Video of the Day: Bob Welch and Fleetwood Mac

Bob Welch died earlier in 2012. The Video of the Day entry is a small acknowledgment of the work he did with Fleetwood Mac from 1971 to 1974, which has been largely overshadowed by the band's subsequent career but which stands on its own terms.

Welch was an American guitarist and songwriter who joined Fleetwood Mac when the band was based in Los Angeles and transitioning from the British blues rock of the Peter Green era. His four years with the band produced a set of records — Future Games, Bare Trees, Penguin, Mystery to Me, Heroes Are Hard to Find — that have a distinct character: slightly psychedelic, folk-adjacent, concerned with California landscape and atmosphere in ways that connect more directly to the American singer-songwriter tradition than to British blues.

The overlooked chapter

The Fleetwood Mac story is most commonly told in two parts: the Peter Green British blues era and the Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks era that produced Rumours. Welch's American chapter in between these two periods is usually presented as transitional. This is unfair to what he actually contributed.

Future Games (1971) is the record where Welch's atmospheric approach is most fully realized. The title track is one of the better Fleetwood Mac songs in the catalog, which is to say one of the better songs in the California rock canon of the period.

What the footage contains

The performance footage from the Welch period is scarce compared to the extensive documentation of the Buckingham-Nicks era. What exists shows a band in a genuinely interesting period — working out an aesthetic that sat between the British blues they came from and the California rock sound they were moving toward.

Welch's songwriting in this period has a folk quality in its structures: the verse-chorus forms are simple, the melodies are accessible, the lyrics are concerned with feeling rather than narrative complexity. This is closer to the folk tradition than the record-buying public's primary memory of Fleetwood Mac would suggest.

The timing of this entry

Welch died by suicide in June 2012. The entry is not an obituary — there are better places for that — but the occasion for returning to work that was genuinely good and that the noise around the band's later career had partly obscured.

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