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Obituaries
Bob Welch 1945-2012
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 8 June 2012
Former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Bob Welch has been found dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest, aged 66. Police said his body was discovered by his wife at their Nashville home yesterday. He had been suffering from undisclosed health problems.
Born in 1945, Welch was the son of movie producer Robert L Welch and actress Templeton Fox. In the late 60s he left LA, where he had grown up, to study French at the Sorbonne in Paris. While living in Europe, in 1971 he auditioned to join Fleetwood Mac in England and, having been accepted, returned back to the US with the band, intending to complete his studies at UCLA (although he never did).
The band had been through several line-up changes since forming in 1968, and Welch’s first album with them, ‘Future Games’, (their fifth) saw them moving away from their original blues sound and more towards pop. And after lead guitarist Danny Kirwan was fired from the band, Welch’s role in their artistic direction became more prominent.
In 1974 Fleetwood Mac recorded their ninth album, ‘Heroes Are Hard To Find’, which was their first to crack the US top 40 but Welch’s last with the band. With his marriage failing, and feeling that he had reached his creative limits with the band, he quit and was replaced by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, completing the band’s most famous and most successful line-up.
He briefly formed a new band, Paris, with whom he released two albums, before going solo with the album ‘French Kiss’ in 1977. The album featured a new version of ‘Sentimental Lady’, a song he had originally written for Fleetwood Mac’s 1972 album ‘Bare Trees’. The reworked version featured his former bandmates Mick Fleetwood and Christine McVie, as well as his replacement Lindsey Buckingham, and went into the US top ten. The album too became the most successful of any of he appeared on.
As this collaboration shows, Welch was initially on good terms with his former bandmates. Indeed, Mick Fleetwood managed Welch’s solo career into the 80s. However, the relationship turned sour in the 90s, when Welch sued his former bandmates, accusing them of renegotiating their royalty rates without informing him and depriving him of a higher income. The dispute controversially led to Welch being left out of the band’s induction into the Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame four years later in1998.
Welch continued to record and perform, releasing his most recent album in 2006, a second of two albums mixing previously unreleased material from his Fleetwood Mac years and new material.
In a statement yesterday, Mick Fleetwood told Reuters: “He was a very, very profoundly intelligent human being and always in good humour, which is why this is so unbelievably shocking. He was a huge part of our history which sometimes gets forgotten … mostly his legacy would be his song writing abilities that he brought to Fleetwood Mac, which will survive all of us. If you look into our musical history, you’ll see a huge period that was completely ensconced in Bob’s work”.
Welch is survived by his second wife, Wendy.
