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.