The story that goes along with these photos from the man that took them jps721
"This group of Fleetwood Mac shots aren't my last concert shots, but they were easily my best ones. It wasn't long after this that cameras became restricted. These were taken in Madison Square Garden on June 30th 1977...right at a huge peak for these guys on their Rumors Tour. I had seen the concert advertised in the NY Times and placed a mail order for a ticket. Timing IS everything...my order arrived just when it had been decided to play a second show the night after. Timing got me a front row seat...I was blown away. So I arrive and get to my seat and realize that I'll be sitting about 20 feet from where Stevie Nicks will be standing...OMG, this is gonna be good. And then I notice out of the corner of my eye that there were two very official looking guys standing in a nearby aisle, checking me out. Of course, I wasn't too conspicuous with 2 cameras...one bearing the 200mm tele and motor drive. They talked for a minute and looked at me, but no one came over and told me to leave or surrender the gear...but I was waiting. Finally the show started and I felt OK then. So these are the creme de la creme for me."
Well this is interesting... I wonder if she's speaking about this footage? If so, it's cool to know that it's intact somewhere and by the sounds of it, is being worked on. Michael Collins is also the one who shot the documentary footage that will be released with the Rumours re-release later this month.
Ringing in the New Year With Fleetwood Mac
by Jane Heller Huffington Post
I've never been a big fan of New Year's Eve. There's so much pressure to do something out-of-this-world fabulous, not to mention have someone out-of-this-world fabulous to do it with. I remember prix fixed restaurant dinners that weren't worth the money and too-big parties whose forced gaiety made everyone feel tense and champagne hangovers that wrecked me for days. And I remember occasions when my husband was suffering from flare-ups from Crohn's disease and was too ill to celebrate at all.
My favorite memories are of quiet evenings with him and a few close friends, and this past New Year's Eve was a case in point. He was in better-than-usual health and good spirits, so out we went.
Our hosts were Martha and Michael Collins, who had lost their house in the 2008 wildfire that destroyed over 200 homes in the Santa Barbara area. After living in a trailer for four years, Martha and Michael rose from the ashes, literally, and moved last month into the spectacular new house they built on the same site -- a meticulously-crafted beacon of resilience. Some people would have been thrown by the very notion of losing everything (short of the clothes on their backs and their laptops), but Martha and Michael thrived, their marriage and partnership more solid than ever.
We were in the midst of their scrumptious meal when Michael, a filmmaker whose specialty has been chronicling the lives and music of our most accomplished rock 'n' roll artists, mentioned that among the very few material possessions he'd been able to grab before a wall of flames drove him and Martha out of their house was the documentary footage he'd shot 35 years ago of Fleetwood Mac's 1977 Japanese tour to promote their "Rumours" album.
"I'm finishing up the documentary now," he told us.
"The public has never seen Fleetwood Mac like this before," Martha chimed in. "They were so young and it was such an innocent time, and the music is beyond great since they were in their prime."
I put down my knife and fork (not easy when your hosts have prepared a feast that would rival any restaurant), and said, "Can we see this documentary? Like, tonight?"
Michael hesitated. "It's still raw -- a work in progress. But I guess I could show you clips."
I was not taking "I guess" for an answer. Fleetwood Mac has always been one of my favorite bands and on this particular New Year's Eve, when I'd felt barraged by news of Kanye West, the Gangnam Style guy and Rihanna's latest Twitpic, I was so in the mood for a little boomer music.
Michael obliged. We adjourned to the Collins's living room with its 50" flat screen, professional-grade sound system and comfy chairs, and watched avidly as cameras swooped in on the youthful faces of Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham and Christine and John McVie. (If you liked the close-ups in Les Mis, you'll love this film.)
If you are interested in our Fleetwood Mac download deals, you're going to love our Deal of the Week - an original 1977 Fleetwood Mac poster from a stop on their Rumours Tour at Oakland Coliseum Stadium for a Day on the Green concert! All week long, you'll save 50% on this beautiful oversized poster designed by Randy Tuten. Don't stop, thinking about getting this poster. Don't stop, it'll soon be yours!
Poster size: 16 1/2" x 28"
Poster Price: was $185 now $92.
Fleetwood Mac had released Rumors earlier in the year and was half way through their 1977 tour when they played this show at Oakland Coliseum Stadium. Bill Graham had the band headline the May 7th Day on the Green show.
Another amazing slice of Mac history making it's way online for the first time ever!
This never before seen video has Christine McVie taking the spotlight with "You Make Loving Fun". This is the 4th video in a series of videos that have just made there way online in the last few weeks, taken from a show in Sydney Australia, November, 1977.
Cool snapshot of Fleetwood Mac in simpler times... It's amazing listening and watching this knowing there are only the 5 of them on stage creating this sound. No back up singers, no extra guitar players, or extra percussion players... just the 5 fireflies.
Fleetwood Mac performing live in Australia on the Rumours tour, November, 1977. Another magnificent unseen piece of Mac history revealed for the first time!! It's so great to see footage like this after all these years so well preserved... With multiple camera angles & close ups it doesn't get much better then this if you are a Mac fan... This is raw and real as it happened! The stage lighting back in the day wasn't all that bright so the video does suffer from being a little dark, but it does brighten up in various places through out especially on the close-ups...
Once again, a big thanks to the youtube uploader for sharing this 34 year old footage!... Yes! 34 years. Hard to believe, makes you wonder what else is floating around out there!
In case you missed them, the other videos from this night...
WOW! Well this stopped me in my tracks... And this almost makes me cry the quality is so great!....
FLEETWOOD MAC - Rumours Tour
Sydney, Australia November, 1977
"GO YOUR OWN WAY"
Video description:
"One of many songs Fleetwood Mac played from their fabulous 'Rumors' Album. Recorded at ROCKARENA in November 1977 in Sydney, I was the OB supervisor of the concert and had the pleasure of meeting the band when they came to the OB van at the end of the concert to watch the performance. We were not allowed to take an audio feed from the desk so we set up 2 shotgun mikes at the speaker towers so think of it as a 'live' concert. I have done a bit of video editing on it to make it more presentable.
I have many stories from this concert; enough to write a book! This video is from my 'never been seen on TV' vault and I thought it was about time I shared it with others.
Do you want more?"
Uhm... YES WE DO Mr. OB Supervisor!
Go to youtube leave your comments and let it be known you'd like to see more footage from this show... What a treasure this is!
I saw Fleetwood Mac open a stadium show back in ‘75, before Anaheim had bleachers in the outfield, back when the Angels sucked and no band ever emerged from Orange County.
It was a summer of stadium shows. Today only Taylor Swift can sell 50,000 tickets, anybody else who says they can lies, or plays with a plethora of other acts. But back in the day, these giant clusterfucks were de rigueur. How many Days On The Green did Bill Graham have?
And I knew the act as a blues band. And there was that great latter day record, from "Kiln House", featuring Christine McVie on harmony vocals, "Station Man", which I heard intermittently on the radio and cranked back when you couldn’t hear your favorite music on demand unless you owned it, back when being a rock chick didn’t mean showing your tits but being so cool as to be a goddess, who was the last true rock chick, Chrissie Hynde? She’s STILL cool!
And that afternoon Christine sat at the keyboard and played my favorite new track, "Over My Head", and it sure sounded nice, but I did not buy the album, because I wasn’t buying anything, I was on the road, in L.A. for the summer, between winters in Salt Lake.
Medieval banquets, card tables full of cocaine… spoiled ’70s superstars Fleetwood Mac lived up to their mantra, writes promoter Michael Chugg in his new memoir
Michael Chugg was only fifteen years old when he began managing and promoting music in his hometown of Launceston, Tasmania. That was in 1962. Fast forward to the present, and "Chuggi", as he is affectionately known, has been a pioneer in bringing the newest, biggest and baddest musical acts to Australia.
These include The Police, Frank Sinatra, Liza Minelli and Sammy Davis Jr., Fleetwood Mac, R.E.M., Bon Jovi, Guns N Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kiss, Pearl Jam, and many more. Chuggi has developed a reputation as a hard-arse, often walking on stage to shout down the crowd or pull the talent into line. He also never minces words writing in shocking detail about what goes on behind closed doors when big international acts come to town.
This honest, open and blunt expose of the underbelly of Australian music events is both hilarious and fascinating.
Released in Australia: 01/10/2010
These are pages from The Weekend Australian Magazine September 25-26th edition
Never going back again | The Australian:"MICHAEL Chugg was an up-and-coming 30-year-old music promoter when his employer, Paul Dainty, gave him the gig of looking after the now legendary Fleetwood Mac tour in 1977."
Just as the band’s recently released album, Rumours, raised the bar for pop albums (it would go on to sell 40 million copies), the corresponding tour would similarly set new standards for rock and roll excess, especially in Australia.
“The promoter’s rep will meet the band’s tour manager in the car park of Sydney Airport with two ounces of cocaine,” was one of the first instructions Chugg received from Fleetwood Mac’s management. It set the scene for the rest of the tour, if not Chugg’s ensuing career.
Chugg was not a coke user – not then, anyway – and enlisted a roadie to score for him. The band had a crew of 67 people, which meant that they were able to float from one gig to the next with only their cocaine-fuelled performances to worry about.
Despite the lavish demands the band put on catering – extensive banquets accompanied by French champagne and Courviosier – Mick Fleetwood and his colleagues were never seen consuming food. “All of them were too wired to eat,” Chugg recalls. “The excess was outrageous. There was just too much coke and too much weed.”
Bill sent this photo in yesterday - a sample of some of his snap shots that he took that night. Back in '77 Bill was just in his early 20's and enjoyed taking concert photos, b/w and colour... Nice results for an amateur!!
One of his photos was also submitted to the Seattle Music Experience museum, the museum was looking for photos from local concerts. I posted about that photo back in January of this year - here. Bill confirmed that the date the "Rhiannon Fire" photo was taken was in fact 1977 - from this same Seattle show.
Location: Sept 1977 at the Seattle Center Coliseum
In the late 70's I worked at Tower Records Tacoma & Seattle. Used to take concert photos from the main floor. In those days, it was rare to have seats on the main floor, only festival seating. And you could take in cameras. I had a Minolta SRT 102 with a telephoto lens. This photo of Stevie is one of my favorites because in the early days when she sang "Rhiannon", she had so much passion and fire in her eyes. Today, it's a much tamer song. But to see her in the photo with all that emotion, it's what made her a star! I absolutely love Stevie Nicks!
As Oberhausen awaits Fleetwood Mac to take the stage in a couple of hours we take you back to Fleetwood Mac's "Comeback To Europe" Tour April 14, 1977....
The last concert held at Arizona Stadium was headlined by Fleetwood Mac, which was touring behind the release of a little-known gem called "Rumours."
Described as the hottest band in the country at the time, Fleetwood Mac shared the stage with superstar artists Kenny Loggins and the Marshall Tucker Band, along with local band Arizona.
An estimated 67,000 people jammed the football field and nearly filled the stands that hot Saturday night on Aug. 27, 1977, to make for the largest crowd of rock fans Arizona had ever seen.
Tickets were $8 to $10, and the show grossed some $430,000. The Arizona division of the American Heart Association was the major beneficiary.
Still, authorities estimated hundreds of people got in free in the crush that ensued once the gates opened. The surging crowd knocked a deputy down a flight of stairs, and a 16-year-old girl was trampled and suffered an injured elbow.
Fans had started camping outside the stadium at 6 p.m. the night before, 23 hours before the music was scheduled to begin.
The concert ended about 11:30 p.m. after more than six hours of music. Fleetwood Mac played for more than two hours, and an Arizona Daily Star reviewer said Stevie Nicks' vocals and the guitar of Lindsey Buckingham stole the show.
Large clouds of marijuana smoke hovered above the crowd, along with sporadic flares and firecrackers.
Overall, authorities called the concert a peaceful event and nowhere near the mayhem they had prepared for.
Afterward, Chuck Raetzman, UA's superintendent of grounds, labor, maintenance and transportation at the time, was quoted as saying the field suffered no severe damage.
He added that if any part of the field was still faded by the time the Wildcats' televised home-opener rolled around, it would be painted green for television. The center of the field reportedly suffered the most damage from "compaction."
Concern over Arizona Stadium's field was one of the main reasons ASUA moved the stage to the sidelines, off the playing field, for Wednesday's performance.
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