While major upheavals have seemed to follow Fleetwood Mac throughout their career, the events that led to the recording of the group’s ninth studio album, 1974’s Heroes Are Hard To Find, left them at an especially low ebb.
Listen to ‘Heroes Are Hard To Find’ here.
The backstory: “He issued an ultimatum to all of us”
Two weeks into a US tour to promote the previous year’s Mystery To Me album, it became common knowledge that Mick Fleetwood’s then wife, Jenny Boyd, was having an affair with guitarist Bob Weston – a revelation that led to Mick Fleetwood informing the rest of the band, following a gig in Lincoln, Nebraska, on 20 October 1973, that he could no longer work with the guitarist.
Weston was fired, the group disbanded and the tour collapsed, leaving manager Clifford Davis to fulfil 26 agreed-upon dates – or face hefty legal fees. He took the nuclear option and went for the former. Despite surely knowing it could never end well, Davis claimed that he owned the rights to the band’s name, and while the real Fleetwood Mac band members were on their respective holidays he informed them of his plans by post. “We all got letters from Clifford Davis indicating his intentions to put a new band back on the road,” guitarist Bob Welch told Rolling Stone in January 1974. “He issued an ultimatum to all of us. In effect, what happened was that we got offered gigs, which is not really his place to do.
“We said, ‘Well, hell, we’re not going to do that,” Welch continued. “‘We want to go back on the road in such-and-such length of time.’ Nobody accepted the offer, and so the guy proceeded to get together another band.”
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For his part, Davis claimed the group had been his all along: “I want to get this out of the public’s mind as far as the band being Mick Fleetwood’s band,” he told Rolling Stone, before declaring that the personnel switch-up had been his idea. “I just decided it was time to change the band, certainly onstage, and that’s what I did. I’ve always been sort of the leader. I’ve always sort of picked who was going to be in it and who wasn’t.”
Davis’ ad-hoc Fleetwood Mac comprised of members of the band Legs – Elmer Gantry (lead singer) and Kirby Gregory (guitar) – plus David Wilkinson (piano), Paul Martinez (bass) and Craig Collinge (drums). Despite Davis’ skullduggery, he’d picked undeniably talented musicians, and there were reports of the gigs initially going down well, but as the tour continued and audiences became increasingly aware of being hoodwinked, hostility took hold and the tour was eventually cancelled.
A lawsuit over rights to the Fleetwood Mac name followed, and though the case was eventually resolved out of court four years later, talks with lawyers made Bob Welch realise that, should they reform, the band needed to relocate to Los Angeles to work more closely with their record label, Warner. After some persuading, particularly when it came to keyboardist/singer Christine McVie, the whole band agreed. Although Davis had taken out an injunction against them performing under the name Fleetwood Mac, concert promoter Bill Graham stepped in to help the group negotiate a new deal with the label and, come July 1974, the band were free to record again.
