The Times
Guitarist with Fleetwood Mac during the band’s transition from hard-driving blues to mainstream rock
REX FEATURES
Bob Welch played a key role in the transition of Fleetwood Mac from gritty British blues band to multimillion-selling American soft-rock heroes. As a guitarist, singer and songwriter, he performed on five albums by the band in the early 1970s, including Heroes Are Hard to Find (1974), which gave Fleetwood Mac its first American Top 40 hit.
Welch was widely credited with keeping the group going through several difficult years. Under his influence Fleetwood Mac swapped its early hard-driving blues sound in favour of a more melodic and radio-friendly style, heard to fine effect on compositions such as Sentimental Lady and Hypnotise. The first American member of the British-based group, he was also instrumental in persuading Fleetwood Mac to relocate to his home town of Los Angeles, a move which was pivotal in their subsequent success.
He left the group in late 1974 and was replaced by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. The new line-up went on to record Rumours, one of the biggest-selling albums of all time and a record which, in many ways, was the logical outcome of the musical direction in which Welch had taken the band.
Initially there was no bitterness on his part at having missed out on the group’s greatest commercial success. He remained close friends with former bandmates Mick Fleetwood and Christine McVie, both of whom played on his 1977 million-selling album French Kiss, which also gave him three hit singles with the title track (which he had previously recorded with Fleetwood Mac), Ebony Eyes and Hot Love, Cold World.
But his solo career subsequently petered out, in part due to heroin addiction, and relations with his old bandmates also turned sour. He sued for underpayment of royalties. Although the case was settled in 1996, the resentment lingered. Two years later, when Fleetwood Mac was inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, he was not among the former members invited to participate. “My era was the bridge era,” an angry Welch complained at the time. “It was a transition, but it was an important period in the history of the band. Mick Fleetwood credited me with ‘saving Fleetwood Mac’. Now they want to write me out of the history of the group. It hurts.”
Robert Lawrence Welch was born in 1945 in Los Angeles into a showbusiness family. His father was a producer and screenwriter at Paramount Pictures and his mother had been a singer and actress. Growing up in the easy affluence of Beverly Hills, he took clarinet lessons as a child and got his first guitar at 8. A talented scholar, after finishing high school he moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne before returning to study French at UCLA. He dropped out in 1964 before graduating in order to join the group the Seven Souls as a guitarist. He stayed until the group broke up in 1969, when he moved back to Paris and formed the trio Head West who recorded a solitary self-titled album in 1970.
He was still living in France in 1971 when he joined Fleetwood Mac, on recommendation of Judy Wong, a school friend who was working as the group’s PA. The group had lost the guitarists Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer in short order, and Welch was given the job of replacing them without the rest of the band having heard him play.He moved into the group’s communal home at Headley in Hampshire as part of a line-up that also included the guitarist Danny Kirwan, the drummer Mick Fleetwood, the bassist John McVie and his wife Christine McVie on keyboards and vocals. He made an immediate impact by writing the title song of the group’s 1971 album Future Games, which represented the first move away from the blues style of the Green/Spencer era.
The album Bare Trees followed in 1972, and featured the first version of Welch’s Sentimental Lady. It was also the last album to feature Kirwan, who fell out badly with Welch and was summarily sacked after he refused to take the stage with the band.
He was replaced by the Savoy Brown lead singer Dave Walker and the guitarist Bob Weston for the 1973 album Penguin, which found Weston writing four of the record’s nine tracks. The follow-up, Mystery to Me, which appeared later that same year, included half a dozen Welch compositions including Hypnotised.
Walker and Weston were both soon gone, and although record sales were respectable, they were difficult years for Fleetwood Mac as the group struggled to shed its blues past and find a settled line-up. Matters were not helped when line-up problems forced the group to pull out of an American tour in 1973. Their manager Clifford Davis responded by putting together a “fake” Fleetwood Mac comprising entirely different musicians to undertake the dates. A debilitating round of legal action followed, which successfully thwarted Davis, but also sidelined Welch and his colleagues for the best part of a year.
In addition, Welch was unhappy with the group’s Los Angeles-based label Reprise, which he felt was failing to promote their records effectively. Convinced that Reprise would take the group more seriously if they moved to LA, in 1974 he persuaded Fleetwood and the McVies to join him there, where they recorded Heroes Are Hard to Find, which made No 34 in the US charts, Fleetwood Mac’s highest chart placing to date.
Seven of the 11 tracks on the album were Welch compositions. But by the end of 1974 he had resigned, claiming that he was burnt out from the struggle of keeping Fleetwood Mac going. He briefly formed the hard-rock trio Paris with the Jethro Tull bassist Glenn Cornick and the drummer Thom Mooney, releasing two albums with the group. But by 1977 he had gone solo. His million-selling debut Sentimental Lady was followed by Three Hearts and The Other One (both 1979), Man Overboard (1980), Bob Welch (1981) and Eye Contact (1983), but sales rapidly declined.
A battle with heroin addiction and a move to Nashville followed but little more was heard from him until he sued Fleetwood Mac in the 1990s.
He returned to recording in 1999 with the experimental jazz release Bob Welch Looks at Bop. His Fleetwood Mac Years and Beyond (2003) consisted of re-recordings of his old hits, while His Fleetwood Mac Years and Beyond 2 (2006) mixed old and new material.
In recent years he suffered health problems and underwent spinal surgery. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and was reported to have left a suicide note.
He is survived by his wife Wendy.
Bob Welch, musician, was born on August 31, 1945. He died on June 7, 2012, aged 66