC performances of the blues band Chicken Shack. Future star Christine McVie (then known as Christine Perfect) was the keyboardist and occasional lead singer for Chicken Shack for a couple of years before she officially joined Fleetwood Mac in 1970. I say "officially" because she began playing for Fleetwood Mac as a session musician in 1968, and married the band's bass player, John McVie, so she slowly before a de facto band member before it became official. Thus, in light of her later long-time connection to the band, I consider the Chicken Shack songs where she sang lead vocals fair game for this series. The two songs she did here are songs she never recorded in the studio with either Chicken Shack or Fleetwood Mac, so they're especially interesting. I'll have a few more from her Chicken Shack days on later volumes.

By the way, one of those songs, "It's OK with Me Baby," initially sounded terrible, and still sounds problematic in spots. The sound was fine in general, except that the song changed pitch several times, and for long stretches. I was able to fix most of those problems, but you can still hear some brief wobbly parts, including the first few seconds. Trust me, it sounds way better than it did before.

The rest of this album is pretty straightforward, with lots of great bluesy guitar work. The band did a few more songs at the BBC in this time frame with an obscure blue singer named Eddie Boyd. I didn't include those because Boyd sang lead and they'd belong more properly on an Eddie Boyd album. But I did include one, "The Stroller," because it's an instrumental that prominently features Green's guitar soloing.

There's one more thing I want to point out. I've already posted a bunch of stray tracks compilations from this band. Many BBC performances were included on those - more than twenty! - because early Fleetwood Mac played lots of songs that they never released on any studio recording, and the BBC versions have the best sound quality, by far. I was torn whether to include those exact same versions in this series or not. I ultimately decided to do so, because I've never seen all of the band's BBC performances collected in one place, not even on bootleg. So, my apologies about some duplication here and there.

Regarding the bonus track, it's an excellent sounding version of "Black Magic Woman," taken from a Top of the Pops broadcast in 1968. It's a bonus track because it's a duplicate of a song already on this album. Plus, I can't find any information about the exact session. If anyone knows any details about this, please let me know. It's about half a minute longer than the other version here (and I've checked closely, and they're different all the way through).

This album is 50 minutes long, not including the bonus track.

01 Long Grey Mare (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Looking for Somebody (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Believe My Time Ain't Long (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Baby Please Set a Date (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Got to Move (Fleetwood Mac)
06 A Fool No More (Fleetwood Mac)
07 When the Train Comes Home (Christine McVie & Chicken Shack)
08 It's OK with Me Baby [Edit] (Christine McVie & Chicken Shack)
09 The Stroller [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac & Eddie Boyd)
10 The Sun Is Shining (Fleetwood Mac)
11 Don't Be Cruel (Fleetwood Mac)
12 Sweet Little Angel (Fleetwood Mac)
13 The World Keep On Turning (Fleetwood Mac)
14 I Can't Hold Out (Fleetwood Mac)
15 Mean Old World (Fleetwood Mac)
16 Black Magic Woman (Fleetwood Mac)
17 Peggy Sue Got Married [Edit] (Fleetwood Mac)
18 Please Find My Baby [Edit] (Fleetwood Mac)

Black Magic Woman (Fleetwood Mac) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/mMf2q2wX 

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/Xv2LiPVUbx5PVMg/file

For the cover art photo, I couldn't find any good color ones of the band in 1967, and very few in 1968. I used one from 1968. I wish I had them on stage or in the studio, but this was all I could find.

John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green - The Marquee Club, London, Britain, 4-27-1967

As I've mentioned in this blog before, I'm not a big fan of John Mayall's singing. The reason I've posting this is 100% due to the lead guitar playing of Peter Green. His guitar was simply on fire here.

This was recorded while Peter Green was still part of John Mayall and the Bluebreakers. For a few months in early 1967, including when this was recorded, there were only four members of the Bluesbreakers: John Mayall, Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie. Green, Fleetwood, and McVie all left to form Fleetwood Mac. So this is basically early Fleetwood Mac, except with Mayall doing all the singing

All the songs come from two official live albums, "Live in 1967" and "Live in 1967, Volume 2." These came about being a big fan recorded a handful of the band's concerts in early 1967 using a reel-to-reel machine, while standing right in front of the stage. This was done with full knowledge of the band, and they listened to the playbacks after each concert was over. So even though it was only an audience bootleg originally, it has much better sound than typical recordings from that era.

Decades later, Mayall bought the rights to the bootlegs and released the highlights as the two official albums mentioned above. There's no between song banter or even audience reaction at the ends of songs. But other than that, it sounds very good, in my opinion, with no crowd noise to speak of while the songs are playing.

 One issue I have with the two live albums is that the songs are from five different concerts, but are not in any apparent order. I've selected the songs that are from just one of those shows, the Marquee Club, because the sound quality is slightly better for that show and there are more songs than for the other shows. This makes up a 45 minute long album. The emphasis is on Green's guitar soloing, with just a minimum amount of vocals and harmonica from Mayall.

I did enough research to get the song order correct. However, I'm missing some songs. I've found a few extra unreleased songs that were recorded by this fan and have been posted on YouTube, but none of them happen to be from the Marquee show. I've heard that the complete recordings for all five shows are out there. For this show, there are about 10 to 15 more minutes of music. If anyone has that extra stuff, please let me know! I could post more from the other concerts, but I'd rather wait first to see if more of the songs show up.

By the way, the version of "Double Trouble" here, from "Live in 1967, Volume 2," is exactly the same as the version from "Live in 1967," which was supposedly recorded at the Manor House a week later. Based on my limited research, I think this version was recorded here, at the Marquee Club.

Also note that some versions of the official live albums call the instrumental "Greeny" by the name "Four Million Knobs." I don't know why that is, but it's the exact same song, and "Greeny" is the name used on the studio album version. 

This album is 58 minutes long.

01 Tears in My Eyes (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
02 Streamline (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
03 The Stumble [Instrumental] (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
04 So Many Roads (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
05 Ridin' on the L & N (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
06 Talk to Your Daughter (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
07 Greeny [Instrumental] (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)
08 Double Trouble (John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Peter Green)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/y9t9C6f4

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/WKWTGiHrv3m7kGL/file

The photo of Peter Green used for the cover art doesn't come from this exact show. However, it comes from a concert at the Manor House, also in London, just one week later. Due to my usual distaste for black and white photos, I colorized it.

In 2025, I improved the detail of the image with the use of the Krea AI program.

Fleetwood Mac - The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown) - Non-Album Tracks (1970)

Now that I've made it past Fleetwood Mac's very busy 1969, which resulted in three full stray tracks albums and part of another, I can tackle the band's 1970 with relative ease.

According to setlist.com, the band played over 80 different songs in each of those years. But in 1970, the vast majority of those songs were songs they'd done in previous years or were from the band's studio album that year ("Kiln House"). So I only have one stray tracks album to make this time around.

Happily, I can say this is a very strong album. Fleetwood Mac started out a blues band with the occasional 1950s styled rock song thrown in, but by 1970 the band was widening its musical palate. This can be seen in the hit song "The Green Manalishi," which was rooted in the blues and yet was something new.

By the way, before I say anything else, I just have to say, holy crap, listen to "I've Got a Mind to Give Up Living" at the end of this album! Guitarist Peter Green was on fire! How on Earth is it that so many concerts and archival albums from Fleetwood Mac's blues years have been released, and yet this song hasn't been officially released in any form yet?! What the heck is the record company thinking?! This recording is from a pristine soundboard, so sound quality can't be an excuse. If you like Fleetwood Mac's Peter Green era, you need to hear this song!

Anyway, 1970 was a big transitional year for the band. Green began slowly losing interest and quit the band altogether in July. At that point, Christine McVie joined the group. In truth, she'd been playing keyboards on their records since 1968, and married bassist John McVie that year, and frequently went on tour with the band as part of Chicken Shack or later as a solo artist, so her joining was gradual and almost inevitable.

In 1970, Christine McVie was mostly performing blues songs. But even so, because her voice would become so well known as one of the most famous voices of soft rock, it's jarring to go from hearing a song sung by Green to hearing one sung by McVie. As it so happens, I had more two songs than I could reasonably fit on an album, and a shortage of songs for my 1971 stray tracks album, so I've moved two McVie sung songs to the 1971 one. She still can be heard singing some on one song here, "Down at the Crown," but this album is still dominated by Green's singing and playing.

This album is 45 minutes long.

01 The Green Manalishi [With the Two Prong Crown] (Fleetwood Mac)
02 World in Harmony [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Loving Kind (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Oh Baby (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Stranger Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Tiger (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Only You (Fleetwood Mac)
08 Sandy Mary (Fleetwood Mac)
09 Down at the Crown (Fleetwood Mac)
10 I Can't Stop Loving Her (Fleetwood Mac)
11 All Over Again [I've Got a Mind to Give Up Living] (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15116037/FleetwodMc_1970e_TheGreenMnalishi_atse.zip.html

The cover art is the exact cover art of "The Green Manalishi" single.

Fleetwood Mac - One Sided Love - Non-Album Tracks (1968-1969)

Boy, did I screw up with Fleetwood Mac! A few days ago, I posted three stray tracks albums which I said covered their 1969 material. But a day or so after that, I stumbled across some unreleased BBC material by the band that I'd overlooked. Then I dug deeper and realized there were even more songs they'd played on the BBC but not on any studio albums and were officially released, and I'd overlooked those too. The good news is, I screwed up so badly that I ended up finding pretty much exactly one album's worth of good music (47 minutes) of still more stray tracks from 1968 and 1969. So here it is.

I must say I'm rather impressed at the sheer number of songs the Peter Green-led Fleetwood Mac played, but I'm equally distressed at how shoddily this era has been treated in terms of official releases. There have been a bunch of archival compilations and box sets and live albums and so on, and yet there are many great songs that haven't been released in any form yet.

The sole official BBC compilation, "Live at the BBC," is a particular disappointment. Consider this album alone, which contains five songs in good quality sound that were performed on the BBC and yet not included on that album: "Sweet Little Angel," "Please Find My Baby," "That Ain't It," "Mean Old World," and "You Need Love." I found a bunch more that I decided not to include here because the sound quality wasn't good enough, but it seems likely that a record company putting together official releases would have access to more and better quality recordings.

By the way, if you notice a strong resemblance between the song "You Need Love" and the big Led Zeppelin hit "Whole Lotta Love," that's no coincidence. The Led Zeppelin song steals entire chunks from "You Need Love," which is a song written by Willie Dixon in 1962. This Fleetwood Mac version predates the Led Zeppelin one by about a year. Fleetwood Mac were very popular at the time, so it's interesting to speculate what would have happened had they included their version on an album before Led Zeppelin did. I would guess Led Zeppelin wouldn't have dared release "Whole Lotta Love" (at least not without massive changes) since so many people would have noticed the similarities. (By the way, Led Zeppelin claimed to have written "Whole Lotta Love," but in the 1980s Dixon sued them and got his name added as songwriter and got a chunk of the royalties.)

Most of the songs here are cover versions. But "That Ain't It" and "One Sided Love," at least, appear to be originals. It's sad that after all this time not even all of the band's originals from the Peter Green era have been officially released. I would guess it's because the band went on to so much greater fame and fortune with the "Rumours" version of the band that their early blues years are kind of an afterthought.

Nine of the 14 songs here are from BBC performances, either officially released or not. But I also added five live songs that I found while I took a deeper dive to make sure I didn't miss anything. As I often do, I removed the audience noise to make them fit with the other songs.

This album is 49 minutes long.

01 Sweet Little Angel (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Don't Be Cruel (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Please Find My Baby (Fleetwood Mac)
04 That Ain't It (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Willie and the Hand Jive (Fleetwood Mac)
06 The Woman I Love [My Baby's Skinny] (Fleetwood Mac)
07 I Loved Another Woman (Fleetwood Mac with Paul Butterfield)
08 Ready Teddy (Fleetwood Mac)
09 Mean Old World (Fleetwood Mac)
10 Mind of My Own (Fleetwood Mac)
11 You Need Love (Fleetwood Mac)
12 Sweet Home Chicago (Fleetwood Mac)
13 One Sided Love (Fleetwood Mac)
14 Greeny Alone [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15211733/FleetwodMc_1968f-1969_OneSdedLve_atse.zip.html

The cover art is based on a concert poster from this time period. However, the poster was rectangular and I had to fit it into a square space, so I cut out a chunk (just below "Fleetwood Mac") and I stretched the rest to make it fit. Normally I wouldn't stretch art like that, but in this case I think it works out okay. I also added the text at the bottom.

Fleetwood Mac - Oh Well - Non-Album Tracks (1969)

Here's the third and final of the three 1969 Fleetwood Mac stray tracks albums.

The key song here, which I've also made the title song, is "Oh Well." This was a big hit and remains one of the band's best known songs. Sometimes the lively, vocal "Part 1" gets played, and sometimes the longer, instrumental "Part 2" gets played with it. On the side, "Part 1" was the A-side and "Part 2" was the B-side. For this album, I've chosen to start it with "Part 1" and end it with "Part 2." But for those who prefer the full version, I've included "Oh Well, Parts 1 & 2" as a bonus track.

Aside from that, I've filled the album with other stray tracks. These are more "stray" than usual, since none of them are A- or B-sides. Instead, four are from the archival compilation "The Vaudeville Years." Two more were exclusively played live at the BBC. Another, "Lemon Squeezer," was only played live in concert, so I've used a recording from an official live album ("Shrine '69") and removed the crowd noise.

The longest song here by far is "The Madge Sessions, Part 1," which is 17 minutes long. I've included the song "The Madge Sessions, Part 2" on the "English Rose" album, but it's a very different song that's only three minutes long, although both are instrumentals.

Note that I haven't included all the non-album tracks from 1969 that I could have - I only included what I considered the good ones. In particular, I don't have much fondness for most of the songs sung by band member Jeremy Spencer. Most of his songs were copies of other artists, especially Elmore James, or songs attempting to be humorous, or both. I find the copies unoriginal and the "humorous" songs unfunny. For instance, there was an entire EP of Spencer's songs called "The Milton Schitz Show" to be released as a bonus to the "They Play On" album, but the record company decided they weren't worthy of release (wisely, in my opinion). His parodies and copies probably were entertaining in concert, and added some variety to the band's sound as a whole, but they haven't stood up well as recordings.

This album is 48 minutes long, not counting the bonus track.

01 Oh Well, Part 1 (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Tallahassee Lassie (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Blues with a Feeling (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Lemon Squeezer [Live] (Fleetwood Mac)
05 The Madge Sessions, No. 1 [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Tell Me from the Start (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Everyday I Have the Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
08 My Baby's Sweeter (Fleetwood Mac)
09 Oh Well, Part 2 [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)

Oh Well, Parts 1 & 2 (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15115968/FleetwodMc_1969d_OhWll_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I used the exact cover of the "Oh Well" single. However, I removed some small text that said "Parts 1 and 2."

Fleetwood Mac - English Rose - Alternate Version (1969)

Here is the second of three stray tracks albums for Fleetwood Mac in 1969.

Although the band only released one album of all-new studio material in 1969, but they also put out two compilations of miscellaneous songs, generally made up of A- and B-sides. In Britain, the album was called "The Pious Bird of Good Omen." Even though I prefer to go with British albums as the more definitive ones, this album is a real mess. Despite having lots of other songs to choose from, it contains songs from previously released albums as well as two songs by obscure blues musician Eddie Boyd, which are only backed by Fleetwood Mac. The band backed lots of blues musicians around this time, so it's very strange why they choose these two songs by this particular person.

So I've decided to ignore that album altogether and draw from the US compilation album, called "English Rose." This album also was an inexplicable mess, containing no less than six songs from the previously released studio album "Mr. Wonderful," as well as some A- and B-sides. But it also had three songs that hadn't been released anywhere else yet. So I've ignored all the "Mr. Wonderful" songs, but I've used the other songs as the basis for this album.

That only makes up seven songs. Due to all those needlessly duplicated "Mr. Wonderful" songs, the album is still too short. So I've added in some more stray tracks from the time to fill out the rest. Four more songs come from the later archival release "Jumping at Shadows - The Blues Years," and one more song comes from the later archival release "The Vaudeville Years." One more song comes from a BBC compilation.

There's also one song here that isn't a Fleetwood Mac song at all, but I figure it's close enough for horseshoes. That's "Hard Work" by the band Tramp. Tramp was a short-lived side group that contained guitarist Danny Kirwan and drummer Mick Fleetwood after they already were in Fleetwood Mac. Tramp had a female lead singer, so the songs with vocals don't fit here. But their 1969 album contains one instrumental, "Hard Work," written by Kirwan and prominently featuring his lead guitar work. I think it sounds almost exactly like other Fleetwood Mac instrumentals by Kirwan.

Unlike the other 1969 stray tracks album I just posted, "Watch Out," this one has songs in a variety of styles. It also contains two big hits, "Man of the World" and "Albatross."

This album is 46 minutes long.

01 Man of the World (Fleetwood Mac)
02 Albatross [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Something Inside of Me (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Someone's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked in Tonite (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Jigsaw Puzzle Blues [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
06 One Sunny Day (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Without You (Fleetwood Mac)
08 Hard Work [Instrumental] (Tramp (with Danny Kirwan & Mick Fleetwood))
09 Showbiz Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
10 I Have to Laugh (Fleetwood Mac)
11 The Madge Sessions, No. 2 [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)
12 Jumping at Shadows (Fleetwood Mac)
13 Like It This Way (Fleetwood Mac)
14 Farewell [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15115911/FleetwodMc_1969c_EnglishRseAlternate_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I simply used the cover of the official "English Rose."