Prior to becoming a pop sensation, Fleetwood Mac was a powerhouse blues act that was fueled by the guitar wizardry of Peter Green. Apart from Peter Green's excellent guitar playing and vocals it also features a few classic Jeremy Spencer slide guitar tracks and he also gives the piano a good bash on the classic Great Balls Of Fire. Listen to this album and you may well be convinced. It has often been said that the Fleetwood Mac of the sixties sounded better live than on their studio albums.
It captures Fleetwood Mac at the peak of their playing powers, particularly Peter Green on tracks such as Before The Beginning and Something Inside Of Me. If you like the "Boston blues" album you will love this one recorded a year earlier.By bobandheleneales.~ Great sound, it's only near the end you realise it was actually recorded in mono.It features the group halfway between leaving their blues roots and reaching the powerful peak of "Oh well" and "The green manalishi".With Danny Kirwan fully integated into the group and Jeremy Spencer still to the fore and fronted by the searing guitar of Peter Green, this album will thrill all devotees of the original Mac. Recorded during the Mac's second US tour in January 1969 this live album puts you right there up by the stage. This release would be of more interest if there wasn't already an abundance of live and outtake early Mac available on Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac Live at the BBC, Jumping at Shadows, Cerulean, and Vaudeville Years. The latter boasts over-the-top lewd lyrics, "lick my dick" being substituted for "blue blue, blue suede shoes" for a while in the chorus-just the type of schoolboy humor that might have seemed taboo-smashing in 1969, but seems sort of stupid on disc. No late-sixties Fleetwood Mac live release, it seems, is deemed complete without the inclusion of a couple of comic fifties rock covers, and you have to sit through "Great Balls of Fire" and "Blue Suede Shoes" here. That means you don't get classics on the order of "Black Magic Woman" or "Oh Well," but on the other hand it's nice to hear different versions of some of the lesser-known early Mac originals, like Peter Green's anguished "Before the Beginning" and one of Danny Kirwan's better tunes, "Something Inside of Me." It's getting hard to keep track because of the bumper crop of official and semi-official live late-sixties Fleetwood Mac releases now available, but this is the first appearance of "Lemon Squeezer" to my knowledge, and "My Baby Sweet" is not easy to come by (although at least one version has appeared on a hard-to-find CD).
The fidelity is very good (excellent, in fact, by late-1960s standards), and the band are good form on a nine-song set (a tenth track is just a "Tune Up") that sticks mostly to lesser-known originals and covers. A live concert from January 25, 1969, recorded in Los Angeles by soundman Dinky Dawson.
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