Tracks 17, 18, 19 and 20 from Tusk (1979)
Track 21 from Mirage (1982)
Track 22 from Tango In The Night (1987)

Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie first played together in John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers, a staple of British blues scene that was famous for launching the careers of quite a few musicians who went on to bigger fame (including Eric Clapton and Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones). And the first few Fleetwood Mac albums are heavy on bluesy originals by Green and singer/guitarist Jeremy Spencer, as well as covers of Robert Johnson and Big Joe Turner. Christine McVie married John McVie in 1968, the year Fleetwood Mac began releasing albums, and she eased into full membership in the band very gradually, first playing keyboards on their 2nd album, making uncredited appearances on their 3rd and 4th albums, becoming a full member that occasionally contributed songs and sang lead on their 5th album, and sang on a single for the first time on their 6th album, by which point Bob Welch had emerged as the frontman of their cultishly beloved middle era. 

There aren't many other bands named after the rhythm section, and the only comparable huge band where the namesake and only constant members are 2 instrumentalists is Van Halen. But they had one of the flashiest and most skilled guitarists of all time, and as versatile and talented as Mick and John have proven themselves over the course of Fleetwood Mac's career, they're hardly stars. Their persistence in keeping the band going, with so many other musicians shuffling in and out, might seem silly if it hadn't paid off so hugely and made them geniuses. The Rumours-era lineup was a perfect storm, three singer-songwriters who all wrote hits, backed by each other and a rhythm section that made them into something so much bigger and more potent than they'd ever be as solo artists. If you changed any of the events that led up to that, a lot of those songs would never have been written, or they'd languish in obscurity forever. 

"Stop Messin' Around," the opening track on the first Fleetwood Mac album with McVie on piano, was covered by Aerosmith and Gary Moore of Thin Lizzy, among others. Danny Kirwan's instrumental "Sunny Side Of Heaven" was once a popular music bed for radio stations, and stayed in the band's live repertoire in the Buckingham-Nicks era. "The Derelict" is one of 2 songs Fleetwood Mac recorded with vocals by Dave Walker, a British rock journeyman who's been in a million other notable bands, including an even shorter tenure as Black Sabbath's lead singer that produced no recordings. 

I've always been fascinated by instances of artists recording multiple unrelated songs with the same title (for instance Madonna has two called "Forbidden Love"). And in Fleetwood Mac has two songs called "Angel" written by people who were never in the band at the same time -- first Bob Welch, and then 5 years later Stevie Nicks, whose "Angel" was another song about the title character from "Rhiannon." A more deliberate connection: Christine McVie and Lindsay Buckingham loosely adapted "Word Turning" on the 1975 self-titled album from Peter Green's "The World Keep On Turning" on the 1968 self-titled album. Peter Green made two uncredited appearances on Fleetwood Mac albums after he left the band, playing guitar on "Night Watch" from Penguin and "Brown Eyes" from Tusk.

I wound up with a playlist that has three songs sung by Peter Green, one by Jeremy Spencer, one instrumental penned by Danny Kirwan, one song sung by Dave Walker, two by Bob Welch, four by Christine McVie, seven by Lindsey Buckingham, and five by Stevie Nicks. 

Obviously, the stuff from 1975 onwards is what most people know and love, and those are indisputably great albums. Fleetwood Mac was still one of the biggest acts in popular music when I was a kid, and it actually surprised me how many of these songs rang a bell that I didn't think I'd heard more than once or twice, including nearly every single from the Buckingham/Nicks era and many non-singles. I remember my parents had copies of Rumours and Tusk around the house, but I didn't get out the former LP and put it on the turntable until Hole covered "Gold Dust Woman" and I wanted to hear the original. Other than the songs with Stevie's immediately recognizable voice, a lot of Mac hits might kind of fade into the '70s/'80s AOR wallpaper until you listen more closely and get to know McVie and Buckingham's voices better and appreciate what enormously talented songwriters they are. 

Of course, things got really interesting on Tusk, one of pop history's great ambitious double albums that gladly risked alienating the giant fanbase the band had just won over. Certainly, it wouldn't have been hard for an A&R man to whittle the album down to the Nicks and McVie songs and a couple of Lindsey Buckingham's more accessible tracks, but then it wouldn't be Tusk. Instead, we got Buckingham's weird minimalist vision, an album that cost over $1 million to record but is shockingly lo-fi at times. My favorite tracks are stuff like "What Makes You Think You're The One," where Buckingham is banging on a Kleenex box but Mick Fleetwood is also going off on a drum set over one cheap mic. The band's two '80s albums have great songs, but they'd never cut loose the same way again.