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LOS ANGELES – Fleetwood Mac was at the top of its game in August 1977 when the band returned to its adopted home in Southern California to play three shows at The Forum in Los Angeles. Rumours had only been out a few weeks when the band left in February to tour the world, returning six months later to play three shows at The Forum for nearly 50,000 fans.
Rumours was the #1 album in America and well on its way to becoming one of the most successful ever released. Rumours eventually sold more than 40 million copies worldwide and has just been certified 21x platinum in the U.S. The record has also been certified 14x Platinum in the U.K., and 13x Platinum in Australia and New Zealand, all countries where the album reached #1.
RUMOURS LIVE captures the energy and excitement of the band’s opening night at The Forum on August 29, 1977. The nearly 90-minute performance includes live versions of most of the songs from Rumours and Fleetwood Mac, the group’s first multi-platinum #1 album, which came out in 1975.
The concert remained unreleased for decades until 2021, when “Gold Dust Woman” from the show was included as a bonus track on Live: Deluxe Edition, Rhino’s expanded version of Fleetwood Mac’s 1980 concert album. The other 17 songs on the collection have never been released before.
RUMOURS LIVE will be available on September 8 as 2-CD and 2-LP sets. The black-vinyl version has two 180-gram records in a gatefold jacket with lacquers cut by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering. Pre-order HERE. Also, a crystal clear-vinyl version of RUMOURS LIVE will be released the same day exclusively at Walmart.
The music will be available from digital and streaming platforms. Unreleased live version of “DREAMS” from RUMOURS LIVE is available today digitally. Listen HERE.
The concert’s setlist draws almost exclusively from Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, the first two albums recorded by the band’s latest incarnation: Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, and Christine McVie, and the newest members, Stevie Nicks, and Lindsey Buckingham. The lone nod to Fleetwood Mac’s other nine studio albums is a performance of “Oh Well,” a rock-guitar masterpiece originally released in 1969 and written by the band’s founder, guitarist Peter Green.
Engineer Ken Caillat, who helped record Rumours, also recorded the concert at The Forum using the Record Plant’s mobile recording truck. He captured the band’s impassioned performance at a moment of peak Rumours frenzy, including powerful versions of “Landslide,” “Never Going Back Again,” “Songbird,” and “The Chain.”
In the liner notes from RUMOURS LIVE, Sam Graham observes: “The songs are familiar: ‘Dreams,’ ‘Go Your Own Way,’ ‘Say You Love Me,’ ‘Over My Head,’ and on and on. But most of these live versions are more muscular, more ferocious, than the album recordings, driven by the powerhouse Fleetwood-John McVie rhythm section and Buckingham’s febrile guitar playing; and instead of a rote recital of the hits, the group stretches out in concert, as songs like ‘Rhiannon,’ ‘World Turning,’ and ‘I’m So Afraid’ blossom into exuberant tours de force onstage.
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