Fleetwood Mac performed in concert at Veterans Memorial Arena in Spokane, Washington on Saturday night, the 42nd show of the current North American tour.
Here is amateur footage of the show. Special thanks to Debra3, matthewshoes, 99jwoodz, Jean Simons, TheMrSparkly for making these clips available.
1. Second Hand News & 2. The Chain (courtesy of TheMrSparkly)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ut1tNPt1Iw]
4. Sad Angel & 5. Rhiannon (courtesy of 99jwoodz)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXzrlMTcuok]
5. Rhiannon (courtesy of Jean Simons)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7ijfe2Wf0]
6. Not That Funny (courtesy of Jean Simons)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyTKPGN1XFo]
7. Tusk (courtesy Jean Simons)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOgZmaKBFHc]
8. Sisters of the Moon – partial (courtesy of 99jwoodz)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PTk98oyYcs]
10. Big Love (courtesy of 99jwoodz)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktToj36pqNg]
17. I’m So Afraid – partial (courtesy of Debra3)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlHjpwTIKYw]
17. I’m So Afraid – partial (courtesy of Debra3)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BwLzqrJr-k]
17. I’m So Afraid (courtesy of Jean Simons)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eCHNBkpfXQ]
18. Stand Back (courtesy of TheMrSparkly)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8EvD8fxISk]
18. Stand Back (courtesy of Jean Simons)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgCm68oR2hA]
19. Go Your Own Way (courtesy of TheMrSparkly)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCNkm3-zsPk]
19. Go Your Own Way – partial (courtesy of 99jwoodz)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgFyzpLL-Jw]
19. Go Your Own Way – partial (courtesy of Jean Simons)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpHB-K-Aju4]
20. World Turning – partial (courtesy of Jean Simons)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYXhBb547n8]
21. Don’t Stop (courtesy of TheMrSparkly)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecmRonG06tU]
23. Say Goodbye (courtesy of matthewshoes)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP6GIKbEIf0]
Stevie Nicks reunites with the band that made her famous
Through her career with Fleetwood mac and her solo hits, Stevie Nicks, 65, has kept the smolder in her sound. As the band celebrates the 35th anniversary of its Rumours album with a U.S. tour, Nicks talks about her longevity and the relationship she once called “tumultuous” with ex-partner and lover, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham.
Did you ever think you’d be touring with Fleetwood mac in your 60s?
I never considered that I wouldn’t be singing in my 60s. Maybe not still in a rock band, but I [thought] I’d still be writing and singing and doing shows.
Touring is hard even when you’re young. How do you stay charged up?
If you don’t stop, it’s not that hard to keep going.
What’s it like collaborating with Lindsey Buckingham today?
We’re getting along really quite well. When you’re older, you don’t get as upset about the little things.
So you never got to see Queen with the incandescent Freddie Mercury, Journey fronted by Steve Perry, or U2 before Bono took himself so seriously. It’s a loss, to be sure. But on Sunday at the Rose Garden, you’ll have the chance to catch one of rock’s legendary bands while they’re mostly intact and can still bring it.
Fleetwood Mac is Paleolithic by pop music standards — its first incarnation can be traced back to 1967 — but recent reviews from previous stops on the band’s current world tour attest to the fact that they’re still more than the sum of their very individual, disparate parts.
Drummer Mick Fleetwood is the band’s occasional manager and one of the Beatles-era originals, along with bassist John McVie. Fleetwood has also been described as the glue that’s held the group together for decades, even back when they cycled through various members as a blues outfit in London.
In 1975, at a Los Angeles restaurant, Fleetwood hit the jackpot for the band’s lineup, meeting the couple who would anchor the band’s longest-running incarnation. Lindsey Buckingham and his girlfriend/partner Stevie Nicks brought pop and poetry to Fleetwood Mac, but like so many windfalls, they also brought more drama and turmoil to a group already rocked by substance abuse and the crumbling marriage of Christine and John McVie.
That drama eventually resulted in Rumours, one of the best-selling albums in music history.
More telling of influence than album sales, however, is the number of 30-something women walking around today with the name Rhiannon. It’s likely they’ve only seen videos of the person whose song inspired their name — the band’s enchanted frontwoman, Nicks. There’s an argument to be made that Nicks, still draped in diaphanous scarves and age-defying blond locks at 65, is the element that must be present in order for Fleetwood Mac to conjure magic.
And yet the creative process that resulted in some of pop’s most enduring music rarely involved the band jamming together. Rumours, as well as many subsequent Fleetwood Mac albums, came about through overdubbing and piecing together various bits and riffs recorded by the members individually, with almost all tracks written by Nicks, Christine McVie or Buckingham.
This dogged individuality has been both necessary to the band’s success and nearly its undoing over the years; it’s fitting that “The Chain” — a song that the players themselves agree is the band’s unofficial anthem — is the only one in Fleetwood Mac’s extensive catalog with a five-way writing credit.
It’s a track that begins with one of rock music’s most recognizable plucked-guitar intros, courtesy of Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac’s youngest member. At 63, he remains the intense, guitar-shredding kid in the band who has always served as the catalyst for change. Buckingham is also the main reason Fleetwood Mac has a new four-song EP called Extended Play, which landed in the iTunes Top 10 when it was released in April. At least a few of those tracks are incorporated into this tour’s set, which has been running longer than 2 1/2 hours.
While the new songs are unmistakably Fleetwood Mac creations, they are missing the sweet voice and polished keyboard work that Christine McVie brought to the mix. Retired to the English countryside since 1998, she was always the group’s much-needed leavening agent. Some of her best-known songs are understandably absent from the current tour’s playlist, and word is there’s a thinness to the live show without her presence.
But there is still the drama of seeing Buckingham and Nicks trying to resolve whatever chemistry remains between them live on stage; lanky Mick Fleetwood hunched over a drum kit pounding out “Tusk”; John McVie’s ominous vibrating bass lines; and the near-astral experience that is “Sara.” Even after three decades, it’s an alchemy that continues to produce gold.
Buckingham says the band’s musicianship has not diminished with age, nor has the desire for most of them to make music together.
“After all this time you would think there was nothing left to discover, nothing left to work out, no new chapters to be written,” he told Rolling Stone earlier this year. “But that is not the case.”
Michele Coppola / Special to the Oregonian / Friday, June 28, 2013
The stadium-sized psychodrama begins once again. “This war is pretty good!”
Upon seeing Fleetwood Mac perform, one cannot help but ponder the lot of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Their romance ended the better part of four decades ago, yet the two of them are chained together seemingly for eternity in a sort of Sisyphean nightmare, forced to rehash in front of thousands of people night after night the recriminations that fuelled the blockbuster success of 1977’s Rumors (which has sold 19 million copies in the US alone).
Of course, “forced” is hardly the right word – after all, they choose to open up their wounds for all to see and do so to their great financial benefit – but, despite the apparent bonhomie on display, the energy that Fleetwood Mac exudes is weird. The choreographed moments tonight, like their slow dance twirl at the end of “Sara,” or Nicks’ declaration to Buckingham that “this war is pretty good” during the introduction to “Landslide,” do little to camouflage it.
On record, of course, this kind of misdirection has long been the ace up Fleetwood Mac’s billowing sleeves. Rumours didn’t go mega-platinum merely because of the intra-band soap opera that played out in the lyrics, but rather because of the tension between that acrimony and the exquisitely produced Southern California soft rock, giving just a hint of bluesy edge to the pretty melodies. Tonight, though, worn by age and scuffed up by a cavernous arena (and without the breezy vocals and, for the most part, the more optimistic songs of Christine McVie, who retired from performing with the band in 1998) the edges of the songs are torn and tattered. Time has taken its toll on Nicks and Buckingham’s voices, Mick Fleetwood’s drums are front and centre and more aggressive than on record, and Buckingham plays his guitar with more attack and rhythmic drive.
While Nicks still has the whiskey-and-cigarettes timbre, the high notes and much of the tremolo that characterizes one of the most distinctive voices in rock are gone; she noticeably struggles with “Rhiannon.” But other songs’ coarser edges – “Sisters of the Moon,” with its fiery guitar leads, and the more atmospheric, Ry Cooder-ish fills of “Gold Dust Woman” – provide cover for her vocal limitations, and her less fluttery reading of “Gypsy” lends it more poignancy.
The songs may have slightly new skin, but nostalgia is still the order of the day. Nicks is adorned in one of her characteristic Morgane Le Fey dresses and playing a tambourine festooned in ribbons, Fleetwood sports jodhpurs a la the Rumours sleeve, and all but three of the songs pre-date 1984. Introducing “Without You,” a ballad bearing more than a passing similarity to “Peace Train” that was recorded by Buckingham Nicks as a demo in the early ‘70s and recently discovered by them on YouTube, Nicks says that she wrote it, “when they were really young and beautiful and in love.” There is no escaping the original music’s healthy, youthful glow; the Pacific sunsets gleaming in the expatriates’ eyes; the Californian natives’ effortless melding of ocean breeze and desert heat. Despite the leaner, tighter arrangements, the songs now show some middle-age paunch.
Tanned and toned and with the top button of his shirt undone, Buckingham whoops and hollers, as ever a little too eager to please as a live performer. While he refreshingly evades the traditional male rock star moulds, he is of a piece with fellow soft-rock icons like Jackson Browne and James Taylor, guys who, if they were born five years earlier, would have been lawyers and seem hellbent to prove how smart they are. His between-song patter is peppered with phrases like “we as a band had to subvert that axiom” and “it bears repeating,” transforming a crowd of some 18,000 middle-aged men and women into fidgety pre-teens.
As his exegesis of his songs indicates, Buckingham is a notorious control freak – he spent a then-unheard-of $1 million painstakingly trying to perfect the follow-up to Rumours, Tusk, widely regarded as rock’s version of Heaven’s Gate upon release. Although its reputation has been rehabilitated over the ensuing years, Buckingham still seems defensive about this quixotic curio, as he introduces a four-song selection from the album. Apart from the awkward, nervous energy of the punk-inspired “Not That Funny,” the section proves the show’s highlight. Nicks is at her best on “Sisters of the Moon,” a song the band hasn’t performed since 1979 (Editor’s note: Fleetwood Mac last performed “Sisters of the Moon” in concert during its 1982 Mirage tour), as well as the album’s most enduring track, “Sara.” In the past, the group have performed the title track in a stripped-down version, shorn of its marching band bombast. Tonight, however, the horns are front and centre on a tape loop, Fleetwood is augmented by a second drummer hidden behind the stack of amps, and the original introductory verse is reinstated, making plain the song’s paranoia. Filling Madison Square Garden with noise and rhythm and unstoppable forward momentum, “Tusk” truly brings the house down.
While the studio is the natural element for Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac have an undeniable command of live dynamics and are forbiddingly tight as a unit – there is not a note or movement or even a breath that seems out of place. You could say that they’re resolutely professional, but then some seemingly genuine affection between Buckingham and Nicks creeps through the carefully managed stagecraft. During their intimate duet on “Say Goodbye” (from 2003’s Say You Will) that closes the show, there’s even a sense that their bond might be one of true commitment, rather than bridled burden.
Stevie Nicks performs in concert with Fleetwood Mac in Newark NJ, 4/24/13. (Brian Killian / Getty Images)
Stevie Nicks thanks New York Magazine’s Jada Yuan.
When New York magazine reporter Jada Yuan went to see Stevie Nicks at Jones Beach last weekend, she got more than a concert T-shirt. During the show, Ms. Nicks dedicated “Landslide” to the journalist, who had recentlywritten a profile of the singer.
“I would like to dedicate this song to a girl, a lady. Her name is Jada and she wrote the most beautiful article about me,” the Fleetwood Mac singer said.
“She got something that nobody that has ever written about me before has ever gotten,” continued Ms. Nicks. “And I just wanted to tell her how much I appreciate that.”
“I’ll never, ever forget it. Her name is Jada, and I want to thank her so much.”
Ms. Yuan, who was in the audience, was stunned. “I cried through the whole song and don’t even remember at least the next five,” Ms. Yuan told OTR.
Weeping, even without having Ms. Nicks dedicate the song to you, is apparently a common reaction to “Landslide.”
In the profile, which ran in the June 17 issue of New York, Ms. Yuan wrote of the song: “Chances are, you or someone next to you was weeping during ‘Landslide,’ with that chorus you might casually dismiss as cliché until you find yourself singing it in unison with 15,000 fans: ‘Time makes you bolder / Children get older / I’m getting older, too.’”
Ms. Yuan spent about four months working on the 5,823-word feature and saw multiple concerts. Most profile writers say that after spending so long with a subject—during both the interview and the writing process—the illusion of familiarity often fades once the piece is published.
“Anyone who writes profiles knows you end up spending a lot more time with the subject than they do with you,” Ms. Yuan said. “For them, it’s an hour or two out of their lives, but you spend days or weeks with this person rattling around in your head, and you can get pretty invested and then never hear from them again.
“It’s rare to get any feedback, let alone that they thought you got it right. So to hear it from Stevie Nicks, who’s such a beautiful writer herself, was a really special honor.”
Ms. Yuan, who was at the concert with a friend, went backstage afterward and got to follow up in person with the singer.
While the mandate of a magazine profile isn’t to please the subject, Ms. Yuan’s article wasn’t a puff piece by any means—it tackled Ms. Nicks’ battles with drugs, her weight and relationships.
The singer’s honesty about her struggles is one reason she has so many fans. Her gracious reponse to the article, said Ms. Yuan, “says a lot more about Stevie than it does about me.”
Video below (be prepared to have the song stuck in your head for at least 24 hours):
Fleetwood Mac, the Grammy winning British/American rock band, will be playing the Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines at 8 p.m., on Wednesday, June 26. This concert is part of the Fleetwood Mac Live 2013 arena tour, a 66-concert tour throughout Europe, North America, and Oceania which began on April 4, 2013, in Columbus, Ohio.
Fleetwood Mac’s current lineup includes four Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductees: Drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, original members since 1967; and guitarist/vocalist Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks, members since 1975.
These four, along with former member Christine McVie, recorded Fleetwood Mac’s iconic 1977 album Rumours, the eighth highest selling album of all time. “Rumours” features the No. 1 single “Dreams,” as well as hits “Don’t Stop,” “Go Your Own Way,” and “You Make Loving Fun.”
Tickets are available for $49, $79, $99 and $149. Tickets can be purchased on the Iowa Events Center’s website, online at dahlstickets.com, at the Wells Fargo Arena Box Office, at all Dahl’s Foods locations, or by phone by calling 866-55-DAHLS.
The set list for the Fleetwood Mac Live 2013 tour includes many of their classic hits, such as “Landslide,” “Rhiannon,” and “The Chain.” The band is also performing new tunes “Sad Angel” and “Without You.” Both new songs are off Fleetwood Mac’s new four-song EP, “Extended Play,” released April 30, 2013.
The Fleetwood Mac Live 2013 tour marks Fleetwood Mac’s first set of live performances since their sold out Unleashed tour in 2009.
It’s been 36 years since the release of the iconic Rumours album, but Fleetwood Mac is still thrilling fans with anthems like “Go Your Own Way” and “Gold Dust Woman.” On Wednesday, June 26, the legendary band stops at Wells Fargo Arena on its Fleetwood Mac Live 2013 tour. Expect a two-and-a-half-hour concert set filled with Fleetwood Mac classics like “Dreams,” “Rhiannon,” and “Don’t Stop.” Fleetwood Mac has been red-hot throughout the current tour, getting rave reviews from fans and critics, alike, so be sure to catch this hot summer show.
Fleetwood Mac performed at Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, North Carolina on Monday evening, marking the 40th show of the current 2013 North American tour. The band will perform six more shows in the US before taking a two-a-half-month break. The tour will resume in Dublin, Ireland on September 20.
Videos
3. Dreams (courtesy of deadhead92582)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEH8HOubl24]
7. Tusk (courtesy of Deanna Halbach)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyGy_fc0Skc]
10. Big Love (courtesy of deadhead92582)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_GTFqNQ4qg]
10. Big Love (courtesy of iamrorytoo)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLoTCDnw6d0]
11. Landslide (courtesy of gradyryan1)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_42an1cSvU]
20. World Turning (courtesy of Timothy Henderson)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoxZeviGu4w]
21. Don’t Stop (courtesy of deadhead92582)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=489d8ZUpB6U]
