Thursday, December 01, 2005

STEVIE NICKS: LONG DISTANCE WINNER - SURVIVING THE 70S

Photo via Goldduststevie
By Andy Capper, Stevie Nicks
Dec 1 2005

I'm 56 now, but music still has the same effect on me as when I was 15. Every so often, I'll hear a couple of songs that will just kill me and make me go instantly to my desk to write, and then straight to the piano to compose. That feeling is something that's never gone away and I feel really blessed by that.

I know some people say they used to write better when they were younger, but I feel the greatest writing for me is yet to come. I'm always working on new material and I'm always inspired. At the moment, I'm going between preparing for a short residency at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas and composing a series of songs based on the books of Rhiannon, these Welsh legends that I really love. They're such beautiful stories. It's what the old Welsh people left behind to teach future generations about how to raise their children and how to deal with relationships—how to run their lives, basically.

Another thing that inspires me in my music at the moment is my niece Jesse. She's 13 but she's an inch taller than me, with black hair and blue eyes. Sometimes when I'm running on my treadmill and listening to music on my CD player, I'll be singing and howling along while Jesse's in the same room and I'll make her listen to how the singer is singing. Jesse was with me when I wrote four songs for the last Fleetwood Mac album, and she even got to sing on the title track, "Say You Will." That was fun.

It's not that I want to push her into music. I would never do that. The arts are not something that you can push on anybody. People either have it or they don't. I really believe that. I would say to girls who are thinking about getting into making music that the most important thing to do is to learn how to play an instrument well. If you're a girl who can play, you can always get a job. You can play keyboards or guitar in a band no problem. Since you're a girl, you're even more special.

But making it all last, you know, having longevity, is another story. The thing that's kept me going all these years is absolutely "the music." It sounds like a cliché, but the music is way more personally motivating than being in a band. Yes, I was in a band, but it's not like Lindsey Buckingham and I wrote songs together. We never did. We were very, very separate in that. He was a very good producer for my music but that was that.

I was very selfish and was not willing to give up my art for a family and a husband. Now, at this point in my life, I am really glad, because I see so many of the people that did get married and did have relationships—they're all divorced, they're all miserable, their children are miserable, and it's like I'm thinking to myself: "You made the right decision."

I guess for me, as a woman, there was nobody who would tolerate my lifestyle. Even the richest of rock stars had reason to be jealous of me. The poorest of people, the waiter, the great men in my life, it hit them all very hard.

There was the waiter. There were the doormats and the security guards with some other famous bands. There were all these really beautiful and sweet men who have been in my life and then there's the rich, famous men, but at some point or another, my life was too much for ALL of them. They started to make demands. Like, "Where are you going? And what do you mean you're coming home from your tour but you're stopping over in England for a month?"

That kind of thing doesn't go over well. The long black limousine drives up the long path to your house to pick you up and your boyfriend is waving goodbye to you. It's never fun to be left. It wouldn't be for me.

I had my chances but I would never marry a rock star either. Because you can never trust them. I know, I have watched them while I was out there. There was an unspoken society, which Christine McVie and I always stayed completely away from. We didn't really ever know what the rest of the boys in our band did, but we knew what boys in other bands did because that gossip got to us. Whatever went on in Fleetwood Mac was kept from us. We didn't wanna know anyway. As a woman who lived in that world of groupies and rock and roll excess, I can understand why the men do what they do. But I don't have to like it.

I swear on my mom's grave (and she's not even dead yet) that Christine and I didn't go out and have one-night stands while we were on tour. We never met someone in a coffee shop and then went back and slept with them, ever. But the guys would. And in the rest of the world it happens all the time and it's not a big deal. It still happens now with all the new rock and roll bands.

Whatever went on—and plenty of things did—I'm just grateful that I've had so many beautiful memories in this life of music. I would say the most memorable day I ever had was when I was 29 and we played the first ever "Day on the Green" concert in San Francisco. It was Peter Frampton headlining. We were on before him. The concert was a tribute to the success of Peter's Frampton Comes Alive album, so the promoter Bill Graham had built a huge fairy tale castle on top of this massive stadium stage. The castle was so gorgeous. It was sparkling and glittering, and it had turrets and stairs that went up on both sides. The turrets had seats, so it had this Rapunzel kind of feeling. This was the beginning of 1976, and at that point Lindsey and I had only done a small tour with Fleetwood Mac, where there were like 5,000 people per show. This audience was 75,000 people!

We had no idea what to expect. When I got there, I saw each of our dressing rooms had personalized, carved-wood signs in beautiful calligraphy with our names written on them. Of course they were just trailers, but oh what trailers they were!

The first performer was this guy named Lee Michaels. I'd lived in San Francisco, where he's from, so I was a fan of his already. I went out and hid on the side of the stage and watched the show, and then I went back and got dressed during the last half of the next act's set. When we finally got on stage to do our set, I just thought to myself: "Where would I ever want to be in the world except for this sparkling castle in front of 75,000 people?"

I was standing in the middle of the stage thinking, "This is the big time!"

Even better than that was that my best friend and I got to go up the stairs on the side of the castle and sit in those little princess chairs and watch Peter Frampton play live. Peter's an amazing guitarist and back then he had that shoulder length golden hair. He was so gorgeous. He looked like a king. So to sit up there and watch him from that vantage point was just wonderful. When the show was over there was a huge party in Frampton's hotel suite. It was just a magnificent rock and roll moment.

At the party, everybody was drunk. But I can remember it like it was yesterday, so that means it was fun. Everybody was drinking wine, and there were wine spritzers there because of all the English people. It was a beautiful thing. At that point the serious drugs hadn't kicked in yet.
So yes, some bad days came later, but there's always been good days too. All of it, the good and the bad, is what allows me to sit now in a house that overlooks the ocean and have complete freedom in my life. I'm just really grateful to music every day.

STEVIE NICKS AS TOLD TO ANDY CAPPER
By: Andy Capper, Stevie Nicks - Vice

Monday, April 05, 2004

CHRISTINE MCVIE WILL release In the Meantime July 27, 2004

McVie Returns With “Meantime”
Former Fleetwood Mac keyboardist to release third album



BY ANDREW DANSBY
April 5/2004
Rollingstone

CHRISTINE MCVIE WILL release In the Meantime, her first set of new songs since departing Fleetwood Mac, on July 27th. Meantime is only the singer/keyboardist’s third solo release in her almost four-decade career, and it’s the follow-up to a self-titled album issued two decades ago.

McVie’s return contradicts comments from her former Mac mates who said that she had left the music business altogether and retreated to her home in the U.K. Because Fleetwood Mac’s 2003 release Say You Will included some material from the mid- and late-Nineties, McVie’s keyboards were heard on a couple of the songs, but according to drummer Mick Fleetwood, McVie “retired” because “she doesn’t want to be in this business anymore. Her heart was in the music always, but she didn’t have her heart in what comes with it.” The group released the album as a four-piece and toured without McVie.

McVie’s departure followed a tenure of more than three decades with Fleetwood Mac, to which she contributed several of its Top Forty hits including “You Make Loving Fun” and “Say You Love Me.” Christine McVie spawned a pair of hits itself, with “Got a Hold on Me” breaking the Top Ten and “Love Will Show Us How” going Top Forty in 1984.

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

WARNER BROS. WILL reissue Fleetwood Mac‘s landmark late Seventies albums

Fleetwood Mac Dust Off Demos
Expanded reissues of late Seventies albums due in March




BY COLIN DEVENISH
January 28, 2004
Rolling Stone Magazine

WARNER BROS. WILL reissue Fleetwood Mac‘s landmark late Seventies albums Fleetwood Mac, Rumours and Tusk on March 23rd.

The expanded version of Fleetwood Mac, originally released in 1975 and the first to feature Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, will include a previously unreleased jam, along with four alternate takes of album cuts. Both Rumours (1977) and Tusk (1979) will come with a full disc of unreleased demos and outtakes.

Rumours, which has sold more than 19 million copies, has become almost as famous for its creators’ feuding as its blockbuster hits. “All of those problems and all of those drugs, and all of the fun and all of the craziness, all made for writing all those songs,” says Nicks in the liner notes. “If we’d been a big healthy great group of guys and gals, none of those great songs would’ve been written.”

The roughs and outtakes on the discs offer a behind-the-scenes peak at the group’s sometimes fractured songwriting process, which gave “The Chain” its name.

“It started out as one song in Sausalito,” Buckingham told Rolling Stone. “We decided it needed a bridge, so we cut a bridge and edited it into the rest of the song. We didn’t get a vocal and left it for a long time in a bunch of pieces. It almost went off the album. Then we listened back and decided we liked the bridge, but didn’t like the rest of the song. So I wrote verses for that bridge, which was originally not in the songs and edited those in. We saved the ending. The ending was the only thing left from the original track. We ended up calling it ‘The Chain’ because it was a bunch of pieces.”

Fleetwood Mac outtakes:

  • Jam #2
  • Say You Love Me (Single Version)
  • Rhiannon (Single Version)
  • Over My Head (Single Version)
  • Blue Letter (Single Version)

Rumours demos and outtakes:

  • Second Hand News
  • Dreams
  • Brushes (Never Going Back Again)
  • Don’t Stop
  • Go Your Own Way
  • Songbird
  • Silver Springs
  • You Make Loving Fun
  • Gold Dust Woman #1
  • Oh Daddy
  • Think About It
  • Never Going Back Again
  • Planets of the Universe
  • Butter Cookie (Keep Me There)
  • Gold Dust Woman
  • Doesn’t Anything Last
  • Mic The Screecher
  • For Duster (The Blues)

Tusk demos and outtakes:

  • One More Time (Over and Over)
  • Can’t Walk Out of Here (The Ledge)
  • Think About Me
  • Sara
  • Lindsey’s Song #1 (I Know I’m Not Wrong)
  • Storms
  • Lindsey’s Song #2 (That’s All for Everyone)
  • Sisters of the Moon
  • Out on the Road (That’s Enough for Me)
  • Brown Eyes
  • Never Make Me Cry
  • Song #1 (I Know I’m Not Wrong)
  • Honey Hi
  • Beautiful Child
  • Song #3 (Walk a Thin Line)
  • Come On Baby (Never Forget)
  • Song #1 (I Know I’m Not Wrong)
  • Kiss and Run
  • Farmer’s Daughter
  • Think About Me (Single Version)
  • Sisters of the Moon (Single Version)

Tuesday, May 01, 2001

Stevie Nicks "Trouble in Shangri-La"

MAY 1, 2001:
Stevie Nicks sixth solo album "Trouble in Shangri-La" was released May 1, 2001 and debuted at No.5 on Billboards Top 200 Albums Chart with 109,000 units sold in the U.S. on May 19, 2001 This was the second highest debut for the week behind Destiny's Child "Survivor" at No.1 which feat. a sample of Stevie's "Edge of Seventeen" on "Bootylicious". This was also Stevie's highest charting solo ranking since 1983's The Wild Heart hit the same peak, and her biggest SoundScan era sales week ever, besting her previous solo album, 1994's "Street Angel", which started with 27,000 units sold and debuting at No.45. Trouble in Shangri-La was also the No.1 Internet Album for the week with Destiny's Child coming in at No.2.

The album spent a total of 20 weeks on the Top 200 chart. To date the album has been certified gold in the U.S.

Thursday, May 14, 1998

Nicks’ box set has finally arrived! Enchanted: The Works of Stevie Nicks




Q&A: Stevie Nicks
Rolling Stone interviews Fleetwood Mac's white witch
BY JANCEE DUNN
MAY 14, 1998

LOOK, WE LOVE LINDSEY AND CHRISTINE and the gang, but, let’s face it, that Fleetwood Mac tour was all about Stevie Nicks: white witch, Gemini, ex-cheer-leader, poetess, former three-pack-a-day smoker, Miami Vice fan, one-time hostess at Bob’s Big Boy, friend to Billy Corgan and Courtney Love, fashion icon. The accolades continue with Legacy: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours,” in which folks like Elton John, Jewel and Matchbox 20 salute Rumours‘ classic tunes; but, more exciting, Nicks’ box set has finally arrived! Enchanted: The Works of Stevie Nicks, culled from her six solo albums, contains eight previously unavailable tracks; a new single, “Reconsider Me”; and a booklet chock-full o’ photos and personal reminiscences. “This is my heart,” she writes. “This is my work; it has been enchanting. I wouldn’t change a thing.” Nicks chats with us from her Phoenix home, where she has just returned from Bed, Bath & Beyond.

And what did you buy?
Two floor lamps and some silky white panels to wrap around my pole bed. I’m not doing a lot because I’m really trying to rest. I started working on this box set the day I got home from the Fleetwood Mac tour. If you’re a Stevie Nicks fan, you’ll probably really like this.

There is a lot in this box set, Stevie.
It’s a lot of music, and it’s all my intense songs. It’s very heavy. You have to be in the right mood for it. I have to be in the right mood for my music. I tend to listen to slow jazz on the radio. The first thing I do when I get to a hotel is look for jazz stations, because I can dance around to that – I can be happy and sing my own words. I can’t be intensed-out by rock & roll all the time. I have too much going on in my life that is intense enough.

Do you rock out to CDs?
When I rock out, I usually play tapes I’ve made over the years – all the big songs through the Eighties and the beginning of the Nineties. I can’t really listen to a whole CD. I’m gonna have two or three favorites and that’s all. Hey, I’m almost fifty [laughs]. I’m an old woman.

Now, you stop with that.
You can only rock out so much. Then you have to go rest. I also make [tapes] for the treadmill.

I thought you watched Miami Vice on the treadmill.
I do, but Miami Vice isn’t on quite as often as it was before.

Let’s go back to you saying you’re an old lady. You don’t really feel that way.
Well, I’m tired. I am tired. The tour was actually easier for me than coming home and doing two months of TV things. We did the Brit Awards, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, then the Grammys. I was the most nervous for that.

Let’s talk about the tour.
It was an incredible experience. We played forty-five concerts, we made a lot of money, I think we made a lot of people happy. We never had any fights. It just went by like a whirlwind.

Do you feel melancholy at all, now that it’s over?
Six months before we re-formed, I would have told you in my own psychic way that there was no possible way that Fleetwood Mac would have ever gotten back together. So I’d never say it’s not ever going to happen again.

How are relations with Lindsey?
He and I are probably better friends than we’ve been in a long, long time. We had some really nice talks and some nice moments that were sweet.

Your solo tour begins at the end of May.
This is going to be a different set than I’ll ever do again. I’m going to put some of the cool things from the box set in it – some of the country songs, acoustic things, really neat stuff. We’re going on the bus this time, and it will be a fabulous one, otherwise I won’t go on it.

Your fashion influence continues. Even Madonna is copying you.
People have been telling me that, and I don’t know quite what to say. I saw her video, and, of course, I loved all her black clothes and the long, long, long black hair. And the birds were interesting. But I didn’t immediately go, “Oh, how me.” But some people are saying that, right?

Absolutely. Are there still plans for you and Billy Corgan to collaborate?
Billy is recording in L.A. When I get home next week, I’ll go visit him. Both of us have been totally, totally working.

What about your next solo album?
Well, I spent three years writing songs after the Street Angel tour. I probably have six songs, so I’ll come home to Phoenix in September to write the other six. I can do anything here. I can record, I can write. I can sit by the pool. I can draw. My house here is like my own little resort. At midnight, if I want to, I can go in, light candles and put a fire in the fireplace and spend two hours writing.

Fireplace? In that heat?
We just crank the air conditioner.

Do you swim in that pool?
I do.

I can’t picture you in a bathing suit.
Yeah, well, you never will [laughs].

It has to be customized in that special Stevie way.
I get a black bathing suit and a fabulous black-lace sarong thing and kind of tie it around me. And there is never, ever, a man in the back yard. If there is, he is banished to the front of the house.

Please, you’re looking fabulously thin.
It’s not a question of weight. It’s dancing across the stages of the world for two and a half hours for those three months. My body kind of changed from all the dancing. And, you know, the tambourine playing.

Saturday, April 18, 1998

STEVIE NICKS: LONG-DISTANCE WINNER


Atlantic Honors Stevie Nicks with lavish 3-CD "Enchanted" Anthology

Billboard Magazine
April 18, 1998

A quarter-century ago, Stevie Nicks penned a tune about embracing a paradox, its music an upward spiral that predicted a corresponding descent, its lyrics contemplating the change that only comes from awareness of the unchangeable. The song ultimately celebrates the victory that arrives by agreeing to allow others to triumph.

On the eve of the release of "Enchanted" (Atlantic, due April 28), the engaging three-CD, 46-track retrospective—with eight unreleased cuts—of Nicks' lengthy solo career, it seems the soon-to-be-50-year-old singer/songwriter, who wrote the lovely "Long Distance Winner" as half of an early-'70s duo on Polydor called Buckingham-Nicks, has finally found the wisdom to learn from the intuition of her 25-year-old self.

"Back then, 'Long Distance Winner' was very much about dealing with Lindsey," says Nicks, referring to Lindsey Buckingham, her artistic and emotional partner in the interval before their act merged with a subsequently revitalized Fleetwood Mac. "How else can I say it?" she wonders aloud, quoting a passage of the "Enchanted" track resurrected from the long-out-of-print "Buckingham-Nicks" album: "I bring the water down to you/But you're too hot to touch."

"What the song is really all about," Nicks confides, "is a difficult artist, saying, 'I adore you, but you're difficult, and I'll stay here with you, but you're still difficult.' And the line 'Sunflowers and your face fascinate me' means that your beauty fascinates me, but I still have trouble dealing with you—and I still stay. So it's really just the age-old story, you know?" Meaning the inability to live with someone and the inability to live without them.

According to Nicks, who starts a 40-date U.S. solo concert trek May 27 in Hartford, Conn., Buckingham's stubborn but admirable streak lay in his unwillingness to compromise his composing to "play in clubs, playing four sets a night in a steakhouse, whereas I was much more able to be practical." That was then, and this is now, an era in which Nicks and the tempestuous Fleetwood Mac were able to set aside their collective differences, focus on teamwork, and reunite for the hugely fruitful "The Dance" live record and tour.

Stevie is quick to assert that the Mac now "plays way better than we did in the beginning" and readily agrees that the material selected for "The Dance" boasts even better arrangements than the vintage renditions. Yet she also admits her own personal and artistic intransigence of old: "'Gold And Braid,' another song on 'Enchanted,' is an unreleased track from my [1981] 'Bella Donna' [solo debut] sessions, and it's about Lindsey wanting more from me in our relationship. But wanting to know everything about someone, which goes hand in hand with being in love, was never something I've ever wanted to share with anybody. Professionally, everybody always wanted me to be their idea of what I should be. I'd flat-out look at people and say, 'You know I'm not gonna do what you want, so why do you bother?'

"I've learned from mistakes," she adds. "I got fat, and on the Dr. Atkins diet I had to lose that 30 pounds I had been trying to lose for four or five years. But people have come into my career and wrongly told me, 'Change your music, reinvent yourself!' I just stayed what I am." Which is a real rock'n'roll character, a true one-of-a-kind piece of work. "Thank you!" she responds, erupting in giggles edged with her trademark throaty rasp. "People used to laugh at my musical style or my black handkerchiefy stage clothes, which make me look like an orphan out of 'A Tale Of Two Cities,' and say, 'Oh, that's very Stevie Nicks.' But now people in the fashion industry [like designers Anna Sui and Isaac Mizrahi] are giving me these accolades. If you believe in something and stick it out, it'll come around, and you'll win in the end."

Other familiar criticisms of Nicks center on her devotion in both composing and common-day activities to a heavily mystical life view. Possibly the single most recurrent image in her material, as illustrated by the "Sleeping Angel" cut that "Enchanted" retrieves from the 1982 "Fast Times At Ridgemont High" soundtrack, is a supporting cast of heavenly spirits. "I am religious," Nicks explains. "I wasn't raised in any religion, because we were always moving when I was a kid and didn't get involved in any church. But I believe there've been angels with me constantly through these last 20 years, or I wouldn't be alive. I pray a lot. In the last few years I've asked for things from God, and he's given them to me. And there were things I thought were gonna kill me, and he fixed them. I felt that because I was fat I wasn't talented anymore; I was destroying this gift that God gave me and asked for help. Now I'm happy, even outside my music, and enjoying my life."

Stephanie Nicks was born May 26, 1948, the daughter of General Brewing president Jess Nicks and the former Barbara Meeks. "My mother's mom and dad were divorced very early," says Stevie, "and her stepfather worked in a coal mine in Ajo, Ariz., and died of tuberculosis. She had a hard life, was very poor, was 19 when she got married, and had me at 20. My dad went after a big job in a big company, got it, did very well, and liked to move around and travel a lot. My mom got used to it and had a lot of fun, but she's much more practical, frugal—she still sniffs her nose at my dad's and my expensive tastes—and she wanted more than anything else for her daughter and son [Christopher] to be independent and self-assured.

"I didn't want to be married or have children," Nicks confesses, "because then I couldn't have worked as hard on all this. I would have split the whole thing down the middle, and I wouldn't have been a good mother, or a good songwriter either. If I got a call from the love of my life and a call from Fleetwood Mac saying you have to be here in 20 minutes, I'd still probably go to Fleetwood Mac. And that's sad, but it's true."

Over the years Nicks has overcome substance abuse, serious eye surgery, the Epstein-Barr virus, and a host of detractors eager to diminish her musical contributions. Yet "Enchanted" documents a resilience and a wry candor—"I'm no enchantress!" she pointedly exclaims on the album's "Blue Lamp"—as well as a parallel path to her Big Mac experience, characterized by productivity and solo success equaling or exceeding that of her talented bandmates. Nicks' work is unapologetically feminine in the face of the boys' club that is rock. Consistently tuneful and sure in its spell-weaving, Nicks' music also has surprising staying power, as shown by "If Anyone Falls," one of the best and sexiest pop/rock singles of the '80s, and "Enchanted's" frank "Thousand Days," which could close the '90s on a similar note.

"'Thousand Days' was written about my non-relationship with Prince," says Nicks, who had earlier composed "Stand Back" with him—although she notes he's never called her back "to set up his payment on 50%" of the latter. "Days" recounts an abortive, all-night '80s recording session with him at his Minneapolis home during a Fleetwood Mac tour, climaxing with Nicks "smoking my pot—he didn't agree with my lifestyle—and going to sleep on Prince's floor in his kitchen. I like him, but we were just so different there was no possible meeting ground."

What current colleagues/collaborators does she most admire? "Alanis Morissette, Joan Osborne, Sheryl Crow [who co-authored "Somebody Stand By Me" on "Enchanted"], and Fiona Apple, who's very young and angry. I care about her and hope she's OK. Fame is dangerous ground when you're young. You've gotta pace yourself."

Thursday, October 30, 1997

Rumours of Fleetwood Mac's demise are exaggerated -- for the time being


Is the Mac Truly Back?
Rumours of Fleetwood Mac's demise are exaggerated -- for the time being
By Steve Appleford - Thursday, Oct 30 1997
Houston Press

This is an odd bit of paradise for Lindsey Buckingham. He's ensconced in a plush East Hollywood recording studio, eyes closed, his bare feet tapping at the hardwood floor as he listens to a playback of "Bleed to Love Her," another forceful blend of acoustic guitar and tortured romance from the singer/guitarist. His hands beat silently against imaginary drums. Maestro Buckingham looks like a happy man.

More remarkable is the reason for this musical bliss. It's right there on the video monitor in front of him, confirming that Buckingham isn't here working on some long-awaited solo project, but that he's somehow reunited with Fleetwood Mac for the first time since abruptly quitting that fraying superstar act in 1987. Buckingham is a little surprised himself.

"If you had asked me six or eight months ago if I would be doing this, I would have said no," Buckingham says gravely. The singer/ guitarist had his reasons for leaving Fleetwood Mac a decade ago, even as it was enjoying a new surge in popularity. Various forms of excess had taken their toll. There had also been lingering resentments between him and singer Stevie Nicks in the years after the breakup of their romance in 1977. But most profound for Buckingham, the band had taken a disturbingly commercial direction in the 1980s, and thus could no longer fulfill his dreams of off-center studio wizardry.

"The priorities had gotten a little screwed up," he says. "A lot of people were having personal problems, and it was not a nurturing atmosphere creatively. It was very unfocused. Now that a lot of [that] doesn't exist, I don't know. I have to say I'm enjoying just sharing the situation with these people."

There's a beat of hesitation in his voice, as though he were still trying to convince himself that he should even be here. But the good vibes seem real enough among Nicks, singer/pianist Christine McVie, bassist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood, all of whom inadvertently reunited this year during the making of a still-unfinished Buckingham solo effort, his first since 1992's Out of the Cradle. "Nobody's pissed off anymore," says Nicks. Maybe so. But the ultimate test is coming now, with Fleetwood Mac's current 40-date national tour, which will deliver the band to the Summit on Sunday.

For the moment, Buckingham's taking a break from mixing The Dance, a new live release culled from the MTV special of the same name. He soon takes a call from Reprise Records president Howie Klein, and you can almost feel the steam rising at the other end of the line as Buckingham describes which major hit songs won't be on the disc. Afterward, he laughs. "Everything," he says, "is about that far from the fan."

Buckingham is dressed in casual black, the hair at his temples and chest a subtle gray -- all the band members are now, after all, in their late 40s or early 50s -- and he slouches comfortably on a porch just outside the control room. The studio overlooks a badminton net and a jungle paradise of green, right in the midst of urban Los Angeles; it's where the band (except for the laissez-faire John McVie) made almost daily visits before going on tour. At a nearby table, Fleetwood speaks quietly into a telephone as Christine McVie prepares to leave.

Before stepping into her car, the singer stops to kiss Buckingham on the cheek. "Good-bye, Lindsey," says Christine, looking reed thin in a T-shirt and tinted glasses. "Don't stress yourself out too much."

That's a tall order in a band that has thrived most when suffering the greatest turmoil. In 1977, Fleetwood Mac discovered profound inspiration in their own shattered relationships for the 20-million-selling Rumours release. That year saw the breakups of Buckingham and Nicks, Fleetwood's marriage and that of the McVies. The result was music energized by bitterness (Buckingham and Nicks) and romantic faith (Christine McVie). Songs were at times accusatory, loving and mystical, with a dark undercurrent that owed much to the ominous brooding of the Mick Fleetwood/ John McVie rhythm section.

For all the tales of bad love on Rumours, it was pure musical escapism, and it connected deeply with the masses. It remains one of the best-selling albums of all time. "We kind of captured the imagination of people back then -- the idea in those days of a sort of heavy-duty alcohol/drug band with broken relationships all kind of singing to one other," Christine says. "We seemed accessible to them, and people related greatly to the content of the songs. And the chemistry between us was awe-inspiring. People used to meet us and feel intimidated when there was more than three of us in a room. It was a pretty heavy-duty thing."

If Rumours was the band's perfect pop document, it took 1979's Tusk to suggest real ambition. It was an unexpected reaction to mass appeal, particularly when compared to the Eagles' utterly disposable atrocity The Long Run, a different kind of reaction to success that was released the same year. Tusk was an outing that eased into focus via gentle strumming and the warm longing of Christine McVie's voice. What immediately followed was a rich fabric of sounds and ideas: Buckingham's subtly twisted rhythms and twangy guitar, the off-kilter piano that opens Nicks's "Sara," the perverse recruiting of the USC Marching Band for a horns-and-drum section on the title track. And throughout, listeners could hear the blissful sense of freedom in Buckingham's voice.

"That was probably my favorite time in the band," Buckingham says now, "because I felt the most empowered and the most spontaneous in terms of understanding what I was doing and why I was doing it."

The ultimate source of Buckingham's frustration within Fleetwood Mac originated not in Tusk's commercial disappointment (if two top ten singles and sales above four million can be called disappointing), but with the shift in internal politics that determined experimentation was not the way to continued riches, and therefore not the way for Fleetwood Mac. So what followed were records that were smooth and safe, leaning heavily on tested hit-making formulas. A Buckingham solo career was inevitable.

Buckingham was not the only notable talent within the band, but his was the vision that held it together. In 1987, Fleetwood Mac were met with renewed popularity and critical acclaim for Tango in the Night, a CD of real pop craftsmanship, but with emotions that sounded more manufactured than before. The heavy breathing of the song "Big Love" notwithstanding, the heat within Mac was largely gone.

By then, Fleetwood Mac was more an obligation than a useful venue for Buckingham. The band had ceased to be the setting where the singer bared his tortured soul, becoming instead merely a profitable hit factory, designed to keep the old fans happy during their morning commutes. When Tango in the Night was finished, after a year of sessions in his garage studio, Buckingham announced that he could not be part of a scheduled tour and essentially quit the band.

The quintet's only high-profile reunion came as a result of the 1992 presidential election, after Bill Clinton adopted the band's "Don't Stop" as his campaign song. When he was elected, Clinton requested that the late-'70s lineup of Fleetwood Mac reunite for his inaugural celebration and perform the song as the climax of a show populated by the likes of Barbra Streisand and a uniformed Michael Jackson. Even John McVie, now an American citizen and staunch Republican, was ready to oblige. Only Buckingham was hesitant, but Nicks finally convinced him to participate.

"I thought it was touching that for the first time you had a president who was openly professing his alliance [with] rock and roll," Buckingham says with a shrug. "That gave off a sense of possibility that maybe didn't really pan out."

If there were any hopes within the band of a permanent reunion, it was soon clear that Buckingham didn't share them. "It was a one-off thing, and I don't think anyone thought much beyond that show," Christine says. "At the airport as we left to come back to L.A., it was pretty much, 'Well, see you around....' " Soon after their return, Nicks quit the band.

"At the inauguration I just realized I wanted it to be back the way it was, or I didn't want to be in it anymore," says Nicks, who had remained committed to the band even as her solo career took off. (Indeed, she has just signed a new five-release deal with Reprise and plans to head into the studio after the Fleetwood Mac tour.) "For me, it made me realize that it had to be that five, or it couldn't be. I couldn't continue to be in a Fleetwood Mac that didn't have Lindsey in it."

Fleetwood Mac was formed in 1967 by London blues guitarist Peter Green, an alumnus of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. It was a different kind of outfit then, a quintet of dedicated blues fanatics. Green named the group after his Fleetwood/McVie rhythm section largely because he wasn't interested in the sort of "Clapton is God" hero worship that was already heading his way.

That rhythm section formed the spine of an ever-changing lineup after Green's departure in 1970. "I'm not a singer/songwriter," Fleetwood says. "I'm a drummer who's a good organizer. And I love what I do with a passion, and I still have a passion that's intact. My setup is, I have to keep this going in order to function. What will I do? Who will I play with? I can't play in my front living room. I need a band. John and I are a couple of gigsters."

By 1975, Fleetwood had heard a little-noticed release by a duo called Buckingham-Nicks. The two singer/songwriters were struggling just to pay the bills; Nicks worked as a waitress in coffee shops and restaurants around Los Angeles, and Buckingham toured as a sideman to a fading Phil Everly. When Fleetwood called, the couple spent their last few dollars on old Fleetwood Mac vinyl, searching for something they could identify with. "I had to say to Lindsey, 'Well, I'm very tired of being a waitress, so I definitely think we should join this band,' " Nicks recalls.

Nicks had wanted to be Joni Mitchell, but instead she ended up a singer with a strange, raspy vibrato. Critics weren't immediately won over. She particularly remembers one reviewer describing her vocals as the sound of a "bleating goat." Still, the vocals were memorable. And the eventual result was a voice as distinctive as any other in '70s music, as much an acquired taste as Robert Plant or Johnny Rotten.

The self-titled Fleetwood Mac effort, released in 1975, was immediately successful; it sold four million copies and then was followed by Rumours. "It was great," Nicks says. "It made us all a mess. We did a lot of drugs -- we're all lucky to be alive. We had a great time; there was no getting around it. Anybody tells you any different, they're lying. It was incredible."

That excess sent her to the Betty Ford Clinic a decade ago, and the bloated, dazed, black-magic woman who appeared on at least one solo tour bore little resemblance to the fresh-faced California girl who had met Buckingham as a high school student. But today she's slimmed down and garbed in her usual black chiffon, sipping hot tea. "It's hard to be really famous," she shrugs, "but it's hard to be really poor and not famous."

Fleetwood Mac was, for one moment, the biggest band in the universe, seemingly oblivious to the movements of punk and disco then swirling around them. They were instead awash in limousines and private jets and Grammy Awards, and they became easy targets for the American punk movement for what it viewed as appalling rock-star excess.

Even today Buckingham sounds bitter about the punk attacks. But if the likes of Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles helped give the Los Angeles punk movement some of its fire, L.A. punks should be grateful to them, even if the band's real life wasn't so simple. It's with some irony that contemporary punk-based acts such as the Smashing Pumpkins and Hole now refer to Fleetwood Mac as one of their great inspirations.

"We were their age when we started, and we're still doing it today," Nicks says of her close friendships with Courtney Love and Billy Corgan. "So maybe we give them hope."

Like the Sex Pistols last year, Fleetwood Mac's return to the concert stage now will signify nothing more than nostalgia unless it leads the quintet back into the studio, where their work always mattered the most. The final version of The Dance isn't exactly a revelation, though the band does inject some contemporary fire into the old songs. And the inclusion of four new tunes, including the torrid "Bleed to Love Her," suggests the band again has a future -- if, that is, they choose to take it.

Fleetwood Mac performs Sunday, November 2, at the Summit, San Antonio, TX. Tickets are $36.25 to $101.25. For info, call 629-3700.

Wednesday, October 29, 1997

Fleetwood Mac delivers old songs, new songs and fun

Fleetwood Mac Live at Delta Center
Las Vegas, NV - October 28, 1997
The Desert News October 29, 1997





Saturday, August 16, 1997

Fleetwood Mac Back With Album, Video

Reprise's The Dance' Marks `Rumours' Anniversary



BY LARRY FLICK
and MELINDA NEWMAN
Billboard Magazine
August 16, 1997

**NEW YORK** - On Aug. 19, Reprise Records will commemorate the 20th anniversary of Fleetwood Mac's landmark "Rumours" recording with "The Dance," a live album culled from an MTV special that reunites the band's classic lineup of Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, and John McVie. The set will trigger a 40-city U.S. fall tour that will put the group on the road together for the first time since 1982.


The 17-track collection, which combines four new songs with familiar tunes, was gathered from three performances on a Warner Bros. Studios soundstage in June. The 90-minute MTV special, which will begin airing on Tuesday (12), will be issued Aug. 26 on home video via Warner Reprise Video, with a DVD release planned for Sept. 23. A laserdisc version of the show will be handled by Image Entertainment and will be offered Sept. 23.


"This has become a monumental event that pays long-overdue tribute to a band that continues to have immeasurable influence on new musicians," says Craig Kostich, senior VP of artist development/creative marketing (U.S.) at Reprise. "These songs sound as strong now as they did when they were first released. Judging from early interest in this project, people are still clearly very turned on by them."

The extensive marketing strategy behind "The Dance" started to unfold on July 22, when Reprise issued the album's first emphasis track, "Silver Springs," to pop, AC, and mainstream rock radio formats. Since then, the Nicks-fronted tune—which was originally recorded for "Rumours" but did not make the final track listing—has gathered airplay on 47 stations, with audience impressions of 3.8 million, according to Broadcast Data Systems. WNOK, a top 40 station in Columbia, S.C., played "Silver Springs" more than a dozen times its first week out, but PD Jonathan Rush says it's too early to determine the ultimate fate of the song. "I think the album will do very well, but will the single do well? I don't know. It doesn't jump off the radio quite like we'd like it to," he says. However, Rush believes it was a good choice for a first single as a way to bridge the gap between the past and the present. "I think it's kind of neat that it was an old song that was never on an album, and here's a revised edition recorded by the same party in a new era."

Reprise widened the radio scope of "The Dance" by issuing a promotional CD pressing of "The Chain" on Aug. 4. "We're planning to go several cuts deep into this album," Kostich says, noting that the label will eventually focus on the set's new songs, which hark back to the sound of the band's heyday.

Since word of the Fleetwood Mac reunion has circulated for months, retailers are anticipating a strong consumer response to "The Dance." "We're already getting a strong buzz on this; the word has been out for a long time," says Eric Keil, buyer for Compact Disc World, a New Jersey chain. "People have been asking about it and when it is coming out, when they can get it. We put Fleetwood Mac albums in a [summer] promotion, and the 'Greatest Hits' and 'Rumours' flew out of the stores. We know there are people out there who still love this band. This has the potential to be big, not as big as [the Eagles'] 'Hell Freezes Over,' but it could approach that. That was a monster for us."

Television exposure beyond MTV—which has already begun airing clips of "Silver Springs" and "The Chain" from the special—will play a vital role in the marketing of the album. VH1 will air a condensed, 60-minute version of the special in September and has designated Fleetwood Mac as the network's artist of the month in October. VH1 has also recently featured "Rumours" in a recent episode of its "Classic Albums" series.

Additionally, various members of the band are tentatively slated for a string of high-profile stints on shows, including "The Rosie O'Donnell Show," "Good Morning America," and "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno." Most of these appearances will be made before Fleetwood Mac begins its tour in mid-September. Dates for the trek were still being confirmed at press time.

The seeds of the band's reunion were sowed earlier this year. Fleetwood and Buckingham had been working together on Buckingham's solo project, so for Fleetwood, the reunion seemed like a natural progression. "I was really excited," he says. "I felt we had already met musically somehow because I had been working with Lindsey for over a year, or being there and being supportive. I knew the creative light was alive. It was not like a business manager called up and said, 'You've been offered $20 billion to reconvene.' It was not like that."

Fleetwood had disbanded the group two years ago, only after different permutations failed to ignite. "I was a person that very much tried to keep Fleetwood Mac together at any cost, literally," he says. "It has been my life, and the letting go was a decision John [McVie] and I made. Every brick wall, people would say this is the end, but keeping it going was the only thing I knew. We'd had such a cycle of reinventing ourselves as a band. After the [1995] album with Billy [Burnette] and Bekka [Bramlett], we realized that we weren't going anywhere, and that was a major thing for me to admit, and it took me a little time to absorb that."

For Fleetwood, it was a chance to realize that he could survive in a world without Fleetwood Mac. "I truly had let go, and that was good. I sobered up and changed my life; there was a different life to be had, and it was a good one. I know now that I can function without the [band]."

But to Nicks, functioning without Fleetwood Mac was never a question. "We can all go our separate ways for periods of time, but we always seem to come back to each other," she says. "There's a connection between each of us that has nothing to do with business. When I got the call about doing this, I took a deep breath, and then I said yes."

Because Buckingham was recording a new solo album, he was the hardest member to convince to come back; however, no reunion would have happened without his participation. His decision was based somewhat on the clout a reunion would give him when it came time to return to his solo work. "A lot of people seem to think that if you make an album every four years or so, as I do, there was nothing to be lost in doing the reunion, and possibly a great deal to be gained in terms of visibility and opening political doors," he says.

"The hardest part was thinking about putting down [an album] I'd been working on for two years plus and just leaving it on the back burner," he continues. "[Warner Bros. Records chairman/CEO] Russ Thyret called me and said, 'Are you doing this [reunion]?' And I said, 'Give me until the first of April,' and I just took a chance, and I can't say I'm sorry. I'm a different person now. It's a great thing for everybody in the group. I mean, I feel like I'm giving something to these people who have contributed to my life."

After Buckingham agreed to the reunion, the band began rehearsing immediately on April 1 for the MTV taping. "We thought MTV was Fleetwood Mac adverse, but they weren't," says Buckingham. "We rehearsed for six or seven weeks, which wasn't quite enough. I think there was a general view that this thing may disintegrate in a week, and I was gonna do my best to make sure it wasn't me that made that happen. But, you know, Stevie is in a really good place, and there was something good about it. You just have to keep watching yourself to make sure that you don't get petty. I went in and I tried to make nice, and it wasn't hard. It's sweet, it's nostalgic; you could cry over it if you let yourself."

Nicks says there were actually quite a few tears shed during the last of the three shows the band played for the special. "In my heart, I knew that final show was the one that we would use, and I paced myself emotionally. Something clicked as we started to play that night. The magic was there again, only we weren't mad at each other anymore. I looked into Lindsey's eyes during so many of the songs, and the tears came. It was uncontrollable. And it was a beautiful night for us and everyone in the audience."

Buckingham was pleased with the wide demographics the taping attracted. "There really was a nice element of a younger, 20s and 30s crowd, which was great, because a lot of those people learned about us from their parents, or from the rekindled interest in the band since Billy Corgan and a few others have said, 'Fleetwood Mac is not the enemy.'"

Nicks agrees, noting the previously untapped young audience that "Gold Dust Woman" reached after Courtney Love covered the "Rumours" cut with Hole late last year. "She claims to know more about me and my music than I can even remember—which is terrifying but probably very true," Nicks says with a laugh. Love will interview Nicks for Spin magazine this fall.

Buckingham confesses it's been "surprisingly pleasurable" reuniting with his bandmates. "It's been kind of a trip, because we're getting along really well. There's very little of the baggage left that was

 there when I left in 1987," he says. Like Buckingham, Fleetwood's antennae were up, checking for signs that the reunion might not work. "I would always be looking; that's my nature," he says. "We know each other so well. You know what to do to upset someone, and you know what to do to make the situation good; that's what I do with anybody. I would be watching for what anyone would construe as the danger signal. The reality is that these five people have the capability of managing themselves, and we did for years. Basically, we were always very successful, and part of that success was because it was an unusual animal, this thing called Fleetwood Mac. And it came from within."

The live forum of the MTV special created the perfect environment for the band to reconvene, because, as Fleetwood says, creating a new studio album would have been "too stressful. This is a great way of celebrating who we are and then reinventing some of the songs and just saying, 'Shit, we haven't played for years' and have it be really good. I truly think the band is playing 40% better than it ever has before."

While there are no announced plans other than "The Dance" and a 40-city tour, Buckingham doesn't know if the reunion will end after the last date is played. "Well, if you'd asked me a year ago whether I would be doing this, I would have said 'absolutely not,' but here I am, so I'm not going to discount anything." Nicks is equally guarded about the band's future—but admittedly optimistic. "Fleetwood Mac will never die. Whether any of us will fess up to it or not, the spirit of this band will live in each of us forever. And that's a good thing. Some people only dream of the magic we've made—and then we get to revisit it and to build upon it. That is truly a blessing."

Monday, July 18, 1994

Stevie Nicks has been as much an enigma as a consistent platinum-selling act

Stevie Nicks
Since she first exploded on the rock scene in 1975 as the seductive focal point of Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks has been as much an enigma as a consistent platinum-selling act 



By Steven P. Wheeler 
Music Connection July 18, 1994

While her star may not be as high in the black night sky as it was in the late Seventies and early Eighties, Stevie Nicks' career has spanned three decades — twenty years (including eight platinum albums) with Fleetwood Mac and five multi-platinum solo albums - with her latest, Street Angel, likely to follow suit. In short, the lady still commands respect. 

Now, five years after her last solo album the rather lackluster The Other Side Of The Mirror the 46-year-old Nicks has returned to her roots. A sparkling album, Street Angel, harkens back to her Number One solo debut, Bella Donna, and even more so to her days as rock's reigning queen at a time when her former band, Fleetwood Mac, was the biggest act in the music world. 

Recovering from recent eye surgery to correct her lifelong poor vision, we spoke with Nicks from her home in Phoenix, Arizona, where she has been since the infamous Northridge quake earlier this year.  

While Nicks may have kept busy with a greatest hits album (TimeSpace), two solo tours, one Fleetwood Mac album (Behind The Mask), as well as a Mac tour over the past half-decade, the somewhat reclusive superstar agrees that with such a long period between albums, it was time to speak up with the release of Street Angel.

However, she did make clear that there are certain things she never wants to share with her public. "I usually don't do a lot of press, but with this record, I figured that it would only be to my benefit to talk about it a little bit.

But I don't really like people knowing everything about me. I like being a mystery, and I even think I'm pretty mysterious to the people who know me really well. There is a part of me that isn't available to the public, except in my songs. When I'm writing I really do strive to be totally honest. I never make up a song. They either come right from my journals or straight out of my head because of something that is happening. It's always been important to me that people think of me as more than just a 'tune-sayer.'"

The obvious difference between Street Angel and her more recent solo projects is the abandonment of a synthesizer-based sound in favor of the more guitar-oriented influences of her past.

guitar-oriented influences of her past. "I think it has a lot to do with what you start out with," states Nicks in a girlish voice which moves in a machine gun rhythm at times. "On The Other Side Of The Mirror, I started out with Rupert Hines, who is an amazing keyboard player, so that whole album sort of went the way of the airy, surreal keyboard and synthesizer thing. It was like being in the twilight zone at times |laughs|. This album was started with (former Eagle] Bernie Leadon and Andy Fairweather Low. So I had two acoustic guitar players and myself for two months at my house in Los Angeles, playing all the songs that I showed them, which was many more than the thirteen on the record. 

"The ones that ended up on the album started to show themselves," continues Nicks. "We were sitting in my English Tudor-style library playing my songs and it was almost like we were preparing to go out on the road as a Kingston Trio kind of act, where we would go out and play little clubs and set up the equipment ourselves (laughs). So this album just started out from a guitarist's point of view, as opposed to piano or synthesizers."

For her part, Nicks hasn't made any final assessment about the album, saying, "I think it's too soon for me to make a judgment, but I think it's a great driving album." 

While she has spent the last twenty years in the often-blinding media spotlight, little is known of Nic ks' formative years when she lived like the gypsy that she would sing about decades later, and something which obviously set the pace for her professional life.

Born in Phoenix, Nicks' family moved to Los Angeles (her other hometown) before popping into a succession of cities due to her father's successful executive career. The cities flew by like the pages of a calendar—first, there was Albuquerque, New Mexico, then El Paso, Texas, and Salt Lake City, Utah. The clan headed back to Los Angeles for Stevie's first three years of high school, before heading north to San Francisco for her final year of high school. 

"It was my senior year, which is a really rotten time to have to move into a new school," recalls Nicks. "You couldn't try out tor cheerleader. You couldn't try out for song leader. You couldn't try out for flag twirler. You couldn't do anything because they had all tried out the previous year. So I was totally crushed because that was my dream at that point."

While Nicks' voice seems to carry a twinge of childhood regret, it's hard to imagine what would have happened if she had been twirling flags on the gridiron, instead of crossing paths with another flower child of the sixties, Lindsey Buckingham, during the summer of 1966. 

"I met Lindsay at the end of my senior year," explains Nicks. "We were at a party and Lindsay and I sang 'California Dreamin" together that night."

However, it wasn't until two years later in 1968, when the twenty-year-old hippie girl would speak with Buckingham again, this time it was over the phone as her future love interest asked her to join his band Fritz. "I had never sang rock before," admits Nicks, "and I certainly had never been in a rock band, but I thought, 'Why not?' So I ended up being in that band with Lindsay for three and a halt years. We practiced every day, and we played some really big shows."

Those early years with Fritz turned out to be perfect training for the future, but Nicks admits that she had no idea of it at the time. "I don't think I would have ever been able to just walk into Fleetwood Mac and been cool about being center front stage if it hadn't been for those three and a half years in Fritz. I would have been totally nervous and 'stagefrighted out.' But Fritz was like an incredible amount of preparation experience, which I didn't really know was preparation at that point." 

Like many unsigned bands, it was the very goal of being discovered which ultimately led to the demise of Fritz, as Nicks and Buckingham got a quick lesson into the ways of the music business. "This producer named Keith Olsen who would go on to work with Fleetwood Mac and Nicks during her solo years! invited the band down to L.A. to do some recording, but it was very obvious that everybody wanted to break Lindsay and I away from the rest of the guys in the band." 

In fact, Nicks now says that it was the dissolution of the band that brought the musical partners into a more personal relationship. "It was the guilt that drove us together," Nicks says with a laugh. "That's why Lindsey and I started going out. We just felt so bad because everyone in Los Angeles was trying to kill our band. I mean, after three and a half years together, these guys were our best pals in the world and they were just being shut out, and it was very obvious."

With the other Fritz members gone, Buckingham/Nicks made their first and only album. While this self-titled cult classic has grown to become one of the most in-demand vinyl albums, it was anything but a commercial success at the time of its 1973 release.

As for the possibility of the album ever coming out on CD, Nicks points an accusatory finger at her former partner. "If Lindsay would just call me back, we would release the album because there are a lot of labels, including Atlantic, who are very interested in it. But Lindsey has just been incommunicado lately, and if he doesn't call me back soon I'm going to put a huge ad in Billboard that says, 'Lindsey Buckingham is the reason that Buckingham/Nicks hasn't been released on CD,' because it's all him. So sign the petition because I'm doing what I can." 

As their debut album basically flopped, the two struggling musicians had no indication of the stardom that was just around the corner. In fact, Nicks was working as a waitress in Hollywood, while Buckingham worked on the music at their apartment near Canter's Restaurant on Fairfax. 

Meanwhile, in another part of town, as Buckingham and Nicks struggled through this period of shattered dreams, an English blues drummer by the name of Mick Fleetwood happened to be visiting Sound City Studios at the tail-end of 1974. 

Fleetwood was searching for studios to record what would be Fleetwood Mac's next album, while at the same time searching for a new guitarist to replace the recently departed Mac guitarist/vocalist Bob Welch. 

During his trip to Sound City, producer Keith Olsen wanted to show Fleetwood the sounds that the studio was capable of producing, so he grabbed a tape that happened to be laying on the console and turned it up. 

The song that came on was the seven-minute epic "Frozen Love" from the Buckingham/Nicks album. Fleetwood was instantly grabbed by the guitarist on the tape and inquired as to who it was. Olsen explained that the guitar player was part of a duo, who probably wouldn't leave his musical partner, who also happened to be his girlfriend. 

Not to be dissuaded, Fleetwood made the call anyway. Nicks picks up the story from here: "We got a call from Mick on New Year's Eve night of 1974 going into '75, asking us to join Fleetwood Mac. At that time, Lindsay and I were really poor. I mean, we were like really starving. We were totally disillusioned, we were both miserable, totally unhappy with each other and the world in general, and I told Lindsay that I thought we should do anything that was going to raise our lifestyle, and he agreed." 

Ironically, Nicks had no idea who or what Fleetwood Mac was at the time. "I went down to the record store that night and bought every Fleetwood Mac album and we listened to all of them from front to back. I was looking to see if there was something that I could add to this band, and I felt that there was a kind of mystical thing throughout the band's history from Peter Green's bluesy guitar to Bob Welch's 'Bermuda Triangle' to Christine's sort of 'airy-fairy' voice, and I thought that it might work. Of course, they didn't need another singer, they needed a guitar player, but they couldn't get Lindsay without me, so they had to take us both." 

As the band hit the road for an extensive tour behind Fleetwood Mac (which became known as the band's White Album), their powerhouse performances brought more converts to the band, with the charismatic and mysterious singer with the strange little voice quickly becoming the center of attention, as the album eventually topped the charts fueled by the Top Ten single "Rhiannon."

However, success didn't come easily, as a series of internal breakups threatened to destroy the band before it had a chance to discover its full potential. First, the marriage of bassist John McVie and keyboardist/vocalist Christine McVie dissolved, as did drummer Mick Fleetwood's marriage and finally Nicks' long-term relationship with Buckingham. 

As Nicks explains, it was anything but a walk in the park during the making of their classic album Rumours in 1976. "In a normal situation, you don't break up with someone and then see them the next day for breakfast. But within Fleetwood Mac, you saw that person the next day, so the sarcasm level went way up and the little digs got to be thousands a day, and people would just slam out of the studio.'' 

Then, Nicks adds this obvious aside, "Great tragedy definitely led to great art. You had five people who were very high-strung and over the edge really easy. Everybody was really screwed up, but we got the greatest rock & roll soap opera out of it." 

The result of this personal turmoil was an album that would spend an incredible 31 consecutive weeks at the top of the charts. In the process, Rumours became the biggest-selling album in history at the time with more than 20 million copies sold to date. 

Following the seemingly endless touring that helped propel Rumours into the record books, the band returned to the studio for work on their Sgt. Pepper-like opus, simply entitled Tusk. 

The recording took longer than the previous two albums combined, as Buckingham's creativity took on a meticulous, almost scientific approach, something that didn't exactly endear him to the rest of the members. 

Yet, a steady diet of booze and Peruvian Marching Powder enabled the group to get through it and may go a long way in explaining the double album's somewhat scattered focus. 

"Tusk took thirteen months to make, and you had to be there every day," Nicks says without a hint of exaggeration. "There was no calling in sick, you were there from two in the afternoon straight through to seven the next morning, and sometimes we didn't even go home. It was really intense, and it probably was as nuts as we got. The only thing that Fleetwood Mac ever did in abundance was a lot of cocaine and a lot of drinking, and luckily we never did anything else."

Nicks goes on to say that the pressures of following up two consecutive Number One albums, along with the band's notoriously intense touring schedule, led toa lengthy ride in the fast lane. "Everybody was so tired all the time and really haggard. That's why cocaine was so much a part of our lives; we were just too tired every day to go on. We had commitments here and commitments there, and the record company barking down our backs, asking why the album was taking so damn long. To this day, I don't even know what Tusk was; it was just this intense thing. It's a great story to tell but it wasn't much fun to live." 

Following another extensive worldwide tour behind the multi-platinum Tusk, which failed to top the charts like its two predecessors, Nicks began to look seriously at a solo career. After five years with Fleetwood Mac, Nicks had amassed a large backlog of material and presumably, an equal amount of artistic frustration, which became obvious when the down-to-earth singer explained the reasons behind the launching of her hugely successful solo career.

"I realized that two or three songs every two to three years wasn't enough for me," states Nicks. "Not only was it just two to three songs, it usually wasn't even my favorite two to three songs. The band would hear fifteen to twenty of my songs when we'd do a Fleetwood Mac album, and they'd invariably pick out the two songs that were my least favorite. So my favorite songs would never get used." 

Nicks goes on to say, "By the time I got to Bella Donna, I had tons of songs that I really loved, and nobody was ever going to hear them. It was like I was working for nothing. That's absolutely why I decided to do Bella Donna; to look for other avenues outside of Fleetwood Mac." 

What Bella Donna did was show that Stevie Nicks was not some sort of Lindsay Buckingham puppet, as the album topped the charts in 1981 on the strength of three Top Ten hits—"Leather And Lace," "Edge Of Seventeen" and the Tom Petty-penned "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around."

Returning to the Fleetwood Mac fold a year later, Nicks began to feel the strain of balancing her solo career with the band that made her famous. 

"I had to give up everything to be in Fleetwood Mac for more than fifteen years, and that's not a lie, that's really true. You couldn't have any kind of a normal life to do what I've been doing all these years." 

Nicks goes on to cite the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. "The reason I finally left Fleetwood Mac was that having to go back-and-forth, and back-and-forth got to be too much. This is the first time that I won't have to go back and forth. It was always a pain. I made it work but it really took its toll on me because when Fleetwood Mac got to go to Hawaii for two months and rest, I had to go in the studio for my own thing. Then when all the people who toured with me got to take some time off, I had to go back in the studio with Fleetwood Mac. This will be the first time in fifteen years that I haven't had two demanding jobs."

Having officially quit Fleetwood Mac after their much-publicized performance at the Clinton inauguration, Nicks seems more than a little enthusiastic at the prospects of the future. "I'm totally excited about this because
I don't have to be dreading the fact that I have a whole other job to go home to." 

In the meantime, it's nice to know that Stevie Nicks has returned with arguably her finest album ever, and is set to hit the stage in the coming months and embark on a whole new chapter of her solo career. 

Tuesday, April 06, 1993

Review/Pop; A Musically Mad Scientist - Lindsey Buckingham


By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: April 06, 1993
The New York Times

Lindsey Buckingham might be described as the mad scientist of California pop. The singer, songwriter and guitarist who masterminded the gossamer folk-rock harmonies of Fleetwood Mac's biggest hits is a notorious perfectionist in the recording studio. And at Town Hall on Wednesday evening, in a concert that was part of his first solo tour, he worked with considerable success to recreate the layered textures that have made both his Fleetwood Mac and his solo albums models of a certain kind of meticulous craft.

Especially on his solo albums, Mr. Buckingham has applied his wizardry to the creation of tortured psychodramas in which every sigh of pleasure is balanced by a primal scream or a Gothic nightmare. His newest record, "Out of the Cradle," is an autobiographical song cycle describing a midlife crisis with many characteristics of a nervous breakdown.

In introducing songs from the album on Wednesday, the wiry, frizzy-haired singer talked about their personal associations. A brooding acoustic version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "This Nearly Was Mine," which he said was his father's favorite song, prefaced "Street of Dreams," a reflection in which a visit to his father's grave sets off howls of loneliness and despair.

Since Mr. Buckingham plays most of the instruments and sings most of the parts on his own recordings, even to begin duplicating what he does by himself in the studio required a nine-member band. He was joined by four guitarists doubling as backup singers, a drummer, a keyboardist, a bassist and two percussionists.

Even though the sound had an impressive clarity, there was something bizarre about finding the stage of Town Hall jampacked with tons of electronic equipment that dwarfed the performers. This sort of technological barrage befits a heavy-metal concert in which the goal is to create a sonic explosion. But it seemed excessive for an artist as quirky and introspective as Mr. Buckingham.

Pumped up to heavy metal levels, such Fleetwood Mac songs as "Go Your Own Way," "The Chain" and "Tusk" sounded overblown, although they had an undeniable visceral clout. When things quieted down, as in "Street of Dreams" and "All My Sorrows" (Mr. Buckingham's freewheeling adaptation of "All My Trials"), the layered voice, guitar and percussion found a blend that was almost as refined as the texture of the recording.