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.