By Donald Gibson
Blog Critics
Thurday, March 28, 2013 at 11:06 pm

Of course they’ve scored plenty of hits over the years, but the prime catalyst of Fleetwood Mac’s legend, why they still generate a buzz and draw arena-sized audiences whenever they re-team for a tour—the band begins a new one next Thursday night in Columbus, Ohio—is Rumours.

For as much as been said and written about the 1977 album’s often-tumultuous creation, of infamous tales of band members feuding and fucking and shoveling through insane quantities of cocaine, its songs collectively remain the band’s crowning achievement. Recently released by Warner Music, Rumours (35th Anniversary Expanded Edition) illustrates over three discs just how driven these musicians were to have something to show for the soap opera their personal lives had become.

Only the second album to include Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in the fray—the lineup was rounded out by Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, and John McVie—the Mac were at this point a pop/rock band, with mainstream hits like “Rhiannon” and “Say You Love Me” having moved them beyond the British-blues roots espoused by departed member Peter Green. And yet listening to some tracks on this set’s third disc, More From The Recording Sessions, reveals an unmistakable blues influence. The included demo of “The Chain,” most notably, finds Nicks summoning a feral, sobering vocal accompanied only by Buckingham’s stark, acoustic guitar. Comparably, Ms. McVie leads the band through a brooding take of “Oh Daddy,” her slinky keyboard riffs against a thick-and-sultry rhythm giving the song a heavier vibe than the light-string-embellished version on the finished album.

In fact the third disc is what makes this entire set essential—the first disc comprises the album proper (which, if you’re interested in this collection, you likely already own) while the second disc is a solid but nevertheless straightforward live performance from the Rumours tour—because it offers perspectives of songs that are, at times, drastically different than the ones to which we’ve been accustomed. Sometimes, as with early, scaled-down takes of “Dreams” and the B-side “Silver Springs,” they’re as good and, arguably, better than their most familiar versions.

By Paul Sinclair
Super Deluxe Edition (UK)
Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album was the first major ‘super deluxe’ release of 2013 and was issued just over a month ago. We have previously posted a photo gallery of the box, but here we take a more in-depth look at the content within.

The 12-inch square slipcase is of high quality and quite sturdy. Within this resides a gatefold jacket which contains the vinyl and the five optical discs (four CDs and a DVD).

The large format 20-page booklet contains the same essay and quotes from the band that’s in the smaller booklet supplied with the three-disc set, but also has a ‘Rumours: Song by Song’ commentary which the cheaper version is denied. This is Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham talking specifically about each track (presumably separately) in October 2012. VERY interesting! Of course the larger format booklet also makes the most of all the great photos.

The CDs and DVD come in card jackets which slot into a gap on the right panel of the 12-inch gatefold wallet. Although these card wallets never exactly exude ‘deluxe’, at least having them allows you to store the discs separately, with protection. Many book-based super deluxe sets just have unprotected discs slotting straight into a back page.

Overall, the Rumours super deluxe box can be described as well designed, and unlike bulkier sets, is quite slim and easy to handle. If you have a vinyl collection of any significance, it will also slot in with your other records rather nicely.

Disc One / The Album

The actual album on disc one isn’t remastered, so if you own the 2CD deluxe edition from 2004 then you’ll have an identical mastering. What has changed is the position of non-album track Silver Springs. In 2004 it was inserted into the running order between Songbird and The Chain. Here it simply gets appended to the album proper, becoming track 12.

Disc Two / 1977 Rumours World Tour

“Ladies and Gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to Fleetwood Mac!” – so begins this fantastic live CD which contains most of the Rumours album (no You Make Loving Fun, or I Don’t Want To Know) but actually starts with Lindsey Buckingham’s Monday Morning from the previous Fleetwood Mac album. The performances throughout are excellent, with a good balance of crowd reaction to music – the second part of “The Chain” is a good example of this as Buckingham’s ferocious guitar and Christine McVie’s Hammond Organ complement the rhythm section superbly.

The audio is crystal clear, with renowned engineer Bill Inglot involved in the mixing and mastering of this archive live material (and the demos – see below). Stevie Nicks’ voice on “Dreams” (like McVie’s on “Oh Daddy”) is pretty much faultless and what comes across most of all throughout the 12 tracks included on this disc is the personality of the band and a seemingly assured, relaxed approach they had to reproducing this material on the stage. This is obviously not a full show, and it’s just a pity more wasn’t included.

Disc Three / The Rosebud Film (DVD)

This DVD is the one element of the super deluxe edition that you cannot get anywhere else. Rosebud is a promotional film made at the time, which follows the band through rehearsals for the 1977 tour and includes snippets of interviews with band members, and some performance footage of them on stage. Although widely bootlegged, this is the first time it’s been available commercially.

What is a pleasant surprise is the fact that the audio has been mixed to 5.1 surround, which just adds to the enjoyment of this documentary. Christine McVie’s “Say You Love Me” and “You Make Loving Fun” are both played in full as the band rehearse, as is “Rhiannon.” Although there are six performances in this film, only two of them are actually from the album, “Go Your Own Way” and “You Make Loving Fun.” Regular tour closer “I’m Not Afraid” (from the previous FM album) is a suitably impressive end to Rosebud.

However great the film is, it’s just 30 minutes long, and it is the only thing on this DVD. There should be so much more on this DVD rather than just this content rattling around like a pea in a tin can, albeit a gold-plated pea. How Warners could have failed to find anything else of worth to put on this disc is incredible. Everyone knows a 5.1 surround version is readily available, and was indeed released by the very same label in Japan on SACD in 2011. Even a hi-res stereo mix would have been better than nothing.

Disc Four / More From The Recording Sessions

Disc five in this box set repeats the bonus disc of outtakes and demos in 2004′s 2CD deluxe edition of Rumours, but this CD is a further set of previously unreleased demos, early takes and instrumentals.

If that sounds like a barrel-scraping exercise, surprisingly it doesn’t turn out that way. In many ways this disc is much better than what was previously issued. “Dreams” (Take 2) makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, with Stevie Nicks singing sweetly to a minimal backing of just keyboard and guitar. It’s much better than the rather flat outtake that was previously issued. Likewise, a five minute demo of “The Chain” is very different from the final track, but is hauntingly good. This somehow wasn’t considered for the bonus disc in 2004, despite there being a section called ‘Early Demos’ on that CD.

“Roll the tape, we’ll just see what happens..” says Christine McVie before launching into a loose version of “Oh Daddy.” It’s a fascinating listen as she shouts instructions to the band throughout “Chorus!”… “keep it going to the B-flat..”, “repeat!” etc. Unlike the version on the other disc, her vocal is nice and high in this mix. Definitely work-in-progress, but really interesting.

Disc Five / Recording Sessions, Roughs and Outtakes

This is the disc from 2004, added here for the completists. As mentioned above, some of the stuff here is not great, including the dreaded ‘Jam Session’. Apart from the demos, the tracks here tend to resemble their finished studio counterparts a little bit more than on disc four.

Disc Six / Rumours on Vinyl

This LP version doesn’t include “Silver Springs” and is pressed on ‘heavyweight’ 140g vinyl. The pressing sounds reasonably good though and the only real letdown is a horrible, cheap plain white inner sleeve that shouts ‘budget’ at you. If this box is truly supposed to be a ‘super deluxe edition’ why did Warners not include the ‘deluxe’ 45RPM double vinyl version that is available separately, rather than the cheaper one disc alternative?

Summary

At around £50 (or equivalent) this set represents reasonable value. Warners appear to have rejected certain content elements, either due to time considerations (this box was released to coincide with a FM tour) or because it would have resulted in a higher retail price, which they presumably feared would put people off buying it. The almost empty DVD and lack of surround or hi-res are omissions that suggest a tight grip on the purse strings but also a blind spot for what the audience who buy these sets might want.

It is also still questionable whether your ‘average’ box set buyer actually wants a vinyl record in his or her super deluxe edition. Leaving that out and including a hi-res or surround DVD may have made the box even more appealing but kept the price the same.

One thing that isn’t really up for debate is the quality of the music on offer. Coupling the album proper with a live disc and the outtakes, really does make for an outstanding package, but of course that version exists for around £13 or $13. Because of this the three-disc set manages to demonstrate outstanding value. Whether the addition of a half hour promotional film on DVD, a vinyl record (that you may have no use for) and a further CD of previously released outtakes (that you may already own), is worth the extra cost is up for debate, and it will likely come down to how much the Rumours album means to you and/or whether you can spare the disposable income.

• UK – Order: Rumours (Deluxe Edition)

• USA – Order: Rumours (Deluxe Edition)

• CANADA – Order: Rumours (Deluxe Edition)

• GERMANY – Order: Rumours (Deluxe Edition)

 

By Doug Gallant 
The Guardian (Canada)
Friday, March 2, 2013

When Fleetwood Mac released Rumours in 1977, the band was already moderately successful, having reached the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album charts with its self-titled album a year earlier.

That record, the first to feature new band members Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, had produced three major singles for them, “Rhiannon,” “Say You Love Me” and “Over My Head.”

While the success of that record must certainly have been gratifying for a band that until that point had been struggling with who and what it was, it paled in comparison to the success Rumours would achieve.

Powered by monster hits like “Dreams,” “You Make Loving Fun,” “Don’t Stop” and “Go Your Own Way,” the Rumours album became a milestone recording for the band.

The critics loved it, the music buying public loved it and the industry loved it.

Rumours won that year’s Grammy Award for album of the year and found its way into the record collections of literally millions of people.

And it’s still selling.

Some people, myself included, re-purchased the album every time it was released in a new format, going from vinyl to cassette to CD. If I’d seen it in DVD-audio I likely would have bought that, too.

With sales of 40 million copies worldwide, Rumours currently ranks as the ninth best- selling record of all time, one notch behind the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever and one notch ahead of Shania Twain’s Come On Over.

So why the musical history lesson?

It’s because Fleetwood Mac has chosen to celebrate Rumours’ 35th anniversary by re-releasing it.

And not only have they re-released the original Rumours CD the world has embraced all these years, they’ve released both an expanded version and a deluxe version of the album.

The expanded version, which I was fortunate enough to find in my inbox, is a three-disc set.

Included in that package are the original album, the B-side “Silver Springs,” a dozen unreleased live recordings from the group’s 1977 world tour and an entire disc filled with unreleased takes from the Rumours recording sessions.

The deluxe edition, which sells for just under $100, features all the material from the expanded edition plus an additional disc of outtakes, a DVD and a vinyl copy of the record.

The DVD features The Rosebud Film, a 1977 documentary about the album.

Listening again to Rumours, I could not help but be amazed at how consistently good this record was.

The writing was brilliant, the performances were almost flawless and the production was gorgeous.

There are so many beautifully melodic pop/rock songs here that I can still sit down and listen to over and over again, despite the amount of exposure they’ve received since this record first saw the light of day.

What’s even more amazing, perhaps, is the fact that this record got made at all.

When Rumours was being recorded the band, internally, was a mess.

The two couples in the band — John and Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks — had essentially split, and Nicks had gravitated, so the story goes, towards drummer Mick Fleetwood.

That kind of emotional turmoil might have caused some bands to call the whole thing off, but instead the members incorporated what they were going through into songs like Go Your Own Way and Dreams.

The expanded version of Rumours is really worth having if you have a soft spot for the band.

The live disc for example, in addition to including versions of some of Rumours’ best material, also features songs from the eponymous album that preceded it, most notably versions of “Rhiannon” and “World Turning.”

The unreleased recordings culled from the studio sessions feature demos and early takes.

Some are particularly interesting because the changes from these versions to the final album versions are so dramatic.

A case in point is “I Don’t Want to Know” which went from being somewhat rough around the edges to a being a wonderfully poppy thing with great harmony vocals.

There’s a lot to absorb here, and most of it is worth your time.

If you’re really high on this record and are prepared to travel, you can also hear them do this material live again.

The original Fleetwood Mac Rumours lineup, with the exception of Christine McVie, is touring for the next three months. There are several dates in Canada, but the closest, sadly, is in Toronto.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

Doug Gallant, a reporter with The Guardian, writes his music review column for The Guardian every week. He welcomes comments from readers at dg******@************pe.ca or 629-6000, ext. 6057.

By Andy Snipper
Vintage Vinyl News
Saturday, March 2, 2013

Not too many albums from 1977 have retained their listenability over the intervening years, but Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is one of those and it may have even improved over the years.

The stories of excess and debauchery are legend and the internecine bitching and fighting that the 11 tracks of the original release represent have all been discussed ad nauseam in the years since, but given a chance to listen to the album without baggage and with many years since, I last listened to it as a whole it really does hit the mark.

The songs are, these days, MOR classics; the basis of Radio 2 or Melody FM shows and repeated day after day but there is still a freshness to the sound of Rumours when you listen to the album and don’t just have it in the background that grabs your attention anew. It doesn’t hurt that the remastering is superb.

Just listening to “Never Going Back Again,” your ears pick up on the jaunty little ragtime picking that is so familiar but the counterpoint of the mandolin against the guitar suddenly comes as a little bit of a surprise and the structure of the song sounds more apparent this time around. When that leads into the overblown country rock of “Don’t Stop” and on to “Go Your Own Way” with the multi-layered harmonies that are sooo familiar you suddenly start to realize that every track on the album is a classic. Formula 1 fans familiar with the guitar outro from “The Chain” might get a real kick out of hearing the whole track — it really is better this way!

The playing throughout is top grade, this is Fleetwood Mac after all, but the production and the sheer effortlessness of the music means that you can just concentrate on the music and ignore all the “stuff” that nearly meant that this album was never made.

Disk 2 is a live show from the 1977 World tour and while you get repeats of the best tracks from the Rumours album, you also get a fabulous version of “Rhiannon” and an extended “World Turning” that will have you up and dancing whatever your musical persuasion.

Overall, I am more than pleased to hear just how well the album has lasted — it is amazing to think that it was released in the same year as Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols, Marley’s Exodus and Television’s Marquee Moon and still stands up without the nostalgia factor.

By Piers Martin
Uncut (UK)
Friday, March 1, 2013

The game-changing ’70s AOR blockbuster turns 35 with a super deluxe boxset.

“Times were a lot crazier then—anything was possible. Budgets were not important and doing drugs was the norm. In the mid-’70s there was a sense that you could do no wrong.” So said an eyeliner’d Lindsey Buckingham, reminiscing in the 1997 Classic Albums documentary on the making of the ultimate classic album, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Thirty-six years after its release—and with more than 40 million copies sold (so far) in at least 80 official international editions—you would imagine that every last drop, every demo, druggy anecdote and hazy recollection, has been squeezed out of one of the biggest records of all time, the eighth best-selling LP in history. You’d assume that anything worthwhile that could add to the enjoyment and understanding of Rumours must have surfaced by now. For a start, Mac completists and even fairweather fans will already have the 2004 2CD reissue that came with a full set of rough mixes and outtakes from those fabled album sessions at the Record Plant in Sausalito, just north of San Francisco. Worryingly, that same disc is included in this “super-deluxe” 4CD+DVD+LP boxset—a package designed to celebrate the album’s 35th anniversary but which actually turns up, as if stoned, the following year.

Like Star Wars or Snickers, there’s never really a bad time to reissue Rumours. Sooner or later everyone finds a way in to it—or looks for a way out, if your parents raised you on Rumours and Tusk in the ’80s. It’s the evergreen baby boomer blockbuster that eased Bill Clinton into the White House and now finds itself a post-ironic hipster lifestyle accessory; Florence Welch, for one, is an eternal student of Stevie Nicks’ cosmic witchcraft. Today, 45 years after they formed, Fleetwood Mac’s twilight period—commencing with 2003’s reunion for Say You Will and drifting through two further “reunions” for world tours, including one this year—has lasted far longer than the band’s vital, late-’60s incarnation.

And it’s all because Rumours is as near perfect an album as anyone will ever make, and its lurid backstory of emotional turmoil and narcotic excess, endlessly recounted in prurient detail, is never less than fascinating. Though short on wildly revelatory material, this boxset ties up a number of loose ends from 1976-’77, focusing on the period when the Mac set about recording the follow-up to ’75’s Fleetwood Mac, a surprise US No.1 and the first album made by the group’s new line-up after fate had parachuted in two young Californian dreamers, Buckingham and Nicks, in late ’74 to rescue Mick Fleetwood’s rudderless British blues outfit.

The chemistry between the five was immediately apparent. Now there were three distinctive songwriters in the group, Buckingham, Nicks and Christine McVie, who would also complement each other in harmony. Buckingham, the firebrand guitarist and craftsman, began to develop an intuitive musical partnership with McVie on piano that started with “World Turning” and led to them fleshing out McVie’s Rumours cuts such as “You Make Loving Fun”. His lover Nicks cast her spell with “Rhiannon” and “Landslide”. John McVie and Fleetwood, solid but soft, glued it all together.

Flushed with cash and confidence after the success of Fleetwood Mac, they headed to the free’n’easy hippy town of Sausalito in February ’76 to bed down in the new Record Plant studio, a dark, wooden, windowless den that for the next two months would amplify the band’s precarious emotional state. Though it worked wonders for the music, the longer they spent in each others’ company, the more unstable the inter-band relationships became. Exacerbated by cocaine and booze and the sessions’ no-limits atmosphere, the McVies’ marriage crumbled as Christine fell for the band’s lighting director, Buckingham and Nicks split, and Nicks began an affair with Fleetwood, whose own marriage was in trouble. Speaking to the BBC in 1989, Christine described it as a time of mellow drama: “Even though eveything was going wrong around us, somehow the music was great.” During the recording, she and Nicks rented separate apartments by the harbour, while the guys took over a house by the studio. “God help you, what went on in there,” Fleetwood recalls.

Tasked with extracting the songs from this soap opera were producers Richard Dashut and Ken Caillat, who worked exhausting 18-hour days with Buckingham to get exactly what he wanted. And much credit to them for unearthing the treasure on Disc 3. Compared with the full-band outtakes of Disc 4, these unreleased demos reveal Rumours in its naked state and shed new light on the songs’ progress. The evolution of “The Chain” can be traced from the chorus of a smoky Nicks acoustic ballad (called “The Chain”) on to which is welded the second half of McVie’s “Keep Me There”, formerly a bluesy shuffle named “Butter Cookie” included on Disc 4. Another Nicks song, “Gold Dust Woman”, starts life as a drowsy hoedown. Two tracks dated “2-4-76” show how driven Buckingham was in the studio: always a wonderfully natural player, he strums though “Second Hand News”, working out the words to fit as he goes, and loveliest of all, perhaps the one true gem here, is a duet with Nicks on “Never Going Back” that he embellishes with a haunting solo. Throughout these sketches there’s never a sense of five people breaking up with each other in sessions Nicks has described as “like being in the army.”

In addition to Disc 2’s live set culled from various dates on the ’77 US tour, there’s an eye-opening DVD of the seldom seen 30-minute documentary The Rosebud Film, commonly known online as Rosebud, the name of director Michael Collins’ production company. Collins was something like the Mac’s official cameraman during the Rumours era and shot stacks of footage onstage and off. Word has it he’s currently putting the finishing touches to a longer Rumours film, having rescued the reels from his Santa Barbara home before it burned down in the 2008 wild fires. Rosebud captures the Mac lithe and hairy at an enormous outdoor show in Santa Barbara in May ’76 tearing through “World Turning” and “I’m So Afraid” and contrasts this with grainy indoor footage of “Rhiannon” and “Go Your Own Way” performed on a sound stage as they rehearsed for a proposed UK promo trip that autumn. Best of all are the candid clips that punctuate the songs: “I’m a legend in my own mind,” mumbles John McVie in one, while a radiant Nicks dissects the band’s image thus: “Lindsey’s all Chinese god in his kimono and I look like I’m going to a Halloween party, Christine looks like she’s going to be confirmed in the Catholic church, Mick’s going to a Renaissance fair and John’s going to the beach.”

A cute description of the five misfits on the verge of becoming the most famous band in the world. Having almost destroyed them, Rumours would change their lives forever. For all the baubles and padding presented with this definitive edition, the disc you’ll turn to again and again is the one you’ve been playing all your life.