Fleetwood Mac
Future Games
1971, Reprise Records
I was born in October 1976, which makes me too young to have any firsthand nostalgia for the 1970s, but I do have some simple, dreamy images in my head that don’t really mean anything.
The dark hallway of the house where we lived at the time. Patterns on bedsheets. Green shag carpet.
I don’t remember people. I don’t remember words. I recall nothing that happened. All I have are these surface details, these scattered dinosaur bones buried in my memory.
I’m interested in that. Why do we remember what we remember? What story did I want to keep alive somehow by remembering bedding and carpets? Is the answer so complicated that I’ll never understand it? Or is it so simple that I’ll always overlook it?
I doubt that I’ll ever know, but the first time that I heard Future Games (about twenty years ago), it sounded like a witness in my investigation. It was sooooooo 1970s and sooooooo dreamy and sooooooo removed from the present world that it touched a nerve and I had an irrational love for it right away.
According to the price sticker on my ragged old vinyl copy, I paid fifty cents for it. Sometimes that’s all that it costs to blow your mind.
Now, I won’t get all Wikipedia on you about the convoluted history of Fleetwood Mac. You either already know that they’ve been three mostly different bands with different sounds and dominated by different songwriters with only the rhythm section in common throughout or you can go look it up.
All that I’ll say is that the road between the earliest days of 1960s British blues band Fleetwood Mac fronted by Peter Green and their 1970s heyday of perfect California cocaine pop defined by the songs of Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham offers many twists and turns in a short amount of time.
Few will like everything that Fleetwood Mac put out, but in retrospect none of these phases are galaxies apart exactly. What they have in common is a certain leaning toward dreamy melody. Listen to the 1968 make-out instrumental hit “Albatross” and the 1977 radio staple “Dreams” and you can pick up on the same attractive swing in the ass as they stroll. That swing is provided by bassist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood, the group’s only stalwarts who’d been there from the VERY beginning. They even branded the group with their names.
The difference between early Fleetwood Mac and later Fleetwood Mac is like the difference between two climates. One is overcast and knows winter. The other is tanned and making the scene on the Sunset Strip.
MY favorite period though is their curious middle era. They’d evolved past the blues and started getting into the progessive sound. They’d made it to California via one of the group’s most compelling visionaries at this time, Hollywood native Bob Welch, but they weren’t yet recording the kind of songs that rule the radio for decades and end up as Democratic Presidential campaign theme songs.
In 1971, Fleetwood Mac were bohemians shacked up on the beach and made music that sounded like soft naked flesh and pot smoke moving through beaded curtains.
The eight tracks on Future Games are thick with atmosphere. Its tempos are slow, but in a luscious sort of way. You’re supposed to sip these songs and savor. The band themselves take credit for the production (with engineering by future seminal British new wave producer Martin Rushent) and they want you to hear every note that they lay down on that sweet old analog tape. Even when the song wanders past seven minutes, everyone is focused on a beautiful melody that you shouldn’t miss. For its raw sonics alone, this LP is refreshing.
It sounds great on vinyl. Break out the marshmallows because this is one warm campfire.
Three songwriters carry us through it.
Danny Kirwan, one of a few brilliant and doomed minds who put their stamp on the band’s early days, gets three slots, including the opening tracks on both sides.
His gorgeous, 4 AM wanderer “Woman of A Thousand Years” sets the tone and if it doesn’t make you see pretty colors in its slow burn, this LP might not be for you.
Kirwan later keeps the dream going on side two with “Sands of Time”, which spends over seven minutes being pretty and pastoral . Immediately following it, his “Sometimes” shambles its shaggy soul into a little tale of love gone wrong. The beautiful lead guitar work flirts with a country sound.
Then there’s Bob Welch, the group’s American infiltrator and master of candlelit melodies.
His “Future Games” is straight-up the best song on the album (no wonder the LP was named after it). It’s art-rock in sensual slo-mo. It takes time to stroke the skin and raise the goosebumps. The band break out everything they’ve got for it. The lead guitar is fixed on the smokey mood and Christine McVie’s surging keyboards make it all sound so grand. It closes the LP’s first side perfectly. It leaves you in a trance. How long was that song? Five minutes? Fifteen minutes? I’m too disoriented afteward to know. (Answer: It’s just over eight minutes.)
On side two, Welch contrasts it with the album’s most aggressive moment. “Lay it All Down” nods toward the band’s blues roots and reminds us toward the end that Fleetwood Mac are still a rock band even if they sometimes like to stop and listen to the ocean waves crash.
Lastly, there’s longtime member Christine McVie whose two songs here aren’t far removed from her later hits in the Buckingham-Nicks era. Her “Morning Rain” and “Show Me a Smile” are instantly likable melodies that the band slide into with the same confidence as the rest.
Let’s also mention the instrumental jam “What a Shame”, credited to everyone, that’s just over two minutes long and is smack in the middle of side one. You can tell by the way that it fades in and fades out that it’s an excerpt from something much longer. Some might call it filler, I call it the act of a band who want things to sound loose and free and like anything can happen here.
Future Games comes from an era in which a rock album was like a little movie. You put it on and listened to the whole thing. The songs didn’t have to compete with each other. Rather, they worked together to achieve a certain effect.
That’s how I’ve always listened to this, at least. I’ve played Future Games dozens of times over a few decades and yet couldn’t quote you any lyrics from it to save my life. Until I wrote this article, I couldn’t even name off most of the tracks in order. The song “Future Games” is my favorite moment here, but I don’t have the slightest clue what it’s about. It’s never seemed important and it still doesn’t.
I always just put the album on and let it spin. I get into its dreamy surface details.
I remember its hallways and bedsheets and carpets.
And that’s all that I need from it.