My Vinyl: Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours"

Now that the great iPod iAge is upon us, I fear that the album may not have much of a lifespan left. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing; in 1950s and early 1960s, record sales were entirely singles-driven, which meant that you could spring for your 45 of "Monster Mash" without having to suffer through 14 additional tracks of dubious artistic merit that Bobby "Boris" Pickett never really wanted to cut in the first place. But sometime in the mid- to late 1960s, probably spurred in part by the seemingly cool, but frequently awkward and pretentious Beatles collaborations of the period, the album overtook the single as the prime currency of the music industry. Ideally, an album is more than the sum of its tracks. It has beautiful, sometimes controversial, cover art; it has personal, sometimes indecipherable, liner notes; it features a collection of songs that enter into conversation with one another, that resonate with and play off of one another; and, perhaps most important of all, an album has a production history, often sordid and laborious, the knowledge of which can give individual tracks a kind of weight and meaning that they would never carry on their own.

The album that I wish to pay homage to this evening is Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours." Its tracks hold up on their own as some of the best songwriting the 1970's had to offer, and Stevie Nicks' voice is exquisite as always. But it's the circumstances under which the band produced and toured "Rumours" that makes this album so fasincating and heart-rending to listen to. Whenever I hear "Go Your Own Way," I think of Stevie Nicks on tour, having to sing back-up to the song that Lindsey Buckingham wrote about her, while still in the midst of breaking up with him. And John McVie had to play bass on his ex-wife Christine's "You Make Loving Fun," a song she wrote about her new love. I can't think of another album that captures the moment a band emotionally imploded the way that "Rumours" did for Fleetwood Mac. And it sounds beautiful, that's the kicker--that they pulled off such flawless songs in the midst of utter dysfunction. So it is that for many years now I've been obsessed with the melodrama behind this masterpiece. It's just so...great.