A couple of weeks before Fleetwood Mac played the Richfield Coliseum in Ohio on July 23, 1976, a story in the Associated Press made a valiant effort to summarize the madness of the group’s previous decade in just three sentences.
“Its recent history includes
two divorces, one romantic split, two religious conversions, and a messy legal battle with a former manager,” read the article, which appeared in newspapers all across the country. “Yet these five people — two women and three men — can drown their sorrows in success. After nearly 10 years as just another group, Fleetwood Mac is hot.”
That hotness was a direct result of their decision to bring Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham into the band for their self-titled LP the previous year. It felt like a last-ditch effort since they had a small caravan of guitarists come and go throughout the early Seventies, following the defection of band co-founder Peter Green. But Nicks and Buckingham were perfect fits. Not only were they incredibly charismatic performers, they also contributed “Monday Morning,” “Rhiannon,” “Landslide,” and “I’m So Afraid” to the LP.
The album that followed a couple of years later has become such an enormous phenomenon, one that somehow grows more beloved with each passing decade, that the impact of 1975’s Fleetwood Mac has been somewhat overlooked. But “Over My Head,” “Rhiannon,” and “Say You Love Me” were inescapable on the radio around the bicentennial, and the album grew so massive that it displaced Frampton Comes Alive! at the top of the Billboard 200 in September 1976.
But it took over a year of restless, grueling touring to unseat Peter Frampton. When they first went out in May 1975, the group was still dealing with the aftermath of a ridiculous situation where a shady manager put a fake version of the group on the road, creating an ugly legal battle. They’d also recently parted ways with singer-guitarist Bob Welch after five unsuccessful albums.
This created incredible confusion in the marketplace, as nobody knew who they’d actually see onstage when they bought tickets to a Fleetwood Mac gig. And at first, Buckingham and Nicks just seemed like the latest newbies destined for the same fate as Welch, Jeremy Spencer, and Danny Kirwan.
The lead-off single from Fleetwood Mac, “Over My Head,” is a classic Christine McVie ballad that hit Number 20 on the Hot 100, their biggest song in America up to that point. That gave them enough momentum to move into larger venues in the States, even if follow-up single “Warm Ways,” another McVie ballad, was a total stiff.
Finally, in February 1976, seven months after the album came out, they dropped “Rhiannon.” For much of the public, this song about “an old Irish witch,” in the words of its songwriter, was their introduction to the majesty of Stevie Nicks. It shot to Number 11, landed them a spot on The Midnight Special, supercharged sales of the album, and transformed Nicks into an icon. (Amazingly, they never released “Landslide” as a single. It became famous as an album track.)
They had no choice but to keep touring in 1976 even though they played more than 100 shows in 1975. This took a predictable toll on the marriage of Christine and John McVie. “You just don’t get any space,” John McVie told the Associated Press. “Seven years later you realize you’ve got a Siamese twin who you’ve seen at best and worst, and usually the worst is more memorable. You begin to think, ‘This isn’t making me happy.’ In this case, Christine felt that way.”
They weren’t the only couple in Fleetwood Mac going through this. “We hear that Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham are the second couple within the group navigating rocky romantic waters,” read an April 1976 item in Rolling Stone‘s Random Notes. “Christine McVie and John McVie split up eight months ago.”
Throughout all this chaos, the Fleetwood Mac touring machine whirled on. And on June 25, 1976, there was an announcement in The Cleveland Press that Fleetwood Mac, Yes, Jethro Tull, the Average White Band, and Jefferson Starship were all coming to the Richfield Coliseum as part of a “Summer Extravaganza” concert series. “Nils Lofgren will open the Fleetwood Mac concert,” read the article, “with another soon-to-be-announced ‘heavy-duty act,'” who turned out to be Boz Scaggs. (All tickets were $6.00, which is about $35 adjusted for inflation in 2026, and were available via Ticketron at Sears, Cleveland Tux Shops, May Co. Downtown, and King’s Men’s Wear. Prices ramped up all the way to $7.00 for people who waited until the day of the show to buy.)
Security at the Richfield Coliseum — located halfway between Cleveland and Akron — must have been somewhat lax since at least one fan brought in a recorder, which is the reason we can hear the show today, and another snuck in a firecracker or cherry bomb that went off just as the band were taking the stage. (This was a constant issue at concerts in this time period, as wild as that sounds today.)
They open with “Say You Love Me,” but then dip back to the early days with “Station Man” and “Spare Me a Little of Your Love.” “We’ll try and do the old and the new,” Christine McVie tells the audience. But it’s the new — an incendiary, fierce “Rhiannon” — that really gets the crowd going, showcasing the strengths of both new members of the group.
“In front of the stage a strange-looking woman in layers of black chiffon and velvet wound her arms about her and sang, ‘All your life you’ve never seen a woman taken by the wind,'” wrote legendary Cleveland Plain Dealer music critic Jane Scott in her review of the show. “She looked like a cross between [silent film stars] Theda Bara and Pola Negri, but she was a blonde dynamite.”
That blonde dynamite only had a few more moments in the spotlight, including a beautiful “Landslide,” since much of the set was devoted to older classics like “Oh Well,” “The Green Manalishi,” and “Hypnotized.” But midway through the night, Christine McVie tells the crowd some news. “We just almost finished another album, which is planned to come out the end of September sometime,” she says. “We’d just like to do one song from that album. This is called ‘You Make Loving Fun.'”
For nearly everyone in the crowd, this was the first time they heard anything from Rumours. But the band had been chipping away at it since February, and it was indeed nearly finished, even though the planned September release date got pushed to February 1977.
In a July 1976 interview, John McVie said the album was like “Mary Hartman on wax,” referencing the Norman Lear soap opera. “It wasn’t planned that way,” he said. “We suddenly realized all the songs were about personal situations in the band. It’s very honest.”
“It’s also likely to be a hit,” noted the AP, “and after all these years, Fleetwood Mac is ready to cope with superstardom.”
The first prediction was indeed correct, to put it mildly. And they may have been ready to cope with superstardom, but it came with quite a few unexpected challenges they’re coping with to this day.
But the madness of the Rumours period was all in the future when they played the Richfield Coliseum in July 1976. At that point, they were just a part of Cleveland’s Summer Extravaganza concert series. And they didn’t even have enough juice to charge $7.00 for advance tickets like the Aerosmith/Derringer show five days later. Neil Diamond, meanwhile, was crushing them both by demanding $7.50, $10.00, and an eye-popping $12.50 for his Aug. 6th show at the Cleveland Coliseum.
Today, there’s not even a tiny trace of the Richfield Coliseum. It was razed in 1999, four years after shutting its doors. It’s now just a grassy meadow in the middle of Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Deer, rabbits, foxes, and the occasional coyote run across the grounds, along with hikers and birders, mostly having no clue they’re standing in the exact spot where groups like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Genesis, and countless other titans of rock once played, not to mention well over 1,000 Cavs games.
Fleetwood Mac isn’t in much better shape following the death of Christine McVie in 2022 and a civil war between Nicks and Buckingham that’s only recently thawed to at least a tiny degree. Fans continue to hope for one last tour, but it’s unclear if John McVie is in shape for such a thing or if Nicks is willing to handle Buckingham for anything more than the occasional phone call.
In the meantime, they should consider some sort of official bootleg series. This Richfield Coliseum tape isn’t quite clean enough to justify a release. But there must be something in their vault from this time. It’s a fascinating moment where a band thinks they’ve hit a peak without having any clue what’s right around the corner.
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