But as much as they adored American blues, they simply weren’t doing any business in the US. They were huge in the UK, scoring a string of big late-’60s hits. Early on, Green was the band’s frontman, and they made fried, fuzzy psychedelic blues. They’d started as a UK blues-rock band in 1967, coming into being when all three non-John Mayall members of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers - Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, and Peter Green - quit his band and launched one of their own. It was bedlam.īut bedlam had always been the natural resting state for Fleetwood Mac. Everyone was also ingesting vast quantities of cocaine and alcohol. Everyone was writing slick, bitter songs about everyone else. Mick Fleetwood was going through a traumatic divorce of his own. John and Christine McVie, the married couple who’d been in Fleetwood Mac, had just divorced, and they were refusing to speak to each other about anything other than music. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, the two Americans who’d joined Fleetwood Mac in 1974 and who’d been together for years before that, had just broken up, and they were constantly fighting bitterly. Infamously, Rumours is an album borne from chaos. In fact, only one song in the entire decades-long history of Fleetwood Mac and of the various solo projects that the band spawned made it to #1. And yet only one of the singles from Rumours made it to #1. Rumours proved that something like that was even possible. Over the next few years, more albums like that would follow: the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, Thriller, Born In The USA. Rumours was something new: a studio album that played like a readymade greatest-hits album. It’s wild to think that “The Chain” and “Gold Dust Woman” and “Second Hand News” and “Songbird” were deep cuts. released four singles from Rumours, and all of them made it into the top 10, something that had never happened before. In its first week, Rumours shipped a mind-boggling 800,000 copies. For an uninterrupted 31-week run, Rumours was the #1 album in the United States. It totally dominated everything else that happened commercially in 1977, and it changed the pop-music calculus. That changed with the release of Rumours, the album that Fleetwood Mac released in February of 1977. And even with the biggest of those albums - something like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or Songs In The Key Of Life or Hotel California - the labels would only release two or three songs as singles. Bands would release two or three albums in a single year. Up until the late ’70s, artists were expected to crank out new music as quickly as possible. Something like this happened in music, too it just took a little longer. And pretty soon, all the studios were trying to make hits on the level of Jaws. After Jaws, multinational corporations figured out how much money there was to be made in movies. It proved just how lucrative a brilliantly executed spectacle could be. It showed that it was possible to get a whole country excited about a movie at the same time. It revealed the inefficiencies of how the studios had been distributing their movies. Jaws captured the collective imagination on a scale that no other film had ever managed. After just a few months, it had surpassed The Godfather as the highest-grossing film in history. Jaws made more money than anyone thought possible. This strategy, pioneered by the independently made indie film The Trial Of Billy Jack, succeeded wildly. But Jaws opened nationwide on more than 400 screens at once after Universal spent hundreds of thousands on national TV ads. Before Jaws, even the biggest Hollywood movies would start out with hyped-up big-city premieres and slowly spread to the rest of the country. In June of 1975, Jaws came out and changed the way that movies worked. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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