Fleetwood Mac - "Oh Well" RA2700 1969 It took quite some time to come terms with liking Fleetwood Mac. And it involved quite a bit of denial and a slow peel of layer upon layer of prejudice. The Fleetwood Mac that was popular when I first became aware of them (and boy were they ever) was the Rumours Fleetwood Mac, loved by Normal People everywhere, and their parents. I was not normal. I was edgy. Off-beat. (At least, I was in my head.) At war with normalcy, wanting to flee from normalcy as far and as quickly as I could. Fleetwood Mac was, to me, the ultimate in anodyne, insipid, pantywaist normality, not just in the music per se, but in the associated lifestyle that it was (as it seemed to me) the soundtrack and emblem of. Boomer parents in their hot tubs, soft-focus beach scenes, crystals, passing around a joint and discussing charter schools after the kids were safely in bed, sensitive men with ponytails, women in filmy scarves talking about enneagrams and vegetarianism and "earth shoes"; i.e., the California lifestyle that surrounded me. I was vaguely aware that the band had a past -- all bands do -- but I was never curious enough to explore it, and it wasn't till pretty late in my music appreciating life indeed that I actually did and had my proverbial mind blown. I like to think that, had I heard the first three FM albums even back then I'd have seen their worth. But maybe not. I was pretty contrarian then, as I am now. (And in fact, collecting all the Fleetwood Mac records now, openly and candidly and sincerely, manifests a trace of the same contrariness, if I'm honest.) Anyway, I didn't. There were long-standing cracks in the edifice, though. For example, when I leared that "Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked in Tonight", an established staple of punk rock and very highly regarded by me, was in fact a Fleetwood Mac cover, coming to the punk world via the Rezillos by way of the Count Bishops. I couldn't bring myself to believe it, but it was true. And ...