By Randal King / Winnipeg Free Press Sunday, May 12, 2013 (revised Monday, May 13, 2013)
Fleetwood Mac
MTS Centre
May 12, 2013
Attendance: 11,500
4 out of 5 stars
“YOU would think after all this time, there would be nothing left to discover…”
So said singer-guitarist Lindsey Buckingham to the 11,500 people who constituted a nearly sold-out crowd at the Fleetwood Mac concert Sunday night at the MTS Centre.
Buckingham suggested more discovery was imminent, with some justification. Fleetwood Mac is a band that evolved more than most, starting in 1967 as a raw blues entity and morphing into a sophisticated pop sound in the early ‘70s.
All that was before the Fleetwood Mac everyone knows — the incarnation of their monumental 1977 hit album Rumours. Of that lineup at the MTS Centre: original drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, singer/guitarist Buckingham, and ephemeral singer Stevie Nicks. (No Christine McVie on this tour, which means most McVie-penned tunes were also absent.) The band was rounded out by two back-up vocalists.
The question of their continuing evolution was not a big concern for the baby-boomer majority at the MTS Centre Sunday evening who would have been cheerfully resigned to be stuck in the ‘70s, if it meant all Rumours all the time on Mac’s impressive two-hour-plus set list, without intermission.
At 8:20 p.m., the band seemed to deliver on that promise, starting off with “Second Hand News,” the first track on that venerable 45 million-seller. Next song: “The Chain” (first song on Side Two), a song that demonstrates Fleetwood’s driving drum style.
The song “Dreams” saw Nicks take her place, dressed dramatically in black with her de rigueur scarf. These days, Nicks avoids the higher notes so easily scaled in her youth, though it retains its inimitable single-malt texture. (No robotic Cher-esque auto-tuning for 64-year-old Nicks. Respect.)
Preventing the song “Second Hand News” from being prophetic, Buckingham introduced a new song, “Sad Angel,” from their newly released four-song EP Extended Play, which elicited cheers (to Buckingham’s evident delight), largely on the power of the virtuoso guitarist’s close-enough-to-classic riffs.
They quickly returned to one familiar hit — “Rhiannon” — before the leather jacket-clad Buckingham returned to offer his own kind of guided tour to the band’s history, recalling their effort to deviate from the expected.
This of course was by way of introduction to songs from their experimental 1979 concept album, Tusk, including the punk-flavoured “Not That Funny” and the epic “Tusk” (alas, the only marching band was on the video screen, unlike past performances of that song). Nicks unleashed her pagan self with “Sisters of the Moon,” and followed with her comparatively plaintive ballad “Sara.”
Buckingham went solo and acoustic for “Big Love” from 1987’s Tango in the Night, demonstrating his astonishing fretwork.
Nicks drolly dedicated “Landslide” (from the 1975 album Fleetwood Mac) to the Winnipeg audience, courtesy of the line “snow-covered hills,” but scored a curiously timed cheer for the lyric “I’m getting older, too.”
Call it an acknowledgement of the inevitable, but the band demonstrated a potent case for not going quietly, with energetic and fully engaged performances of “Gold Dust Woman” and “Stand Back,” climaxing with (back to Rumours) “Go Your Own Way.”
The crowd wasn’t taking the hint, cheering the band back for encores including “World Turning” (featuring a Mick Fleetwood drum solo that didn’t seem gratuitous) and a climactic performance of “Don’t Stop,” which had the audience on its feet and singing along.
Call it inspiring. We are, after all, getting older, too.
18TH SHOW: Fleetwood Mac, MTS Centre, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Fleetwood Mac resumed its North American tour tonight at the MTS Centre in Winnipeg, the first of five consecutive shows in Canada. The band last performed at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on May 4.
Fan reaction (via Twitter)
@popeslope
Fleetwood mac is destroying right now. Its amazing
@kKostyy
The new shit ain’t bad either #fleetwoodmac
Fleetwood Mac resumes its North American tour tonight at the MTS Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, after taking a week off from performing. It is the band’s first show since headlining the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on May 4. The band will be making five Canadian stops in the coming week, before returning to the States on May 20 for a concert at the Tacoma Dome in Tacoma, Washington.
Here are the five Canadian shows scheduled for this week:
May 12/ MTS Centre / Winnipeg, MB May 14 / Credit Union Centre / Saskatoon, SK May 15 / Rexall Place / Edmonton, AB May 17 / Scotiabank Saddledome / Calgary, AB May 19 / Rogers Arena / Vancouver, BC
The 44th Annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival drew sizeable crowds this year, despite the rain that kept less ardent fans away. Featuring music, food, crafts, and culture, Jazz Fest falls on the last weekend of April and the first weekend of May each year.
The following data reflects public social media mentions on New Orleans Jazz Fest from April 5 – May 5, 2013. The information was pulled from Radian6, a social media monitoring and analytics platform.
In the last year, Jazz Fest goers have turned to social media in greater numbers than in years past – almost doubling the number of mentions about the music festival over 2012. There were noticeably more attendees on Saturday May 4th, as Fleetwood Mac’s performance attracted some of the largest crowds in Jazz Fest history (attendance numbers have not yet been released). However, the classic rock group missed out on the lion’s share of the buzz with Maroon 5 claiming the top place among social media mentions. And although the crowds gathered for Fleetwood Mac were greater in number, it is likely that the younger crowd present for contemporary pop group Maroon 5 was more tech savvy than their older festing compatriots, which could account for the discrepancy in crowd size and the volume of social media buzz.
For the second year in a row, Crawfish Monica and Crawfish Bread were the food items that most people dished about on social media. Crawfish dishes received more mentions from Jazz Festers than many of the top performers. But receiving more buzz than the top food and many key Jazz Fest acts was the weather. Rain played a starring role in Jazz Fest this year, which was reflected in the social media chatter about the festival. Surprisingly, more people posted about the rain at Jazz Fest than the mud, which stuck around much longer. Due to the inclement weather conditions, galoshes (rain boots and shrimp boots) ruled the fest. Many local stores sold out of the types of footwear needed to traverse the festival grounds by the second Saturday of Jazz Fest. Galoshes proved to be a social media star of the festival, receiving more buzz than the top food attractions and many of the musical acts.
It’s been exactly a decade since Fleetwood Mac released a full album, but that hasn’t stopped a new generation of fans from discovering the band. “We’re doing the best business we’ve done in 20 years,” guitarist Lindsey Buckingham tells Rolling Stone a few hours before the Tulsa, Oklahoma stop on the band’s latest tour. “There seems to be a cyclical re-igniting of interests, and there’s certainly a lot more young people out there than three years ago.”
Months before they started tour rehearsal, the band cut a four-song EP titled Extended Play with producer Mitchell Froom. “When we finally decided this was going to be the year we were going to tour again, I thought it would be great to cut some new stuff,” says Buckingham. “I knew we wouldn’t have time to cut a new album. Stevie [Nicks] was still caught up in her solo thing, but I got John [McVie] and Mick [Fleetwood] over from Hawaii. They played their asses off. It was a great experience.”
Stevie Nicks arrived at the sessions towards the end, and Buckingham presented her with “Sad Angel.” “I wrote that song for Stevie,” he says. “She always had to fight for everything. She was coming off a solo album and was in the process of reintegrating herself mentally in the band, and we’re all warriors with a sword in one sort or another. She and I have known each other since high school. So I just wrote, ‘Sad Angel have you come to fight the war/We fall to earth together, the crowd calling out for more.’”
Like many of the group’s greatest songs, “Sad Angel” reflects on Lindsey and Stevie’s complex relationship. “All these years later, we are still writing songs that are dialogues for each other,” he says. “That was part of the appeal of Rumours, and of the group in general . . . Of all the things we cut, ‘Sad Angel’ was, for lack of a better term, the most Fleetwood Mac-y. It was really kind of the best stuff that we have done in a while.”
They also recorded “Without You,” a song that’s roughly 40 years old. “Stevie and I had a little disagreement over when it was written,” Buckingham says. “It definitely predates our involvement in Fleetwood Mac. I believe it was written when we were in the process of culling material for a possible second Buckingham-Nicks album, before we were dropped by Polydor. She claims it was written earlier, but I’m not so sure. But it’s a very sweet song that really harkens back to a time when we were far more innocent. She’s writing to me and it’s about our relationship, when we’d only been together for a very short time.”
Stevie Nicks says that she rediscovered the song on YouTube. “I’m not really sure how it resurfaced,” says Buckingham. “She brought it in one day and she brought it by my house. John and Mick didn’t really work on that. There’s kind of an appropriateness in doing something that predates Fleetwood Mac, because at this stage in time Stevie and I have more of a connection than we’ve had for a while. That’s a nice thing.”
Stevie and I have probably more of a connection now than we have in years.
“Sad Angel” and “Without You” are performed every night on Fleetwood Mac’s ongoing world tour, but the vast majority of the set is devoted to songs from the group’s deep catalog. “Creating a set list is like making a running order for an album,” says Buckingham. “Certain things get pitted against one another that make more sense. One song sets another one off, or it might diminish it. You’re just constantly looking for the next thing that’s gonna make sense in a particular place.”
The show begins with “Second Hand News,” the kick-off track to band’s 1976 landmark album Rumours. “It seemed like the obvious choice as the opener,” says Buckingham. “There are certain touchstones that you always do. When you’ve been around for a while, you realize there’s a body of work you’re going to rely on every time. You’re not going to reinvent the wheel every time you go out, because that would disappoint the audience.”
After “Second Hand News,” the group keeps the Rumours theme going with “The Chain” and “Dreams.” “You get that out of the way,” says Buckingham. “Then we do ‘Sad Angel’ and then we’re segueing into various twists and turns from there.”
A frenetic “Rhiannon” segues into four straight Tusk songs: “Not That Funny,” “Tusk,” “Sisters of the Moon” and “Tusk.” “After the success of Rumours, we were in this zone with this certain scale of success,” Buckingham says. “By that point the success detaches from the music, and the success becomes about the success. The phenomenon becomes about the phenomenon. Warner Bros. would have very much liked to have seen a Rumours II. There was a need on my part — and the band as well, but I was certainly the instigator — to kind of subvert that notion.”
Tusk was a huge bestseller, but the songs were less commercial, failing to live up to the enormous sales of Rumours. “We didn’t want to be painted into a corner,” Buckingham says. “If you want to be an artist in the long run, it isn’t necessarily a good axiom to repeat formulas over and over until they’re used up.”
The rest of the show focuses on enormous hits like “Gypsy,” “Go Your Own Way” and “Gold Dust Woman,” but “Don’t Stop” is the sole number written by former Mac keyboardist/vocalist Christine McVie. “On the last tour we did ‘Don’t Stop’ and ‘Say You Love Me,’” says Buckingham. “But it’s hard to sustain her presence. There’s no real reason to do it. She had some great songs, but it becomes a little schizoid to go out there and try to recreate her thing.”
Christine McVie did participate in Fleetwood Mac’s 1997 comeback album The Dance, but she left after the tour. “She was just in need of a radical life change,” says Buckingham. “She pretty much burned all her bridges in Los Angeles. She sold her house, ended her relationship, quit the band and moved back to England. It was a fairly sweeping set of changes, and something she needed to do for her reasons, though I’m not particularly clear on what those were.”
The group took a break after McVie quit, but regrouped in 2002 to begin work on Say You Will. “We all miss her, and we miss the equation that fivesome made,” Buckingham says. “It’s a different equation with the four. But for me, it actually opened up an opportunity to be a little more myself onstage. When you divide the material more or less down the middle, it gives me more of a chance to be the guy, and to be the kind of presence and energy I am onstage.”
The adjustment has been more difficult for Stevie Nicks. “She misses the female camaraderie,” says Buckingham. “So it’s been a double-edged sword for her. But as the band evolved as a four-piece, it became less relevant to put songs of hers in there. We haven’t felt a need to do that, even though she had some hits. It’s just . . . it is what it is. The band is a different band now. On the other hand, ‘Don’t Stop’ is just one of those anthems with a strong message. That’s why Bill Clinton latched onto it. It’s a very effective encore song for us.”
The show wraps with “Say Goodbye,” the only song of the night drawn from the group’s 2003 LP Say You Will. “As I said, Stevie and I have probably more of a connection now than we have in years,” says Buckingham. “You can feel it. It’s tangible on stage. In many ways, that song is the embodiment of that. When you look at ‘Without You,’ it’s Stevie writing a song about me when everything was before us and all those illusions were intact. ‘Say Goodbye’ was written 10 years ago, when most of our experience together was behind us. Part of those illusions had fallen away.”
Much of their story may be behind them, but Lindsey and Stevie are still taking the stage together night after night and collaborating on new material. “It was difficult for years to get complete closure,” Buckingham says. “There was never any time to not be together. It was kind of like picking the scab off an open wound again and again. That’s part of the legacy of the band. But ‘Say Goodbye’ is a very sweet song, and it’s about her: ‘Once you said goodbye to me/Now I say goodbye to you.’ It took a long time. All those illusions have fallen away, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t resolve and hope and belief in the future in a different context. That’s really what the song is about, and we end the set with just the two of us singing that song.”
Fleetwood Mac headlined Saturday, the biggest day of Jazz Fest. The first sunny day of the weekend helped, as did the last-hour musical choices: Phoenix, New Orleans-born Frank Ocean, Los Lobos and Fleetwood Mac, who were as physical and relentless as the Black Keys in their own way. Lindsey Buckingham played guitar and sang as if every song was a challenge, and he celebrated the ending a hard, rocking version of “Not That Funny” from Tusk with an emphatic “Yeah!” and a couple of foot stomps. At the conclusion of an extended version of “I’m Not Afraid,” complete with a lengthy, aggressive guitar solo, he leaned forward, hands on his knees, to catch his breath.
Their two-and-a-half-hour set was essentially the one the band is playing this tour, including some deep cuts and two from the new Extended Play. Stevie Nicks explained that “Without You,” one of the new cuts, was a lost song from the unreleased second Buckingham-Nicks album rediscovered on YouTube, and that Mick Fleetwood and John McVie listened to them for the guitarist.
“I told them they had to take you,” Buckingham said.
“Thank you for taking me on the ride,” she answered.
In honor of the setting, Nicks performed the chorus to “New Orleans” from her In Your Dreams album, with lines written after Hurricane Katrina. “I wanna sing in the streets of the French Quarter,” she sang. ” I wanna dress up, I wanna wear beads/I wanna wear feathers and lace/I wanna brush by the vampires.”
NEW ORLEANS — What a difference a day makes. After a Friday of mud, wind and chill, Saturday saw the sun return to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The temperature rose into the 70s, the mud receded.
The cooperative weather likely helped draw what must have been one of the biggest crowds in Jazz Fest history to classic-rock band Fleetwood Mac’s headlining show at the Acura Stage. The audience maxed out space on the Fair Grounds Race Course infield and bordering racetrack.
Fleetwood Mac singer-guitarist Lindsey Buckingham used his introduction of a newly recorded Fleetwood Mac song to explain the return of the band that’s sold 100 million albums.
It would be easy to assume, Buckingham said, that a group with decades together in the music business would have nothing new to discover. On the contrary, he said, “there seem to be a few more chapters left in the history of Fleetwood Mac.”
The 2013 edition of Fleetwood Mac features four of the five group members who filled its most successful lineup: drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, Buckingham and singing, tambourine-rattling Stevie Nicks.
“We’re so excited to be in your amazing city,” Nicks said after the band opened with “Second Hand News” and the autobiographical “The Chain.”
The band played many of the hits the crowd expected. “Rhiannon,” a Nicks signature song, also came early in the show.
Nicks, always the most visually striking member of the group, wore blonde bangs, oversized tinted glasses that looked very ’60s and one of her witchy black outfits. Later in the show, she donned a top hat for “Go Your Own Way.”
True to Fleetwood Mac history, one of the new songs the band played — released via iTunes last week — was inspired by a disagreement between Buckingham and Nicks. He responded to her reluctance to make a full-length album by writing “Sad Angel.”
“Hello, hello, sad angel,” Buckingham and Nicks sang together on the Acura Stage. “Have you come to fight the war? … The crowd’s calling out for more.”
Nicks and Buckingham took center stage again for “Landslide,” from 1977’s landmark Rumours album. The pair performed the song as a duet, with her singing and him playing his finger-picking, multi-voiced acoustic guitar.
Frank Ocean also performed Saturday. He is a New Orleans native whose 2012 album, Channel Orange, won a Grammy Award for best urban contemporary album. Another of the day’s Grammy-winning acts, French rock band Phoenix, appeared on the Gentilly Stage.
In this world-famous music festival for which the majority of talent comes from New Orleans, two generations of blues singer-guitarists, Kenny Neal and Jonathon “Boogie” Long, represented Baton Rouge Saturday.
Neal drew a full house to his early afternoon show at the Blues Tent.
“Oh, I’m feeling the blues already!” he told his audience before playing the moody, mid-tempo and ultimately searing “Blues Falling Down Like Rain.”
Neal has been performing at Jazz Fest since the 1970s, beginning with his late singing, harmonica-playing dad, Raful. His band now includes his brother Frederick and nephew Tyree, both playing keyboards, his bassist brother, Darnell, and drummer Bryan Morris.
Always popular at Jazz Fest, Neal’s songs often transcended his genre in the Blues Tent, one example being his inspirational soul ballad, “You Gotta Hurt Before You Heal.”
After his set, Neal posed for photos and greeted dozens of fans, including Jazz Fest attendees from Australia, Germany and France. He also gave an interview to a Slovenian journalist.
Later in the afternoon at the Blues Tent, Long, a 25-year-old star on the rise fresh from a tour with B.B. King, tempered his often rocking, swaggering blues with softer yet still virtuosic guitar interludes.
In an example of the collaborations that happen often at Jazz Fest, rhythm-and-blues and funk masters George Porter Jr. and Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste — the bass and drums in the Meters respectively — joined two jazz artists, trumpeter Nicholas Payton and pianist David Torkanowsky, in the local supergroup, Fleur Debris Superband.
Naturally, this supergroup’s selections grooved, but they also turned ethereal and exploratory in, for instance, the band’s rendition of New Orleans jazz maestro Harold Battiste’s “Marzique Dancing.” The Fleur Debris Superband drew an overflow crowd at the Zatarain’s/WWOZ Jazz Tent.
By Jerry Shriver / USA Today
Saturday, May 4, 2013
All the cool young kids flocked to the Gentilly stage to catch hot French pop band Phoenix execute songs from their new Bankrupt! album, along with irresistible hit Lisztomania from 2009. Given that they were scheduled against Fleetwood Mac, the size of their audience was impressive.
But lovers of classic Baby Boomer pop-rock, and their grandchildren, packed the huge field of the Acura stage to witness a wonderful reunion of Fleetwood Mac. The group in various configurations has been around since 1967, but the lineup on Saturday was the beloved classic version of Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, missing only retired Christine McVie. The group paid loving tribute to its past, taking pains to explain the origins and context of the songs and digging out decades-old obscurities. Buckingham introduced several songs from 1979’s Tusk, an album he said was a turning point in their career. When it came to the classic hits, “Rhiannon” seemed perfunctory but the set reached its peak with a heartfelt “Landslide,” sung by Nicks with an air of resignation. Nicks, wearing a blue velvet long-sleeved gown with a gold wrap, charmed the crowd with a brief a capella version of “New Orleans” from her recent solo album, In Your Dreams.
The whole approach, though well-curated, seemed a bit too low-key for a festival crowd that had been camped in the mud for most of the day.
17TH SHOW: Fleetwood Mac, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, May 4, 2013
Fleetwood Mac headlined the Acura Stage at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on Saturday afternoon. The band pleasantly surprised the diverse festival revelers of all ages and musical persuasions. Attendees tweeted their enthusiasm for Stevie’s engaging stage presence and Lindsey’s exceptional guitar work throughout the show. Fleetwood Mac performed for appropriately two hours and 20 minutes, playing a shortened set list (dropping “Silver Springs” and “Say Goodbye”) for the general festival audience.
Stevie paid tribute to the New Orleans people by singing a few lines from her 2011 song “New Orleans,” which she wrote about Hurricane Katrina.
Midway through Fleetwood Mac’s two-hour-and-20-minute headlining set at the New Orleans Jazz Fest’s Acura Stage on Saturday, Stevie Nicks spun a tale about “Without You.” Originally a poem, she and then-paramour Lindsey Buckingham recorded it in the early 1970s for their unreleased second duo album. “Without You” faded into the hazy mists of memory until they “rediscovered” the song three years ago on YouTube.
“We loved it, we lost it, we found it,” Nicks explained.
She was speaking of the song, but she might well have been describing the arc of Fleetwood Mac’s career, one of rock’s great success stories and soap operas. Like the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac accounted for one of the best-selling albums of all time, as well as one of the most enduring catalogs in American popular music. Also like the Eagles — and with the additional baggage of multiple intra-band romances — they fractured badly, only to come together again as an older and presumably wiser unit.
Much of the Fair Grounds was still a muddy bog on Saturday, but the weather was picture perfect — clear skies, mild temperatures. Tens of thousands of people filled the Acura Stage field and spilled over the dirt track all the way to the fences.
What they witnessed in the second half of Fleetwood Mac’s set was a band that still very much wants to be a band. Nicks, Buckingham, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie — Christine McVie, John’s ex-wife and the lead singer on several Mac hits, has not toured with them in years — could have phoned in a greatest-hits recital and called it a day.
But to their credit, they were not afraid to take chances, and their time. Last week, Jazz Fest moved up Fleetwood Mac’s start time to 4:40 p.m., giving the band 30 minutes more than originally scheduled. They easily filled them.
The show’s early going included classics — “The Chain,” “Dreams,” “Rhiannon,” “Tusk” — as well as “Sad Angel,” from a new Mac EP. “Every time we go apart and come back together, it’s different,” Buckingham said. “You’d think a band that’s been together as long as us would have nothing new to discover, but there do seem to be a few chapters left in the history of Fleetwood Mac.”
History still weighs heavily on them. But now they seem to share the warm camaraderie of veterans who survived a war together. Midway through the show, Nicks and Buckingham were left alone for an intimate duet on “Landslide.” Buckingham finger-picked an acoustic guitar as Nicks sang, “I’m getting older.” At the song’s conclusion, he gallantly kissed her hand.
When Nicks and Buckingham first joined Fleetwood Mac, some fans of the band’s first incarnation as a blues-based rock group were horrified, but they provided the necessary ingredients for mass popularity. A couple at the time, they came as a package; Nicks joked that Mick Fleetwood was really only interested in Buckingham’s guitar skills.
“The voices, all that stuff was completely secondary,” she said. “They just wanted you, let’s face it.”
Buckingham grinned: “It worked out OK.”
At the Fair Grounds, Nicks battled a “New Orleans bug” that was stuck in her throat. “I need some coffee or I’m never going to get through this next song,” she said. “If it totally sucks, Lindsey will be singing lead.”
The next song was “Gypsy,” which would have been an unfortunate choice for Buckingham. Happily, Nicks managed just fine. “Thank you everybody for being so patient,” she said. “We’re learning to live with that bug.”
She accented her black-on-black ensemble — high-heeled, platform suede boots and, for one song, a top hat — with sparkling strands and scarves on her microphone stand and a succession of shawls. During “Gold Dust Woman” — which Fleetwood prefaced with a bass drum and cowbell beat — she and the band embarked on an extended breakdown. “Baby, baby, baby, you should see me now,” she sang. She traced the silhouette of a woman — a gold dust woman? — in the air, then turned to face Fleetwood’s drum kit, holding her shawl aloft like angel wings.
Buckingham’s voice was a bit craggy at points, but his guitar work was consistently aggressive and vital. During a romp late in the set, he ripped off distorted, dirty riffs, high-stepping and stomping across the stage. He pounded the guitar’s neck with his fists, and slapped it, producing squalls of sound. Afterward, he tapped a hand to his heart, then blew the crowd a kiss.
The band’s auxiliary keyboardist — there also was a secondary guitarist, and two female backing vocalists — carried Nicks’ solo hit “Stand Back.” They went back to the Mac with “Go Your Own Way.” It got off to a shaky start; Nicks eyed Buckingham from across the stage, as if trying to get in sync with him. It was all good once the crowd took over the chorus. Buckingham, the bite still in his guitar, ended the song atop Fleetwood’s drum riser, whacking a cymbal with his bare hand.
The encore opened with a sturdy “World Keeps On Turning,” its churning riff angular and lean. It was a bit late in the day for a drum solo, but Fleetwood took one anyway. “You know it’s comin!” he shouted.
Although Christine McVie no longer tours with the band, her signature composition “Don’t Stop” does. Buckingham sang the first verse, Nicks the second. “Don’t Stop” is about moving beyond grief, about looking toward a brighter day. “Yesterday’s gone,” they repeated.
Not if you’re Fleetwood Mac, it isn’t. Yesterday, rediscovered, still sounds pretty great.
By Alex Rawls / 
