Penguin (1973) 


 

  1. Remember Me
  2. Bright Fire
  3. Dissatisfied
  4. (I'm a) Roadrunner
  5. The Derelict
  6. Revelation
  7. Did You Ever Love Me
  8. Night Watch
  9. Caught in the Rain

 

With the release of Bare Trees in 1972, it seemed—briefly—that Fleetwood Mac had finally found their footing. The album was cohesive, well-received, and marked a high point in the band’s transitional years. But, as ever with Fleetwood Mac, equilibrium proved fleeting. Danny Kirwan, the latest in a growing line of gifted but unstable guitarists, suffered a spectacular implosion, reportedly smashing his head into a bathroom mirror before descending into a period of homelessness and disappearance. Another member lost not to musical differences, but to something altogether more troubling.

Undeterred, and perhaps by now grimly accustomed to personnel crises, the band soldiered on. Kirwan’s departure prompted the arrival of two new recruits: guitarist Bob Weston and vocalist Dave Walker (formerly of Savoy Brown). It was a sensible enough decision on paper. In practice, Penguin—released in 1973—shows the limits of adaptation, particularly when too many styles compete for limited space.

Things begin promisingly. The album opens with Christine McVie’s Remember Me, a breezy, mid-tempo piece with just enough melodic sparkle to reassure fans that the core creative team remains intact. Bob Welch follows with Bright Fire, his usual blend of dreamlike imagery and gentle psychedelia, and McVie returns with Dissatisfied, a solid, if slightly melancholic, pop tune. Taken together, these three tracks suggest that Penguin may well continue the graceful, understated path begun on Bare Trees.

But then the album takes a sharp and bewildering detour.

Enter Dave Walker. His two vocal contributions—The Derelict and a cover of Junior Walker’s (I'm a) Road Runner—arrive back-to-back and derail the album’s mood completely. The former is an odd hybrid of folk and country, complete with banjo and harmonica; the latter a straight-ahead barroom rocker more suited to a roadhouse than a Fleetwood Mac LP. It’s not that Walker performs badly—he doesn’t—it’s that he’s occupying a different musical planet from the rest of the band. The sequencing does him no favors, either: placing both tracks side-by-side only underscores the dissonance, creating a jarring mid-album intermission that feels like someone else hijacked the record halfway through.

To the band’s credit, they quickly regain their footing. Welch returns with Revelation and Night Watch, both respectable efforts, though somewhat overshadowed by his finer work on earlier and later records. The standout, however, is Christine McVie’s Did You Ever Love Me, a rhythmically inventive track laced with steel drums and Caribbean accents—evidence, perhaps, of the group's continuing taste for stylistic experimentation. It's one of the more arresting tracks of the “Welch era,” buoyed by McVie's increasingly confident songwriting voice and subtle sense of melancholy.

Behind the music, chaos still swirled. At the time of Penguin’s release, a former manager attempted to tour a different group under the name “Fleetwood Mac,” despite the complete absence of any actual members of Fleetwood Mac. That such a bizarre impersonation could be taken seriously enough to require legal intervention says much about the confusion surrounding the band’s identity at this point.

Indeed, Penguin feels like a document of a group in mid-transition, balancing strong material with bewildering detours and lineup uncertainty. Remove the two Walker contributions and the record arguably approaches Bare Trees in quality—certainly in consistency. But as it stands, Penguin is a fractured but fascinating artifact: half elegant pop, half genre roulette, and wholly emblematic of a band still searching for solid ground.


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