Second Hand Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

While in my youth from 1977 to 1984, the year my little brother was born, my family went on camping trips every summer. Two weeks in the heart of Skyline Drive, every year. Each year we'd all load up into the huge white Chevy Impala, with it's paint chips on the outside of the window just waiting to jump into our mouths to kill us forever, and we'd cruise the hours and hours (looking back now....it was barely 3 hours...at the time, seemed like we were fucking going to Saturn...) and before our ears would start popping we'd have the radio on. Which, like every single other radio at the time, might as well have been named FLEETWOOD MAC RADIO. I guess Rumors was still on everybody's mind...from Go your Own Way to Don't Stop to Dreams, this fucking record was the soundtrack to our mountain drives for fucking years. Years passed, and the only song that was allowed into the Impala after that was Landslide; a pseudo Rumors cut. Damn. All we heard, as I remember.

Then as I got older, I kept hearing about Rumors, how it was one of the best albums of all time. Hmm, I thought, none of the songs I knew really blew me away. I knew that well, they must've been huge in their time, since my youth was a virtual video to their songs, but whenever I reminded myself of the track sequence of Rumors (MINUS, obviously, the one song I did like, Landslide) I just didn't see what the hullabaloo was about. Album kinda sucks, I remember thinking. Always thought the album kinda sucked.

Then a coupla years ago, maybe ten years ago, I was at the Nest and in the middle of yammering about Len Bias I heard a song wafting through the air, and I stopped talking, and I listened, and I walked to the fucking juke to see what it was. And what do you know?

It was the lead off track of Rumors.

Which I had never heard. Hell, listening to the song, I wouldn't even have guessed it was Fleetwood Mac...but it was.

Rumors had FOUR different singles released from the album: Go Your Own Way, Dreams, You Make Loving Fun, and Don't Stop. We've all heard each of those songs 995,000 times. What song could they not bother to release as a single?

The ONE song that to me was THE song of the album, the fucking song of the half-decade, the song that SHOULD'VE been the one that escorted us to the mountains all those years. I'll never understand why Second Hand News gets overlooked as it does - is there another example of a song that leads of an album of the ages that is completely ignored yet is twice as good as any of the "classic" singles from said albums? Wtf?

Second Hand News is a slice of slices. How it's been ignored for so long is a mystery. But tonite, while spitting out car paint chips and pipe smoke and with my ears popping, I give you the single greatest song in the whole canon of Fleetwood Mac. The song that led off the album that gave them their immortality...that is ignored.