Track down and buy
Mystery To Me. It's the absolute best jumping off point for pre '75 Mac. If you're a Stevie fan,
you will like this album. Outside of that, every single song is worth it's weight in gold. I think it's probably the highest quality Mac album of all time... absolutely NO filler. The album is worth it for
Hypnotized and
Why alone... amongst Bob Welch's and Christine McVie's best Mac contributions of all time. ChiliD is right... this is what Fleetwood Mac would have sounded like had Lindsey and Stevie never been hired. And it's surprisingly not all that different from post '75 Mac. Christine's songs are every bit as bubbly and head bobbing as they were in the Rumours era. GREAT music on this album!
Being a North Carolinian, I asked Bob Welch in his Penguin Q&A several years back about Hypnotized... and the significance of the verse talking about the pond in North Carolina with walls of glass. Bob said he and a friend were riding dirt bikes in a heavily forested area near Winston-Salem, and they came upon what they believed was a meteor crater which was filled with water. He said it had a weird vibe, and totally creeped them out, and they high tailed it out of there. It seems like Bob was just taking stories of the supernatural and weaving them together for
Hypnotized... and kind of looking at them all collectively in a philosophic way.
Bob is without a doubt my favorite Macster outside of the Rumours line up. He had a deep love for the mystical... and you could argue he had a much more intellectual way of looking at mysticism than Stevie Nicks for instance. I have often wondered what the Mac would have sounded like with Stevie, Lindsey,
and Bob. Crowded probably... but they could have made some damn cool music!
