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Re:Masters: Fleetwood Mac
After a five-year break, 'rock-'n'-roll's greatest soap opera'
hits the road and remembers the turmoil behind 'Rumours'
By Alan Light
Special to MSN Music
Posted March 1,
2009
A few weeks ago in Los Angeles, the members of Fleetwood Mac -- Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Stevie Nicks -- gathered to run through songs in
preparation for their Unleashed Tour. "We did the entire set, totally
unplugged," says Stevie Nicks. "We laughed about the songs, about what was going
on when we wrote each one -- what we thought it was about, and what it was
really about. One of our backup singers was asking all these questions like she
was interviewing us. It's such a shame we didn't film all the little stories,
because it was really all coming out."
If this band was truly revealing old secrets to each other, it's a bit of a
miracle they walked out of there alive. There is simply no other group that can
match the offstage drama of Fleetwood Mac.
Fleetwood and McVie -- the rhythm section that gave the band its name -- are
the only members who have stuck it out through multiple lineups since the Mac's
early days as a British blues-based band in the '60s. In 1975, the Bay Area duo
of Buckingham and Nicks joined the fold, and all the parts fell into place. The
resulting "Fleetwood Mac" album sold five million copies and spun
off three hit singles.
But that was just a warm-up for 1977's "Rumours." Recorded while Buckingham
and Nicks were breaking up romantically; McVie's marriage to the group's third
songwriter/vocalist, Christine, was disintegrating; and Fleetwood and his wife
were divorcing -- played out amid numerous affairs and copious amounts of drugs
-- the album became a perfect chronicle of the promise, excess and chaos of the
late '70s. It spent 31 weeks at No. 1 on the charts and has sold, to date, a
staggering 19 million copies. (A new CD/DVD box-set reissue of "Rumours," with
previously unreleased demos, outtakes, live recordings and video footage, was to
be released in conjunction with the new tour, but is delayed while some
clearance issues are being resolved.)
For the past few decades, Buckingham and Nicks have bounced between solo
careers and Fleetwood Mac reunions; his sixth solo album, "Gift of Screws," was released in September, and she
has a live album and DVD coming out later this month. The Unleashed Tour, which
kicked off March 1 in Pittsburgh, is the band's first outing in five years.
Unfortunately, this time around, Christine McVie -- an often-overlooked
secret weapon in the Mac arsenal -- opted not to participate (there was talk of
Sheryl Crow filling her chair, but the idea fizzled
out), and there is no new music attached.
Instead, there is an unprecedented sense of loyalty and camaraderie between
the band members, as Buckingham and Nicks both expressed during separate
telephone conversations on break from rehearsal. For a band whose music is
forever linked to its personal relationships, its high-wire act of romance and
heartbreak, Fleetwood Mac has even started to fully embrace maturity.
"I'm a first-time parent in the last 10 years -- at age 59, with three kids
under 10," says Buckingham. "That transforms your life, that sensibility and
stability, and it informs everything I do. Being adult carries over into the
group setting."
MSN Music: Do you find it difficult to connect to the old songs?
Especially because you don't have a new album for this tour, is there any extra
challenge in relating to that material again?
Stevie Nicks: The way we always start is that we go back to the original. We
listen to the record once or twice, all of us together -- and then we don't
listen too much more after that. So every time we play a song, of course,
there's a lot of the original in there, but it also tends to morph a little bit,
depending on our mood and what's going on in the world. After 9/11, everything
took on a different meaning. For this show, a song like "World Turning" is such
a premonition of our world in chaos, spinning out of control.
Lindsey Buckingham: I was definitely a little ambivalent about the mentality
going in to this. We knew that we wanted to get out and do something, and there
was talk of making an album, but it didn't work out. But the last album we made
[2003's "Say You Will"], we worked for almost a year, in the
same house, and by the end, there was a lot of tension that carried into
rehearsals and the shows that followed.
Getting back into the big machine could be seen as resting on our laurels. So
the mantra has had to be not what new statement we are making, but how we have
moved along as people trying to become adults, who were admittedly living in a
state of arrested development, without ever getting closure and never really
working our problems out fully.
What becomes meaningful to me is that we've got this body of work, so let's
relax into that and enjoy it and see what comes, rather than go through the
pressure cooker again. And, as a result, these are probably the smoothest
rehearsals I've ever been involved in.
So much of your writing, particularly on "Rumours," grew out of your
personal relationships. How do those songs evolve as your own lives
change?
Buckingham: It becomes easier to look back and appreciate the struggles we
went through. I think that, especially with "Rumours," there really was a
transformative, redemptive purpose in that music. We somehow survived all of our
personal difficulties because of the music. On that album, I think there's a
staying power that comes from being very authentic in terms of what we were
going through. I can hear these opposite emotions going on in those songs that
really lend themselves to a very timeless quality. But it takes time to be able
to appreciate that.
Nicks: When you're singing, you definitely throw yourself back into that
time. You can't sing "The Chain" without throwing yourself into it. You can't
sing "Damn your love/Damn your lies" without becoming those people again.
Lindsey and I haven't been in a relationship for 20 years, but you go right back
to that -- I mean, if we didn't, it would be pretty stupid to even do those
songs.
Lindsey and I will never be pals, never just hang out. We will always be that
ex-couple where it all blew up in the middle of being so rich and so famous and
so indulgent. But we're still able to be a power couple onstage. We can be
nothing to each other when we don't see each other for three years, but when we
come back together, we can have that relationship, and we're still working out
our problems onstage.
We never found the peace that we'd like to find. We've known each other since
we were 16 or 17, and I think we'd like to know before we die that we finally
found a peaceful place together.
The reputation of "Rumours" is that it's the greatest rock-'n'-roll
soap opera of all time. Do you think the focus on its history distracts from the
music?
Buckingham: I think you have to be realistic about the fact that "Rumours"
was a success for reasons other than the music. There got to be a point where it
did clearly detach from the music and bring out the voyeur in listeners. We put
ourselves out there, and people started to invest in us more emotionally. And
that was part and parcel of the phenomenon -- it had to do with the mythology
around the record, and it would be unrealistic to not acknowledge that. I don't
think that it diminishes the appreciation of the music in any way; it was just a
scope that went beyond the music.
I will say I'm glad it didn't happen in 2008 or 2009. I think the way the
tabloids work today, it would have been exploited in such a different way. At
the time, though some of it was reported, it really was more word of mouth, and
there was an authentic sense of a lore that grew up around it.
Nicks: It is inextricably part of it, and you have to embrace that. (Story Continues On Next Page...) |
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