It's a small miracle that Fleetwood Mac, in its most famed iteration, remains still intact. With Christine McVie's return in 2014, each member of the quintet that defined popular music for the larger part of the 1970s continues to tour, drawn back together again by some centripetal force. It's a miracle not just because, since its creation, Fleetwood Mac has been a particularly pliable thing, with a grand total of 17 members playing musical chairs, but because The Fab Five specifically—Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, John McVie, Christine McVie, and Mick Fleetwood—have never had a smooth go of it, their music less a product of personal camaraderie than its antidote.
Purveyors of pop culture conspiracy have suggested Fleetwood Mac was cursed from the beginning: three of the band's previous guitarists, the ghosts from the Mac's past, became unhinged while on tour, with founder Peter Green most famously taking tabs with a sketchy group of fans in Munich, experiencing an intensely messianic acid trip, and proceeding to dress up as Jesus before leaving the band for a religious cult. Thereafter, the specter of Fleetwood Mac's past lives loomed large, a kind of eerie bellwether for things to come. And what came, of course, was Rumours.
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