9. Oh Well (Parts 1 & 2)

Fleetwood Mac (Reprise single, 1969; released in the U.S. on Then Play On); composed by Peter Green

I do not subscribe to the theory that Fleetwood Mac was a great lost British blues band who lost its true believers Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer to bad acid and Jesus cults before Buckingham-Nicks finished crashing the blimp in 1975. It really is all the same band from beginning to end, and this oddball single bears that out. Part 1 rocks out and part 2 spaces out. Covers of this song by others usually ignore part 2 altogether, but Green apparently wanted the slow spacy part to lead off. Similarly mysterious is much of the music on the contemporaneous LP, Then Play On, on which the blues usages are ubiquitous, but undergird a sound world more than a rock record, as such. A lot of the music is quiet and deliberately unfinished, fragments of studio jams cross-fading into Green’s slide excursions and ruminations. It does not sound like much else, and it is to this band’s credit that they never did. When Green left, they lost his sound world as much as his playing and writing. Great as Christine McVie was at filling the songwriting gap, it took Lindsey Buckingham’s record-making knack to bring that weird sound world back.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).