From the Vaults – Bob Welch
There was a time when one could not escape Bob Welch on FM radio. Hardly an hour would pass without his late 1970s hits Ebony Eyes or Sentimental Lady flowing from the speakers. Welch, who passed away in June of 2012 at the age of 66, was a much more complicated human being than these two pop songs might suggest. Few people can take credit for saving an iconic band undergoing a mid-career crisis, but Welch did. Mark Blake’s 2024 book (Dreams: The Many Lives of Fleetwood Mac) does a great job of telling Welsh’s story and Classic Rock Magazine ran an exclusive extract about him in their October 2024 issue.
Right off the bat, many people who knew of Bob Welsh’s association with Fleetwood Mac assumed he was another British guitar player. Before Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks ‘Americanized’ Mac, Bob Welsh had already added his own ‘American’ influence. Welch was a child of ‘old Hollywood’, born there in 1945. His father was a movie producer who worked with the likes of Bob Hope and his mother, Templeton Fox, was an actress. Their family home was across the street from Yul Brynner. Chauffeured limousine rides to school and attending lavish Beverly Hills parties at a young age were his normal. He explained his upbringing: “People over the years have sung about how decadent L.A. is, but they’re all transplants. I’m a native, I was born right here. I’m the real deal.”
After graduating from high school, Bob went to Paris to study art. He was soon back in L.A. because he found it hard to focus on art with all the distractions Paris had to offer. Back home, he joined his first band, Seven Souls, a soul revue-style band. They didn’t score any radio hits but their wealthy German sponsor got them gigs at exclusive resorts in places like Saint-Tropez and the Italian Riviera. When they broke up in 1969, he was back in Paris where he formed Head West, a funk-rock trio. Left destitute after their equipment was repossessed (Blake doesn’t say why, but when the bailiffs came to call, it no doubt had something to do with not making payments), Welsh was at loose ends. A phone call from an old high school friend, Judy Wong, changed all of that. She was working as an aide-de-camp for Fleetwood Mac and she called Bob to tell him there was an opening in the band after the departure of Jeremy Spencer.
The now dirt poor Welsh was in L.A. with no means to get to England to audition, so the band bailed him out and paid his airfare there. He had to dig a little to afford the train fare from London to Guildford and upon arrival at the train station, Mick Fleetwood himself picked him up in a VW Beetle. Welch recalled, “He was six-foot-six and weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds. He was a strange-looking human being.” Bob moved into their communal house, Benifold, and officially joined the group in April of 1971 without ever playing a note for an audition. After their past troubles with Peter Green and Spencer, they seemed to be spending more time scoping out compatibility issues rather than musical ones (Bob called it his ‘psychological soundness test’). Christine McVie said, “Bob never played a note. All we did was sit around and talk until dawn. We just thought he was an incredible person.”
To Welch, his new bandmates were, “like the British royal family.” He jumped right in and composed the title track for their next album, Future Games, and a track that was not a hit in 1972 but would become Bob’s signature tune as a solo artist, Sentimental Lady. When guitarist Danny Kirwan was fired in 1972, it solidified Welch’s standing in the band. Everybody loved him, except manager Clifford Davis. Maybe it was because Welch was not shy about wondering why they didn’t fire Davis (he described him as their ‘bluff cockney manager’). For his part, Davis tried to get the other Macs to hire vocalist Dave Walker (who found fame later with Savoy Brown) because he didn’t think Welch made a good frontman. His geeky glasses and hairline aside (part of why Davis didn’t like him fronting the band), Welch did make a great songwriting and harmonizer alongside Christine McVie.
Welch seemed to fit in with the ‘royal family’ and their eccentricities. Peter Green came to Air Studios in London to play on 1973’s Penguin record sporting a piece of cheese stuck in his hair. Bob noted, “I don’t know if it was Caerphilly or Cheddar, but when he left, Peter still had the same piece of cheese in his hair. Nobody thought to mention it.” Fitting into the band wasn’t a challenge because Welch himself was pretty much a free spirit and willing to go with the flow. He would turn out not to be just a pull toy going along for the ride.
In the Fall of 1973, Mick Fleetwood had to pull out of their scheduled U.S. tour due to marital problems. The ever supportive Clifford Davis (say this again with sarcasm) recruited a ‘new’ Fleetwood Mac that included none of the existing members. Davis sent them out in place of the ‘real’ Mac. Welch’s solution was simple – he had invested three years in this ‘dysfunctional bunch’ and was not about to go down without a fight. He convinced the ‘real’ Mac to relocate to L.A. Davis and his faux band were dismissed and the outlook brightened for them in 1974 when they got a $100,000 advance for their next record, Heroes Are Hard To Find. Welch saved the band by financing the sessions with his own money. Unfortunately he was the only U.S. citizen in the band, a little detail that caused him eternal conflict with the IRS for years to come.
Fleetwood framed this turning point succinctly when he said, “Bob became part of a band that could have drifted into oblivion and was hugely important in keeping us going.” As it happens all too frequently, being the savior exacts a cost. The IRS troubles, legal battles, and drugs took their toll and Welch left the band at the end of 1974. Bob had other reasons besides the woes listed: “Musically speaking, I wanted to do things they didn’t want from me.” His next stop was a band called Paris that included ex-Nazz drummer Thom Mooney and former Jethro Tull bassist Glenn Cornick. Their album Black Book was more Zeppelin than Fleetwood Mac. Hunt Sales would replace Mooney for their second LP (Big Towne) but they didn’t move many records. Before they split up, Mick Fleetwood heard them and was impressed enough to sign Welch to his Limited Management company as a solo act.
The future proved Mick’s reasoning to be sound: “There was no doubt in my mind, Bob could have a hit record. We felt like we were on the coaster heading up, and I wanted Bob on this ride.” His album (French Kiss) arrived in the summer of 1977, not too long after Mac released Rumors. The album and both singles (the revived Sentimental Lady and Ebony Eyes) made it into the Top 20 U.S. charts. By the next summer, Welch was opening for Fleetwood Mac and hitching a ride to gigs on Mac’s chartered plane. Mick would take him to radio interviews as his manager, then do his own spot as a member of Fleetwood Mac – kind of like double dipping.
How did Welch feel about the situation? He was having his own hits but his former band were becoming fabulously wealthy without him. He insisted, “I didn’t feel like I was missing the boat because it was a different group. But I contributed something to the group’s sound and felt very proud that they were making it.” This is not a common attitude among musicians who jump (or are pushed) off the boat just before it arrives in port, but it speaks well of Bob’s mindset at the time. His second album (1979’s Three Hearts) was also well received and he branched out. He began hosting a music video show in 1980 called Hollywood Heartbeat but by then, Welch’s physical appearance hinted that he might have gone down the rockstar’s worst rabbit hole.
A 1981 appearance at The Roxy in Hollywood featured most of his old Mac band members and his playing was ‘out of his skin’ according to author Blake. The old ‘but he wasn’t selling very many records without his old bandmates’ rub raised its ugly head. He declined an offer to join Mick’s side band (The Zoo) and his 1983 LP (Eye Contact) failed. He was living in the Hollywood hills with gold records lining the walls, but he was at a tipping point. His marriage ended as did his record contract and he found himself, again, at loose ends. Bob Welch’s life was about to take a sharp left turn into the fog with a big drop off a cliff possibly waiting ahead.
Guns N’ Roses drummer Steven Adler came into Bob’s world at this time. HIs then girlfriend told him about a ‘fun dude’ she knew so she took him along to visit Welch. Bob was recovering from a near fatal drug overdose but wasn’t getting the picture. Welch’s housemate invited the couple in and passed them the crack pipe that was sitting on the living room table. Adler vividly recalled, “I inhaled and had never experienced such a dire need to get high again, right away, now.” The experience of 20 year-olds hanging out with 40 year-old Bob Welch started Adler’s decline and would eventually get him booted from Guns. Bob would fire up the pipe and tell tales of his illustrious past and eventually, G N’ R was rehearsing in his garage. Six months later, Welch was arrested for drug possession and in his words, “I was smart enough to see the writing on the wall and changed all my friends. I was being a very bad boy. It was not a good time.” The drug bust parted the fog and no doubt saved Bob’s life, but Adler was now driving down a similarly foggy road (which he detailed in his book My Appetite for Destruction).
Not long after Bob’s release from the hospital he met film assistant Wendy Armistead at the Viper Room. They married in December of 1985 and pulled up stakes to make a new start in Phoenix, Arizona (something Blake says recovering addicts call ‘doing a geographic’). He credits the L.A. police (for busting him), the Cedar-Sinai hospital (for helping him with his rehabilitation) and his new wife, “who helped me stop beating my head against a brick wall.” His next band, Avenue M, didn’t last long and the couple relocated again to Nashville. He focused on writing songs and filed a lawsuit against Fleetwood Mac for not negotiating a higher royalty deal for him when they restructured their own contracts (thus underpaying him for his past work). The band took the lawsuit poorly.
When Fleetwood Mac was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, Welch’s name was nowhere to be found in the list of past members. As Bob put it, “Mick Fleetwood dedicated a whole chapter of his biography to my era of the band. He credited me with saving Fleetwood Mac. Now they want to write me out of the history of the group. Mick treats most past band members as if they didn’t really have anything to do with Fleetwood Mac, with the exception of the Rumors band and Peter Green and, rarely, Jeremy Spencer. Everybody else he shuts out of this mind.”
When the band finally settled out of court in 1996, Welch changed his tune a bit. He blamed Warner Bros for the ‘financial mismanagement’ and the Rock Hall of Fame for him being left out of the ceremony. If a bit of revisionary history eased his mind and the out of court settlement gave him some financial stability, so be it. He would get back to making music including two albums of re-recorded Fleetwood Mac songs. He remained interested in paranormal activity and left-field science (which often inspired some of his out-there lyrics) for the rest of his life.
Asked in the early 2000s, he said he was ‘semi-retired’ but still playing a few dates here and there. “Two shows at a time and then go home,” he told Blake, “At my age that’s all that I want to do.” He stayed sober in his later years but spinal surgery in March of 2012 did not go well. The doctors told him he had little chance of recovery and over time, he would lose all mobility. He was in great pain and as he explained it in a letter to his wife, he had watched his mother care for his invalid father and did not want her to have to do that for him. Sadly, he put a gun to his chest on June 7 and ended his life.
Not long after his death, Mick Fleetwood did something Welch had accused him of never doing. He acknowledged Welsh’s contributions to the band. Mick said, “Like Stevie and Lindsey later on, Bob came out of the ether when we needed someone just like him. I would have hated the thought of him becoming like that guy Pete Best, who left The Beatles and was thinking, ‘I was right there, then left and then this happens. I do so hope [Bob] felt identified and not ust left on the sidelines.”
In the end, Welch was satisfied with his life in music. He was smart enough to pull back from oblivion when he was well on the way to killing himself with partying. It is just a shame that his physical health pushed him to put the final period on his all too short life.
Top Piece Video: Bob Welch performing Ebony Eyes with Stevie Nicks and other members of his old band, Fleetwood Mac