Guns N’ Roses’ former drummer Steven Adler never forgot the first time he smoked crack cocaine. It was the spring of 1985 at Bob Welch’s place in the Hollywood Hills.
Adler’s girlfriend at the time had told him about a “fun dude” she knew. When they arrived at Welch’s house, they discovered he was recovering from a heroin overdose in Cedars-Sinai hospital. Nevertheless, Welch’s housemate let them in, fired up a glass pipe on the living room table and offered Adler a taste. “I inhaled, and had never experienced such a dire need to get high again, right away, now,” he wrote in his autobiography, My Appetite for Destruction.
Adler soon joined the other waifs and strays at the property and moved his drum kit into the garage. Bob Welch re-joined the party as soon as he was out of hospital. But the 20-year-old glam rock wannabe and the 40-year-old former Fleetwood Mac guitarist made an odd couple.
The pair would sit up at night, playing music and watching videos of Welch performing at the 1978 California Jam, with Stevie Nicks waving her tambourine and singing backing vocals. Bob, whippet-thin and hollow-cheeked, fired up the pipe and shared tales of the pre-superstar Mac and his solo hits, Sentimental Lady and Ebony Eyes.
Other future members of Guns N’ Roses were soon rehearsing in the garage, with Welch as their landlord/mentor. The party stopped six months later when the Los Angeles Police Department arrested Welch for drug possession. “I was smart enough to see the writing on the wall and changed all my friends,” he said years later. “I was being a very bad boy. It was not a good time.”
It was also a comedown for a musician who’d sung, written for and played on five Fleetwood Mac albums. “People forget,” Mick Fleetwood said after Welch’s death. “Bob became part of a band that could have drifted into oblivion and was hugely important in keeping us going.”
Robert Lawrence Welch Jnr was born in ‘Old Hollywood’ in August 1945. His father produced movies starring Bob Hope, his mother Templeton Fox was an actress, and the family lived across the street from Yul Brynner.
Welch spent his childhood being chauffeured to school in a limousine and acting older than his years at ritzy Beverly Hills parties. “People over the years have sung about how decadent LA is, but they’re all transplants,” he said. “I’m a native. I was born right here. I’m the real deal.”
After graduating, Welch moved to Paris to study art. But he was distracted by the nightlife and returned to LA in 1964. Soon after, he joined his first group, a soul revue-style band, Seven Souls. They never had a hit, but their sponsor, a wealthy German hotelier, booked them to play at exclusive resorts in Saint-Tropez and the Italian Riviera until they split in 1969.
Welch stayed behind in Paris and formed a funk-rock trio, Head West, who made an album but ended up destitute after bailiffs repossessed their equipment. Then Welch’s old high-school friend and Fleetwood Mac’s aide-de-camp Judy Wong rang to tell him guitarist Jeremy Spencer had left, and there was an opening in the band.
“I didn’t know what to do,” said Welch. “‘I had no money for an air ticket to Los Angeles, and I was getting very depressed.”
Fleetwood Mac bought him a ticket to England, and Welch scavenged enough for the train fare from London to Guildford. He was waiting outside the station with his acoustic guitar and a bag of clothes when Mick Fleetwood pulled up in a Volkswagen Beetle. “He was six-foot-six and weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds,” Welch recalled. “He was a strange-looking human being.”
Welch moved into their communal house, Benifold, and formally joined the group in April 1971. “Bob never played a note,” recalled Christine McVie. “All we did was sit around and talk until dawn. We just thought he was an incredible person.”
Having lost Spencer and Peter Green in strange circumstances, the band wanted to be sure Welch wouldn’t abscond, too. “I wasn’t being scrutinised for my musical talents as much as my psychological soundness,” he said.
Welch described his new bandmates as “like the British royal family”. Nevertheless, he made his mark on the poetic title track of their next album, 1971’s Future Games, and composed one of Fleetwood Mac’s most straightforward love songs, Sentimental Lady. It wasn’t a hit in 1972, but would later become his signature song.
Welch came from a different place to his predecessors. Jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery was his primary influence; he had a languid, very Californian vocal delivery, and channelled some recherché interests into his songwriting. Welch’s The Ghost, Miles Away and Hypnotized dabbled in esoterica. His lyrics were inspired by unexplained phenomena; by Carlos Castaneda’s tales of Yaqui shamans and the works of French novelist André Malraux, who’d embarked on a quest to find the lost city of the Old Testament Queen Of Sheba.
Welch shored up his position after fellow guitarist Danny Kirwan was fired in 1972. But not everybody was a fan. Clifford Davis didn’t rate the American interloper, and Welch couldn’t understand why the group didn’t ditch their bluff cockney manager.
Davis also encouraged Fleetwood Mac to hire lead singer Dave Walker because he didn’t think Welch was a convincing frontman. In fairness, Welch, with his bug-eyed spectacles and troublesome hairline, did resemble the class geek who’d become a guitar prodigy. Walker looked the part, but Welch and Christine McVie’s songwriting and harmony vocals didn’t suit him.
Welch had also become accustomed to the royal family’s eccentric ways by now. When Peter Green arrived at London’s Air Studios to play on 1973’s Penguin, he had a piece of cheese stuck in his hair. “I don’t know if it was Caerphilly or Cheddar,” Welch recalled. “But when he left, Peter still had the same piece of cheese in his hair.” Nobody thought to mention it.
However, Fleetwood Mac were about to face their greatest challenge yet. When Fleetwood pulled out of an autumn 1973 US tour because of marital problems, Clifford Davis assembled a new Fleetwood Mac – minus any existing members – to tour in their absence.
Welch hired a lawyer and was instrumental in keeping the real group together. He’d invested three years of his life in this dysfunctional bunch and wasn’t going down without a fight. He persuaded the others to relocate to Los Angeles and see off Davis and his counterfeit group. It worked.
In early 1974, the real Fleetwood Mac received an advance of 100,000 dollars for a new album, Heroes Are Hard To Find. Welch agreed to pay it through his bank account, as he was the only one with US citizenship, which led to huge problems with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for years to come.
Heroes Are Hard To Find showcased Welch’s topically spooky Bermuda Triangle and the drily witty Silver Heels, and was their biggest-selling US album yet. But Welch quit at the end of the year. The drugs, the IRS and the legal battles had all taken their toll, but there was more. “Musically speaking, I wanted to do things they didn’t want from me,” he said.
This was evident in the band Paris, the trio he formed with ex-Nazz drummer Thom Mooney and lapsed Jethro Tull bassist Glenn Cornick. Black Book, the first song on their self-titled debut, was almost a Led Zeppelin pastiche, and the rest of the LP was in a similar vein.
Welch hadn’t abandoned his love of esoterica, either. During Paris gigs, he would throw old books into the audience, inscribed with bizarre messages, which confused his bandmates as much as their fans. Paris replaced Mooney with future David Bowie’s Tin Machine drummer Hunt Sales (also responsible for that walloping rhythm on Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life) and expanded their sound on a second LP, Big Towne, 2061. But Paris struggled to sell records.
Before the group split, Welch composed a bunch of idiosyncratic but more radio-friendly songs for a third album. Mick Fleetwood heard them and was so impressed he signed Welch to his Limited Management company as a solo act. “There was no doubt in my mind, Bob could have a hit record,” said Fleetwood. “We felt like we were on the coaster heading up, and I wanted Bob in on this ride.”
Welch’s solo album, French Kiss, arrived after Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours in the summer of 1977. It included Fleetwood, Christine and Lindsey Buckingham guest spots, and songs skirting hard rock, album-oriented rock and orchestral disco. The album and the singles Sentimental Lady and Ebony Eyes cracked the US Top 20.
By the following summer, Welch was opening for Fleetwood Mac and flying between US dates on their chartered plane. Mick escorted him to radio interviews as his manager, and was then interviewed by the same host talking about Fleetwood Mac. Welch was having hits, but his old band had become rich and famous without him.
“I didn’t feel like I was missing the boat, because it’s a different group,” he insisted. “But I contributed something to the group’s sound and felt very proud that they were making it.”
The follow-up to French Kiss, 1979’s Three Hearts, was another hit, but still indulged Welch’s left-field influences and conspiracy theories. Danchiva was inspired by Hindu philosophy, and The Ghost of Flight 401 by the Bermuda Triangle.
Visually, the two albums were very much of their time. Welch appeared on both sleeves flanked by under-dressed female models pulling aroused facial expressions. In his beret and tinted shades, he looked like the Bee Gees’ imaginary elder brother dispensing Class As in the back office of a Malibu nightclub.
Life was starting to imitate art. In 1980, Welch began hosting Hollywood Heartbeat, a music video TV show. On it he interviewed Mick Fleetwood, and the pair joshed around like old pals. But Welch’s skeletal appearance suggested some ruinous lifestyle choices.
Most of Fleetwood Mac guested with Welch at the Roxy in Hollywood in 1981. By then he had acquired new hair, and a silk kimono embroidered with Chinese dragons. He played out of his skin on Hypnotized and Rattlesnake Shake. But without his old group’s patronage he struggled to sell records. Welch turned down the offer to sing in Mick Fleetwood’s side hustle Zoo, but his solo albums all missed the charts.
The failure of his 1983 record Eye Contact was a tipping point. Welch had a house in the Hollywood hills, a studio and gold discs on the wall, but his marriage was over, and he’d just lost his record deal.
It took an overdose, a drugs bust and members of Guns N’ Roses using his garage as a junkies’ shooting gallery for Welch to come to his senses. Then, soon after his hospital stay, Welch was in the Viper Room nightclub when he was introduced to the woman who would become his second wife, film assistant Wendy Armistead.
Welch married Wendy in December 1985 and, in the parlance of recovering addicts, ‘did a geographic’ and moved to Phoenix, Arizona. Welch explained his lifestyle change: “I was able to pull out of a major depression, drug addiction and extreme negativity, thanks to the LA Sheriff ’s Dept – I was busted – the hospital where I was rehabilitating and, especially, a lovely lady who helped me stop beating my head against a brick wall. Wendy helped me to get back into reading music again, to want to do a band again, and to regain my musical and personal identity.”
Welch’s next band, Avenue M, didn’t last, and he and Wendy later settled in Nashville, where he focused on writing songs. He also launched a lawsuit against Fleetwood Mac. He claimed they’d signed a contract with Warner Bros agreeing to an equal share of royalties for the records they’d made together. Welch believed the other three members had since renegotiated the deal with a higher rate for themselves, and that he was being underpaid.
In 1988, Fleetwood Mac were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame, and Welch’s name was missing from the roll-call of past members. “Mick Fleetwood dedicated a whole chapter of his biography to my era of the band,” Welch told the press.“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 Rumours band, Peter Green and, rarely, Jeremy Spencer. Everybody else he shuts out of his mind.”
Fleetwood Mac eventually settled out of court in 1996, and Welch revised his story, blaming Warner Bros for the financial mismanagement and the Hall Of Fame for the snub.
By now Welch was making music again, including two albums of re-recorded Fleetwood Mac songs. He was still fascinated by the paranormal and left-field science. In a rare interview, he was asked what he did besides music, and replied: “UFO watching.” His website linked to articles about extraterrestrial visitation, antigravity technology and bio-mind superpowers.
By the 2000s, though, he was, in his words, “semi-retired” but still playing a few dates a year. “Two shows at a time and then go home,” he said. “At my age that’s all that I want to do.”
Welch maintained his sobriety, but underwent spinal surgery in March 2012, only to learn that his chances of recovery were slim and he’d eventually lose all mobility. He was in great pain, and wrote a letter to his wife, explaining how he’d seen his mother caring for his invalid father and didn’t want Wendy doing the same for him. Welch took his own life on June 7, dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest.
“Like Stevie and Lindsey later on, Bob came out of the ether when we needed someone just like him,” Fleetwood said, a few months after Welch’s death. “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 I left and then this happens.’”
At the time, Fleetwood paused and furrowed his brow. “I do so hope he felt identified and not just left on the sidelines.”
Dreams: The Many Lives Of Fleetwood Mac by Mark Blake, published by Nine Eight Books, is out now.
