[becca]

There is a lot of Elvis (the middle period you might call it) I just won't listen to, mostly movie junk. It's probably good if some things are forgotten.

As for Fleetwood Mac I think all the Peter Green stuff, especially once Danny was involved and the Chess sessions, is timeless in quality and production. I think some of the '70s and especially '80s stuff will sound increasingly dated but I wouldn't say it will disappear either. I think the later things Mick has been involved in outside of FM like The Visitor and the new blues recordings is a bit more timeless. I have to say that I think Stevie's Bella Donna has aged much better than Christine's 1984 solo (and I'm more a Christine person) or Tusk and Mirage. I can only hope lots more people would discover some of the gems on the albums from Kiln House through Heroes Are Hard To Find but they probabaly won't. Dave Walker's Derelict stands up along with Danny's stuff and Jeremy's Together One. Bob Welch's songs are sometimes a little over-produced but necessarily so. Pretty much every track Christine did with FM up to Tusk is quality, and some from Mirage. Ditto for Stevie except her Tusk and Mirage material holds up just as well. Lindsey's tracks are just too self-consciously overproduced in my opinion despite being a fantastic guitarist and singer, I would change my mind in a second if you could just have 'unplugged' less elaborate renditions. It just seemed at times he slathered on so many layers and effects and it's too bad. He did the same to many of Chris' tracks that would be great otherwise. He was most heavy-handed on his own stuff though. Him and Bob together in the same group might have been a recipe for it to have gotten even further out there.

I'm being really long-winded here but as I say the Peter Green stuff will live on the longest I think because he was probably the best British blues guitarist and his peak was with FM. Thank God they didn't have the over dub-capacities back then and you can hear these amazing perfomances without all kinds of extra stuff going on or being added (aside from Danny's equally stunning accompaniment on some).

What do we have to listen to from 1909 really? So maybe 100 years is a bit hard to figure. Look at what we listen to from 1936 (Mills Brothers, Ink Spots, Robert Johnson, Ethel Waters, Ma Rainey, Django Reinhardt, Bing Crosby, Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers) and what we don't (Rudy Valee, Paul Whiteman -excepting Bix Beiderbecke-, lord knows how many pre Bing type crooners, Al Jolson, all those white dixieland Jazz combos, and any other precise overly cleaned-up sort of thing, not sure people listen to Leadbelly recordings either, they dated fairly quickly as well so that by the '50s they were more Mitch Miller/Weavers material than Bukka White or John Coltrane).