Shrine '69

Album Review

A live concert from January 25, 1969, recorded in Los Angeles by soundman Dinky Dawson. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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.