by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a quite good Live
from the Belly Up episode featuring “The
Mick Fleetwood Blues Band with Rick Vito.” Mick Fleetwood, you’ll recall, is
the drummer for Fleetwood Mac and has had that gig since the band started in
1968 — it was named after him and the original bass player, John McVie, who met
in the 1967 edition of John Mayall’s Blues Breakers with lead guitarist Peter
Green and decided to form a blues band of their own. They added a young British
musician named Jeremy Spencer and the four of them recorded the first Fleetwood
Mac album, called simply Fleetwood Mac, at the CBS Studios in London in 1969 for Mike Vernon’s Blue Horizon
label. Blue Horizon was a label that specialized in reissuing American blues
records, including quite a lot of Elmore James (they licensed the tapes of
James’ last sessions in 1963 for Bobby Robinson’s Fire label — Fire was one of
only a handful of labels recording African-American music in the 1950’s that
was actually Black-owned — and so Elmore James became one of Blue Horizon’s
most prolific artists even though he’d been dead for four years when the label
was founded), and in recording British musicians who played in the American
blues style. (Their biggest acts were Fleetwood Mac and the Aynsley Dunbar
Retaliation, another band formed by an ex-Mayall drummer.) They made three
albums with that four-piece lineup, one for Blue Horizon and two for Andrew
Loog Oldham’s short-lived Immediate Records label, as well as a marvelous set
of recordings, originally issued as Blues Jam in Chicago and later in the mid-1970’s as Fleetwood Mac in
Chicago (an obvious attempt to
cash in on the later success of a quite different, in both personnel and style,
Fleetwood Mac, though anyone who bought Fleetwood Mac in Chicago expecting it to sound anything like Rumours would have been sorely disappointed!), in which
the Macsters backed real Black blues musicians from the Windy City. (For me the
high point of that album was the appearance of Elmore James’ surviving band,
led by saxophonist J. T. Brown, backing Jeremy Spencer on great performances of
some of James’ songs.)
In the early days Fleetwood Mac’s material was almost
all blues — either covers of Black blues songs or their own originals written
in the same style — until the band in general and Peter Green in particular got
to be more experimental and started sniffing around what would eventually
become known as “progressive rock.” Green started writing and playing long,
atmospheric songs, many of them either outright instrumentals or long jams with
just bits of vocal. He also started taking a lot of LSD, and after one of his
trips he announced to his fellow band members that from then on he wanted them
to take just enough money for bare subsistence, and give the rest away to
various charities. Needless to say, the other band members weren’t too thrilled
about that, so they fired Green and hired another guitar player, Danny Kirwan,
to take his place. Then, just as the new Fleetwood Mac was about to start a
major U.S. tour, Jeremy Spencer suddenly became a born-again Christian and quit
the group to join the Children of God cult. Since there was no time to break in
another new musician and teach him
all their material for their tour, the band had to go, hat in hand, to Peter
Green and ask him to rejoin — which Green agreed to do, but only for that one tour. Over the next few years the
band went through various personnel changes and morphed their music from blues
to mainstream rock, and they added the other three members — McVie’s then-wife
Christine, Lindsay Buckingham and his then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks — recording another album simply called Fleetwood
Mac in 1975 and then following
it up with the 1977 mega-success Rumours. The “new Fleetwood Mac” hung together for a while, broke up more due to
personal than musical issues, and periodically have re-formed for widely
publicized and highly lucrative reunions. Meanwhile, Mick Fleetwood decided to
form a side project that would allow him to get back to his blues roots, and
the result was the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band — though I couldn’t help but make
the joke, when Charles arrived home early on while this show was on, that with
his other band Mick Fleetwood gets
to play stadia and with this band he gets to play bars. The Mick Fleetwood
Blues Band is a solid band that puts on a good show and, like the original
Fleetwood Mac, relies for material on a mix of Black blues covers (Elmore James
in particular) and originals in blues style.
If they have a weakness, it’s
their front man, singer-guitarist Rick Vito, who’s a perfectly competent
blues-rock player but one would think that someone with Mick Fleetwood’s
prestige and money could get a stronger, more assertive, more charismatic
musician. Through much of the show I wondered what this band would sound like with
Joe Bonamassa fronting it; though Bonamassa’s e-mails get awfully strange at
times he is an excellent player (in a
review of one of his own performances on PBS I called him the best white blues
guitarist to emerge since the death of Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1990 — has it
really been that long?) and a collaboration
between him and Mick Fleetwood would
be considerably more exciting than the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band as it stands.
Fleetwood himself remains an excellent drummer, though when the show opened I
was struck by the sheer amount of equipment he had on stage — at least four
tom-toms, two or three bass drums and three crash cymbals as well as a set of
little bells and a gong that looks like Fleetwood bought it at J. Arthur Rank’s
garage sale — and couldn’t help but reflect how much Gene Krupa got out of just
a snare drum, two tom-toms, a bass drum, two crash cymbals and a hi-hat. Much
of the material the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band played was from Fleetwood Mac’s
first three albums — including the song “Black Magic Woman,” which Peter Green
wrote for Fleetwood Mac’s second album (Vito mentioned that in the U.S. it bore
the title English Rose and the
cover shot was Mick Fleetwood in drag — Fleetwood was predictably embarrassed
that his band’s front man was reminding people of this) but which didn’t become
a huge international hit until Santana covered it (less effectively, I might
add, mainly because Carlos Santana, a great technician, simply isn’t as
creative or individualistic a guitarist as Peter Green). They began with a song
called “Fleetwood Boogie” which I suspect was written especially for this band,
then went into a cover of another Peter Green original for the first Fleetwood
Mac, a minor hit called “Oh Well,” and then a cover of an Elmore James song called
“My Baby’s Hot.” Then they did a medley of two blues songs, “Rollin’ Man” and
“Voodoo Woman,” followed by their version of “Black Magic Woman” — which was
quite good even though Vito probably didn’t relish having to compete with both Peter Green and Carlos Santana! Then they switched
gears for a nice bit of New Orleanian funk called “Lucky Devil,” for which Mick
Fleetwood got up from his huge drum set and played another set of drums, and the keyboard player, Mark
Johnstone — whom I thought was the best musician in the band next to Fleetwood
himself: though he was playing two stacked Roland electronic keyboards he had
one set to sound like a real blues piano and the other like a Hammond B-3
organ, so the sounds were authentic and right for the music — doubled on
harmonica.
Later another percussionist, Paulinho Morelli (at least I think that’s the name — he’s not listed on the official
Mick Fleetwood Blues Band Web site and I suspect he was a guest the Belly Up
Tavern brought in for this gig), took over that second drum set for a long song
that was a blend of an instrumental called “Passage East” (which I suspect was
a Peter Green composition because it was strongly reminiscent of Green’s more
atmospheric instrumentals, both with Mac and on the beautiful 1971
all-instrumental solo album The End of the Game he recorded right after he left the band for the
last time) and a song called “World Turning.” The band’s final song (of nine; Live
at the Belly Up is one of those TV shows
where the number of songs the band is able to squeeze into the hour-long time
slot says a lot about their musical style
— I’ve seen progressive-rock acts play only four, five or six songs in the slot
and pop and blues acts play 12) was the searing Elmore James blues “Shake Your
Money Maker,” which Fleetwood Mac played (with Jeremy Spencer on lead vocal and
slide guitar) on their first album; Vito was hardly in Spencer’s league, let
alone James’, but the message still got through and it was one of the
infectious things the band played all night. Live at the Belly Up is one of the most important local resources for
live music on KPBS — as the Belly Up Tavern itself remains a huge asset to the
local music scene as well as a favored venue for major acts (like Fleetwood and
Joan Osborne), as well as their offspring (Willie Nelson’s son Lukas has played
a Live at the Belly Up telecast
with his band Promise of the Real), doing off-beat side projects. Though not a
patch on the Black musicians who created these sounds — in the 1960’s, when I
first started listening to British blues records, they sounded a lot better
than they do now, when the American originals they were covering are readily
available in reissues of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore
James and others — the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band is a quite appealing
blues-rock act, and the large, grey-haired, grey-bearded Mick Fleetwood himself
has the look of an ancient sage behind all those drums, someone who has
traveled the world to bring back wisdom in the form of a 12-bar blues.
