Fleetwood Mac played the Forum on Saturday night with Christine McVie, back after a long break.

Fleetwood Mac is having a moment.

Decades after its late-1970s commercial peak, the band can still fill arenas around the world with fans eager to relive memories indelibly linked to old hits like “Dreams” and “Go Your Own Way.”

Yet Fleetwood Mac’s polished pop-rock has also become a touchstone for younger, hipper acts such as Jenny Lewis and One Direction. In 2011, the television show “Glee” built an episode around the group’s music; the next year it was the subject of a high-profile tribute album.

So it’s not hard to understand Christine McVie’s decision, announced in January, to rejoin the band after retiring in 1998.

She helped create the legend — shouldn’t she enjoy the glory?

Fleetwood Mac’s tour with McVie, whose presence restores the lineup that made the gazillion-selling “Rumours,” stopped at the Forum for two concerts over the weekend. (It will return for a third on Dec. 6.)

But if the cheers that greeted McVie on Saturday confirmed her reasoning, the singer’s participation also reminded you that, despite its huge success, this is a deeply weird rock group, with three songwriters – McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks – whose approaches hardly seem compatible.

Backed by the stalwart rhythm section of drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie (to whom she was married until 1977), Christine McVie was warm and trusting in “You Make Loving Fun” and the buoyant “Everywhere.” The cheerful optimism – and the propulsive groove – of “Don’t Stop” inspired thousands in the audience to sing along.

And though “Little Lies” hinted at the romantic deception that famously runs through Fleetwood Mac’s history, the tune’s sweet melody neutralized any sense of real desperation.

Buckingham offered no such protection as he growled the lyrics of “Big Love,” about the cold comfort of material fortune, over harsh finger-picked guitar. He was similarly intense in the stomping “Tusk” and a long, raw rendition of the bluesy “I’m So Afraid.”

“Second Hand News” was catchier but still anxious, its crisp tempo a promise of escape from the turmoil the song describes.

Then there was Nicks, who set aside her bandmates’ realism in favor of imagery rooted in history and mythology: “Rhiannon,” “Sisters of the Moon,” “Seven Wonders,” the last of which, she told the audience, had made it back into Fleetwood Mac’s set list after the song appeared in a recent episode of “American Horror Story.”

That quasi-mystical vibe is a big part of what’s endeared Nicks in particular to a new generation of musicians, including the sisters of L.A.’s Haim, to whom she dedicated “Landslide” on Saturday. (The Haim sisters weren’t the only admirers who turned up to pay their respects: According to a tweet from the Forum, Harry Styles of One Direction took in Friday’s show.)

Twirling in one of her trademark shawls during “Gypsy,” Nicks drew a wildly enthusiastic response from the crowd. And fans seemed untroubled by the adjustments she made to the melody of “Dreams,” a song whose high notes are now presumably out of her reach.

Yet that adulation hasn’t led, as it does with so many stars, to an unquenchable need for more.

Here Nicks appeared happy — even relieved, perhaps — to share the spotlight she grew accustomed to filling while McVie was away, and it was that sense of camaraderie that held Fleetwood Mac’s internal contradictions together.

“Once you come back, you can’t leave again,” Nicks recalled telling McVie in a rambling monologue about the reunion. That she meant it was clear when McVie, singing her ballad “Songbird,” closed the show.

Twitter: @mikaelwood / Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

Mikael Wood / Los Angeles Times / Sunday, November 30, 2014

With Christine McVie back in the fold, the band plays all its ’70s hits.

Leave it to Stevie Nicks, ever the mystical muse of Fleetwood Mac, to let us in on the secret – some combination of cosmic vibes, love and magic, and a simple cell phone call – that made the legendary band whole again some 16 years after singer and keyboard player Christine McVie retired from touring.

Yes, McVie picked up the phone and called Nicks in October 2013 to ask if she could come back to the band that had soldiered on with four-fifths of its classic lineup of Nicks, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, bassist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood. And of course Nicks told her she was welcome whenever and for always.

But that was just the product of deeper machinations in the universe, Nicks said at the close of the band’s sold-out show at the Forum on Friday, the first of four Southern California dates that includes a stop at Honda Center in Anaheim on Sunday, Dec. 7.

“I think that last year at some point in October there was there was some magical thing that went out from all our fans saying, ‘It’s time for Christine to come back,’ ” Nicks said. “We are so thrilled that we got our girl back – you have magical powers.”

That the feeling was mutual – all that love and magic, natch – was clear from the start of Fleetwood Mac’s two-and-a-half hour show and a set that in its 24 songs included many written and sung by McVie that fans here hadn’t heard since a 1997 tour that included three nights at the then-Irvine Meadows and one at the Hollywood Bowl.

Though this On With The Show tour has run for 20-some shows so far the opening number, “The Chain,” seemed a little rough at the start, the harmonies of Buckingham, Nicks and Christine McVie not quite meshing as smoothly as they should. All felt better though by the opening keyboard bit of the next song, “You Make Loving Fun,” a Christine McVie number that drew tremendous cheers as the crowd welcomed her back into the fold.

This is a band whose fights and fractures were legendary during the height of their fame. Nicks and Buckingham and the McVies each were couples, and then were not. Drug addictions and interband rivalries caused rifts even as Fleetwood Mac made some of the best albums of the era, from the self-titled “White Album” to “Rumours” and “Tusk.”

That they survived all that then is a minor miracle; that they perform as well as they do when they’re all between the ages of 65 to 71 years old must be an even sweeter success.

The show largely unfolded with the three singers taking turns on the songs they wrote and sang lead on. Early in the set that found Nicks singing “Dreams” and “Rhiannon,” the latter of which found her all a-twirl in her gauzy black shawl, bowing deeply to acknowledge the cheers at the end.

Buckingham’s “Second Hand News” and “Tusk” put a spotlight on his high-energy vocals and still-dazzling guitar work, but throughout the night it was the McVie spotlights such as “Everywhere” and “Say You Love Me” that felt just a bit more special given her absence on stage for so many years.

Given how well-known these songs all are you’d be forgiven for thinking there’d be few moments of genuine surprise or deeper emotional connection, but throughout the night many of these older tunes felt fresh in the context of the gang getting back together again.

This was the case even when it was only Buckingham on stage by himself, singing “Big Love” and talking about how the feelings of alienation he felt with the band when he wrote it have faded to meditation now, or later when Nicks joined him for a beautiful take on the always lovely “Landslide.”

Nicks was her usual endearingly hippy-dippy self, at one point giving a shout-out to the TV series “American Horror Story” for featuring the song “Seven Wonders” earlier this year and thus getting it back into their set. She later told a long and rambling anecdote about her earliest days as a singer in San Francisco pre-Fleetwood Mac and how a visit to the lady rock star clothing store later inspired the song “Gypsy.”

Highlights in the final stretch of the main set included McVie’s “Little Lies,” a take on “Gold Dust Woman” that from the ominous guitar line and cowbell opening through Nicks’ gold-shawl-twirling performance was perhaps the tour de force of the show. They closed with “Go Your Own Way” with Buckingham taking the lead vocals but both Nicks and McVie joining in as it built to the finish.

The encore opened with “World Turning,” which featured Fleetwood on an old-fashioned drawn-out drum solo that you didn’t really mind given how animated and happy he seemed, then “Don’t Stop,” which had most of the Forum singing along.

After one more break, McVie returned alone to a piano at center stage, singing “Songbird,” the nickname Fleetwood gave her during the band introductions, alone for a moment, then joined by Buckingham on guitar. A fitting final spotlight for the prodigal daughter now back in the fold.

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Peter Larsen / OC Register / Saturday, November 29, 2014