REVIEW: Fleetwood Mac Live in East Rutherford, NJ March 21, 2009

FLEETWOOD MAC EXPLORES ITS PAST
by Jay Lustig

The Star-Ledger
March 22, 2009

At Fleetwood Mac's Saturday night Izod Center concert, singer-guitarist Lindsey Buckingham talked about getting together in January, after several years apart, to rehearse for the current tour. Band members told each other "Let's just have fun," he said.

At the Meadowlands, Buckingham, seemed to be doing just that, belting out songs, taking long, flamboyant guitar solos and stomping around the stage. Drummer Mick Fleetwood also seemed to be enjoying himself immensely -- every time the video camera caught his face in a closeup, he was smiling like a mischievous schoolboy who just got away with an outrageous prank. Bassist John McVie didn't seem to be having fun, or experiencing much emotion of any kind. Then again, he's been a stoic figure throughout his 40-plus years with the band, so it would have been foolish to expect anything else of him.

The biggest problem with the show was that singer Stevie Nicks, who co-fronts the band with Buckingham, didn't seem to get the fun memo. Granted, most of the songs she sang, such as "Dreams," "Sara," "Gypsy" and "Rhiannon," are low-key affairs, powered by subtle hooks and an air of mystery. But she sang them so half-heartedly they didn't exert their usual charm. It wasn't until the second half of the show, on songs like "Stand Back" and "Gold Dust Woman," that she seemed fully engaged.

Nicks' diffidence didn't kill the show: the repertoire the band has assembled over the years is too indestructible for that. But it kept a solid show from becoming transcendent.

The band's history goes back to the British blues-rock explosion of the '60s, But it wasn't until the mid-'70s, when the lineup settled on Fleetwood, McVie, Buckingham, Nicks and McVie's then-wife Christine McVie, that Fleetwood Mac became a hit-making machine. This is the band's second tour without Christine McVie, who retired from touring in 1998.

It's also a rare example of a Fleetwood Mac tour that doesn't follow the release of a new studio album. The band isn't necessarily done with recording, though. "We do not have a new album to promote -- yet," said Buckingham, as part of his "Let's just have fun" speech.

The four band members, who range in age from 59 (Buckingham) to 63 (John McVie), were joined by three other musicians and three backing vocalists at the Meadowlands. A sped-up beat added some urgency to "Monday Morning," while "Never Going Back Again" was slowed down to a melodramatic crawl. Singing together, Buckingham and Nicks turned Christine McVie's "Say You Love Me" into a lovers' duet, and Nicks sang McVie's parts on "Don't Stop." The band reached back to one of its earlier incarnations for the explosive blues-rock song "Oh Well" (written by the band's original frontman, Peter Green).

Buckingham shined on "Oh Well," as well as several other songs that gave him the opportunity to stretch out on guitar ("Second Hand News," "I'm So Afraid," "Go Your Own Way"). Mick Fleetwood also took a long solo during the first encore, "World Turning," though he is really at his best offering propulsive support to the rest of the band, not pounding away on his own.

Since the band doesn't have a new album to take up slots in the setlist, it was able to explore some past non-hits. Buckingham resurrected "I Know I'm Not Wrong," a song from the band's 1979 "Tusk" album that brims with manic energy. Nicks also went back to "Tusk" for "Storms," a song that was as calm and pensive as most of her other material, despite lyrics like "Never have I been a blue calm sea/I have always been a storm."

The band closed with "Silver Springs," a Nicks-written song inspired by her failed '70s romance with Buckingham. At times in the past, Nicks and Buckingham have seemed to relive their own stormy history as they performed this song together -- Nicks snarling out the angry lyrics, Buckingham answering with screaming guitar riffs. But on this night, they barely even looked at each other.

They're still in the same band. But in many ways, they seem to live in different worlds now.

REVIEW: Lindsey Buckingham Still Snorting Lines of Something... Fleetwood Mac Live in NYC

FLEETWOOD MAC - MADISON SQUARE GARDEN

Blender.com
by Jonah Weiner
(4 Stars)

When Fleetwood Mac calls a tour “Unleashed: The Hits,” it prompts two questions: No. 1. Will I go to the bathroom during “Dreams?” “Go Your Own Way?” “Tusk?” “Say You Love Me?” The only answer is, I will not go to the bathroom at all, or I will go to the bathroom during my pants. This is the band that put out Rumours, after all – the Thriller of dentist’s waiting rooms! (That is meant as a very big compliment). Question No. 2. “Unleashed?” What leash are they referring to? Mick Fleetwood’s crisp, clockwork drumming? Christine McVie’s airy, lovely, shmaltz, absent this go-round? The need to promote a new album and thus fill a set list with the new, unfamiliar, and unwelcome?

There is no new album on the way, which means they started last night’s Madison Square Garden set with “Monday Morning,” closed it with “Silver Springs,” and played nary a whatsit in between.

Some revelations:

• The band is loud. Surprisingly, rockingly, putting-peers-half-their-age-to-shame-ingly loud.

• Since the mid-‘70s arrival of Cali songbirds Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks propelled the group from Brit bluesoid also-rans to superstars, you don’t appreciate quite so vividly on record that Mick Fleetwood is the band’s secret weapon. Last night he was great at putting the downbeat where you weren’t expecting it, and whacking his sticks with a hungry clobber without losing the in-the-pocket snap he’s famous for.

• He was also wearing the weird testicle-ball thingies he wears on the cover of Rumours. And sans culottes. Made out of velvet.

• Buckingham has probably quit cocaine by this point in his life. Yet he is still very thin, and ridiculously energized: Every other band member took a break but him. He howled when it wasn’t entirely appropriate, sometimes nowhere near a mic. He is clearly still snorting lines of something. We are guessing crushed wheatgrass.

• Stevie Nicks still twirls across a stage with a lace shawl draped around her shoulders better than anyone else in the business.

• The whole “I’m getting older, too” refrain from “Landslide” gained a new power now that Stevie is thirty-odd years older than when she first sang it. She delivered it with a moving, impossible combination of verve and woundedness – it was one of the night’s biggest applause lines.

• John McVie, stoic in a black-vest-and-white-button-down combo, said not a word, hardly looked up. This is only fair, since your average rhythm section has room for only one extrovert with eyes the size of emu eggs and a penchant for skipping around the stage and cackling.

• Kirsten Dunst and someone we are pretty sure was an Olsen sister, both in attendance, are big Fleetwood Mac fans. Including your Blender correspondent, that made three people in the building who weren’t in college when, like, Millard Fillmore was president. That was so long ago, I’m not even sure Millard Fillmore is actually the name of a president.

• They didn’t play “Beautiful Child.” Sniff.

• Roving merch people were actually selling little tambourines with a sticker of the four current touring Mac members – for $40. Meaning if you bought one and two of the good-seats tickets (see pic right), you were shelling out well over $400 for the evening. (And that assumes you skipped the $13 sushi rolls for sale at concession stands).

Let’s make sure you got that: Next to hot dogs and Bud Light, MSG was selling Sushi. We did not try it, because, ew.

PHOTOS: Fleetwood Mac in New York City "Nicks twirls as the rest of the members of Fleetwood Mac rock on"

HERNAN HERNANDEZ PHOTOS OF MSG (more photos)

LIZBALLER PHOTOS (more pics)

Third Estate Sunday Review: Stevie Nicks, rocking it her way

Third Estate Sunday Review: Stevie Nicks, rocking it her way

"Nicely Done" MICK FLEETWOOD BLUES BAND "Blue Again" (Review)

The Mick Fleetwood Blues Band, “Blue Again” (SLG).
Buffalo News

Though it is now emblematic of the dulcet tones of ’70s California pop, Fleetwood Mac was born a blues band in the latter ’60s, one whose influence was everywhere in the arenas and stadiums of ’70s rock. Originally, drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, and guitarists Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer sprung from the same soil that sprouted Led Zeppelin, Free and the Jeff Beck Group. Tunes like “Rattlesnake Shake,” “The Green Manalishi With the Two-Pronged Crown” and “Black Magic Woman” were vehicles for Green’s gorgeously understated solos, beneath which the Fleetwood-McVie rhythm section toiled like tireless journeymen, shoveling coal in the engine room for all they were worth. It’s that Fleetwood Mac that Mick Fleetwood celebrates with “Blue Again,” a live album that ably documents the fire and finesse of his touring band, led by another Mac alum, guitarist Rick Vito. The disc centers on songs Green wrote— “Looking For Somebody,” “Stop Messin’ Around,” “Rattlesnake Shake,” “Albatross” and the like —and is as much a tribute to Green as it is a paean to the music Fleetwood fell in love with as a teenager with a drum fetish. Nicely done. ★★★( J. M.)

Stevie Nicks, The Soundstage Sessions (Review)

The Independent

Reviewed by Simon Price

Stevie Nicks' voice is one of the musical wonders of the world – she's almost alone in making the concept of adult oriented rock seem enticing and not a soul-crushing bore – so any opportunity to hear it in full flight, such as this televised concert, is welcome.

Though slightly ravaged, her voice remains a miraculous thing, able to make even a Dave Matthews Band song tolerable ("Crash"). Nicks's stripped-down versions of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" and "Sara" are things of traffic-stopping beauty.

Pick of the album: Where everyone would love to drown: 'Sara'

NICKS IN NEW YORK CITY - CD SIGNING AT BARNES AND NOBLE

MEET NICKS AT CD/DVD SIGNING

According to Page Six of the New York Post STEVIE NICKS will be at Barnes and Noble Union Square on March 31st - the day her "Live in Chicago" DVD and CD are being released to meet fans and sign copies.

Post Mention

THAT on March 31, a lot of Stevie Nicks' devotees are expected at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square for the rock goddess' first in-store signing of her "Live in Chicago" DVD.

Barnes and Noble:
Union Square
33 East 17th Street
New York, NY 10003
212-253-0810

7pm

REVIEW: FLEETWOOD MAC - NEW YORK TIMES

Tamed by Time: 

Ex-Lovers, Hit Songs
By JON CARAMANICA
NY TIMES March 20, 2009

House lights still dimmed, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks came out onto the Madison Square Garden stage on Thursday night holding hands, then took their positions at opposite sides of the stage and got into character: Ms. Nicks the romantic mystic, Mr. Buckingham the petulant cad. At points over the next two hours Ms. Nicks would cede the stage to her former lover, disappearing backstage as if she couldn’t bear to watch, or couldn’t be bothered. Probably the latter.

This is Fleetwood Mac, the golden years, catering to two different constituencies. Mr. Buckingham, with his extravagant gestures, indulgent guitar playing and general air of preening, was trying very hard to keep a flickering flame alive — a panting salesman. Ms. Nicks, on the other hand, appeared content with laurel-resting, coasting along on the familiar: the shawls, the twirls, the fringe dangling from her microphone and, occasionally, the piercingly cloying vocals. A screen with scrolling words — lyrics, presumably — sat at her feet.

As ever, the rhythm section — the drummer Mick Fleetwood and the bass player John McVie, for whom, together, the band is named — soldiered on like exceedingly tolerant parents. Mr. Fleetwood, ponytail intact and wearing short pants that brought to mind plus fours, played with force, if not grace, and Mr. McVie succeeded by not drawing notice to himself. In a band so obsessed with role-playing, such restraint qualifies as innovation.

“There is no new album to promote — yet,” Mr. Buckingham teased early in the night. But even the most rabid Fleetwood Mac fans probably don’t crave the distraction of new songs and were perfectly content with this show, designed as a hits revue and sticking closely to the band’s self-titled 1975 album and its follow-up two years later, the tragicomic “Rumours,” one of the biggest-selling albums ever. (These were the first with the band’s essential lineup, which included the Buckingham-Nicks combo and Christine McVie, who no longer tours with the band.) Here, particularly on the breakup songs from “Rumours,” Ms. Nicks and Mr. Buckingham still had a touch of zest, making for rare moments of lightness. (Mr. Buckingham also shined on a theatrically unhinged version of “Go Insane,” from his solo album of the same name.)

Mostly, though, the band sounded desiccated. On “I’m So Afraid,” Mr. Buckingham’s guitar solo, which he accompanied with hoots and hollers, was excruciatingly long, and excruciatingly dull. On “World Turning,” Mr. Fleetwood saw him, but thankfully did not raise him, with his own numbing solo.

And just as it did 30 years ago, the band succumbed to an obstacle of its own creation, and its name was “Tusk.” That 1979 album, driven by Mr. Buckingham’s experimental impulses, was an overreach, burdensome and needlessly decadent. Here, after the band played the title track and “Sara” midset, it never fully recovered. Introducing “Storms,” from that album, Ms. Nicks said the band chose it for this tour because they had never played it live before, though the turgid rendition that followed made it clear why that had been the case.

Unexpectedly, the night’s most invigorating moments came when the band stepped out from its own long shadow. “I Know I’m Not Wrong,” a song from “Tusk” played early in the night, sounded like the Replacements, as if the band had just discovered punk. And “Oh Well,” an electric blues from before Mr. Buckingham and Ms. Nicks joined the group, was a welcome nod to the band’s early history as a tribute to something bigger than itself.

Fleetwood Mac performs on Saturday at the Izod Center in East Rutherford, N.J.

NICKS RULES OUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY

FLEETWOOD MAC SET TO PLAY IRELAND

Rumours have been persistent about Fleetwood Mac playing Glastonbury this year in the UK, and with news today being reported by the Irish Times that Fleetwood Mac are set to play Ireland at the "Electric Picnic Music and Arts Festival" , can there still be doubt out there that Fleetwood Mac will be heading to Europe this Summer?

The festival is held at Stradbally, Co Laois.

FULL ARTICLE

REVIEW: Fleetwood Mac at MSG in New York City

Fleetwood Mac
Madison Square Garden
The Village Voice
by Chris Ryan
photo by David Atlas

It was sometime during Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham's delicate duet performance of the lullabye-like "Never Going Back Again" at last night's Madison Square Garden Fleetwood Mac show when someone behind me opined, "They shouldn't even be allowed to fucking play these hallowed fuckin' halls."

This self-appointed curator of Madison Square Garden, a man who could be best described as what would've happened to Turtle from Entourage had he never gotten out of Queens, was dismayed at the similarity of last night's set to previous Mac gigs he had seen. And while I wouldn't exactly put it the same way, you could empathize with his frustration.

Tonight's most recent incarnation of Fleetwood Mac, a Stevie-John-Mick-Lindsey-and-five-dudes-playing-backup-in-the-shadows set-up, was, according to ticket stubs, on the Unleashed: The Hits 2009 Tour. But despite a set list of nothing but straight-'70s-FM-God-Body-Heat-Rocks this wasn't easy listening.

Fleetwood Mac's well-known extra-musical narrative is about the strong personalities, big demons and contentious conflicts that haunted the band. And their records, especially the classic run from Fleetwood Mac through Tango In The Night, are testaments to the band members' collective ability to overcome their egos and all the upheaval in their lives and make a seamless, often beautiful, sound together. They really were a collective; imbuing any song--be it a Stevie, Lindsey, or Christine--with a sound only the group could produce.

So it was kind of sad watching them balkanize their set in such a decided way: making their performances celebrations of individual achievement rather than group harmony, pummeling the real trophywives of the NYC in the audience with drum and guitar solos, and badly misjudging the pacing and momentum of the set.

The early part of the night peaked with the band's most unselfconscious performance: a blinding take on "I Know I'm Not Wrong" from Tusk that had motorik and sounded more like The Clean than anything else. After a marching-band-free "Tusk," the band went all an-intimate-evening-with... and played a sleepy stretch of quiet jams: "Sara," "Landslide," and the rarely-played-out "Storms."

After a punishing Turkish prison sentence of the Peter-Green-era blues explosion, "Oh Well," and some Mick Fleetwood drum-solo/scream therapy (enlivened only by a great version of Nicks' solo new-wave classic "Stand Back"), the group came into the home stretch: "Go Your Own Way," then break, then "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." As people started to file out, Turtle piped up, "They got one more; they're gonna do 'Silver Springs.'" And, like clockwork, the band filed out to play the gorgeous mid-tempo break-up song, originally left off Rumors. On this very last song, Fleetwood Mac, playing a tune about tearing yourself apart, actually sounded the most together they had all evening. And despite knowing what was coming all night long, even the self-appointed guardians of these hallowed halls--as they tipped back their white Yankees hats and teared up a little--seemed to finally feel like they got what they paid for.

REVIEW: Fleetwood Mac at Madison Square Garden Unleashed Tour

Fleetwood Mac's Golden Oldies are Aging Just Fine

New York Daily News
BY JIM FARBER
DAILY NEWS MUSIC CRITIC
Photo: Loud/Getty

Family dynamics never cease to fascinate us - especially ones with histories as incestuous as Fleetwood Mac's.

It should surprise no one, then, that the band's show at Madison Square Garden last night proved as musically vital, and as alive with subtext, as ever. This, despite the fact that the band had no new music to play, instead drawing most of the material from wells filled more than 30 years ago.

Opening with 1975's jubilant "Monday Morning," the band's remaining four main members wove through a two hour and 20 minute set that functioned as a nearly unbroken greatest hits medley.

The current "Unleashed" tour represents the band's second since singer/songwriter Christine McVie bailed. So, naturally, the defection has thrown a harder light on the complex interplay between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.

Their songs threaded in and out of each other at last night's show just as the lives of these former lovers have. "Gypsy," Nicks' tale of emotional independence, played off Buckingham's admission of neurotic excess, "Go Insane" - together serving as an on-going public confession of their mutual needs and deficiencies.

In "The Chain," the two harmonized about family bonds in a way that communicated less loyalty than threat. "You'll never break the chain," they brayed at each other. Consider these guys the original "reality show."

The loss of McVie has robbed the group - which also features John McVie and Mick Fleetwood - of its most diplomatic voice. And she was missed on the few numbers that originally featured her, like "Say You Love Me."

But as a happy consequence, the band rocked harder and found more room for Buckingham's fiendish guitar work. His obsessive arpeggios gave a richly tactile feel to "Big Love," while in "I'm So Afraid," he mined deep blues hues.

The group kept things frisky by tweaking the arrangements and the harmonies in many songs.

Buckingham delivered some with newly emphatic inflections.

But the night's emotional highlight struck a tender note. When Nicks sang her song of age and humility, "Landslide," she read the line "I'm getting older, too," with an acceptance that showed not an ounce of regret.

Some families, it seems, only grow more sure with age.