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Wednesday, March 11, 2009
FLEETWOOD MAC'S HIGH ENERGY TOUR HAS BEEN "UNLEASHED"
Fleetwood Like old times
Adam Mazmanian
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Mick Fleetwood acts as if he has the best job in rock 'n' roll. Resplendent in breeches, stockings and bright red shoes, he commands the stage from his position on a riser surrounded by a gargantuan drum kit, complete with a shiny golden gong. The occasional close-ups of him on the JumboTron at the Verizon Center last night revealed a man gleefully possessed, whether tapping on a cowbell or unloading on the crash symbols. His drums are amplified beyond what is normally considered decent for a band that attracts, let us say, mature audiences.
Mr. Fleetwood's drive, energy and sheer joie de vivre are perhaps underrated as a force behind Fleetwood Mac's success. Another reason behind the band's success was there only in spirit - Christine McVie, singer, songwriter and ex-wife of founding bassist John McVie.
The band is crisscrossing the United States and Canada playing arena shows on its "Unleashed" tour. With no album to promote, the band mates are playing a selection of their most popular hits, a few of Miss McVie's compositions among them - including "The Chain," "Say That You Love Me," "World Turning" and "Don't Stop." For longtime fans steeped in the band's romantic intrigue, tempestuousness and shifting lineups, the current tour offers a familiar, passionate approach aimed at pleasing the vast majority of the audience.
Guitarist and singer Lindsey Buckingham alluded to this, introducing "Dreams" with a brief monologue on the "fairly complex and convoluted emotional history" of the band. By and large, though, Mr. Buckingham let his nimble fingers do the talking. His fiery, loose finger-picking style is a rarity among big-name electric guitarists. His frequent solos appeared to leave him spent, and he seemed authentically humbled by the applause that rained down after his efforts - especially after the lengthy, lightning-fast shredfest that concluded "Go Your Own Way."
Mr. Buckingham also does justice to the softer side of the Mac oeuvre, shifting adroitly between the frenzied, pulsating electric material and the acoustic miniset he performs with just Stevie Nicks at his side, including "Landslide" and "Never Going Back Again."
Miss Nicks was the wild card of the foursome. Her voice is best when it's rough and edgy, but at times her signature timbres seemed to give way to a flatter, more generic sound. On a few songs, her vocal lines were buoyed by the efforts of three backing vocalists. Her performance was uncertain at times as she leaned on her microphone as if for support. Perhaps, because it's early in the tour, she was pacing herself.
Still, by the time Miss Nicks had worked her way through two costume changes and the band had busted out the classic (and local favorite) "Silver Spring," she sounded a little more like the Stevie Nicks of yore. If Miss Nicks was feeling shaky, her audience was more than prepared to forgive her. She got her biggest cheer of the evening on "Landslide," with the lyric "But time makes you bolder/Children get older/I'm getting older too."
The 23-song set was more than businesslike but less than riveting. While the Verizon Center was filled nearly to the rafters, there wasn't an overpowering energy in the crowd. Even in the very front, just a few rows danced their way through the show. But my guess is that people who grew up on Fleetwood Mac will experience whatever transcendence their memories supply so long as the band keeps cranking out their old hits.
Fleetwood & Co. take to the town
By: JEFF DUFOUR and KIKI RYAN
Washington Examiner
03/11/09 12:05 AM EDT
Lindsey Buckingham made like a Clinton with a free night in Washington on Monday: The famous front man of Fleetwood Mac dined at the Bombay Club, across Lafayette Park from the White House.
What about drummer Mick Fleetwood, who used to own a restaurant in Alexandria? Another source spotted him getting into a car in front of the Ritz-Carlton on Tuesday afternoon, in advance of the band’s show at Verizon Center. His attire: “Blingy” sunglasses.
FLEETWOOD MAC - WASHINGTON DC REVIEW
Tuesday night at the Verizon Center, Fleetwood Mac surveyed 40 years of its turbulent career, including material written by members past and present. But the concert was dominated by singer-guitarist Lindsay Buckingham, whether the quartet was excavating its origins as a late-'60s blues band or playing hits from "Rumours,'' its 30-million-selling 1977 zenith.
"Rumours'' connected to so many listeners because its raw emotions neatly contrasted the band's '70s update of California folk-rock, and because the group had three equally matched songwriters. One of them, Christine McVie, left the band in 1998, but the Mac could hardly play more than two hours without doing a couple of hers: "Say You Love Me'' arrived about two-thirds through the show, and onetime Clinton anthem "Don't Stop'' was among the encores.
Since there's "no new album... yet,'' as Buckingham announced to cheers, the group was free to mix longtime favorites with a few lesser-known numbers. Both Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks performed tunes from their solo albums, although only the former got the stage to himself. But then Buckingham held the spotlight even when the full band (plus five backing musicians) was present. While much of his guitar work was folk-style finger-picking, he strutted as an electric-blues axe hero during "Oh, Well (Part 1)'' -- a song recorded years before Buckingham joined the group.
With Mick Fleetwood's drums heavily overamplified and as many as seven voices belting the choruses, the delicacy of the group's sound was sometimes at risk. But the melodies held up just fine, Buckingham led as deftly on stage as in the studio and Nicks showed she still knows how to really work a shawl.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
101.9 RXP INTERVIEW WITH STEVIE NICKS
101.9 RXP THE NEW YORK
ROCK EXPERIENCE
Stevie Nicks joins Matt and Leslie today for part 1 of a 5 part interview. Stevie discussed getting the call to join Fleetwood Mac, working with Lindsay Buckingham before they joined Fleetwood Mac and how since Stevie was a young girl she knew she had a gift for poetry and songwriting. Stevie also discussed her Soundstage DVD and CD release, the Rumours Boxset that's coming out and what's going to be on it. This is a really good interview.
If you want to listen to the interview as a stream click here. It's approximately 25 minutes long uninterupted by commercials.
STEVIE NICKS - SOUNDSTAGE PRESS RELEASE
LEGENDARY ROCK QUEEN STEVIE NICKS’ NEW “LIVE IN CHICAGO” DVD AND “THE SOUNDSTAGE SESSIONS” CD SCHEDULED FOR MARCH 31st RELEASE
New York, NY - Stevie Nicks, rock’s superstar chanteuse, the “Gold Dust Woman” herself, will be releasing the “Live In Chicago” DVD as well as “The Soundstage Sessions” CD - both in stores
on March 31st, it was announced today by Reprise Records.
The “Live in Chicago” DVD includes all the timeless Nicks songs from her solo projects as well as songs written as a member of the legendary rockers Fleetwood Mac. Along with Stevie classics such as “Stand Back,” “Rhiannon,” “Dreams,” “Gold Dust Woman,” “Landslide” and “Edge of Seventeen,” the DVD also features stunning cover songs, including Dave Matthews’ “Crash Into Me” and a tear-down-the-house finale of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll.”
“This is the first time since 1985 that I have had one of my live shows filmed and recorded,” said Nicks. “We spent three years perfecting this show, which we began in Vegas in October of 2007. I could not move on until we filmed this show. Luckily “Soundstage” producer Joe Thomas, who saw the show many times, felt the same way. I am as proud of this as anything I’ve ever done in my entire career.”
Stevie Nicks “The Soundstage Sessions” CD includes 10 songs from the “Live in Chicago” DVD. Nicks brought the songs from the show to Nashville and worked once again with Joe Thomas in the studio where they added “Nashville strings” and additional vocals. The CD features a lush orchestral version of “Landslide” and other Nicks gems including “Stand Back,” “Crash Into Me,” “Sara,” “Fall From Grace” and “If Anyone Falls in Love.”
Digital downloads of “Crash Into Me” (”I’ve wanted to record this song for the last 10 years,” said Nicks) and “Landslide” (orchestral version) will be available on Amazonmp3.com on March 17th. “Enchanted,” an exclusive album track, is scheduled to be available on March 31st on Amazonmp3.com. “Gold Dust Woman” and “Edge of Seventeen” will be available exclusively on iTunes on March 31st.
“We wanted everything on the DVD and CD to look and sound perfect and I think we succeeded,” concluded Nicks.
Nicks is currently on the Fleetwood Mac “Unleashed” Tour, which began March 1st in Pittsburgh.
REMEMBERING THE TURMOIL BEHIND RUMOURS
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
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.
And when you hear it, it's like being back there -- even for me. It puts me right back there, and it makes me understand why I'm going out on the road with Fleetwood Mac again, because it is that good.
Right now, Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles and Bruce Springsteen are all on the road -- it could be the touring calendar for 1979, not 2009. Does it surprise you that you're all still standing and still out playing?
Nicks: If you'd asked me 25 years ago, I would have said that I think we would all still be going, but that I also hope there are some great new bands who are firmly established by the time I'm 60. And there are a few, but it's not what I expected, and I really fault the music business for that. Artist development really died about 15 years ago, and it's killing the ability of talented kids who are just as good as Fleetwood Mac, just as good as Led Zeppelin -- and I know they're out there -- from ever seeing the light of day.
Buckingham: We obviously had a lot of commercial success at that time, but they weren't the happiest days for me personally, or the most artistically satisfying. And in those days, the studio was crazy and the road was five times crazier. People always ask now, isn't it tiring being on the road? It used to be, when we were doing all that nonsense, but now with everyone behaving, the whole day is really geared around having the energy for those two hours onstage. It's very Zen, a very pared-down environment, if that's what you choose for it to be.
Any time there's a band with a male and female singer -- from a rock band like Rilo Kiley to a country group like Little Big Town -- they get compared to Fleetwood Mac. Do you think that kind of harmony singing is your most defining legacy?
Buckingham: It's hard to analyze your own work. You concentrate on the process and not the impact that it's having. So it's hard to know what's passed on. I mean, I can tell that Death Cab for Cutie has listened to Fleetwood Mac, I can hear the chordal structure. But I think about the construction, the complexity that makes up Fleetwood Mac; I don't necessarily think about the most obvious things. You just have to let it go, out into the ether.
Nicks: I think two girls and a guy really worked. It adds that spark of romance, no matter what. I mean, the Eagles have romantic songs and they're all guys, but having a woman in a band of great guys is a big selling point. And if she's as good as the guys, it's a huge selling point. So if I were a kid, I'd definitely be looking to make that next Fleetwood Mac.
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