Although "Oh Well" was a hit in the UK, the song was not the group's first single released in the United States. Instead, Clifford Davis, who was Fleetwood Mac's manager at the time, selected "Rattlesnake Shake" to be released in the US since he thought it would become a big hit, but it did not chart anywhere. After the commercial failure of "Rattlesnake Shake", "Oh Well" was released as the second single, and subsequently became a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Mick Fleetwood ranked the song in his top 11 favorite Fleetwood Mac songs of all-time list since he was able to participate in bringing out the character of the song.
According to Mick Fleetwood, the double-time shuffle near the end of the song was spun out of an improvised jam. "It incorporated the freedom to go off on a tangent, to jam – the classic ‘Do you jam, dude?’ We learned that as players. You hear that alive and well in the double-time structure that I put in at the end, which on stage could last half an hour. It was our way of being in The Grateful Dead."
In a Q&A, Peter Green admitted that "Rattlesnake Shake" was about masturbation, reckoning that the lyrical content was inspired by Fleetwood. Fleetwood would later back up this claim in his 2014 autobiography "Play On", stating that "Rattlesnake Shake" is an ode to masturbation as a cure for the blues. "I'm named in it, as a guy who does the rattlesnake shake to jerk away my sadness whenever I don't have a chick. That was an appropriate immortalisation of my younger self..." To achieve the rustling noises heard at the end of each chorus, Green found it appropriate to insert the sounds of an actual rattlesnake found on an audio tape.
- Producer – Fleetwood Mac
