Things I Will Keep #23: FLEETWOOD MAC, Future Games

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.

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