Fleetwood Mac - Sentimental Lady

[Enid]

In the meantime.....Bob Welch had just joined, was told the stories...and who knows how he felt? He was definitely joining a strange band. He wrote "The Ghost" and "Hypnotized" which were decent songs with cool melodies. Mick Fleetwood suffered through the worse psychological pain that could ever be inflicted upon a musician that travels the road for a living. Losing 3 fantastic lead guitarists/writers to cults/drugs, losing his wife to Bob Weston, and just nightmare after nightmare...it's a wonder he is not in a psychiatric hospital. He has a very strong will to survive. Some people in the past have summed up these experiences as being part of the times Fleetwood Mac were living in. Half of an excuse as to why young people joined cults in the late 60's and early 70's has been narrowed down to the times they were living in which was the hippie culture....however...many cult leaders were way into their 30's between 66' and 71' and were depending on the social environment of the 60's and 70's drug culture to produce vunerable people they could program or seduce with perhaps things like fish flirting. Drugs were suppose to be fun at the Rock festivals, however a good percentage of people were taking the drugs because they were personally lost and drugs might help them to forget the sexual abuse they experienced as children in their upbringing and so they eventually gave up drugs and joined a cult. In other cases...as with Satan cults...the situation was often quite the opposite, presenting the S.R.A. victim with the option to take drugs in the group itself.....for example, Green and Kirwan which is a far cry from apocalyptic Christian doctrine that says it is okay for cult members to sexually abuse children because of a misleading quote in a scripture that is applied to the cult leader's personal agenda. In that sense, I must insist that cult leaders depended on the times we were living in to gain power.

[bob_32_116]

^^ Wow.

[profusion]

The band has a bizarre history based on several recorded events particularly with Spencer, Green, and Kirwan. The Munich incident was like a fork in the road for John McVie and a permanent state of mental illness for Peter Green and Danny Kirwan.

The "Munich incident" appears to be a bit of storytelling by Mick, from what I've read.

Green was already planning to leave FM, and the craziest thing he supposedly did at the cult house in Munich was some Santana-ish jamming with the housemates that bored the other FM guys who were waiting to take him back to the hotel or some such. It sounds like he was playing the sort of thing that ended up on his first solo album...which is fantastic, by the way, if you love the sort of freaked-out Kosmigroov fusion that Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock were doing at the time. I enjoy it more than his FM work, to be honest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_Game

Peter was probably starting to have mental problems, but he hadn't completely broken away yet.

[Onomatopoeic]

...Danny Kirwan remained with the band for years after the Munich incident and wrote some amazingly beautiful music. It is possible that he was programmed by the cult, but remained inside himself in this kind of fantasyland...

Danny Kirwan already had simmering psychological problems the day he joined FM -- as a 16-year-old kiddo guitar prodigy that once impressed the hell out of Jimi Hendrix when Jimi saw him playing live at a club months before he joined FM. He was an introvert with fears of foreigners and flying, and had a bit of a compulsive disorder. He was not a substance abuser then, like he would be later (i.e. -- mainly alcohol), but he did have psychological problems. His problems got worse over time with forced touring and introduction to substance abuse. Things got a lot worse for Danny (psychologically) when Fleetwood hired Bob Welch in 1971. Suddenly, Danny had some competition.

Still, Danny was a top-of-the-heap guitarist and a pretty good composer and singer as well throughout his tenure with FM. Danny's phrasing and vibrato technique on the guitar was as good as anybody's then or now. Unfortunately, Danny's deterioration increased during the two FM albums with Bob Welch in the group and Mick eventually had to can him after a pretty serious fit of rage just before a show in late 1972, where he smashed his lovely Goldtop P90 Les Paul into pieces, the electric guitar that he made so many great recording with, after getting into a fight with Bob Welch about getting in tune with with the rest of the band during the sound check.

Danny did release three solo albums after FM, but only the first two are worth having.



Danny on right side, after joining FM in 1968... he's the kiddo hanging out with the 4 men

[Enid]

Danny Kirwan already had simmering psychological problems the day he joined FM -- as a 16-year-old kiddo guitar prodigy that once impressed the hell out of Jimi Hendrix when Jimi saw him playing live at a club months before he joined FM. He was an introvert with fears of foreigners and flying, and had a bit of a compulsive disorder. He was not a substance abuser then, like he would be later (i.e. -- mainly alcohol), but he did have psychological problems. His problems got worse over time with forced touring and introduction to substance abuse. Things got a lot worse for Danny (psychologically) when Fleetwood hired Bob Welch in 1971. Suddenly, Danny had some competition.

Still, Danny was a top-of-the-heap guitarist and a pretty good composer and singer as well throughout his tenure with FM. Danny's phrasing and vibrato technique on the guitar was as good as anybody's then or now. Unfortunately, Danny's deterioration increased during the two FM albums with Bob Welch in the group and Mick eventually had to can him after a pretty serious fit of rage just before a show in late 1972, where he smashed his lovely Goldtop P90 Les Paul into pieces, the electric guitar that he made so many great recording with, after getting into a fight with Bob Welch about getting in tune with with the rest of the band during the sound check.

Danny did release three solo albums after FM, but only the first two are worth having.



Danny on right side, after joining FM in 1968... he's the kiddo hanging out with the 4 men

Wow! Fantastic post! I believe all 3 of them had serious issues, but again...I must reflect upon the reality that cults pray upon people like that. I recall reading , (whether or not it was true), that Green and Kirwan never the same after they fooled about with acid. I recall the road manager stating that the cult stripped them of their identity. Even though they may have been invited to a party and even though Green was simply jamming, the cult's philosophy on life HAD TO influence some of their bizarre actions to unfold even more. I mean...you just don't go to a place like that ..at the drop of a hat and expect to return to your friends in a normal state of mind the next day. Take Spencer...for example....he was confused about continuing with Fleetwood Mac because he already had a duel personality...according to bio's...who knows?...but anyway, it seemed he was the life of the party. Perversion and comedy and then off he went to his quarters to read a bible.




After the mescaline trip he had with Kirwan, he didn't know if he wanted to stay in the band or not. He was afraid of an earthquake as he flew over L.A.. That's something that occurs in sections of California every year and he related it to a prophecy in his bible. Then Apollo lured him in to the "Children Of God", but again...it has also been stated that Spencer was more than willing to join anyway. In one of his songs with Fleetwood Mac, he sings..."I'm gonna be a Baptist preacher so I won't have to work ". Maybe he wanted someone to take care of him? Maybe religion or joining a religious cult was good for him? However ..he still had to work for the lord, the cult, and I'm sure that he felt that kind of work was easier to deal with. I remember reading something a long time ago...about Christine McVie. She had once stated that what happened to Jeremy ...would have never happened in England. She is not technically correct in all cases, but I believe she was overwhelmed by L.A.'s vast religious movement and the variety of cults existing there at the time and she probably couldn't visualize England being to that extreme in the 60's and 70's. So...she may have thought that if Jeremy Spencer had remained in England, there would have been no reason for an incident to occur. If's and and's, pots and pans...is where we arrive with these observations and the answer is clearly that many of us will never know what happened for sure or why exactly it all DID happen. John McVie, Mick Fleetwood, and Christine McVie were probably devastated. Think about it. How would you feel if your band members got mixed up with cults , took the wrong drugs, and went off the deep end. Supposedly they were already on their way to developing insanity, but the drugs and the attraction to cults made it ten times worse.

[PeterG]

Always found it a cloying AM radio kind of song.

Well, that pretty much describes how I feel about everything they released after Peter Green left.