Fleetwood Mac - Swing Auditorium, San Bernardino, CA, 7-19-1971

I've posted a lot of early Fleetwood Mac albums: stray tracks collections, BBC collections, and entire concerts. But while there's tons of live material from the Peter Green years ending in 1970, and while I've posted a 1972 concert, I haven't posted a concert from 1971. Until this post, that is.

1971 is often unfairly overlooked in the history of Fleetwood Mac. Many people love the guitar work of Peter Green, so when he left the band in mid-1970, interest plummeted. You can see that in a dearth of bootleg material for the years after he left. But even without Green, the band was still firing on all cylinders. They still had guitarist Danny Kirwan, who should have gone on to be a famous "guitar hero" in his own right, except for the fact that he flamed out of the band, and then later out of music altogether. The band also picked up the very talented Bob Welch as another lead guitarist and songwriter. The band's 1971 album "Future Games" is top notch in my book.

So I wanted to post a 1971 Fleetwood Mac concert. In terms of sound quality, it turns out there really is only one option: the Swing Auditorium show in San Bernardino, California, in July 1971. It's the only excellent soundboard bootleg from that year. The downside is that it's short and incomplete, only about 45 minutes when the band usually played at least twice that long.

To fix this, I've added five more songs of the same sound quality to the beginning of the album. They come from the official album "Madison Blues." It's a little known album that's kind of a grab-bag of material from the year or so after Green left the band. It has a bunch of songs that were performed at an unknown venue on an unknown date some time in January 1971. I left out a couple of songs that were duplicates of songs played at the Swing Auditorium. The result is that the 45-minute-long concert effectively sounds like an hour and 12-minute-long concert.

Both the Swing Auditorium and mystery Madison Blues recordings are excellent soundboards. But in a way they're too good, in the sense that they did a great job of capturing what was played on stage, but captured very little of the audience noise. That meant that after each song, it seemed like they played to an indifferent audience that barely cheered or clapped. To fix this, I tried to boost the volume of the audience reactions as much as possible. I also found some extended sections of generic cheering after a couple of the songs, and added that in to the ends of other songs, to further boost the audience response. The end result is now the songs still sound great but there also is the expected amount of cheering when each one of them ends.

01. Crazy about You (Fleetwood Mac)
02. talk (Fleetwood Mac)
03. One Together (Fleetwood Mac)
04. I Can't Stop Loving Her (Fleetwood Mac)
05. talk (Fleetwood Mac)
06. Lonely without You (Fleetwood Mac)
07. talk (Fleetwood Mac)
08. Jewel-Eyed Judy (Fleetwood Mac)
09. talk (Fleetwood Mac)
10. Station Man (Fleetwood Mac)
11. talk (Fleetwood Mac)
12. Get like You Used to Be (Fleetwood Mac)
13. Dragonfly (Fleetwood Mac)
14. Purple Dancer (Fleetwood Mac)
15. I'd Rather Go Blind (Fleetwood Mac)
16. talk (Fleetwood Mac)
17. Tell Me All the Things You Do (Fleetwood Mac)
18. Jam [Instrumental] (Fleetwood Mac)

https://www119.zippyshare.com/v/2rLbyxgV/file.html

It surprisingly hard to find any photos of Fleetwood Mac playing in concert in 1971. I found one, which I think is from an appearance on the "Top of the Pops" TV show. It's not ideal in that it only shows three of the band members, and one of those (drummer Mick Fleetwood) is partially obscured. But it does show the two most important band members of that year, Christine McVie and Danny Kirwan.