About the band: Fleetwood Mac are a British-American rock group formed in 1967, who started out with blues songs and had their biggest hits in the seventies with a more Americanized rock sound. They released 17 studio albums, of which Rumours has sold over 40 million copies. Fleetwood Mac currently have one song in my list of about 200 best pop/rock songs of all time.
About the song: Oh well, from the 1969 album Then play on, is a unique song, composed of two completely contrasted parts - in fact the song was split along those lines in a single release, hence the classification often seen as Oh well parts 1 and 2. The song starts out as a conventional up-tempo bluesy rock song, with some nice lyrics twists ("I can't sing, I ain't pretty and my legs are thin - But don't ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to"). After three and a half minutes the song abruptly ends to give away to the awesome second part, a pensive guitar dominated instrumental, which clearly influenced bands like Pink Floyd and Dire Straits. It was to be their last successful song in the sixties' line-up with major creative influence Peter Greene ending up in a mental institute. Run time 9:05.
