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  • ‘The beautiful blur’ that is Mirage

    ‘The beautiful blur’ that is Mirage

    Rolling Stone contributing editor David Wild reflects on Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage and gets the band members to share memories of the classic 1982 recording at a ‘haunted’ French chateau

    Fleetwood Mac 1982
    (Photo: David Montgomery)

    Listen closely now to Mirage — the lovely album Fleetwood Mac first released in the summer of 1982 — and you can still hear the gorgeous sound of one of the greatest bands in all of rock history making the group decision to move forward by willfully and artfully retracing its own steps.

    For some, Mirage may have looked like a step in the wrong direction — a big yet graceful move backwards. For others, the album seemed more like Fleetwood Mac’s beautiful return to Rumours form. In truth, Mirage appears to have been the conscious and, in many ways, successful effort of the band to look back to the future after taking the brilliant and brave left turn that was the group’s previous studio effort — 1979’s then-controversial, but now acclaimed Tusk.

    Yet by any fair standard the group’s collective decision to change course back in the early Eighties was an understandable and, perhaps, commercially advisable move. And taken on its own slightly more conservative terms Mirage remains an impressive and often stunning piece of work reflecting many of the strengths that we have come to know and love from Fleetwood Mac. Take another listen and look back at Mirage today and you will find that, despite its hazy title, this album was not some grand illusion that eventually disappeared into thin air. Instead, Mirage is a well crafted and, at times, truly-inspired song cycle that only appears to grow more vivid all these years later.

    Fleetwood Mac 1982
    (Photo: David Montgomery)

    As the great scientist, mathematician and very early rock critic Sir Isaac Newton once famously explained; for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And in the ongoing successful musical experiment known as Fleetwood Mac, the action of creating the more experimental and expansive 1979 album Tusk ultimately led to the equal and opposition reaction of this next studio album, Mirage. On the double album Tusk, Lindsey Buckingham had rather daringly led Fleetwood Mac in a series of intriguing and fresh new directions with some of the album’s twists and turns reflecting the many changes that were then afoot in music work back in the wake of the Punk and New Wave movements. Though now widely considered an influential rock masterpiece, Tusk was in many ways ahead of its time, especially for a much-anticipated album by a group of mainstream Seventies rock superstars. Perhaps as a result, Tusk was — if only in relative terms compared to the historic runaway success of Rumours — considered a significant commercial disappointment.

    Mirage remains an impressive and often stunning piece of work reflecting many of the strengths that we have come to know and love from Fleetwood Mac.

    And so it came to pass that after the band’s worldwide tour in support of Tusk concluded on September 1, 1980 at the Hollywood Bowl and some of the group members took some time off to start their solo careers, Fleetwood Mac ultimately reconvened outside Paris to record its next studio effort at Chateau d’Heroville, an estate and recording facility perhaps made most famous by Elton John, who famously dubbed the 1972 album he recorded there Honky Chateau. By the time the band began to gather at the Chateau in late 1981, the prime directive had become clear. In an effort to recapture a little of the magic of Rumours, founding member Mick Fleetwood in his managerial capacity strongly suggested the band get away from all distractions in Los Angeles — something the group had done back when they had recorded Rumours in Sausalito in an effort to create more of a group effort that played to some of the group’s more obvious strengths.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, the group’s resident studio genius Lindsey Buckingham felt considerable ambivalence about being asked to take a step in what felt like the wrong — or at least more predictable — direction. Revealingly, Buckingham’s first composition on the album — and the second track following Christine’s McVie’s lovely and buoyant “Love in Store” — would be a haunting little gem entitled “Can’t Go Back,” in which Buckingham seems to express some of his decidedly mixed emotions.

    Fleetwood Mac Can't Go Back single“Standin’ in the shadows,” Buckingham sings at the beginning of the song. “The man I used to be. I want to go back” before being answered by a multi-tracked chorus of male and females voices declaring, “Can’t go back.”

    Yet in a way going back to the formula that had made Fleetwood Mac such a tremendous success story was the mission statement for Mirage — which perhaps helps explain the many references to both going and looking back spread throughout the album, including in Stevie Nicks’ song called “Straight Back” as well as her characteristically poetic references to going “back to the Velvet Underground” and “back to the Gypsy” in the towering Fleetwood Mac song on Mirage, “Gypsy.”

    Even Christine McVie’s big first hit single from the album “Hold Me” includes the memorable lines, “there’s no one in the future / So why don’t you let me hand you my love?” It was as if by looking back and holding on close to each other in close quarters might be the only way for Fleetwood Mac to keep their famous chain together as they continued to figure out their place in the “Eyes of the World,” to borrow another phrase from the Buckingham song that closed the album. (Editor’s note: “Wish You Were Here” actually closes the album.)

    Looking back today Lindsey Buckingham recalls, “It was hard to know where to go at that moment when you had just gone somewhere in one direction that felt right — then to have to sort of reel it back in a more forced way felt difficult. But I understood that I was the only one member of the group so what was I going to do? And back then Mick used to have these broad-strokes ideas and I think that going to France was an attempt to recreate an environment that was exotic and away from home as we had with Rumours in Sausalito. I think Mick’s idea was to get us out of our particular ruts we might have been in to create something people might like. The attempt to create that kind of spontaneity, to me, spoke of the fact that he was trying to create a moment in time that had come and gone, but I tried to do what I could.”

    Looking back now, Mick Fleetwood says that he understands more deeply Buckingham’s concerns. ” I think Mirage was more preconceived as a kind of band record organically representing where we left off with Rumours,” Fleetwood explains. “So in retrospect, it wasn’t as daring an album as Tusk which understandably would leave Lindsey with some trepidation. Tusk has become a much more iconic album as the years trickle by and that is a testament to where Lindsey led us. But Tusk also became a sort of cross to bear. It sort of confused some listeners which in a way was exactly what Lindsey was intending to do.”

    “But Mirage has its own merits artistically. And in truth, part of the notion of doing Mirage in France came from the band helping me out by being there. I sort of managed to convince everyone, and in my mind, it was about the fact that when we made Rumours the sessions had the feeling of the band getting together away from home. I am sure I was trying to get that same sort of drama and sense of theater that had worked for us before. To me, it was a way to get the band away from the distractions of Los Angeles and have us make music with some sense of community because — whether we liked it or not — we were all in the same place again. That was how we made Rumours in Sausalito and I figured that had worked out pretty well.”

    For Stevie Nicks, her memories of recording Mirage in France are mostly pleasant and picturesque ones. “When I think of Mirage now I think of living in a castle and visiting Paris,” Nicks says. “I think of white fishnet stockings, red high heels, and going to get my hair done and having five different hair dressers working on me. It’s like, who does that? Well, the French do thankfully. I also remember living in the Chateau, which was romantic, though I remember for some reason there was no ice. And they thought it might be haunted because there were strange sounds in there. So to me, the Mirage sessions were beautiful and insane. The place felt like the setting for an old-movie murder mystery and I do seem to remember there was one day when Jimmy Iovine — who I had been dating and came to visit me — did want to kill Lindsey, but somehow we all survived and the music lives on very nicely.”

    Mick Fleetwood too arrived at the Chateau from work far, far away. “I came back from having made my first solo album The Visitor in Ghana, Africa, then spending some time working with the London Philharmonic to complete it. So me and our co-producer, Richard Dashut, turned up the night before recording Mirage high on that whole adventure. I remember the first thing I did was play Lindsey our version of “Walk a Thin Line” — which he had written and recorded for Tusk that I loved and re-recorded in Africa. Lindsey had made his own solo album Law and Order then and I remember sitting Lindsey down and playing him that song and that he was really moved hearing our crazy band from Africa doing one of his tracks.”

    Fleetwood confesses that for him at least the craziness was not over. “I’m a nutcase so I love the drama, the theater, the sense of being in a place of such beauty and history. There was supposedly a ghost and I was of course a sucker for the company. And because I was a supernut in those days, I had my own automobile shipped out there and I would drive into Paris on the weekends and disappear and rave on so that no one had to witness my misbehavior.”

    Fleetwood Mac
    (Photo: Neal Preston)

    Thankfully, there were some stabilizing influences at the Chateau including the calming presence of Christine McVie. Nicks notes, “When Christine is around, the atmosphere is much better. Lindsey likes her a lot and recognizes her talent and doesn’t have any baggage with her. She’s sort of the Earth Mother who can speak truth to anybody. That’s always been her role. She’s not just a great voice — she’s the great voice of reason. She is able to make everyone come to their senses and get back to work. And she’s the kind of person who will say, ‘We’re not getting anywhere, I’m going to go home and cook.’ She doesn’t put up with much — and never has. She’s no nonsense — and we always have a lot of nonsense going on. But looking back it’s a beautiful piece of work with some songs I love. I do notice Lindsey has five songs, Christine has four and I have three. For me, “Gypsy” was my standout. Chris’s songs are always so great — she’s always been our true hitmaker as “Hold Me” proved again. I remember “Oh Diane” was a huge hit in Europe too — though we never do it [in concert]. On the other hand, “Eyes of the World” is a really choice song, and it’s one we have done onstage, like, every other tour.”

    Fleetwood Mac Gypsy 1982Buckingham agrees that “Gypsy” is a high water mark for his longstanding, if sometimes tense, collaboration with Stevie Nicks. “In spite of any reservations I might have about that time in our recording, “Gypsy” is and always has been one of my favorite things ever from Stevie. And for me, it is also the best thing I ever did for Stevie all in all in terms of helping her create the right musical landscape to frame a song. That song really speaks to her strengths — and to my strengths in terms of showcasing her strengths. And to me, like a lot of the best work of the band, the result is something greater than the sum of our parts.”

    Exactly how much of the work on Mirage was ultimately done in France — and how much was recorded once the band returned to Los Angeles — remains a bit of a mystery to me, even after taking with the band at some length. “I don’t remember the lionshare of the work going on in France, but I’m not quite sure. So there’s the funny irony there. As a manager, Mick was worried about the economics of the business, yet he was willing to be extravagant. The man has style. But the truth is I’m not sure how much was impacted by us being there at the Chateau particularly. But the mood was cordial enough. You have to remember, so much other stuff had gone down within the band by then. I mean, the Fleetwood Mac album and Rumours were both done under a certain amount of duress just because of what was going on personally within the band, especially the two couples who were, shall we say, in transit. At least all of that had been resolved by the time of Mirage. For me, the only frustration was the sense that in some way feeling like I had been slightly put in the artistic penalty box.”

    As Mick Fleetwood sees it now, “It’s fair to say that the push from me was getting more of a representation of the whole band — and perhaps more of what people who loved the band wanted. And I think we got that with Mirage and the album’s success suggests that too. But that said, Tusk is a my favorite Fleetwood Mac album along with Then Play On. Coming off Tusk, Mirage was a somewhat more conscious effort to return to that place we left after making Rumours. And in the end, however, we got there and wherever we did it, we got to a very good place with Mirage.”

    Finally, Stevie Nicks wonders, “Did Lindsey remember how much we did when we left France and went back to L.A. because I sure don’t. My memory is that in L.A. we were in every single studio trying to get Mirage done. I can just tell you about our time in that castle and I was even a little late getting there. But I will never forget walking amid all the ghosts of all the famous people who had been there before us, and I remember there were no ice cubes — because it was hot and I needed ice. Other than that, it’s all a bit of a blur — a big beautiful blur.

    In other words, a Mirage, one that has never really gone away.

    David Wild / September 2016

    Where to Buy Mirage (Deluxe Edition)

  • LISTEN: Mirage Deluxe Edition

    LISTEN: Mirage Deluxe Edition

    Here are selected outtakes and live tracks from Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage (Deluxe Edition), released on Friday, September 23.

    Where to buy Mirage (Deluxe Edition):

    Live at The Forum, Los Angeles

  • 10 Questions for Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac

    10 Questions for Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac

    The peacemaker of Fleetwood Mac on Mirage, Maui, and missing the buzz

    theartsdesk meets Christine McVie on a sunny Friday afternoon in September; the Warner Brothers boardroom (with generous hospitality spread) is suitably palatial. We’re the first media interview of the day, so she’s bright and attentive. McVie was always the member of Fleetwood Mac who you’d want to adopt: the most approachably human member of a band constantly at war with itself. Readily admitting that she’s the “peacekeeper” in the band, the singer/songwriter behind such Mac classics as “Everywhere” and “You Make Loving Fun” is as sweet and serene as you’d hope she would be.

    She’s here to promote the new deluxe remaster of 1982 album Mirage – the follow-up three years on to the somewhat deranged Tusk, which was recorded and released as Christine and John McVie, the band’s bassist, were divorcing. She quit the band in 1998 after the hugely successful live album The Dance, after which she started a fairly solitary life of her own in the English countryside for the best part of 16 years. The first four of those, she says, were simply spent working on the house. It was only therapy and the canny, persuasive hand of Mick Fleetwood that coaxed her into returning after a trip to Maui, Hawaii, where Mick lives close to John McVie, his lifelong partner-in-crime.

    The former Christine Perfect had a severe fear of flying that she’s now completely beaten, and as we speak, it’s clear that she’s fairly perplexed about having left the fray for so long in the first place. So what was she doing in all that time exactly? “A lot of people ask me that question!” With a brand new album (their first since 2001’s Say You Will) and a new world tour in the planning stages, it’s clear that the Fleetwood Mac story still has several enthralling chapters ahead. Somewhere near Fleetwood’s on Front Street – Mick’s fancy restaurant in Maui – the drummer must be feeling pretty smug that the ragged band of brothers and sisters he founded are finally back together.

    RALPH MOORE: What was the mood of the band post-Tusk?

    CHRISTINE McVIE: I remember we did two huge world tours after Tusk. We drove ourselves into the ground physically, and obviously there was a lot of drinking and a lot of drugs, and that just about killed us all, so we took a lot of time off. There was a long time between Tusk and Mirage. Mick went to Ghana to make an album called The Visitor and Stevie [Nicks] made Bella Donna, which was a huge hit for her.

    Fleetwood MacBut I think maybe we were under contract so had to make a record at that time, so Mick tried to recreate a similar bubble to Rumours where we were away from our homes, and that’s how that started. The mood? I was quite looking forward to it. We recorded at Honky Château [the infamous Chateau d’Herouville, located 20 miles north of Paris in the Val d’Oise]. There was a big piano there that Elton John had left there, so that was great. I seem to remember we did a lot of mucking around, playing table tennis. The guys from the French Open came down to visit us and John McEnroe also came down – I think I actually beat him at table tennis one night! It was a funny time. I don’t remember any particular animosity. I’m sure we were under contract to do another record so that was the basis of it. And from that, from little acorns the oak tree grew and it turned into a much nicer experience with some really good songs on it.

    You returned to the band in 2014: had the dynamic changed?

    Well, I just couldn’t believe that 16 years had actually passed. I mean, quite literally, from the moment I stepped on stage in Dublin to rehearse “Don’t Stop” I knew: the eye contact with all the band members, it was like going home. Truthfully. And they felt the same about me. The circle was complete. Had anything changed? Only technically. Vibe wise, I had Mick looking at me through his cymbals, but there was always that gap there on the stage when I left – they hadn’t filled it up with anyone else. That gap when they were touring without me was there every night. It was such a great feeling.

    Is it fair to say that you’re the peacekeeper in the band?

    I know Stevie always calls me Mother Earth, so possibly! How do I put this…. I have always been the most sane one of the lot, more down to earth, but I think John’s probably even more down to earth now. Peacekeeper? Yeah, I like that title. I do tend to meander around in the cracks! And do I have to be a peacekeeper now? Only occasionally. You always get moments with Stevie and Lindsey [Buckingham], that’s part of their make-up – they are each other’s muses and they have not been together for years, but they have this love/hate thing that they’ll always have and someone has to gently insinuate in the middle.

    But Stevie and I are really good friends, in fact I think we’re better friends now than we were 16 years ago. And it’s a fact, when it’s the Buckingham/Nicks show backed by John and Mick, that’s going to cause a lot of tension and stress. But with me in there, it gave Stevie the chance to get her breath back and not have this constant thing going on with Lindsey: her sister was back.

    Is it fair to say that Fleetwood Mac is a democracy, but driven for the most part by Mick?

    Yes, but you’ve got to have a degree of flexibility. We’re very democratic. If one person is outvoted, you go with it. Mick always says, I’m a drummer, I can’t just sit in a room and play drums, I need a band. So in Maui, he has his own little band and when Fleetwood Mac’s not touring, he plays with them. It keeps him busy.

    (Photo: Danny Clinch)
    (Photo: Danny Clinch)

    In the 16 years interim, what were you doing and did you see the band much?

    I didn’t see them very much. First of all, I never flew anywhere. I saw them at Earl’s Court a few years back and sat at the sound board and that was a weird feeling. But I had no sense at that time of wanting to rejoin and at that time it was a relief – but I didn’t realise what pleasure I was missing until more recent days when I made the phone call to Mick and asked, “What would be it be like if I came back?” Fortunately Stevie was dying for me to come back, as were the rest of the band. Lindsey didn’t believe it would ever happen, but when I walked back onstage he did and they were delirious.

    But when I first left, I was married at that point and spent four years restoring the house, a big rambling place with gardens – it was quite a project. But I didn’t write very much and the marriage didn’t work out, and I started to find I was twiddling my thumbs in this huge place, bouncing off the walls. So I thought that I’d do a little solo project. I got together with my nephew who’s a good musician and quite handy with ProTools and I thought, I’ll do a little record because I can’t fly, and I don’t want to tour, so we did that in my garage. And that took a couple of years, because we didn’t have a pressing need to finish it.

    And then I sunk into isolation and got in a bit of trouble and sought help, and that was when I called Mick. It was healing and cathartic going back into the band. I missed all that buzz. I was also deluded about some idea of being the country lady with dogs, a Range Rover and Hunter boots, going for long walks, all that. Baking cakes in my Aga. It was not what I wanted in the end.

    How did you overcome the fear of flying?

    I was starting to realise that I was trapped in England unless I went by train or boat – and that I will never be able to see the world. So I went to a therapist and said, “I have to be able to get on a plane.” And he said, “Where would you most like to go?” And I said, “Maui!” And he said, “Buy a first-class ticket. Don’t get on – you have the ticket, that’s the starting point.” And as serendipity would have it Mick said, “I am coming to London” and I said, “I have a ticket to Maui!” So he said “Stay there! And we’ll go back together.”

    So I went back with Mick to Maui and didn’t even feel the plane taking off, that’s how unafraid I was. I had some pretty good therapy, and I love flying now! And I did some songs with his little band there, and that was the start of it all. It’s the best thing we could have ever done. In many ways, I think we sound better and the audience reaction is better than even it was before. It’s unprecedented in rock ‘n’ roll that someone should leave and rejoin 16 years on and all five of us are still alive and healthy – touch wood and whistle.

    Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie
    Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie work on new songs in the studio.

    Let’s talk about the new album.

    I love every single track we’ve done, bar none. This’s something to me that is really special. Stevie hasn’t come in on it yet because she’s been busy doing something else. Last year, I was in there with Mick and Lindsey and John – John’s healing very nicely now – and nearly completed seven tracks and they’re magic. Seriously, no padding! I’m going to go over again in October to work on it. Stevie’s on tour but we’ve got until next year to finish it because we’re planning a world tour again, for the summer of ’17. I don’t know if I’m privy to give song titles yet, but Lindsey and I have practically co-written everything. Getting the band all together is like herding sheep: to get all five of us in a room is nigh-on impossible. And then somebody will wander out. But it does happen.

    Mirage is still a pretty eccentric record when you listen to it. And what’s great is Fleetwood Mac is now a genuine, cross-generational experience.

    The generation gap is phenomenal! Kids are going, “We’d better see them before one of them dies!” The songs endure. I have lots of friends with growing children, even 12- and 11-year-olds and some of them are avid listeners, they carry Rumours on their iPods! Tango is a favourite and Tusk is a favourite of some the weird 14-year-old boys. The demographic is remarkable.

    And you still have the potential to play Glastonbury again.

    Yes. I think we have been asked but for whatever reason it hasn’t happened, I don’t know for what reason. Would I love to do it? Love’s a strong word! I wouldn’t mind – so long as we could helicopter in and helicopter out!

    Fleetwood Mac Mirage (1982)Let’s end by returning to Mirage – where does it sit in the Mac canon for you?

    If I have to be really truthful, it’s not catalogued as my favourite but on it are some great songs and some really good memories and it harkens in a vague sense not to the soul of Rumours but to more commercial roots after Tusk, which was the antithesis of commercial. On Mirage we made an effort to have a few more catchy songs. But it’s still a pretty eccentric record when you listen to it. It’s nuts!

    The deluxe edition of Mirage is out on September 23rd on Warner Brothers.

    Ralph Moore / theartsdesk (UK) / Tuesday, September 20, 2016

  • Mick Fleetwood reflects on overlooked Mirage

    Mick Fleetwood reflects on overlooked Mirage

    1982-mirage-album-cover

    Mick Fleetwood talks to Rolling Stone about the band’s ‘overlooked’ smash Mirage

    Ahead of new reissue, drummer Mick Fleetwood talks “wild and romantic” France sessions, opulent video shoots, and more

    “I don’t think it would be wrong to say it sort of got overlooked,” says Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood, reminiscing about his band’s 1982 album, Mirage, which will be reissued in a deluxe package via Warner Bros. on September 23rd. It’s something of an odd statement to make about a record that charted at Number One on the Billboard 200, spawned multiple hit singles and went on to sell more than three million copies. Of course, when you’re in Fleetwood Mac, the definition of what constitutes success is relative.

    The album, the band’s 13th studio effort overall and fourth to feature singer Stevie Nicks and singer/guitarist Lindsey Buckingham alongside longtime members Fleetwood, bassist John McVie and singer/keyboardist Christine McVie, came on the heels of one of the more impressive runs in rock: the lineup’s smash 1975 “debut,” Fleetwood Mac; the now-more-than-40-million-selling follow-up, Rumours; and the sprawling and sonically adventurous Buckingham-helmed double–LP Tusk (a commercial “failure” that still managed to move several million copies). By the time the band reconvened for Mirage in May 1981, they had been off the road for close to a year, during which time three members had recorded – but not yet released – solo albums (Buckingham’s Law and Order, Fleetwood’s The Visitor and Nicks’ eventual chart-topping, multi-platinum Bella Donna). That time apart, combined with the tensions that had been brought on by the experimental nature of the Tusk album, left them ready to recapture a bit of the old Rumours magic, so to speak.

    [jwplayer mediaid=”373865″]

    “There’s no doubt that having come off Tusk there was a conscious effort to make Mirage into more of a band album,” Fleetwood says. “Because Tusk had been very much Lindsey’s vision. And it was a great one – along with [1969’s] Then Play On, it’s probably my favorite Fleetwood Mac album. So it was a highly successful creative moment. But at the time we took some blows for it, and Lindsey in particular, because the album wasn’t as successful as Rumours. How could it be, anyhow? But that being beside the point, I think Lindsey sort of handed back the mantle on Mirage. It was, ‘Let’s just do this as a band.’ That was the vibe going into it.”
    The result was an album that, if judged by its two hit singles – Christine McVie’s buoyant “Hold Me” and Stevie Nicks’ somewhat autobiographical “Gypsy” – seemed to represent something of a step back to the concise, sharp-focus pop-rock that had characterized Rumours and Fleetwood Mac. Indeed, says Fleetwood, “If you were a sort of super-intellectual critic, which is maybe not a great place to come from, it would be fair game to say the album kind of went backwards.” But, he adds, “Having said that, the amazing thing is that, looking back on it now, in the present day, so many of those songs are at a very high level in the continuing story of Fleetwood Mac.”

    All the more reason, then, to revisit Mirage now. The new three-CD-plus-DVD deluxe package presents the original 12-track album in remastered form, along with one disc of B sides, outtakes and rarities, and another that collects 13 songs from two nights at the Forum in Los Angeles during the band’s 1982 Mirage U.S. tour. Also included is a vinyl copy of the album and a DVD of the original collection in 5.1 surround sound (additionally, there are two-CD, single-disc and digital download versions available). “The fact that we’re talking about it again is actually really cool,” Fleetwood says of Mirage. “Because we ended up making a far better album than we gave ourselves credit for for many years.”

    They also made an album that is more varied and quirky than it gets credit for. In addition to the two hit singles, there’s plenty more of the sort of expertly crafted soft rock the band had become known for by that point, such as Christine McVie–penned tracks like “Only Over You” and the propulsive opener (and minor hit) “Love in Store.” But there’s also the brittle electro-pop of Buckingham’s “Empire State” and lilting country-folk of Nicks’ “That’s Alright,” the latter a holdover from the Buckingham Nicks days a decade earlier. Furthermore, unlike the lineup’s three previous efforts, which were recorded mostly in and around California, Fleetwood Mac, along with Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut (who co-produced with Buckingham and the band), tracked Mirage largely in France, at the famed Château d’Hérouville, outside of Paris. Explains Fleetwood of the change of scenery, “My recollect was I asked the band if I could record overseas to help me out with some tax issues. And very kindly they did that. But in truth, knowing me, I think the main purpose of it was to get them the hell out of L.A. so that we could make an album without imploding.”

    “I personally had probably too much fun. I used to go into Paris every weekend and misbehave.”

    The band’s new environs offered up a different sort of vibe than the Southern California studios they were used to calling home. “We were at the Château, which was an historic place,” Fleetwood recalls. “If you look it up, you’ll see that some incredible shit was done there – [Elton John’s] Honky Chateau and all that. A whole load of people had recorded there. So it was an amazing place. It was wild and romantic. It’s a mansion in the French countryside, with cooks and food and wine, you know?” He laughs. “I personally had probably too much fun. I used to go into Paris every weekend and misbehave and come back for work on Monday morning. But it accomplished what we needed, and, all joking aside, the fact that we were in France and we were in the middle of nowhere, truly I think it had great value.”

    The band’s choice of location for recording their music wasn’t the only aspect of Mirage that showed Fleetwood Mac breaking with their past. They also explored new avenues in terms of how they offered up that music for public consumption. Mirage was released in June of 1982, less than a year after the launch of MTV. As a legacy band that had often proved surprisingly adaptable to current trends, Fleetwood Mac embraced the music-video age to great success. So much so, that, rather than merely mimic playing their songs in the clips, as most artists did in the network’s earliest days, Fleetwood Mac opted to take on acting roles. The first single from Mirage, “Hold Me,” came complete with a storyline that showed the band frolicking in the Mojave Desert, with Fleetwood and John McVie playing archeologists who excitedly stumble upon a cache of buried guitars and other musical instruments. The elaborate clip for “Gypsy,” meanwhile, had the distinction of being the most expensive music video ever produced at the time. “I’m really glad we made it,” Fleetwood says, “even though it cost a fortune for us.”

    [jwplayer mediaid=”15602″]

    As for the shoots themselves, the directors of the videos for both “Hold Me” and “Gypsy” have since discussed the fact that the band’s well-publicized and mythologized romantic entanglements led to some uncomfortable moments on the sets. Fleetwood, however, says he doesn’t recall as much. “I don’t have huge memory of any gossipy things happening,” he says. “But the amount of pain we were used to going through, maybe it was noticeable. Although we had an uncanny ability to suck it up. But ‘Gypsy’ especially, it’s interesting because they’re featuring Lindsey and Stevie dancing in it and you’re going, ‘This is quite profound. …’ It was like, ‘Wow, that’s a scene!’”

    He continues: “In general, though, we were really professional, and I believe from memory we were all hugely cooperative and into [doing the videos], really. There was no ‘I don’t wanna fucking do that,’ one-shot-and-we’re-out-of-there type stuff. And the directors, they were young filmmakers with big budgets, and they seemed quite conversant with handling lunacy. So they were fun days.” Fleetwood laughs. “I mean, to me everything was fun because I was having a party 24/7. So it didn’t really fucking matter! But I think we were good candidates for that sort of thing.”

    It would seem that Fleetwood Mac were in fact very good candidates for that sort of thing, as both “Hold Me” and “Gypsy” became staples on MTV, helping the band to achieve two of the biggest hits of their career. In fact, Fleetwood now acknowledges that “those songs became more memorable than the album as a whole. And that’s sort of an unusual slant.

    “Mirage is part of our history,” he continues, “and as the band heads no doubt to a wind-down of some description in the next few years ahead, I think these types of cataloging events are important. Because it’s certainly not an album to be discarded. And now this little project is representing it, and giving it measured and investigated amounts of kudos. That’s a good thing.”

    Richard Bienstock / Rolling Stone / Tuesday, September 20, 2016

  • REVIEW: Mirage (Expanded Reissue)

    REVIEW: Mirage (Expanded Reissue)

    Fleetwood Mac
    Mirage (Expanded Reissue)
    (Warner Brothers/Rhino)
    Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

    Often considered the belated follow-up to 1977’s mega platinum Rumours, 1982’s Mirage was a clear retreat from the somewhat abrasive, occasionally commercial avant-pop of the controversial Tusk. While that album has, over the decades, come to be respected as Lindsey Buckingham’s creative zenith, it appears Warner Brothers was less enthusiastic about their star act’s detour into the artsy abyss. Perhaps Mac were tired of it themselves, because the slick, glossily produced Mirage seems a capitulation to an audience who might have found the dense, inconsistent, but bold Tusk a musical and drug-fueled bridge too far.

    While Mirage was no Rumours, its dozen sophisticated pop songs include such near-classics as “Love in Store,” “Gypsy,” and “Hold Me,” the latter two appearing on most subsequent Mac hits packages. But there are other, often unappreciated gems here too. Selections such as Buckingham’s folksy “Can’t Go Back,” Stevie Nicks’ surprisingly effective foray into country “That’s Alright,” the frisky pop/rock and sumptuous harmonies of “The Eyes of the World” and the closing “Wish You Were Here,” one of the always dependable Christine McVie’s more affecting and least appreciated pieces, are well worth reexamining.

    It’s not a great album but it’s a good one, especially for Mac’s avid pop fans, and ripe for rediscovery on this newly remastered and expanded edition. A second disc with 20 previously unreleased rarities includes early, stripped down demos, alternate arrangements and outtakes of nearly every tune, plus some that didn’t make the final cut, and is well worth the price of admission. The no-frills versions are a welcome contrast to the finished product’s often over-produced slickness, and such oddities as a four minute in-studio jam on drummer Sandy Nelson’s 1959 instrumental “Teen Beat” with Buckingham at his most frazzled and unhinged is a major find.

    But the real excitement is relegated to the pricey “deluxe” package that includes not only a 5.1 surround audio-only DVD of the album and a remastered vinyl reproduction, but a live show from the ‘82 Mirage tour. This 74-minute concert catches the band on a particularly inspired and improvisation filled night in LA as Mirage was ensconced atop the Billboard charts. It kicks off with a propulsive seven-minute “The Chain” that smokes the studio take into oblivion and features extended performances of two Tusk tracks with a nearly 10-minute “Not That Funny” along with another 8 minutes of “Sisters of the Moon,” closing with an unplugged emotional “Songbird” all in front of a clearly engaged audience.

    Whether that’s worth dropping nearly $90 is up to you, but this is an invigorating presentation. It captures these five musicians (before they added an unnecessary backline to bolster the live sound) bouncing energy off each other and feeding from the crowd with exhilarating results.

    Hal Horowitz / American Songwriter / Tuesday, September 20, 2016

  • VIDEO: Take a closer look at Mirage Deluxe

    VIDEO: Take a closer look at Mirage Deluxe

    Fleetwood Mac has released a new preview video for Mirage Deluxe. The 40-second clip shows the 4 CDs, vinyl album, liner notes, and photographs included in the expanded set. Mirage will be reissued on Friday, September 23.

    [jwplayer mediaid=”374631″]
  • Stevie Nicks on tour, Fleetwood Mac album, Prince regret

    Stevie Nicks on tour, Fleetwood Mac album, Prince regret

    Stevie Nicks on crafting a setlist for 24 Karat Gold Tour, possible Fleetwood Mac album & wishing she’d performed with Prince

    “I’m hoping that this will be as much fun for the audience as it’s gonna be for me,” Stevie Nicks tells Billboard about her just-announced 24 Karat Gold Tour. The two-month trek — launching Oct. 25 in Phoenix, with the Pretenders opening — supports her 2014 effort 24 Karat Gold: Songs From the Vault, which marked her sixth top 10 album on the Billboard 200 chart.

    The album was comprised of tracks Nicks had written and made demo recordings for decades ago but had never been included on any of her previous albums. Then, in 2014, she and producer Dave Stewart headed to Nashville with the demos and recorded entirely new versions of the songs to produce 24 Karat Gold. “I think this [tour] is going to be great,” Nicks says. “I think that all the fans are gonna have a ball. And I hope that they totally just dress up — as Wendy Williams would say, ‘Dress to the nines.’ And come to party, and sing.”

    Stevie Nicks Announces Joint Tour With the Pretenders

    Nicks says the setlist for the tour is still being shaped (it’s “about at 30 songs right now”) but will feature songs from 24 Karat Gold and possibly title cuts from some of her older albums, like “Bella Donna,” “Wild Heart” and “Trouble in Shangri-La.” She wants the show to “have its little explosions of fun” from the various parts of her career. Nicks also gives a hint to fans: “You know what, you might want to come to two shows, because you never know: There might be an alternative [set]list.”

    It’s likely that familiar favorites like “Edge of Seventeen” and “Stand Back” will both turn up in the setlist, and for Nicks, “Stand Back” has a new emotional weight. The track was “written to” Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” and she’s “brokenhearted” that she was never able to have him share the stage with her on the song. “Had I ever in a million years thought that we would lose him,” Nicks says, “I would have made sure that that would have happened. And it didn’t. So that’s just one of those things in your life where you so say, ‘I really missed out.’ Because he should have. That should have happened. So whenever I play ‘Stand Back’ from this day forward, Prince will be standing next to me. That is always going to be a joy.”

    Nicks, of course, has a second career with the band Fleetwood Mac, which completed its triumphant On With the Show Tour in November 2015. The global run saw the classic Rumours-era lineup of the band — with a returning Christine McVie — play 120 shows on three continents. Now that the tour has concluded, might there be a new studio album from the famous quintet?

    “You know what, I never know what’s going to happen,” Nicks says. “It’s like, I didn’t — in my wildest dreams — ever know that I was going to do the 24 Karat Gold record. And I certainly didn’t ever, after 16 years, think that Christine McVie was going to call up and say, ‘How would you feel if I came back to the band?’ You know, it’s like, are you serious? Is this a joke?”

    With McVie back in the Fleetwood fold, fans are also holding out hope for a new album from the group. “I learned a long time ago to never say never. Right now, because of the fact that we know that people don’t buy records… it’s like, hard to sell records. So then you think, ‘Well, why do you do records?’ Well, the reason you do records is because it’s like we’re like kids again, and we can do anything we want. We have enough money. We don’t really have to work if we don’t want to. So we can do records for the reason that we actually did them in the very beginning — just ’cause it’s fun.

    “Is it possible that Fleetwood Mac might do another record? I can never tell you yes or no, because I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. … It’s like, do you want to take a chance of going in and setting up in a room for like a year [to record an album] and having a bunch of arguing people? And then not wanting to go on tour because you just spent a year arguing? Or do you just go on tour because you know that you have fun up there and you love doing shows? And Christine’s only been back for [laughs] a year and a half.

    “So you start to weigh your… ‘Why would you do this, why would you do that?’ And I honestly don’t know. But I never say never… that really is in God’s hands.”

    Here are some excerpts from our conversation with Nicks:

    Nicks recorded the 24 Karat Gold album just two months — and it was her final album owed to her record label, Warner Bros. Records. But she had to essentially put 24 Karat Gold away and not listen to it for over a year as she was about to head out on the road with Fleetwood Mac:

    We finished [24 Karat Gold] in, like, two months — the whole record. And then, this is kind of what I did: It was like, metaphorically, I bought a gold box, I put the record in the box, I put tissue around it, I wrapped it, I put a red bow on it. I got in the car, we drove past Warner Bros., and I ran in, put it on the front desk and said, “Please give this to the president of Warner Bros.,” and I ran back out. Got in the car and went straight to Culver City to be at rehearsals with Fleetwood Mac at 2 o’clock. That was it!

    Needless to say, me doing a record wasn’t exactly the most favorite topic of conversation at the Fleetwood Mac rehearsal. Christine had just come back in, you know, changed her life, moved to L.A. So that was it. I can honestly say, I never even listened to 24 Karat Gold again until we got home from the tour in January. Because why would I, you know what I mean? Why would I go and make myself feel bad by listening to my really beautiful, fun record of all my great old glory songs? [They] were the sex, rock & roll and drug songs that just almost made every single big record, but for whatever my reasons were, I pulled them. These weren’t songs that were kicked off the record by anybody; these were songs that I pulled off records.

    So why would I want to sit around and make myself miserable? So I never listened to it once until we got home from the Fleetwood Mac tour. And then I said to my manager, “Well, I’m gonna think about this very carefully.” And the fact was… my little life-partner puppy dog that was almost 18 years old was seriously dying. And she died between December and July 5. So I didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t take any vacations, I didn’t really do anything except be with her and kind of deal with that whole situation. But all through that, I was thinking, “You know, if I don’t do this now, we’ll miss the window that will make it possible.” If we go out for 24 Karat Goldright now, we’re actually going out with some product — not that I am going to necessarily sell records, because I don’t believe that people buy records, so that’s not why I’m going out. I’m going out to promote this record just because I want people to hear what’s on it. And I figured the only way I can let them hear what’s on it is to actually go out and play some of the stuff that’s on it.

    Her manager asked if perhaps Nicks would just rather stay home this year after the passing of her beloved pet and spending so much time on the road with Fleetwood Mac:

    I don’t want to miss the window. If I don’t go out until next year, we won’t go out until the spring, and then by the time we get out there, it’ll be the summer, and by the time I get home, it’ll be too late to do the 24 Karat Gold Tour. And it’ll just end up being Stevie going out to do another Stevie Nicks tour that has all the exact same songs that every other Stevie Nicks tour for the last 20 years has had. And that’s not what I want to do.

    Nicks discusses what the 24 Karat Gold Tour setlist might include:

    This will make you laugh, but it’s the truth. When I sat down a couple weeks ago to start figuring out what would be in here, I had decided that I also wanted to do “Wild Heart,” maybe do “Bella Donna,” maybe do “Trouble in Shangri-La.” So I wanted to do some title songs [from Nicks’ albums]. I mean, I thought, you know, this is laying open a whole new world for me… So my list is like about at 30 songs right now. And so Waddy [Wachtel, Nicks’ guitarist and music director for the tour], he said to me, “Just call me when [the setlist is] over.” Like, “Stevie, have you cut out any songs yet?” And I said, “Well, maybe two, so I’m working on it.”

    So what I’ve done is, I’ve sent out all 30 songs [Laughs] to everybody in the band, saying, like, “We’re not going to do all of these 30, but we have to try some of these.” Because sometimes you don’t know. You might hear the song that you think is going to be the best ever, and it’s not. And then there’s the song that you think is going to be totally terrible and it’s great. So I said, “You don’t have to learn them for real, but just be aware.” So that we can spend a few days just playing bits and pieces of everything. So, yes, is [the setlist] going to be songs from 24 Karat Gold? Absolutely. But it’s also going to be some things from some of the other records also, because I’ll never get a chance to do this again. Until I actually do, like, the full-on acoustic set that will actually be three hours, where I can actually start with “Bella Donna” and go all the way up through… until I get to that tour.

    So this tour, I want it to have its acoustic parts, I want it to have its little explosions of fun from all different parts. I want it to have the 24 Karat Gold demos, there’s two or three songs off In Your Dreams. I’d like to do the “New Orleans” song, I want to do “Soldier’s Angel” because that’s important to me right now — just, once again, with the whole political thing that’s going on, I think “Soldier’s Angel” is an important song to do. So it’s like, it’s gonna be a lot of cool stuff, and I’ll have about two hours and 15 minutes. So, I may — maybe — cut a couple songs down a little bit. Maybe I won’t do all six verses, you know? … Maybe if I do “Bella Donna,” maybe I’ll only do half of “Bella Donna.” I want to do “Wild Heart,” and that has never been done onstage, ever. Because that is a hard song to do. So I’ll give it a try, and if I can pull it off, I’ll do it.

    On how so many of her old demo recordings ended up on the Internet and eventually back to the 24 Karat Gold album, and then to the 24 Karat Gold Tour:

    At some point a suitcase of demos was sold, and out went all the demos to all these songs. … They all got sold. I mean, they just got lost. And in those days, we were so free with our music. It was like, “Sure I just wrote a new song.” And some of your friends are like, “Can I have a tape of it?” And you’re going, “Sure I’ll make you a cassette right now.” And then of course that cassette goes to their house and then somebody else says, “Gee, that’s so great can I have a cassette of that?” And they’re like, “Sure!” And nobody was ever selfish with music, one bit. But in the long run, unfortunately, it did release just about everything I’d ever done. Everything, probably, I’ve never done is out in the cosmos, somewhere.

    But the thing is, [the fans] haven’t seen it done. They haven’t seen it played in concert. So that’s what I’m hoping, is that this can be the suitcase of demos that they didn’t ever see performed. And that this will be really fun for people. Because they are familiar with these songs. They’re familiar with all the songs on 24 Karat Gold. They’re familiar with almost every demo I ever made. So this is bringing them to life. And that’s what I wanted to do, you know? And I’m hoping that this will be as much fun for the audience as it’s gonna be for me, because I’m so tired of doing the same thing over and over and over again. I’m not that kind of person, really. I’m the off-the-top-of-your-head kind of person and always have been. And it’s very hard for me to just do the same thing every single night.

    Nicks has performed “Edge of Seventeen” and “Stand Back” more than 400 times each in her shows. Are there songs she’s tired of performing live?

    Because I have two careers — the great thing is, is that I got three years off from doing “Edge of Seventeen” or “Stand Back,” because Fleetwood Mac actually used to do “Stand Back” and took it out [on the last tour]. So I haven’t done “Edge of Seventeen” or “Stand Back” in closing in on four years. … All those songs, if they actually were in almost all the sets, then you know I really like those songs. I didn’t do them because I had to do them. Because I could always put something else in instead.

    Keith Caulfield / Billboard / Thursday, September 8, 2016

    Read more articles by Keith Caulfield

  • REVIEW: Fleetwood Mac revisits Mirage, inside the studio and out

    REVIEW: Fleetwood Mac revisits Mirage, inside the studio and out

    After Rumours became the biggest pop album of the 1970s, Fleetwood Mac followed it up with 1979’s shockingly different Tusk — a critical success, but a relative commercial flop. Where to go from there? 1982’s Mirage, which leans closer to the Rumours sound while maintaining a distinct identity. The band will Mirage in September with a new deluxe package that showcases the remastered original album, a full disc worth of alternate takes and B-sides, and a third disc of live tracks.

    Read the full review at SILive.com

  • Mick Fleetwood talks Maui gallery, Fleetwood Mac’s future

    Mick Fleetwood talks Maui gallery, Fleetwood Mac’s future

    “There really are dozens of songs,” drummer says of possible new studio album from ‘Rumours’ lineup

    “People always say that corny thing: ‘Every picture tells a story,’” says Mick Fleetwood. “Well, they truly do! That’s what I love about them.” The 69-year-old Fleetwood, it should be noted, is certainly a fan of a good story. During a recent evening at Fleetwood’s on Front St., his restaurant and bar situated on the west Maui shoreline, the drummer regales Rolling Stone with an array of tales, from a dinner party with Willie Nelson at the island home of “supermensch” manager and agent Shep Gordon, to accompanying his daughters to a Justin Bieber concert (“He’s got some drum chops that I don’t have – a total shredder”) to a long-ago post-gig blowout in Honolulu that ended with Fleetwood, his mother and former Mac producer Richard Dashut covered in a whole lot of cake frosting – the aftermath of which is captured in a snapshot of a young Mick and mum drenched in buttercream that is hanging on a nearby wall.

    Regarding his interest in photos, Fleetwood is here to discuss his newest endeavor, a partnership with the Morrison Hotel Gallery that has brought an outpost of the New York–based rock photography showroom to Maui. The new space, which opened in late June with a showing from acclaimed lens man Henry Diltz, is housed below the restaurant and adjacent to Fleetwood’s General Store (where one can purchase plenty of signed Mac memorabilia, among other items). “It makes sense to me to have it here,” Fleetwood says of the gallery. “Because it’s so connected to where I come from. Morrison Hotel is all about music.”

    Fleetwood is still all about music as well. Next month the drummer will embark on a short fall tour of the west coast and Canada with the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band, a unit that revisits Fleetwood Mac material from their late-Sixties formative years with singer and guitarist Peter Green. “It’s a reminder to me of from whence I came,” he says of playing songs like “Black Magic Woman” and “Rattlesnake Shake” again. Furthermore, he revealed that Fleetwood Mac, which less than a year ago completed a mammoth world tour with the fully restored Rumours-era lineup, will indeed be hitting the road once again at some point in the future. If all goes well (and if one member in particular gets on board) there may even be a new studio album from the band, their first since 2003’s Say You Will. “We have a cartload of recorded stuff, and I’d like to see if come out,” Fleetwood says. “Truly, I think there should be an album.”

    Over dinner with RS, Fleetwood discussed the new Morrison Hotel Gallery, what brought him to Maui and the future of Fleetwood Mac. Then he retreated to the restaurant’s rooftop dining area, where he chatted with guests and sat in with local band the Houseshakers, drumming along on a short set of classic blues songs. “People see me around and they say, ‘How long are you here for?’” Fleetwood remarked of his presence on the Hawaiian island. “And I tell them, ‘No, no. I live here.’ All of this — the restaurant, the store, the new gallery — it wouldn’t work otherwise. This is my home.”

    What led to the opening of the Morrison Hotel Gallery here in Maui?
    I had met [Morrison Hotel founder] Peter Blachley 12 years or so ago during a Mac tour down in Australia, and I thought he was a super cool guy. I didn’t even know he had this gallery. Our paths crossed a few more times, including once in New York when Morrison Hotel presented a show of Stevie’s Polaroid photos [“24 Karat Gold”], and I went to support her. And I found myself thinking, “I wonder if …” But it just went off the radar. Then, more recently, Peter was in Maui on holiday, and when he came here to Fleetwood’s he saw the whole operation we have going on, and the great art scene that surrounds us. I mean, the Hawaiian islands are one of the top three art capitals of the world. They sell more art on these islands than almost anywhere. And so I brought up this idea and he was interested. Then I said, “How about we just pony up and have you come and really do this properly?” And now we’re off and running.

     

    You actually do some photography yourself.
    Well, yes … but not so much. I go out and take pictures of trees and things. So it’s not quite the same [laughs]. But for a long time on the road I was a snapshot-taker that annoyed everyone. I was always taking shots in Fleetwood Mac and boring people. But now I’m the one with all the pictures, for whatever purpose that serves! But for me, it’s always been about trying to freeze a moment in time and tell a story. We had a great opening at the gallery with Henry Diltz, and a lot of his work is hanging here at the moment. He did a wonderful meet-and-greet and slide show, and one thing I noticed when Henry was giving his presentation was that he started telling stories along with his photos, and the stories were so amazing. He takes great pictures, but I have to say the stories almost eclipse the pictures. And that’s what it’s about at the gallery. All our boys and girls went to New York to get trained, because it’s all in the storytelling. I love that stuff.

    “The pictures are very much triggers to a bygone generation.”

    Another great thing is that the Morrison Hotel operation is all very together. They’ve been doing it for years and they have a really beautiful collage of photos that are forever. Those photographs of Henry’s that are downstairs? They’re never going to go out of style. And why would they? You’re looking at the outtakes of a shoot of the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album. It’s storytelling of some mythological proportions, really. The pictures are very much triggers to a bygone generation. And people want to see that. Half the people who come to see Fleetwood Mac now are 20, 30 years old. And they come because there’s a story to be told. That’s the fascination. People go, “What’s this all about?”

    Are there plans to launch additional shows similar to the Henry Diltz exhibit?
    Oh, yes. We’re planning on having other photographers come in. Neal Preston is one of our featured photographers. I’m hoping that Pattie Boyd comes. I’m visualizing Stevie coming. And we’re going to rotate in some local talent that I think is worth a damn. Because the idea is also to support the scene. On an island, that’s what you should do. And it’s what I enjoy doing. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s similar to some of the things I did in Fleetwood Mac — get a stage and find some lovely, incredible people to put on it.

     

    How long have you been on Maui?
    Actively, about 16 years. And for about seven years before that I’d be here half the year. I came here after we finished the Fleetwood Mac album with Stevie and Lindsey [Buckingham]. The reason was, this is where [producer] Keith Olsen had taken them when they had finished their Buckingham Nicks album [in 1973]. The Napili Kai hotel, to be exact. So then when we finished the Fleetwood Mac album they said “Why don’t we go?” And that’s when I fell in love with Maui. John [McVie] did too. And actually, the house I have in Napili is one I had originally turned John onto. He owned it for 30 years and then sold it back to me. And Stevie used to come out and spend weeks here. So there’s a lot of Mac history flying around the island.

    As far as Fleetwood Mac is concerned, you guys wrapped up a world tour – your first in more than a decade with Christine McVie back in the fold – a little less than a year ago. What does the future hold for the band?
    Well, we’re all dedicated to getting together about a year or so from now and going and doing another two years of touring all over the world, probably. And we also have a huge amount of recorded music. A huge amount. None of it’s with Stevie. Or very little. Some of it is very, very old stuff that Lindsey maybe did with her years and years ago. We’re not quite sure what will happen with it. But you know, doing this band is a huge investment. We’re only off the road for less than a year, and when you add in the time it takes to put a tour together, do rehearsals, get it up and running, the whole thing, it’s three years that you don’t do anything else. And Stevie has her own life and career and I think … you know, she just doesn’t want to spend the time right now. And we’re quietly saddened about that but also I sort of understand.

    Do you think there will be a new record?
    I really don’t know. The hope was that there was going to be. I do know that when Christine came back, she came back with a bag full of goods. She fucking wrote up a storm. She and Lindsey could probably have a mighty strong duet album if they want. In truth I hope it will come to more than that.

    So nothing’s planned … but it could happen.
    There’s always a “could happen” [laughs]. But one thing that’s for sure — there really are dozens of songs. And they’re really good. And so you think, “Shit, I don’t want it to be that, decades later, when we’re all pushing up daisies, someone hears this stuff and goes, ‘Well, that should have come out!’” So we’ll see.

    Richard Bienstock / Rolling Stone / Wednesday, August 3, 2016

  • REVIEW: Fleetwood Mac Tusk

    REVIEW: Fleetwood Mac Tusk

    Fleetwood Mac’s beautiful and terrifically strange 1979 LP Tusk poses the question: What happens when love dissipates, and you have to find a new thing to believe in? What if that thing is work?

    Rating: 9.2/10

    The autumn of 1979 was, by any reasonable accounting, a challenging time to be alive. The world felt tenuous, transitional: panicked families were fleeing East Germany via hot air balloon, China was restricting couples to one child each, fifty-two Americans were barred inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, pending release of the Shah. It was also the year of Tusk, the album in which Fleetwood Mac, a soft-rock band second only to the Eaglesin their embodiment of easy 1970s gloss, completely lost their minds. It was the band’s twelfth album, though only its third with the now-iconic lineup of guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, keyboardist Christine McVie, and singer Stevie Nicks, and it reflected a personal tumult so claustrophobic and intense it felt global in scale—an after-the-fall re-telling of catastrophic heartache and its endless reverberations.

    By this time, Fleetwood Mac was widely beloved for its melodic, harmonized jams, which evoked Laurel Canyon, curtains of strung beads, turquoise jewelry, pricey incense, scarves flung over floor lamps, and brandy poured into a nice glass. Despite their smooth, murmuring sound, few of the band’s records pull punches emotionally, but even compared to a cry of pain like “The Chain,” Tusk is singular. It is pocked with heartbreak, resignation, lust, hope, and deep hurt. It poses unanswerable questions. It reckons with the past, and what that past means for a future. It invariably makes some people want to lock their door, excavate half a joint from the recesses of their couch cushions, and spend the next fourteen hours contemplating the Buckingham-Nicks union as one of the great failed loves of the twentieth century.

    Just two years earlier, the band had released Rumours, a collection of pert and amiable love songs that sold over ten million copies and spent thirty-one weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 chart. Rumours is presently among the top ten best-selling albums in American history, and, as of 2009, has shipped more than forty million units worldwide. It was—it remains—an album owned by people who have only ever owned eleven albums.

    Commercial success on that scale is, of course, a complicated thing to navigate; for Fleetwood Mac, it was presaged and then aggravated by outrageous amounts of cocaine and an awful lot of intra-band copulation. I don’t mean to be reductive about the group’s emotional dynamic, but I can’t think of another assemblage of five able-minded adults who created and survived such a preposterous tangle of romantic investments and divestments (to wit: Nicks and Buckingham, McVie and McVie, Nicks and Fleetwood, Fleetwood’s wife and former member Bob Weston, McVie and the lighting designer, and Fleetwood and Nicks’ then-married best friend—to cite just the handful of permutations known to the public).

    By the time *Tusk *was released, the two primary relationships sustaining the band (Christine and John’s marriage, and Lindsey and Stevie’s long-standing romance) had fully dissolved, which seemed to qualify Fleetwood Mac, in some perverse way, to go on to become one of our best and bravest chroniclers of love’s horrifying tumult. Being tasked with singing backing vocals for a song written by your ex-lover, about you, months (and eventually years) after the relationship ruptured? Hold that in mind—just how excruciating that must’ve been. Then find a video of Buckingham and Nicks performing “Silver Springs” (a song written by Nicks about Buckingham, withheld from Rumours, and later released, either cruelly or keenly, as the B-side to the single “Go Your Own Way,” a song written by Buckingham about Nicks) and try not to lose your mind completely when, as if to narrate the precise mechanics of their break-up, Nicks announces: “I’ll begin not to love you… Tell myself you never loved me.”

    It’s “Silver Springs,” more than any other track in the band’s pre-Tusk discography, that tells the story of how Buckingham and Nicks lost each other, and, ergo, the story of Tusk; performing the song live, they frequently end up locked in a kind of tense combat stance. When Nicks’ cool, steady voice begins to dissolve into something feral and nearly deranged (“Was I just a fool?” she finally hollers) she’ll often take steps toward him. He always meets her gaze, calmly, and with determination. Maybe they’re putting us all on, but there’s something in those moments that makes True Love—the preposterous, fairy-tale kind, the sort that never resolves itself, that can’t be outrun or eschewed, not ever, not after decades, not after a lifetime—seem entirely possible, even to the most hard-boiled cynics. I bring this up because it’s the only explanation I can think of as to how the band kept going, despite what must’ve seemed, to anyone watching, like a cataclysmic implosion. True Love doesn’t care if your relationship ends; it remains, it buoys you.

    If Rumours was the band’s break-up record, Tusk covers arguably even more complicated ground: how to transform a romantic partnership into a purely creative one, while remaining mindful of all the perilous ways in which love nurtures art, and vice-versa. That the band did this at all, much less successfully, much less good-naturedly—in promotional photos for Tusk, Nicks is pictured resting her left hand disconcertingly close to a bulge in Buckingham’s blue jeans—is dumbfounding.

    The result is a beautiful and terrifically strange album. From the outset, Buckingham was insistent that the band not churn out a sequel to Rumours. His was a defensive, contrarian pose: Let’s deliberately not recreate that colossal commercial and critical success; let’s instead do something different, artier, less bulletproof, more experimental, more explicitly influenced by punk and new-wave, and less indebted to pop. Tusk contains twenty songs and is seventy-two minutes long. It retailed for $15.98 (or $52.88, in 2016 dollars). Its terrifically unattractive cover features a grainy, off-center photograph of a disembodied foot getting chomped on by a dog. The title is a euphemism for cock. Its sequencing is plainly insane, seesawing between two equally manic moods: “Everything is totally going to be fine!!!” and “This plane is going down and we’re all going to die!!!”

    Tusk took thirteen months to make, and was the first record to amass production costs of over a million dollars. It was called self-indulgent, and it is. Legends abound regarding the details of its composition and recording. Nicks described their space in Studio D as having been adorned with “shrunken heads and leis and Polaroids and velvet pillows and saris and sitars and all kinds of wild and crazy instruments, and the tusks on the console, like living in an African burial ground.” Everyone agrees Buckingham was losing it a little—that he was chasing something (artistic greatness? avant-garde credibility?) and pursuing it wildly, haphazardly, like a crazed housecat stalking a black fly about the living room. Did he really have a drum set installed in his bathroom so he could play while on his toilet? (More reasonable minds have suggested he merely liked the acoustics in there.)

    One solid argument against Tusk—though it could also be levied against Rumours—is that it lacks narrative coherence, in part because it features three songwriters (Nicks, Buckingham, and McVie), each working in their own distinct style. Still, while Nicks and McVie contributed some truly lovely tracks—“Sara,” “Beautiful Child,” “Think About Me”—the record clearly belongs to Buckingham, who wrote nearly half its songs, insisted upon its scope, and is its unquestionable spiritual center, the hamster on its wheel. The engineer Ken Caillat described Buckingham as “a maniac” during the sessions. He said it without equivocation. “The first day, I set the studio up as usual. Then he said, ‘Turn every knob 180 degrees from where it is now and see what happens.’ He’d tape microphones to the studio floor and get into a sort of push-up position to sing. Early on, he came in and he’d freaked out in the shower and cut off all his hair with nail scissors. He was stressed.”

    At one point, Buckingham insisted that the band rent out Dodgers Stadium, and arranged to have the 112-piece U.S.C. Marching Band back them on the title track (his bandmates went along with this; none of the group’s foundational romantic relationships were intact, but Tusk still couldn’t have been made by people who didn’t trust one another implicitly). “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? Why don’t you tell me who’s on the phone?” Buckingham and Nicks chant, their voices paranoid. Buried somewhere in there is a riff that could have sold a zillion cassingles, had this been 1977. But it wasn’t.

    Though Tusk’s most memorable tracks are also its strangest (like “The Ledge,” a manic, pitter-pattering kiss-off in which the band’s signature harmonies are overridden by a guitar that’s been tuned down and turned up), there are a handful of songs that harken back to Rumours’ rich palatability. “Save Me A Place” plays like an extension, at least lyrically, of “Go Your Own Way,” in which Buckingham begrudges his lover’s unwillingness to grab what he’s half-offering her.  A lot of Buckingham’s lyrics from the late ‘70s seem to simultaneously admit trepidation and cast him as the aggrieved party; he seems, in an endearing way, oblivious to his own caveats, or how they might dissuade another person. “Guess I want to be alone, and I guess I need to be amazed/Save me a place, I’ll come running if you love me today,” he sings on “Save Me A Place.” He later described the song as vulnerable. “None of us had the luxury of distance to get closure… It’s about a feeling that’s been laid off to one side and maybe not been fully dealt with, sadness and a sense of loss.” It captures the wildness of recovery: what happens when love dissipates, and you have to find a new thing to believe in? What if that thing is work?

    Buckingham funneled all of his disorientation into these songs. Tusk is, more than anything else, a document of that feeling and that process—of bewilderment turning into ambition writ large. What happens when a complicated, wounded person grows exhausted and unimpressed by the commercial medium he took to naturally, maybe even instinctively, but no longer believes is important or curative? It’s not hard to imagine the voice of Buckingham’s internal foil during these sessions, whispering seedily, naysaying each new melody, pushing for more: “This is fine, but it’s not Art.” I don’t know anyone who cares about making things who hasn’t at some point lobbed the exact same challenge at themselves: Can’t you do better? Hasn’t someone done this before? Haven’t you done this before? You get the sense of a broken-down person trying to rebuild himself. He is diligent about getting the architecture right.

    All of which makes “I Know I’m Not Wrong”—the first song the band started recording for Tusk, and the last one to be finished – even more poignant. When Tusk was reissued, in 2015, the expanded release included six (!) different “I Know I’m Not Wrong” demos, all recorded by Buckingham in his home studio. The chorus is a declaration of intention, of confidence: “Don’t blame me/Please be strong/I know I’m not wrong.” It’s not a thing a person gets to say very often. But Tusk isn’t a record that gets made more than once.

    Amanda Petrusich / Pitchfork / July 17, 2016