Friday, February 27, 2009

FLEETWOOD MAC - Best Rock Show

The backstage drama in this 40-year-old band is enough to fill several books, and it already has (personally, I can't wait for the pull-no-punches Lindsey Buckingham autobiography). The back-and-forth between Buckingham and Stevie Nicks is why this band is making fans pay through the nose to see them play the hits one more time, but don't underestimate the power of the Mick Fleetwood-John McVie rhythm section. Still, the "retired" Christine McVie is much missed, and here's hoping they acknowledge founding guitarist Peter Green by resurrecting "Oh, Well" or some other '60s blues-rock gem.

Wednesday/Thursday - March 5/6 at the Allstate Arena, 6920 N. Mannheim Rd., Rosemont, IL

Tickets:$149.50, $79.50, $49.50;
Phone: 312-559-1212

Greg Kot
Chicago Tribune

FLEETWOOD MAC UNRESOLVED ISSUES


Fleetwood Mac heads out on Greatest Hits Tour
with unresolved issues

Thursday, February 26, 2009
By Scott Mervis, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Stevie and Lindsey Speak to the Post Gazette (Short Audio Segment of this interview)


In 1975, British blues-rock band Fleetwood Mac, already troubled with legal battles and internal breakups, went into the free-agent market and hired on the attractive young L.A. singer-songwriter duo of Buckingham Nicks. The result: one of the greatest hit machines and perhaps the greatest running soap opera in pop music history.

Forget "Behind the Music." When you have two sets of ex-lovers on stage, it's the stuff of a miniseries.

Thirty-four years later, as Fleetwood Mac prepares for the "Unleashed" greatest hits tour, you get the feeling maybe they should keep a good group therapist, perhaps that guy who helped Metallica, on the speed dial.

Not even a minute into an interview with Lindsey Buckingham, the volatile singer-guitarist is referring to things that "maybe got left hanging" and the tour being as exciting "as much on a personal level as anything else."

"Personal level" has little to do with how anyone gets along with the jovial chaps who hold down the rhythm section -- founding Brits Mick Fleetwood and John McVie -- and everything to do with the harmony between Buckingham and former flame and quintessential pop diva Stevie Nicks.

It will all begin at the Mellon Arena, where Fleetwood Mac makes its home for several days of rehearsal this week before the 15-city tour begins there on Sunday.

Go Your Own Way

"Unleashed" is the first reunion of Fleetwood Mac since the band finished the marathon "Say 
Yo
u Will" tour in 2004. After that run, the band members sat down for a meeting in which, according to Buckingham, "I sort of said very methodically to the group, 'Don't come knocking on my door for X amount of time' with the intention of doing two solo albums in relatively short order and touring behind them."


Nicks, in a separate phone interview, notes that Buckingham said, " 'I need two to three years.' And for me that's fine, 'cause I have a whole 'nother world that keeps right on going with or 
without Fleetwood Mac." She can go play "Edge of Seventeen" anywhere. "But the rest of the people in Fleetwood Mac really don't. So for them that's like big. Like, 'HOW many years?' It was kind of a thing where we had to sit and go, 'OK, he needs to do this.' "

Buckingham squeezed out two solo albums, his first since 1992's "Out of the Cradle" (released after he quit Fleetwood Mac in '87). The first one, 2006's "Under the Skin," was a big departure from the band with delicate fingerpicking, whispered vocals and hazy melodies that had been left too long in the sun.

"No lead, really, no bass or drums, and it was really about one or two guitars being the basis for a whole track," Buckingham says.

"Gift of Screws," which came out in September, rocked a lot more and included songs like "Love Runs Deeper" that could very well have been Fleetwood Mac hits. Fleetwood and McVie even played on the album.


"People will say, 'What constitutes a band song vs. a solo song?' " Buckingham says, "and I always say part of it is just what you're doing at the time. If you're involved in a band thing, then the material will shape itself into being band material or possibility the group mentality will be what the group is receptive to. Having said that, I was more into doing some approaches that were more particular to me as a solo artist."

Of course, it's worth noting that Fleetwood Mac wasn't exactly risk-averse, "Tusk" -- with the USC Trojan marching band tromping through -- being the living proof.

"Yeah, we did [experiment]," Buckingham says. "Not always at everyone's comfort level. In the wake of 'Rumours,' I guess I was the culprit behind 'Tusk.' That was a big experiment, which proved itself to be successful years later. I think at the time there was a bit of a backlash from the record company and certainly from the band. We've done our share of chance-taking. You find yourself in a situation that can only be described as a 'big machine.' Once you have a level of commercial success, you have a lot of forces out there that want you to repeat those formulas for not necessarily the right reasons -- only for the reasons of generating income -- and if you forget who you are, you can certainly paint yourself into a corner over a period of time and have nowhere to go creatively. And you have to kind of reject all of that and try to listen to your inner voice as much as possible and follow it whenever you can. So I've done a pretty job of navigating that line. It's been a little convoluted, but ... still here!"

Buckingham says when the "big machine" came calling last month, he still wanted to put the finishing touches on the solo work with another leg of "Gift of Screws" shows. "It was a little hard to let go of because, obviously, the whole solo thing is more a labor of love in its own way."

Buckingham's solo venture leaves Fleetwood Mac no choice but to embark on a greatest hits tour, but the foursome is putting the best possible face on it, making it sound as if it's what they always wanted to do.

"It's exciting to us," Nicks says, "because we're not trying to shove new songs down people's throats. As much as we love new material, every time you do a new tour you can only do two or three new songs, because the audience is out there going, 'You know what, we're delighted that you're still writing, but you can't be taking out our favorite songs to put in your favorite new songs.' And this is something we learned a long time ago. This time we're not doing any new stuff. We're doing 'Stand Back' and Lindsey's doing one of his songs -- that's really the only things coming out from our solo work. When you look at the set, it's jam packed. It's two hours and 20 minutes and it's starting in 1975 and just working all the way up."

Buckingham says you could make a case for some of the songs on his solo records being ripe for a Fleetwood Mac workout on stage, but that he's aware of the politics of such lobbying. Pointing to the "Say You Will" tour, the first without Christine McVie, he says, "I had that much more room to be a guy up on stage, just to be who I am. And we were reflecting portions of ['Say You Will'], which had quite a bit of edge to it in places. I think we came off that tour with Stevie feeling quite uncomfortable with what that was. I think there was talk then about the next time we went out 
we needed to just play more of the body of work. So I haven't brought up any songs from solo work to do and, quite honestly, those albums, I think, are not something anyone else in the band has listened to."

Really?! They haven't heard his solo records?

"You'd be surprised," he says.

The other woman

The rumor circulating early last year was that the next time Fleetwood Mac hit the road, holding down the Christine McVie slot would be none other than Sheryl Crow, who helped produce Nicks' last solo album, 2001's "Trouble in Shangri-La."

Obviously, that would have turned the Fleetwood Mac dynamic somewhat upside-down, but in the end, it wasn't meant to be. Crow had to miss a Fleetwood Mac studio session, due, quite symbolically, to a Mother's Day affair and told the band she would have to pass.

Says Nicks, "I gave Sheryl a long lecture and said, 'Listen, honey, you just adopted a new baby, you just came through breast cancer, you survived Lance Armstrong, to come into Fleetwood Mac right now where we are going on a tour that could go on for a 135 shows. ... You can't say I 
need a month off with my baby, because you're not going to get it, because nobody gets time off in Fleetwood Mac. Once you're in the Mac, it's like being in the army ...' So I said to her, 'As Stevie Nicks, who loves to sing with you, I would say I'd be very disappointed. But as your friend, you're making the right decision.' She passed on Fleetwood Mac. Everybody thinks we passed on her."

Christine McVie, who was married to John McVie from 1968 to 1976, remains a much tougher loss for the band, her having written and sung -- in a pure, beautiful voice -- such hits as "Over My Head," "Don't Stop," "You Make Loving Fun" and "Say You Love Me." The 65-year-old British singer hasn't worked with Mac since the reunion for "The Dance" in 1997 and the band's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction a year later.


"We never wanted Christine to leave," Nicks says. "We wanted Christine to change her mind. But what happened was, Christine had been keeping big secrets from us all the many years. She was afraid to fly. Because she's such a tough old bird, she never let us know. And she was having panic attacks about it. She was really having a hard time with the traveling, and they say when people get older, you get more claustrophobic and more sensitive, and I think you really do. And so it hit Chris, and she was like, 'I don't want to do it anymore.' And it's not that she didn't want to come on stage, not that she didn't want to do music anymore. She just didn't want to tour."

Fleetwood Mac has three backup singers to help with the high harmonies -- and Buckingham and Nicks are already a vocal powerhouse themselves -- but Stevie says there are intangibles Christine McVie brought to the group that can't be replaced.

"The horrible thing, which breaks our heart, is just Christine herself. Her personality, her crazy English self. She was a buffer between all of us. She was definitely a buffer between me and Lindsey, and she would be the one to say -- [imitating a chirpy British accent] 'You guys are all being stupid!' She'd be like 'Break it up, break it up!' "

By all accounts, there are times in Fleetwood Mac when a buffer is needed between Buckingham and Nicks, who were romantically entangled from 1972 until the tumultuous making of "Rumours" four years later.

"Lindsey and me are the problem children," Nicks says.

But the relationship has changed a lot in the past 10 years, with Buckingham becoming husband to photographer Kristen Messner and dad to their three children: a 10-year-old boy, and girls 8 and 4.

"He lives in girl land now," Nicks says. "He lives in ballet land and girls basketball team land, very girly, so how could you not soften up when you're surrounded by women? And when you have two little girls you also have two little girls and all their friends. So he's been in that world for the last four years. And it has softened him, and instead of treating me like his miserable ex-girlfriend, he's treating me more like a difficult but loved daughter. And I like it just fine, because he is softer and much more understanding of me and what I do. And he doesn't get mad at me. I yell out something and he lets it go. He's more the Lindsey he was when I first met him. So it's delightful for me because I'm kind of getting to see the man I cared about so much all those many years ago again almost come back."

And he's not throwing guitars at her, as he famously did on stage once.

"He's not throwing anything at me," Nicks says, with a laugh. "And it's almost like it would be ridiculous, you know what I mean? We are 59 and 60. We were 16 and 17 when we met. We have both looked at each other the last couple months when we've been talking about this, going, 'We met each other when we were 16 and 17, we need to make peace before we die.' "

Asked whether he's softened with fatherhood, Buckingham concedes.

"I think that's probably true. During the time Fleetwood Mac was making albums and after Stevie and I had broken up, and I was still having to produce for her, and make hits for her, we never had gotten any closure. We just had to kind of seal everything off; everyone was living in their own states of denial. Not only had there not been closure, but there hadn't been a lot of fairness in the way things worked out, nor had there been a lot of honesty. And so I'm certain that having children and getting to that point, I don't feel so embattled in my life in general. These things, they just happen in their own time."

So when they get up on stage Sunday night and do a song like "Go Your Own Way," is it a good deal less emotionally charged than it would have been 30 years ago?

"I think that we've done them so many times," Buckingham says. "Even when we were writing these songs, they didn't necessarily feel as personal or autobiographical I guess as they ended up appearing to be. We just get up there and have a good time. It's all been said and done and scrutinized to death, really, so we just get up there and we play. And I don't think we think about it so much on an emotional level. Or I don't, anyway."

WDVE INTERVIEW WITH MICK FLEETWOOD

Mick Fleetwood interview on
102.5 WDVE Rocks
in Pittsburgh, PA 2/26/09

FLEETWOOD MAC IN ONE INCARNATION OR ANOTHER

By Ed Symkus
GateHouse News Service
Norwichbulletin.com

Fleetwood Mac, in one incarnation or another, has been making music — first it was straight blues, now it’s pop-rock — since 1967. 

They started off playing in dark and dingy London clubs and, throughout the late-’70s and early-’80s, they packed the largest arenas in the world.

Their current three-month tour of North America marks the first time they’ve performed together in five years. They visit the TD Banknorth Garden on March 11, in support of their new “best of” album, “Unleashed.”

All four members of the band recently took part in a telephone conference call. Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham were in chatty moods; John McVie took on the role of silent partner.

The tour marks the first time since the band’s rise to prominence in the’70s that they’ve gone on the road without an album of new material; they’ll only be playing tunes from their fat catalogue of hits. But that doesn’t mean they’re through recording.

“This is a refreshing thing to do in terms of selecting a lot of really emotively connected songs to the audience,” says drummer Fleetwood of only playing the hits. “But there have been discussions for sure that we would love to make some more music. I think it’s sort of down to the biorhythms of how everyone is feeling and what’s appropriate. We have [solo] careers and families and different perspectives from what it would have been you know 20, 30 years ago. So I think the consensus is that we would love to be challenged to go out and do something with some new songs in a couple of years. My heart says I believe that will happen.”

Singer Nicks and guitarist Buckingham, who have done separate solo albums and tours over the years, are looking forward to the reunion for both personal and professional reasons.

“Solo work and Fleetwood Mac is a really great thing to be able to go back and forth to because you can do your solo work and then you can do Fleetwood Mac,” says Nicks. “ And then you can go back to your solo work and then you can do Fleetwood Mac. We’ve been apart for four years. Now we’re back together and we’re having a blast.”

Buckingham feels that not having to present new material and try to win audiences over on a first listening is a wonderful thing.

“It kind of frees you up to enjoy each other a little bit more as people,” he says. “The mantra is really more ‘let’s just have a good time,’ and we can value the friendships and the history that underpins this whole experience that we’ve had over the years. I think because of that we are actually able to just look at the body of work and choose from that. And then you know just have a little bit more fun with it than we would normally be able to have.”

Though no set lists have been put together yet, Fleetwood reveals that they’ll certainly be playing what he calls the obvious ones: “Go Your Own Way,” “Don’t Stop,” “Dreams.”

“But then we are finding songs as we go along that we feel are special songs that maybe aren’t considered the massive, massive hits but are truly emotionally connected to Fleetwood Mac,” he says, without naming them. “I feel really confident that we’re going to surprise the audience in some ways. I think that we’re going to make the audience identify with songs that they know. And we’ve had fun really re-sculpting certain segments of the show, which will remain secret until you see us.”

Buckingham is also keeping secrets, of sorts. Asked if there are any songs he wishes he didn’t have to play ever again, he first dodges the question, saying, “You know, we really have a body of music that we’ve been lucky enough to have become part of the fabric of the music culture.”

Then he gives in — but doesn’t name any songs — and says, “Certainly there is a challenge of being on the road in terms of the repetition. It’s almost the inverse of the challenge of being in the studio where you’re trying to pull stops out of the air; the challenge on the road is trying to keep things fresh night after night. But you know that’s part of being a professional and it’s also a part of being in a band where you’ve been together a long time and you can keep finding new things for those songs to mean to you personally and to share. It’s just part and parcel of what we do: to go out and recreate those same songs.”

The always outspoken Nicks, asked if she can believe she’s still singing in a rock band after all of these years, casually mentions, without prompting, that she recently turned 60. She follows that with a reminiscence of her first days with the band.

“When I joined Fleetwood Mac, I was 28,” she says. “I went on one tour with just my normal street clothes. I just threw my stuff in my suitcase and we left on like a three-month thing. We went to El Paso, Texas, to do a show, and I tried to put on a dress but unbeknownst to me I had gained five pounds. So the dress didn’t fit. I was screaming and I sat down and I started to draw an outfit. And I said to myself, ‘I’m going to have a uniform. My uniform is going to be such that I can wear it today at 28 and I can still wear it at 60. I’m going to wear the same skirt, the same little top, the same platform boots and some little jacket, and that’s going to be it. And I’m still going to be able to wear this at 60 because it’s not going to be so flamboyant that it can’t be worked with a little bit, and unless I weighed 300 pounds, I’ll still be able to wear this when I’m you know into my 60s. So, yes, I can believe it.”

Suite Deal - Fleetwood Mac in Los Angeles (Staples Center)

A Suite Deal - Fleetwood Mac at the Los Angeles STAPLES Center

Hi, Fleetwood Mac fans,

Our school is running an auction to raise funds at the moment and one of the big ticket items on offer is this: a luxury suite, tickets for 12 and 5 VIP parking passes for Fleetwood Mac at the Staples Center in LA, May 28th 2009.

The value of the auction is $5000 but bidding is starting at $1500. This is the first time we've tried an online auction and so we're just feeling our way and trying to think of any way we can to let people who might be interested in some of our bigger items know about them. That way, fans can bid and likely get a great bargain, and the school gains too.

Our school in Monica Ros School in Ojai, CA, and this is our annual art auction to raise funds for the coming year. 

This is really a great deal for 12 Fleetwood Mac fans to get the top luxury suite at the Staples Center at a far reduced price. 

Bidding starts at $1500 but there is a Buy It Now option too for $4000.

Please do check it out!

Thanks for your time.

S Zahringer (parent volunteer)
Monica Ros School
Ojai, CA

Item Information:
  • Estimated Value $5,000.00
  • Buy Now Price $4,000.00
  • Item Number 164
Item Description

You'll be treated to the best luxury suite in the house. This primo STAPLES Center suite is located on the first level, center court. You'll receive 12 tickets and 5 VIP parking passes.

Special Instructions:
  • Concert is Thursday, May 28, 2009, at 8:00 p.m.
  • Place your bids here
  • Online Close Mar. 5, 2009 8:59 AM PST
  • Opening Bid $1,500.00

Thursday, February 26, 2009

MICK FLEETWOOD KFOG INTERVIEW (3/26/09)

Mick Fleetwood was a Guest on the KFOG Morning Show today (2/26) in San Francisco 

Mick spoke about the upcoming Fleetwood Mac Unleashed Tour - The Rumours Reissue Boxset and how relaxed and excited the band is to get back out on the road for the first time without a new album to promote.

The interview includes the early Fleetwood Mac track "Black Magic Woman" and "I Don't Want To Know" from the Rumours album.

Complete Interview Segment is approximately 15 minutes in length.

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