Big Mac: 72 Fleetwood Songs on ’25 Years’ Retrospective

Given all the free publicity that Fleetwood Mac’s old “Don’t Stop” has received, you’d think the title of the group’s new CD box set would be “Don’t Stop.”

After all, the upbeat 1977 hit emerged as President-elect Bill Clinton’s theme song--featured prominently at the Democratic Convention in New York and at Clinton’s election night victory rally in Little Rock, Ark.

But the Christine McVie composition is merely one of the 72 selections in “25 Years--The Chain,” a four-disc Fleetwood Mac retrospective that will be released Tuesday by Warner Bros. Records.

As the title suggests, the album traces the band’s remarkable history of personnel and style shifts: from the group’s beginnings in the late-’60s as a blues band to the hugely successful folk-rock-pop synthesis achieved when co-founders Mick Fleetwood and John McVie were joined by Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks on the late-’70s albums “Fleetwood Mac,” “Rumours” and “Tusk.”

In fact, those three albums were such high points for the group that more than a third of the tracks on “25 Years--The Chain” are from those collections.

The remaining material includes everything from the group’s first British single, “I Believe My Time Ain’t Long,” and various compositions by the band’s late-’60s guitarist Peter Green (including “Albatross”) to alternate mixes of such familiar tunes as “Gold Dust Woman,” plus four new songs. The last include “Paper Doll,” a bittersweet tune co-written by Nicks that has been released as a single.

For the hits-minded Fleetwood Mac fan, there is an alternative to the set: the previously released, 16-track single disc “Greatest Hits,” which contains all 10 of the Top 20 hits from the three albums except 1980’s “Think About Me.” For the committed fan, however, the set--which contains a 64-page photo booklet, is more on target.

Also New: EMI Records has released separate single-disc anthologies of Johnny Burnette (whose 1960 hit “You’re Sixteen” was a hit for Ringo Starr in 1973), Gene McDaniels (best known for 1961’s “A Hundred Pounds of Clay”) and Smiley Lewis (whose R&B; hits in the ‘50s included “One Night,” a song that Elvis Presley turned into a pop-rock hit--though with tamer lyrics). . . . From Rykodisc: Pete Townshend’s “Who Came First” and Frank Zappa’s “You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore Vol. 6” . . . And from Qwest: New Order’s debut album, “Movement.”