Fleetwood Mac Live at BMO Harris Bradley Center - Milwaukee, WI
February 12, 2015
By Michael Muckian Express Milwaukee
Photo: Danielle Dahl
Fleetwood Mac, the irrepressible pop-rock engine, rolled into Milwaukee Thursday with a huff and puff and as much energy as its aging members could muster. All things considered, that energy proved to be considerable.
Guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, who turns 66 on Oct. 3, is the band’s youngest member, and the numbers only go up from there. But none of that mattered to a mixed-age audience of the faithful, who all but filled the BMO Harris Bradley Center. Given that the band’s lineup also included stalwarts Mick Fleetwood on drums, John McVie on bass, vocalist Stevie Nicks on ribbon-bedecked tambourine, and for the first time in a long, long time, vocalist Christine McVie on keyboards, Fleetwood Mac’s most successful combination was back together again.
Given the age of its members, the band fairly well rocked the walls with a running list of favorite hits on the 54th concert of its current tour. The group played against a fairly engaging backdrop of downright inventive visual imagery that helped drive some the audience’s elder members to gyrate and throb as if on some virulent form of Ecstasy (or perhaps Metamucil).
Fleetwood Mac turn back time in Milwaukee
February 12, 2015
by Daniel DeSlover Examiner
On the road since August 2014, Fleetwood Mac pulled into Milwaukee’s BMO Harris Bradley Center on Feb. 12 for their “On with the Show” tour. Performing without an opening act, it was the 54th show on this extensive trek and featured the five core members who took the band to multiplatinum success with the chart-topping “Rumours” in 1977.
Christine McVie rejoined Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks on this tour for the first time since her retirement in 1998. Opening with “The Chain” seemed an appropriate start to the show and quickly brought fans to their feet. “You Make Loving Fun” followed as a de facto tribute to Christine’s return to the band.
Major vocal highlights of the show included Buckingham’s acoustic and cathartic “Big Love,” McVie’s beautifully harmonic “You Make Loving Fun,” and Nicks’ haunting breakup anthem “Silver Springs,” arguably her best performance of the night next to “Gold Dust Woman.”
This statement below from KFC Yum! Center, posted on facebook Monday evening is in reply to the many messages from fans inquiring whether the show in Louisville will proceed as scheduled on Tuesday night, despite the weather conditions in the area. "At this time the Fleetwood Mac show is planned to proceed as scheduled. It is very unlikely that the event will be postponed or canceled. If that changes, we'll make the announcement via all of our social media channels as well as all TV stations and many radio stations."
With Christine McVie back in Fleetwood Mac after more than 16 years, singer and guitarist Lindsey
Buckingham told a near-capacity BMO Harris Bradley Center Thursday "we begin a profound, poetic and I think a prolific new chapter."
Can't say Thursday's show was always profound, and it's highly doubtful Mac — which dropped its self-titled album, the first with game-changing additions Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks, four decades ago this year — is going to be all that prolific going forward.
But it did seem that Buckingham and most of the band believed the words he was saying. And that conviction, coupled with enduring talent and classic rock songs, was enough to make Thursday's two-and-a-half-hour show, the 54th on its current tour, a nice little footnote for Milwaukee fans.
McVie, however, seemed to live by very different words she uttered: "I'm not as strong as I used to be," as sung during "Say You Love Me." Her appearance was welcome for sentimental reasons, evident by the warm response when she took lead vocals for the first time in the night, for "You Make Loving Fun."
But there were moments of vocal flatness — most obvious at concert's end for her signature "Songbird," alone on piano with Buckingham on electric guitar — and McVie lacked the charisma of her now more-seasoned singing bandmates. Even drummer Mick Fleetwood — perched behind his decked-out kit with chimes and gong — had more pizzazz, albeit perhaps too much when he disguised a lengthy and ultimately none too impressive drum solo during "World Turning" with hollow, hype-fanning pseudo scat-speak.
There were other moments of self-indulgence. "Go Your Own Way," one of several enduring singles from the band's mega-blockbuster "Rumours," ends on the album with a sudden, anti-climactic fade, but Thursday's drawn-out, jam-session finale wasn't much of an improvement.
And Buckingham, like Fleetwood, was a ham, yelping like a cowboy between some songs, cackling like a pirate at the start of a still-rollicking "Tusk," and stomping about like a toddler throwing a tantrum once the song was over. His voice, while emotionally charged, also was a touch raw compared with the heavenly harmonies of Mac's '70s heyday. But his guitar playing, from the bluesy build on concert-opener "The Chain" to the bittersweet beauty of his acoustic guitar on "Landslide," was consistently exquisite.
Nicks acknowledged before "Landslide" — performed with just Buckingham by her side — that the pair had performed the song hundreds of times. But in dedicating it to her late father — it was his favorite song, she said — she still conveyed the same quiet majesty she brought to the first recording 40 years ago.
Nicks' alluring voice and mystical charisma led the band through anthemic yet intimate soft rock charmers like "Dreams," "Rhiannon" and "Gold Dust Woman" — a set list of hits so great that the band can be excused if that "prolific new chapter" never comes. After all, Fleetwood Mac already created a story for the ages.
THE TAKEAWAYS
■ The best part of the concert was a more stripped-down five-song set that included a few fond recollections about the origins of "Big Love" and "Gypsy." If Mac is really seeking a profound new chapter, it should consider a storytellers-oriented tour in smaller venues.
■ One reason the harmonies sounded so great Thursday was because there were up to five backing singers (two of them also supporting instrumentalists). Fleetwood let those musicians take a bow — but not once did he acknowledge a second drummer who played hidden behind the speaker stacks. For most of the night, the drummer was helping Fleetwood fill out the sound, but Fleetwood himself did handle his drum solo actually solo.
■ Notable banter: "On a personal note, let me quickly say how grateful I am and how fantastic it is to be standing here on this stage with these amazing musicians who are my musical family." — Christine McVie.
Fleetwood Mac, who have been performing to sold-out shows throughout North America, have confirmed they will add one more date to their critically-acclaimed “On with the Show” tour.
The new date is April 14 at The Forum in Inglewood, Calif.
American Express card members can purchase tickets before the general public beginning Tuesday, Feb. 17 at 10 a.m. through Sunday, Feb. 22 at 10 p.m.
Tickets go on sale to the general public on Monday, Feb. 23 at 10 a.m. through the Live Nation mobile app and at Ticketmaster. For further information and on sale dates, please go to www.fleetwoodmac.com.
Fleetwood Mac is currently performing with their five star lineup including the returning songbird Christine McVie who rejoined the band following a 16 year absence.
It’s a time-honored tradition that touring musicians will mangle the pronunciation of “Des Moines.” Those Ses throw everyone off. Wednesday night at Wells Fargo Arena it was Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie who got tripped up. To be fair, she had a good excuse.
“It’s been many a year since I’ve been in the city,” McVie said after making a small error she was probably unaware of. While Fleetwood Mac last played Des Moines less than two years ago, McVie hasn’t been a regular part of the band in 17 years.
The crowd got a heaping helping of McVie during the show. After starting the show with the group effort “The Chain,” McVie launched into “You Make Loving Fun,” a song long absent from Fleetwood Mac sets.
“Tonight’s our 54th show,” singer Stevie Nicks said of the current tour. “In the beginning of our 54 shows, at this point in the show I would say ‘Welcome Des Moines’ and ‘Welcome Back, Christine.’ Now that we’re on our 54th show, we can just proceed with ‘She’s back!’ Let’s get this party started!”
Fleetwood Mac stuck closely to its classic material, following the first two songs with two more from “Rumours,” “Dreams” and “Second Hand News,” which gave Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham a shot at lead vocals. From there the band went back a little further, to 1975’s self-titled album with Nicks singing “Rhiannon.”
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Tracklist
1. Go Your Own Way
2. Don't Stop
3. Everywhere
4. Say You Love Me
5. Rhiannon
6. Little Lies
7. The Chain
8. Gold Dust Woman
9. You Make Loving Fun
10. Never Going Back Again
11. Dreams
12. Gypsy
13. Landslide
Falls native and band assistant donates VIP tickets to Fleetwood Mac concert to help local charity; raffle raises $10,000 for anti-drug effort
By Stephanie Warsmith
Beacon Journal staff writer Ohio.com
Cuyahoga Falls native Robert Heeman isn’t a rock star, but he lives like one.
As the personal assistant for Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood, he stays in five-star hotels, rides on private jets and recently bought a million-dollar house in Maui not far from where his boss lives.
Heeman, though, has always wanted to give back to his hometown. He saw an opportunity with Fleetwood Mac’s show Feb. 18 in Cleveland and reached out to Falls Mayor Don Walters, with whom he grew up, to offer VIP concert passes.
Walters jumped at the offer and turned it into an opportunity to raise money for the city’s Not Me, I’m Drug Free program. The city teamed up with I-ROK, which is taking over the concert series in the Falls this summer, and sold $10 raffle tickets for a chance to win one of three pairs of tickets. The raffle raised about $3,000.
Heeman talked Fleetwood Mac into buying any remaining tickets, which will mean a $10,000 donation to the anti-drug program.
For a band that was once famously defined by personal drama and rancour, Fleetwood Mac’s members were almost as generous toward one another as they were to the nearly 12,400 fans who spent 2 1/2 hours in their company at the Bell Centre Thursday night.
The narrative of this tour is the return of keyboardist Christine McVie, which completes the group’s most popular lineup for the first time since 1998. She certainly received her due welcome from the audience and from her bandmates, but the quintet shared the glory, both between its members and as an ensemble.
And what glory. There’s no new album to promote (although one is in the works), and the most recent numbers in Thursday’s show were from the 1987 disc Tango in the Night, with more than half of the set list drawn from the 1975 self-titled release and 1977’s world-conquering Rumours. But this didn’t feel like a nostalgic evening. The performance was absolutely contemporary and, with McVie back, there was an air both of taking care of unfinished business and setting up a new venture.
The crackling energy was there from the walk-on to The Chain, while drummer Mick Fleetwood’s clockwork timekeeping, John McVie’s strapping bass and Lindsey Buckingham’s swampy guitar telegraphed that the band’s locked-in interplay hadn’t diminished. (About the only wrong note of the night was a breakdown in the Bell Centre welcome staff’s usual military efficiency, with security checks causing a chaotic logjam at the entrance.)
Speaking of precision, Stevie Nicks made an early note that this was the 51st show of the tour. “In the beginning, I would have said: a) ‘Welcome, Montreal,’ and second, ‘Welcome, Chris.’ … Today I think we can say, with caution abandoned, ‘She’s ba-ack!’ ”
Charismatic even when she was rooted in place, Nicks went on to lose herself inside Dreams before Buckingham — the only member to routinely venture to the lip of the stage — led a bracing Second Hand News as if the 38-year-old cut was being shared for the first time. Although Christine McVie’s upper-register vocals were a touch strained in Everywhere (but appealingly earthy everywhere else), that sunny delight was also rejuvenated, and stripped of its ’80s gloss.
Buckingham offered his own welcome to McVie when he spoke of “beginning a profound and prolific new chapter.” It may not have been a coincidence that Fleetwood Mac’s most forward-thinking member said this before a mini-block from 1979’s Tusk, the band’s messy masterpiece of art over commercialism.
The title track’s marching-band strangeness remained delightfully odd — and not just by this group’s classicist standards — with Christine McVie on accordion, Buckingham playing the madman card to the hilt, and three auxiliary players contributing more than the almost imperceptible shading offered elsewhere. Nicks’s carefully possessed lead in Sisters of the Moon was supplemented by haunted harmonies from an understated trio of backup singers.
The quick-change pacing of the show’s first hour or so turned far more casual in the back half, starting with an intimate acoustic section that could have taken place in a club setting. Buckingham made conversation before his solo performance of Big Love, once “a contemplation on alienation and now a meditation on the power and importance of change.” True to his words, the solemn but flashy fingerpicking was a revelation, and far removed from the slick original. Nicks joined Buckingham for Landslide, stunning in its stillness, before the duo added a note of darkness to Never Going Back Again.
Over My Head saw the return of the full band, the introduction of Fleetwood’s front-of-stage “cocktail kit” and a reminiscence from Christine McVie about the time spent “sort of floundering, looking for a new guitarist” before Buckingham joined for the eponymous 1975 album. Setting up Gypsy, Nicks offered a history lesson of her own, a touching recollection of window shopping at San Francisco’s Velvet Underground rock-star clothing boutique before she was a star herself. The songs-and-stories format may have helped slow the show’s momentum, but they also helped make one of the top-selling bands in the world seem approachable.
The home stretch included a number of extended showcases: Gold Dust Woman climaxed with Nicks swaying across the stage in a glittering shawl; Buckingham enjoyed a caustic centrepiece in I’m So Afraid; Fleetwood had the stage to himself for a crazy-eyed shamanic routine in the middle of World Turning.
But of course, Go Your Own Way and Don’t Stop were the real climactic crowd-pleasers. The quintet’s camaraderie was at its strongest in the former, with the tireless Buckingham speeding around Nicks, who had donned a bejewelled top hat, and careering into John McVie.
Fleetwood’s splashy introductions of his colleagues in the encore were brimming with affection: Buckingham with his “beady eye on the future,” Nicks the “eternal romantic,” John McVie “always on my right-hand side,” Christine McVie “making all of this so complete — our songbird has returned.”
Nice tee-up, as McVie returned for a second encore of Songbird, delivering her most tender vocal of the night accompanied only by Buckingham. It was a poignant final word, given an equally poignant afterword when Nicks made an endearingly rambling speech. In all her cosmic wisdom, she credited the audience for willing McVie back into the band. Her gratitude for the circle being unbroken tied into Buckingham’s earlier prediction of a “profound and prolific new chapter.” We’ll see about prolific. In light of the rewards from Thursday’s concert, profound is a fait accompli.
The return of The Mac proved to be just as sweet the second time around.
British-American ’70s folk-rockers Fleetwood Mac, boasting their most successful lineup of singers Stevie Nicks, keyboardist Christine McVie and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham (Nicks’ ex-boyfriend), bassist John McVie (Christine’s ex-husband) and drummer Mick Fleetwood, returned to the Air Canada Centre Tuesday night after performing at the same venue on the same tour with the same set list back in mid-October. No matter. Torontonians — another 17,000 or so of them — liked a double serving of The Mac particularly since this tour features the return of the 71-year-old Christine McVie who stayed off the road for 16 years.
With everyone else in the group in their mid to late 60s, there was no time like the present for this reunion.
Thankfully, the Fleetwood Mac back catalogue has held up so well with special mention to the songs from their beloved 1977 discs Rumours that’s sold 45 million albums and counting.
Not surprsingly, the group kicked off the night with The Chain from that album before McVie took over on lead vocals for You Make Loving Fun, also from Rumours.
“Welcome back, Toronto.” said Nicks in her usual black flowing outfit, black suede boots and various shawls throughout the night.
“Tonight is our 47th show and I think we can safely say, ‘She’s back!,’ ” added Nicks, referring to McVie. “So that being said, let’s get this party started!”
McVie told the crowd later: “I love you very much!”
What followed was a nostalgic but mostly riveting evening of music as the group, propelled by the guitar maniac that is still the fastfooted, lightning-fingered Buckingham, made their way through such crowd pleasers as the Nicks-sung Dreams and Rhiannon — with some twirling from her on that latter one — the McVieled Everywhere and the Buckingham-sung I Know I’m Not Wrong in the first third of the show.
Five other musicians and an impressively large video screen and smaller video strips certainly helped to fill out the group’s sounds and sights.
“Well, we were here not too long ago — I guess a few more people wanted to see us,” Buckingham said with a chuckle. “So we came back.... I think it’s safe to say we’ve seen our share of ups and downs and I think that kind of makes us what we are. In this particular moment, with the return of the beautiful Christine, she is a beautiful soul, and I think her return now signals the beginning of a poetic, profound and I think prolific new chapter of this band — Fleetwood Mac!”
The next two thirds of the main set saw such highlights as Tusk, with McVie breaking out the accordion, but the marching band appeared only on the big screen and not as a live accompanmient, sadly; Buckingham’s incredible guitar display and gutteral shrieks on Big Love, his quieter vocals but no less stellar playing on Never Going Back Again and plugging in big time for I’m So Afraid; and Nicks’ ’60s San Franreminiscent Gypsy and Gold Dust Woman (complete with gold shawl) with yet more twirling from her on both.
But the emotional centre of the show proved to be the pretty and delicate Landslide, with just Nicks and Buckingham on stage with the former couple holding hands toward the end of the song and again at its conclusion.
Otherwise, the tunes that made me sleepy last time did it to me again, Nicks’ Sisters of the Moon and Seven Wonders but these are small quibbles.
The mighty Mac is back and they don’t appear to be going away again anytime soon.
Fleetwood Mac Live in Toronto T-MAK WORLD also reviewed the Toronto show and took the below shot of some fancy new footwear that I've never seen Stevie wear before... Check out the review and what Stevie had to say about her boots, along with more photos from the show, here.
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