Fleetwood Mac

A band with a long and convoluted history, Fleetwood Mac was originally conceived as a heavy blues outfit in the tradition of John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers. It wasn't until Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, and Christine McVie enlisted the services of soft-rock duo Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham that the band took on its definitive form. In Buckingham the band acquired a prodigious guitar talent and a gifted lyricist whose occasionally daffy sensibilities nicely complemented the tender intimacies of Nicks and McVie. Though incestuous liaisons within the group threatened to tear it apart, these also sparked some of the band's greatest material. Witness Rumours, to this day one of the top ten best selling albums of all time. From the giddy, self-deprecating "Second Hand News" to the achingly beautiful "Gold Dust Woman," the album is painfully intimate -- and that's precisely what gives it power. Though a pair of mediocre releases in the '90s threatened to end the band's career with a whimper, The Dance (1997) restored Buckingham and Nicks to the fold and dusted the cobwebs off Fleetwood Mac's rich legacy.