October 16, 2002

I've made a mistake or two over the years – who hasn't? I'll stand up and admit it, most of the time anyway. My friends know that I've blown through a wife or three, that I still love both Gangs of Four, that at 16 I took peyote and thought that God was at a family dinner party (bad move), that I still haven't graduated from college, that I don't say no, that I've never voted. I'm not all that ashamed to say I drove through Oakland this morning listening to Fleetwood Mac's Christine McVie singing "Say You Love Me" at top volume. What can I say? Although I never told my hipster friends, I was, once upon a time, hooked on Fleetwood Mac (1975) and Rumours (1977).

This 36-song set features material from those two albums, and Tusk, which I hated when it came out, but now – thanks to Camper Van B.'s recent destruction of the original – songs from that album are permanently, grimly bent, an improvement. Still, the first two albums provide the backbone of this compilation, and some of the material – pure, sugar-coated pop-rock – sounds good, to me anyway. "Go Your Own Way," "You Make Loving Fun," "Second Hand News," and the aforementioned McVie tune made driving in Los Angeles bearable back in the day. Drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie were a rock-solid rhythm section, wonderfully understated in an age of excess.