Recorded live at the Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA January 04, 1970

On July 16, 2021, Artie B. Rockin’ posted an audience recording of the Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac live at the Fillmore West from January 04, 1970.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpnfj79Ez8M –

(‘Teenage Darling’ starts at 1:14:44)

Bootlegs of this show (taken from a radio broadcast) have been in circulation for many years, and this is first to my knowledge to include this performance of ‘Teenage Darling’ – (mistitled ‘Teenage Dream’ in the track listing) – a special thanks to Gert Jan Kuiper for alerting me to this addition

Fleetwood Mac had begun their third U.S. tour with two dates at the Fillmore East on November 21 and 22, 1969.

Their itinerary had them pinballing across the continent, playing dates in Boston, then back to New York City; on to Detroit, Michigan and for the first time, Atlanta, Georgia .  Three days later they played, also for the first time, in Kansas City, Kansas and then three dates in Texas; first in Houston, then in San Antonio and finishing in Austin.

The next night found them headlining a tiny club in Belvidere, Illinois called the Rumpus Room.

After a five-day break they were back in Michigan to play in Birmingham and Clarkston.

Five days after that, they were back in Boston for two days and from there, to Denver, Colorado. *

On January 02, 1970 they played the first of three shows at the Fillmore West.

The bootleg from the opening night of the stand provides us with the first complete recording of ‘Teenage Darling’.  The first live performance of the song caught on tape, from the Municipal Auditorium in San Antonio, Texas, in December of 1969, was incomplete.

The studio version of the number was never released in the U.S., yet the bootleg recordings that we have make clear the delight that audiences took just in seeing Jeremy Spencer coming out on stage in his gold lame costume, cheering and laughing before he says a word. 

There wasn’t much precedent for this type of “performance” from a rock band at the time; Sha Na Na had performed at Woodstock in August of 1969, but they remained on the East Coast in U.S. and the film, introducing them to a much larger audience, was not released until March of 1970.

On the recording from January 02, the musical and spoken word intro runs just under a minute and a half. 

On this newly released version, it is ten seconds shorter, but Fleetwood cues Spencer with a cymbal strike not heard on the earlier version.  Spencer dramatizes the word “mine” in the second verse, a pleasant addition; but the poorer quality sound on this one from the fourth causes not only Green and Kirwan’s backing “Sha-la-las” to get buried, but more disappointingly, Green’s falsetto crooning.

Green adds a nice fill not heard on the earlier version after the bridge; the earlier version concludes much more effectively, with Spencer bringing the number to a “proper” close, where this one just ends.

Now it is possible that they launched into another number immediately after this one finished.  Many written accounts of their shows (including Mick Fleetwood’s, state that they could play for another half-hour or more after Spencer came out in costume. 

If this was true, no bootleg that I am aware of ever captured that part of the show, nor I have never seen any photos of Spencer in costume.

While it is great to have a previously unreleased performance from the Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, I have to wonder where this came from.  Two of the three shows from this stand have been in circulation for well over a decade, and the show from January fourth was originally released commercially in 1994 by Eagle Records under the title “The Original Fleetwood Mac Blues Band”.  When it was reissued by Left Field Media in November of 2020, the set included a blistering version of ‘Long Tall Sally’ (available on bootlegs of the show) on which Janis Joplin can be heard joining in on vocals.  Yet, even that set did not include this number.

*Tour itinerary courtesy of Christopher Hjort, “Strange Brew: Eric Clapton and the British Blues Boom 1965 – 1970” (Jawbone 2007)