Fleetwood Mac - Capitol Theatre, Passaic, NJ, 10-17-1975

Here's a must-have concert if you're a fan of the "Rumours" era version of Fleetwood Mac.

If you know much about Fleetwood Mac, you probably knew the band started out as a blues band led by Peter Green, but slowly morphed into a pop rock band without him. At the start of 1975, the band practically transformed into an entirely different band, because a key singer-songwriter, Bob Welch, left the band, and was replaced by the team of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Those two, plus Christine McVie, who had been a part of the band since 1970, would propel the band into pop superstar status very quickly.

Personally, I like both the early blues versions and later pop versions of the band. When it comes to concerts by the band, 1975 is my favorite year, because during that year and that year alone, there was a more or less even mix between both versions. The band put out the album simply called "Fleetwood Mac," which started selling slowly but would go on to sell millions. they wanted to promote that album with their concerts, but they wanted to draw on their older songs too, so the new version of the band wouldn't alienate long-time fans.

Thus, this concert has six songs from the years before Buckingham and Nicks joined, and six songs from their 1975 album. So you have the rare treat of hearing older songs like "Oh Well," "Station Man," "The Green Manalishi," and "Hypnotized," except sung by new members of the band, usually Buckingham. It's a really interesting mix of pop and blues, and I think Buckingham does well trying to live up to Peter Green's guitar heroics.

It's a bit of a shame that the 1974 "Fleetwood Mac" album did so well, and then the 1977 album "Rumours" did much better still, because that meant from 1977 onwards, the band had so many great recent songs to play in concert that they largely discarded anything from before 1975. That means that 1975 concerts are the best opportunity to hear "old" and "new" versions of the band mix together.

In 2018, a deluxe version of the 1975 album was released, and it included lots of live performances. Six of them were from Capitol Theatre, in Passaic, New Jersey, on October 17, 1975, and I've included those here. Unfortunately though, the band did two shows that night, and those six songs were only about half of the late show. But luckily, some of the early show and the rest of the late show were played on radio at the time, and there are excellent bootlegs of this. So I've combined the versions from the deluxe version with unreleased versions from bootlegs to create an ideal version of a concert from that night.

The early show had a lot of songs not featured in the late show, but unfortunately most of those weren't played on the radio, so there aren't any known bootleg versions of them. That's a great shame, because the band played some very interesting rarities. For instance, they did "Frozen Love," a song from the 1973 Buckingham-Nicks album that was only played a few times in 1975 by Fleetwood Mac. (They also played "Monday Morning," "Why," "Crystal," "Over My Head," "Say You Love Me," and "Blue Letter.") I didn't want to include any duplicates of songs from the late show, so I've only included "Station Man" and "Landslide" from the early show.

Both the performances from the deluxe version and the performances from radio show bootlegs sound great, though the deluxe version performances sound slightly better. But one big problem is that it turns out the deluxe version performances included only quiet levels of the audience, and the radio show bootlegs included loud audience levels. So I did my best to even these out, by lessening the crowd noise for some songs and boosting it for others. Sometimes, I also had to resort to copying and pasting in some crowd noise from the end of one song to another, because some songs had only a few seconds of crowd reaction and others had a lot more. If I didn't tweak things, it would have seems as if the crowd didn't like some songs at all, and loved others. Now,  there should be an expected, typical crowd reaction after every song, and hopefully you won't notice there was any sort of fiddling around.

Aside from that crowd noise issue, which didn't affect the actual songs at all, everything else is fine. This is a great concert that lasts an hour and four minutes. I hope that someday all of both sets from that evening will be released, so we can hear the seven other different songs they played.

Oh, by the way, the band played Capitol Theatre twice in 1975, in June and then again in October. Bootlegs of the concert generally list it taking place in June. But I compared the songs that overlapped between the bootlegs and the official deluxe versions, and I figured out from identical between song comments and other things that the show definitely was in October instead. The song order I use should be accurate as well, though note that the first two songs come from the early show.

01 Station Man (Fleetwood Mac)
02 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
03 Landslide (Fleetwood Mac)
04 Get like You Used to Be (Fleetwood Mac)
05 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
06 Spare Me a Little of Your Love (Fleetwood Mac)
07 talk (Fleetwood Mac)
08 Rhiannon (Fleetwood Mac)
09 Don't Let Me Down Again (Fleetwood Mac)
10 I'm So Afraid (Fleetwood Mac)
11 Oh Well, Part 1 (Fleetwood Mac)
12 The Green Manalishi [With The Two Pronged Crown] (Fleetwood Mac)
13 World Turning (Fleetwood Mac)
14 Blue Letter (Fleetwood Mac)
15 Hypnotized (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15291600/FleetwodMc_1975g_CpitolTheatrePssaicNJ__10-17-1975_atse.zip.html

If you're curious, you can find a video of the entire late show on YouTube. I would have used a screenshot from that for the cover art, except the video is in black and white and is low resolution. So I've used a photo from another 1975 concert instead. Unfortunately, this photo only shows Nicks and Buckingham, but it's next to impossible to find any good 1975 concert photos showing a lot of band members together, since they tended to spread out on stage.