MAC READY TO UNLEASH "UNLEASHED" ON THE WORLD

After five dormant years, Fleetwood Mac has regrouped to hit the road on the band's first-ever tour without a new album to promote.

By ERIC R. DANTON | The Hartford Courant

So why now?

That's easy, Stevie Nicks says: The universe was ready for what Fleetwood Mac is calling "Unleashed."

"'Unleashed' to me meant unleashing the furies, unleashing us back into the universe," she says on a rambling conference call with reporters before starting the tour that comes Saturday to Mohegan Sun. "'Unleashed' to me was an edgy term of throwing this amazing musical entity back into the world that we had been away from."

There you have it. With no new songs to slot in, Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie have drawn up a set list of greatest hits, mostly from the '70s. There's a lot to choose from. Fleetwood Mac's 1977 album "Rumours" is one of the biggest records of all time, with sales of more than 19 million copies in the United States, and the band's self-titled 1975 album and 1979's "Tusk" yielded plenty of fan favorites, too.

"This is truly a new experience for Fleetwood Mac to go out ... and play songs that we believe and hope that people are really going to be familiar with," Fleetwood says.

Fans are bound to appreciate a hits-heavy set, but playing shows without the pressure of rehearsing and fitting in new songs relieves the band of a certain burden, too.

"What it does is it kind of frees you up to kind of enjoy each other a little bit more as people," Buckingham says. "The mantra is really more 'Let's just have a good time' and value, you know, the friendships and the history that really underpins this whole experience that we've had over these years."

The band has a famously fractious history, with near-constant lineup changes since its founding in 1967, and various intra-band romantic relationships disintegrating during the period of Fleetwood Mac's biggest success in the mid-'70s. Christine McVie, who was there for the huge hits, left in 1998. Even now, there are flare-ups: Buckingham says that after the band's previous tour, for the 2003 album "Say You Will," "there was some discontent over how things were left."

He continues, "You wouldn't think it would be possible all these years later, but it is still to some degree a work in progress in terms of how we all interact as people."

Since rehearsals for this tour began, though, everyone is all smiles.

"Lindsey has been in incredibly good humor since we started rehearsal on the fifth of January," Nicks says. "And when Lindsey is in a good humor, everybody is in a good humor. When he's happy, everybody is happy."

Although the band has been dormant, the musicians haven't. Nicks has released a greatest-hits record and toured, Fleetwood put out a solo album in 2004 and Buckingham has been something of a road warrior, crisscrossing the country in support of a pair of recent studio albums. Those side projects, they say, help them to stay sharp.

"It's like it's you never get bored," Nicks says. "And so you can do your thing until you start to get bored and then you can go to the other thing. And then you can do that until you start to get bored and then you can go back to the other thing."

It's possible, though not certain, that the first other thing — Fleetwood Mac — will work on a new album after this tour is over.

"There have been discussions for sure that we would love to make some more music," Fleetwood says. "And I think it's really down to the whole sort of bio-rhythms of how everyone is feeling and what's appropriate. We have careers and families and whole different sort of perspectives from what it would have been you know 20, 30 years ago."

First things first, though: the tour. Fleetwood Mac outings are relatively rare, which gives the musicians added motivation to put on the best show possible.

"We don't do this that often," Fleetwood says. "But when we do it, we try to do it right, even with some of the complications that come with. But we don't do it when it's not possible and it doesn't feel right. And this feels really right to be doing this now."

•FLEETWOOD MAC performs Saturday at Mohegan Sun. Tickets for the 8 p.m. show are $175, $150 and $125. Information: 860-862-7163.

UNLEASHED TOUR COMES TO ROCHESTER

Fleetwood Mac's Unleashed 2009 tour comes to Rochester

By: JEFF SPEVAK
DEMOCRATANDCHRONICLE

Lindsey Buckingham left Fleetwood Mac two decades ago, he says, "for my own sanity."

Call Buckingham crazy, if the price is right. Christine McVie hasn't toured with the band since the early '90s. But Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood can't turn their backs on Fleetwood Mac's long-running experiment in interpersonal train wreck and pop perfection, which comes to the Blue Cross Arena at the War Memorial on Monday.

"I guess I don't need it," Buckingham says. "At the same time, I'm not prepared to say I don't. ..."

His voice trails off to introspective ellipses. "The reasons don't always have something to do with defining the art," he says. "There may be unfinished business that you need to look at on a personal level."

Buckingham's 60 now, and his personal levels seem fine. Talking by phone from his home in California, he sounds quite Zen.

"Well, yeah, I'm probably as calm as I've ever been," Buckingham agrees. Fleetwood Mac, he says, "created a kind of mythology around us that was definitely a hook. It took a long, long time to get a little less emotionally defensive."

He put down his guard after meeting Kristen, a photographer, at a recording session. "We connected, ended up going out for coffee," Buckingham says. "I had just come out of a fairly long and involved dysfunctional relationship with another woman. There had been a series of those. She broke that pattern."

Now they're married with three kids, the oldest 10. "That might not have happened," Buckingham reasons, "had that not all happened."

By that, he means a band that, when he joined in 1974, was well into middle age for a rock group, having burned its way through a vast cast of personalities and sounds.

He and Stevie Nicks, whom he'd known since high school, were just getting started with the release of their debut album, the folk-pop Buckingham Nicks.

"I was talking about this with Stevie recently," Buckingham says. "It wasn't an easy decision to join the band. There was a certain vision with what we wanted to do, even though we had done that one album and it had come and gone.

"Synergy brought all of these people together. Mick, he asked me to join, and I said, 'You've got to take my girlfriend as well.'"

Buckingham became the driving musical force, as both writer and producer, with Nicks its sexy gypsy chanteuse.

The band's self-titled album of 1975 remade Fleetwood Mac into the sound of the decade. Rumours followed two years later, becoming the biggest-selling pop album of all time for a while, in world that had already seen the Beatles.

"We were recording Rumours even as everything was breaking up. Stevie and I were breaking up, John and Christine were getting divorced. We kind of had to rise above it.

"I think it was a fairly unique situation, with two women in a band who were partners with two of the three men. That in itself becomes a tabloid hook. Thank God we weren't doing that in today's media, we would have gotten eaten alive. It was not easy, as a producer, seeing Stevie moving away from me. It was an exercise in compartmentalizing emotions, putting them in a corner so you could get things done. Filter out the trauma and anxiety.

"I wasn't aware that the songs were so specifically addressing what was going on in our lives. You do pull from personal experiences. It's kind of a generic thing, a sum of the parts, where you have three songwriters writing songs to each other. Once the audience picked up on that, and that became part of Rumours, that made it successful. It brought out the voyeur in everybody."

Weary of people peeking into his personal windows, Buckingham left the band in 1987. He has returned several times.

"One of the things that that kind of success teaches you is it's a doubled-edged sword," he says. "We had an album, Rumours, that was selling in the millions, and a choice has to be made. You can be branded as one thing. The fans seem to want that. But more importantly, the machinery wants to see you repeat that formula. Not necessarily for good reasons."

He balances the machinery with a healthy dose of lower-profile solo work — some of which evolved into Fleetwood Mac music — always aware that, "the Fleetwood Mac thing would slowly cultivate the story of my life, and I'd be making these albums that don't get heard very much. It's not easy for me. You mount these things and lose money every time, playing for 2,500, 2,000 people a night."

Several times, Buckingham speaks of this music beyond Fleetwood Mac in spiritual terms. Something that can "keep the connotation of the religion that I think the work should have."

"The work has a very holy kind of feel to it when you're doing it properly. It's nurturing to your inner self. It grounds you. It gives you a strong sense of self, a strong sense that there is magic in the world. A calmness to be had."

IF YOU GO

What: Fleetwood Mac.

When: 8 p.m. Monday.

Where: Blue Cross Arena.

Tickets: $49.50, $79.50 and $149.50, available at the arena box office, 1 War Memorial Square, and at Ticketmaster, www.ticketmaster.com and (585) 232-1900.

Call: (585) 758-5300.

(REVIEW) GOLDEN DREAMS WITH FLEETWOOD MAC

Sometimes the greatest hits, even with some dust on them, are indeed still the greatest

The Boston Globe
By James Reed

With no new album to plug, Fleetwood Mac is on the road again for the best and right reason: to have fun with the band's 40-year catalog.

Guitarist Lindsey Buckingham admitted as much last night at the TD Banknorth Garden, which was just shy of selling out but long on fervent audience enthusiasm.

The 2-hour show didn't present the band's greatest hits in a new light, but rather was a striking reminder of their endurance. If I didn't already own them, I would have rushed out to buy "Rumours" and "Tusk" after realizing how timeless songs from those seminal albums still sound.

Fleetwood Mac has always thrived on, for better or worse, the dynamic among its members, and that tension was a vital part of the show's ebb and flow. Introducing "I Know I'm Not Wrong," Buckingham said the band has had "a complex and convoluted emotional history."

Case in point: After singing "Sara," Stevie Nicks sauntered over to Buckingham's microphone, peered into his eyes, and sang the last verse directly to him. Even though the song is more about Nicks's relationship at the time with Mick Fleetwood, Buckingham collapsed his head on her shoulder. Scripted or not, it was the evening's most poignant highlight. "We didn't rehearse that one," Buckingham said afterward, looking a bit flushed.

Nicks, ever the beloved rock goddess at 60, often kept her strength in the reserves. With her signature shawls and gold-flecked black scarves dangling from her mike stand, she was unusually tepid on "Dreams" early on but then a lively, black-magic woman on "Rhiannon" a few songs later. "Gold Dust Woman" ended with Nicks cast in silhouette, arms outstretched and her back, covered in long blond hair, to the audience.

Buckingham, however, was a man on fire, showing a youthful elasticity in his singing and guitar playing. He's 59 going on 40. Some songs were clearly tailor-made to showcase his guitar prowess, namely a bombastic take on "Big Love" and a searing, extended solo on "I'm So Afraid."

Meanwhile, every time the cameras caught him, Mick Fleetwood looked like the mischievous kid who had scampered onstage to pummel the drums on his favorite songs. Chrome-domed and still sporting a ponytail, he was the evening's designated ham - and eminently watchable. And bassist John McVie looked happy where he's always been: anchoring the group from the shadows. Fleetwood Mac's other anchor, Christine McVie, decided to skip this world tour.

Even without her, the band was at its most thrilling when all its members were in synch with the crowd. On "Go Your Own Way" and "Don't Stop," you couldn't tell how much of the volume was coming from the stage or from the surround sound of stadium-size singalongs.

It says something, though, when an entire arena falls silent for spectral ballads such as "Landslide" and the evening's farewell, "Silver Springs." Sometimes the greatest hits, even with some dust on them, are indeed still the greatest.

(REVIEW) FLEETWOOD MAC DON'T STOP DELIVERING - BOSTON

It’s official: Fleetwood Mac hasn’t lost a step.

Boston Herald

By Lauren Carter

They may be aging rock stars on the back end of massive stardom and near-meltdowns, but apparently they’re no worse for the wear.

Five years since their last tour, sans keyboardist and singer/songwriter Christine McVie, the Mac remains a well-oiled machine that need only be kicked into gear when the timing is right.

Wednesday night at a nearly sold-out TD Banknorth Garden, the famous foursome rocked as though they’re not technically hovering near senior citizenship.

John McVie was the silent, sturdy anchor of the rhythm section, tugging at his bass with businesslike precision.

Counterpart Mick Fleetwood was, as usual, giddy and borderline crazed with joy to smash away at a drum set and serve as the band’s pulse.

At 59, Lindsey Buckingham continues to play with the inspired, tortured fervor of a guitarist with much more to prove and much less in his bank account.

Whether plucking away solo on the acoustic monster “Big Love,” playing backup to Stevie Nicks on the always poignant “Landslide” or letting loose like a man possessed on “I’m So Afraid,” Buckingham’s guitar work remains an undeniable star of the Mac spectacle.

A radiant Nicks reprised her role of dreamy enchantress on “Gypsy,” a beautiful “Sara” and “Storms,” the “Tusk” gem that is seeing the light of performance for the first time on this greatest hits tour.

Nicks’ voice has deepened, but its emotive quality is still intact, and she accessorized the Mac’s music with her typical array of add-ons - layers of lace and chiffon, a top hat during “Go Your Own Way,” swats at the tambourine, wry smiles, her signature sways and spins, wardrobe changes while Buckingham went to work on the guitar, and - occasionally - shared glances with Buckingham that probably did as much for the crowd as the music itself.

At two-plus hours and 23 songs, the set allowed latitude for the band to delve into their greatest hits and beyond, including “The Chain,” the shadowy “Gold Dust Woman” and “Say You Love Me” as well as “Don’t Stop,” Nicks’ synth-rock hit “Stand Back” and the one-time “Rumours” B-side “Silver Springs” during the second encore.

The extra dimension that Christine McVie adds to the band’s harmonies - as well as their musical selections - was clearly missed, but her absence let the focus alternate between Nicks and Buckingham.

BOSTON FLEETWOOD MAC CONCERT (PICS)

Fleetwood Mac played Boston Banknorth Garden on tonight.... March 11, 2009

Photo by: ProtestPhotos1's (click for more)

WASHINGTON, DC FLEETWOOD MAC PHOTOS

Washington, DC Show from last night March 10th.

Photos by: Henson701 (click for more)