Fleetwood Mac - Black Magic Woman - Non-Album Tracks (1968)

Here's the next of what is going to be a long series of alternate Fleetwood Mac albums. The previous one covered the band's first year, 1967, so this one covers 1968. But the band has so many stray tracks that more 1968 stuff will be on the next album too.

Like the 1967 material, this is nearly all blues. I must admit though, that when it comes to Fleetwood Mac's blues years, I'm not including every single song I can, for two reasons. One reason is that they did a lot of blues covers, and some of their versions are just pedestrian. But my main problem is with band member Jeremy Spencer. He had a weird role of being kind of the relief from having an audience listen to so many blues songs in a row. He'd do parodies of 1950s music, especially Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, as well as slavish imitations of Elmore James blues songs. The problem is, in my opinion, his parodies were very rarely funny or interesting enough for more than one listen. His original songs were often just earlier hits with new lyrics. I'm sure it worked well in concert to have him liven things up from time to time with a rousing 1950s-styled song, but on record his style loses its appeal fast.

As a result, I've included some of Spencer's stuff, but not that much. The record company felt the same way. For instance, when Fleetwood Mac released their classic 1969 album "Then Play On," they wanted to include an EP containing nothing but Spencer's parodies. The record company gave it a listen and deemed it so bad that they refused to include it. I have to agree. When it comes to compiling their 1969 stray tracks, I didn't include anything from that unreleased EP.

The album here is 39 minutes long. I think the highlight is the song "Black Magic Woman," which was written by guitarist Peter Green. It was released as a single, but didn't do very well. Santana did a cover that was almost exactly the same except for the addition of more Latin percussion, and of course had big success with it.

01 Black Magic Woman (Fleetwood Mac)
02 The Sun Is Shining (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Need Your Love So Bad (Fleetwood Mac)
04 I Can't Hold Out [Talk to Me Baby] (Fleetwood Mac)
05 Mighty Cold (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Blues in B Flat Minor [Instrumental Version of Before the Beginning] (Fleetwood Mac)
07 Buzz Me Baby (Fleetwood Mac)
08 How Blue Can You Get (Fleetwood Mac)
09 I'm Coming Home to Stay (Fleetwood Mac)
10 Preachin' Blues (Fleetwood Mac)
11 Hang On to a Dream (Fleetwood Mac)
12 Worried Dream (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15115732/FleetwodMc_1968b_BlackMagcWoman_atse.zip.html

The cover art is almost exactly that of the cover for the single "Black Magic Woman." But I did some resizing and moving, because the text was strangely misplaced, leaving a big empty gap at the top.