BOB WELCH:

Guitarist, singer missed Fleetwood Mac fame

Bon Welch, who died Thursday at age 66, was an early member of the rock band Fleetwood Mac, which became one of the most commercially successfully groups of the Seventies and Eighties; he went on to have a fruitful career as a solo artist.

Fleetwood Mac started in 1967, taking its name from drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, both former members of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. With Peter Green on lead guitar, they had their first No. 1 hit in 1969 with Albatross.

They were to become almost as famous for their dramatic personal lives as for their music, and Welch — who joined as a guitarist and vocalist in 1971 — was with them at a delicate, and not particularly successful, period in their evolution.

Green had become enamoured of LSD and had left in 1970; the following year another guitarist, Jeremy Spencer, went shopping one day in Los Angeles and never came back, having joined the religious group the Children of God; and in 1973 the guitarist Bob Weston would be sacked for having an affair with Mick Fleetwood’s wife, Jenny Boyd.

Welch, who had been hired as a replacement for Spencer, himself became embroiled in a personality clash with another member of the band, Danny Kirwan: In 1972, during a concert, the two men had an argument about tuning that ended with Kirwan smashing his guitar and storming offstage, leaving the band to per- form without him; he was later sacked.

There was more trouble when the band’s U.S. tour came under threat following the sacking of Weston.

The band’s manager, Clifford Davis, attempted to recruit an entirely new set of musicians to complete the tour under the name Fleetwood Mac, leading to a prolonged legal wrangle.

Welch’s last album with the group was Heroes Are Hard To Find, released in 1974. In September that year he resigned. The band was later joined by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, and in 1977 released Rumours, regarded by some as one of the best albums ever recorded.

Robert Lawrence Welch was born in Los Angeles on Aug. 31, 1945, the son of the Hollywood producer Robert Welch and the actress Templeton Fox. Bob showed musical talent from a young age, and in his teens began to lean toward jazz and rhythm and blues.

After studying French at the Sorbonne in Paris (where, as he put it, “I mostly smoked hash with bearded guys five years older”) he returned to the United States and a similar course at the University of California at Los Angeles, but dropped out before completing his degree.

For a time Welch played guitar with various bands in the United States and in Paris before being invited to join Fleetwood Mac. He featured on a number of albums, including Future Games (1971), for which he wrote the title song; Bare Trees (1972); and Mystery to Me (1973). Bare Trees featured his song Sentimental Lady, with which Welch later had a hit as a solo artist.

In 1975, Welch founded a hard rock group called Paris. They released two albums before he decided to go it alone. His debut solo album, French Kiss (1977), went platinum, and two of its tracks — Sentimental Lady (with Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham providing backing vocals) and Ebony Eyes — became hit singles. Welch followed up with five more albums in the years up to 1983, although none achieved similar success.

Welch moved to Arizona, in 1987, forming a band called Avenue M. In the late Nineties he went to live in Nashville, where he worked as a songwriter (his songs have been recorded by a number of artists, including Kenny Rogers and the Pointer Sisters) and released several albums, including Bob Welch Looks at Bop and His Fleetwood Mac Years and Beyond.

In 1994 Welch sued Fleetwood Mac, claiming unpaid royalties, an act which is said to have led to his exclusion from the group’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction four years later. The matter was settled in 1996.

Welch died from a gunshot wound at his home in Nashville. He had recently been in poor health, and is reported to have left a suicide note. His death came six months after that of Weston, who died in January at the age of 64.

Welch is survived by his wife, Wendy, whom he married in 1985.