Thursday, January 31, 2013

Photos: Stevie Nicks arriving for the "Sound City" Los Angeles Premiere

Red Carpet Arrivals at "Sound City" Movie Premiere
at ArcLight Cinemas Cinerama Dome in Hollywood.
January 31, 2013


Photos by Kevin Winter

Watch the movie online at www.soundcitymovie.com

DVD & CD in Stores March 12th - Amazon
CD includes Stevie's "You Can't Fix This"

STEVIE NICKS: "The truth about Rumours," she says, "is that Rumours was the truth." #Fleetwoodmac

Fleetwood Mac on 'Rumours,' Breakups and a 50th Anniversary Concert
by Chris Epting
Spinner.ca

They remain one of the world's most beloved bands, an eclectic blend of Englishmen and Americans called Fleetwood Mac. This spring they will hit the road once again, embarking on a significant North American tour that will run until late summer.



They also have just released an expanded version of their magnum opus, 1977's Rumours. The sprawling edition goes way beyond the basic album, which since its release has sold over 40 million copies worldwide.

Great interview below from Spinner.ca - 10 minutes in length.  The entire article can be read at Spinner.ca







The art of falling apart
John Robinson
The National

The only group composition on an album made by self-obsessed individuals, it is The Chain that best articulates Fleetwood Mac's situation at the time - its three discrete elements articulating the band's estrangement from one another. As you can hear over the course of this set, one part comes from a rather sleepy Nicks song called The Chain. The concluding guitar blowout comes from an outro to a McVie composition called Keep Me There. The verse comes from a reworked old song by Buckingham. It's not called The Chain because of some cosmic understanding between band members. It's called The Chain because it comprises three utterly separate elements that have been pragmatically stuck together by Lindsey Buckingham. Hence, one presumes, his exasperated swearing on the lead-in.

Time has made it an anthem, but the expedient composition of the song reveals an important truth about the pragmatism at the heart of Fleetwood Mac. Once a stalwart hard rock band, necessity had forced them to change so often that by the time they arrived at the line-up that made Rumours, the band were in their third distinct phase. Fronted by the mercurial Peter Green, at the end of the 1960s the band had enjoyed chart success with an eerie and lyrical take on the blues. When Green left, mellower songs were written to diminishing commercial returns by another guitarist, Bob Welch. When Welch departed, Mick Fleetwood (the drummer for and sergeant major of the band) doggedly searched again for new musicians.

Full Review at The National


'Rumours' – pop-rock perfection

REVOLVER: BRIAN BOYD on music
Irish Times

If you’re looking for full-on drink and drugs debauchery, celebrity psychosis, überdysfunctional inter-band relationships, lashings of money and ego, and extremities of fear and loathing, you have to look past the usual suspects (Zeppelin, Mötley Crüe et al) and steady your gaze on Fleetwood Mac. Going into the recording of Rumours – still one of the bestselling albums of all time – things weren’t pretty. Bass player John McVie and keyboardist Christine McVie had just divorced and weren’t on speaking terms. Singer Stevie Nicks and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham were in the middle of breaking up but still on speaking terms – if shouting at each other in ferocious rage counts as speaking terms. Drummer Mick Fleetwood had just got divorced, the group had just sacked their manager and their producer, and they were doing enough cocaine “to turn horses into unicorns” as the saying went. For good measure, Nicks and Mick embarked on a shortlived and very drunken affair.

These five people – all of whom had been romantically/sexually engaged with another band member at some time – had to sit in a room together and come up with 11 songs for a record companyimposed deadline. The only other time this kind of situation had occurred with a major band was with Abba – and they used the adverse circumstances to record some of their biggest hits. As did the Mac. But just to give some idea of the level of tension, suspicion, hatred, insecurity and paranoia that prevailed at the songwriting sessions, Christine McVie brought a new song to the table called You Make Loving Fun.

It was written about her new postdivorce boyfriend (who was also the band’s lighting director) and was seen as a personal attack on her erstwhile ex-husband. At around the same time, Mick Fleetwood started going out with Stevie Nicks’s best friend. The blizzard of cocaine was such that the band, seriously, wanted to give their dealer a credit on the album. The label demurred and a stand-off was only averted when said dealer was shot dead, allegedly by an organised crime gang.

Given all that went on, Rumours should have been a mess. The songs were recorded in a small, wooden, windowless studio with the band arriving at 7pm each night, getting off their collective heads until the early hours and only putting down music and vocals when they were too whacked out to keep on partying. Yet it’s as close to a near perfect pop-rock artefact as you could ever hope to hear, and its appeal lies in the fact that we are listening in to love breaking down. How did the band manage to stay together to finish the album?

Stevie Nicks now recalls it was a case of “I’m not the problem, I’m not quitting. You’re the problem, you should quit.” With no one prepared to give in, they effectively stayed together out of spite. Rumours is 35 years old now and there’s a special commemorative, expanded edition of the album just released. Pure music reality TV.

Fleetwood Mac 35th Anniversary Expanded and Super Deluxe Editions Available Now.

@CBSNews Video: Fleetwood Mac still spreading "Rumours"

Fleetwood Mac has just re-released their 1970s mega-hit album, "Rumours," with a deluxe edition. CBS News' Teresa Garcia talked to the band in Los Angeles.


Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" being used in Super Bowl Commercial



The star of this years Budweiser Super Bowl commercial will be a newborn Clydesdale.  

The 60-second Super Bowl ad chronicles the bond a Clydesdale foal shares with his trainer. It marks the 23rd Super Bowl ad featuring the Clydesdales.

Budweiser has launched its first-ever Twitter account that went live this past Sunday, and used the occasion to tweet the first photo of the newborn and are taking name suggestions.

CBS this evening (1/30) aired a show featuring Super Bowl Ads you'll be able to see this Sunday and one of them was a short clip of this ad with "Landslide" playing in the background. I'm assuming that "Landslide" will follow in the full ad when it airs on Sunday.

Kinda cool!  Watch The Super Bowl this Sunday for the 60 sec. spot.

(Photos: Budweiser)

Thanks @N8Curlen and @MYarr for the heads-up!



Video: Super Bowl Ad Preview With Usher, Fleetwood Mac, Flaming Lips and More
Billboard

Advertisers are paying upwards of $3.7 million just to air their spot during the big game, major synchs can fetch anywhere from $100,000 to upwards of $1 million, depending on the artist, number of territories airing the ad, the length of the commercial "flight," or airtime, and whether the song has been synched previously.

One synch likely on the upper tier of that spectrum is Stevie Nicks’ “Landslide,” which was commercially licensed for the very first time for Budweiser’s "Clydesdale" spot, which debuted online early Thursday. “We knew she was very protective,” Paul Chibe, Budweiser’s VP of marketing, says of Nicks’ tentative approach to synchs, “but when she saw the script she felt it was an appropriate presentation, that it was an elevation of the music and not something that would take away from it.”



The spot, directed by Jake Scott, shows the animal growing older—until its breeder must hand it over to the folks at Budweiser. The ad then jumps ahead three years, as the breeder reads in the newspaper that the Clydesdales will be visiting his area.



Hoping for a reunion, he goes to the parade. You can guess what happens from there.



It's a poignant and well-shot commercial—in keeping with some of the better Budweiser ads through the years—made all the more evocative by the use of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide." from the 1975 "Fleetwood Mac" album.


Ad Week

Stevie Nicks on TV... Saturday!

Photo by Katie Cook
CMT Hot 20 Countdown

Katie Cook - Host of CMT's Hot 20 Countdown show will be interviewing Stevie Nicks with Lady Antebellum this Saturday, with a repeat of the show on Sunday... Check your local listings:

Great interview w/ @ladyantebellum & Stevie Nicks! We have a pregnancy update w/ Hillary on this weekend's Hot20 @CMT

Saturday, February 2nd - 11:30 AM
Sunday, February 3rd - 11:30 AM



DATE ANNOUNCEMENT
OPRAH'S MASTER CLASS




Oprah's Master Class with Stevie Nicks will air on March 24th on OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network.


REVIEW + Q&A with Mick Fleetwood on Fleetwood Mac "Rumours" via @uncutmagazine


The game-changing ’70s AOR blockbuster turns 35 with a super deluxe boxset
by Piers Martin
Uncut

“Times were a lot crazier then – anything was possible. Budgets were not important and doing drugs was the norm. In the mid-’70s there was a sense that you could do no wrong.” So said an eyeliner’d Lindsey Buckingham, reminiscing in the 1997 Classic Albums documentary on the making of the ultimate classic album, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Thirty-six years after its release – and with more than 40 million copies sold (so far) in at least 80 official international editions – you would imagine that every last drop, every demo, druggy anecdote and hazy recollection, has been squeezed out of one of the biggest records of all time, the eighth best-selling LP in history. You’d assume that anything worthwhile that could add to the enjoyment and understanding of Rumours must have surfaced by now. For a start, Mac completists and even fairweather fans will already have the 2004 2CD reissue that came with a full set of rough mixes and outtakes from those fabled album sessions at the Record Plant in Sausalito, just north of San Francisco. Worryingly, that same disc is included in this “super-deluxe” 4CD+DVD+LP boxset – a package designed to celebrate the album’s 35th anniversary but which actually turns up, as if stoned, the following year.

Like Star Wars or Snickers, there’s never really a bad time to reissue Rumours. Sooner or later everyone finds a way in to it – or looks for a way out, if your parents raised you on Rumours and Tusk in the ’80s. It’s the evergreen baby boomer blockbuster that eased Bill Clinton into the White House and now finds itself a post-ironic hipster lifestyle accessory; Florence Welch, for one, is an eternal student of Stevie Nicks’ cosmic witchcraft. Today, 45 years after they formed, Fleetwood Mac’s twilight period – commencing with 2003’s reunion for Say You Will and drifting through two further “reunions” for world tours, including one this year – has lasted far longer than the band’s vital, late-’60s incarnation.

And it’s all because Rumours is as near perfect an album as anyone will ever make, and its lurid backstory of emotional turmoil and narcotic excess, endlessly recounted in prurient detail, is never less than fascinating. Though short on wildly revelatory material, this boxset ties up a number of loose ends from 1976-’77, focusing on the period when the Mac set about recording the follow-up to ’75’s Fleetwood Mac, a surprise US No.1 and the first album made by the group’s new line-up after fate had parachuted in two young Californian dreamers, Buckingham and Nicks, in late ’74 to rescue Mick Fleetwood’s rudderless British blues outfit.

The chemistry between the five was immediately apparent. Now there were three distinctive songwriters in the group, Buckingham, Nicks and Christine McVie, who would also complement each other in harmony. Buckingham, the firebrand guitarist and craftsman, began to develop an intuitive musical partnership with McVie on piano that started with “World Turning” and led to them fleshing out McVie’s Rumours cuts such as “You Make Loving Fun”. His lover Nicks cast her spell with “Rhiannon” and “Landslide”. John McVie and Fleetwood, solid but soft, glued it all together.

UK Interview: Mick Fleetwood on Magic 105.4 Magic Breakfast Friday AM TUNE IN!

Mick Fleetwood Scheduled UK Media Appearances

Mick Fleetwood is on a UK Media Blitz next week.
With the 'Rumours' re-issue being released on Monday in the UK - Micks headed over to support the release with a round of interviews and press.  So far he'll be appearing on one TV program and one radio program, there will likely be more.

Rumour has it he'll also be picking up and old friend to bring back to Hawaii for a visit.


MAGIC 105.4FM (Feb 1st)
Mick Fleetwood will be on Magic Breakfast tomorrow morning! He'll be talking about the Rumours re-issue and Fleetwood Mac's 2013 World Tour! (What's interesting about this, is that Magic 105.4 was the station in the UK last weekend that initially posted the 4 UK tour dates along with a contest to win tickets (which they've subsequently taken down).  Maybe Mick will have some good news for the UK tomorrow Morning! Listen Live HERE


The Alan Titchmarsh Show - Friday, February 1st (3-4pm)
The host is joined by Mick Fleetwood, the drummer and co-founder of Fleetwood Mac, and Great British Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood for another edition of the programme featuring music and chat.
The Alan Titchmarsh Show on ITV, STV, UTV  the STV Player will have the show on-line if you miss it

Top Gear - Episode 2 "Reasonably Priced Car" Feb 3rd (BBC 2)
The brand new series of the world's most popular car show continues with an epic road trip across the western side of the United States in three front-engined supercars. With Jeremy Clarkson in a Lexus LFA, Richard Hammond driving the new Dodge Viper and James May choosing the latest Aston Martin Vanquish a glorious soundtrack is guaranteed, as are furious arguments about which is best as the trio head from Las Vegas to Los Angeles and on to Palm Springs. Along the way, the three presenters take in racing circuits, airborne attacks and a race against the police before making a break for the Mexican border with a terrifying penalty for the last car to make it. Meanwhile, back in the studio, legendary Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood is the star in the Reasonably Priced Car.
BBC 2 - Sunday, February 3rd at 20:00

Be sure to catch these interviews... Hopefully Mick will give listeners more details on Fleetwood Mac in the UK and maybe Europe as well... Plus a more definite timetable.


BBC Radio 2 - Monday, January 28th  (2-5pm)
Jo Whiley sits in for Steve Wright in the afternoon on BBC Two, Mick Fleetwood joins Jo along with gardener Monty Don. Re-listen the program on the BBC iplayer here.  Micks bit starts about 36 minutes in.
BBC Radio 2 


The One Show - January 28th 7pm (BBC One)
With guests Cockney comedian Micky Flanagan and Fleetwood Mac's Mick Fleetwood. If you miss the show and you are in the UK, check the iplayer for the repeat.  If you are in the UK you can check out his interview here

Photo by Phillip J Holmes



Wednesday, January 30, 2013

WIN Fleetwood Mac 'Rumours' Expanded Edition from Popdose

WIN EXPANDED EDITION OF RUMOURS
Who doesn’t love Rumours? (The “iconic Fleetwood Mac album” kind, not the “Jeff Giles‘ wedding song was Rod Stewart’s ‘Love Touch’” variety.) This week, Warner Bros. reissued the greatest pop/rock album recorded while its members were enduring painful romantic splits with each other – a triple-disc affair featuring Rumours and non-LP B-side “Silver Springs” on one disc, another disc of live cuts from the band’s ensuing tour and a third disc of demos, early takes and other studio ephemera loosed from the vault for the first time. (None of the songs on that disc featured on the bonus disc from a different expanded edition in 2004, so there’s much less guilt than usual to be had about double-dipping!)


To add this nice little package to your collection, it’s simple! 
Send esteemed Popdose Editor Dave Lifton an e-mail at davelifton@gmail.com with the subject line “Lindsey Buckingham’s Open-Collared Shirts” and provide your best theory as to why the Mac’s iconic 63-year-old guitarist is still able to get away with such an outré fashion choice.

Review: Fleetwood Mac 'Rumours' 41/2 Stars (out of 5)

Album of the week: Fleetwood Mac's Rumours
36 years on, 40 million people can’t be wrong
Herald Sun
By Cameron Adams
★★★★1/2 Stars (out of 5)

ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Rumours is one of those albums where you know every song. Even if you think you don't, they've crept in by soft rock radio osmosis.

The band work on Mac time, so this 35th anniversary reissue actually arrives 36 years after the album was released in February 1977.

Rumours - already in 40 million homes - is one of the most complete albums in history and was fuelled by class A harmonies, class A drugs and beautiful music being made in studios and bedrooms between band members.

The vaults have been raided for more unreleased demos to show rock classics as works in progress. Lindsay Buckingham sniffles his way through an early take on Second Hand News with mumbled vocals and a runny nose and there's Go Your Own Way with lyrics - and vocals - that were yet to be polished. Buckingham says "That was good" at the end - he clearly hadn't heard his flat vocals back yet.

An early demo of Stevie Nicks' timeless Dreams manages to be acoustic but also intense. The album was so strong gems such as Nicks' Planets Of the Universe were left off - she'd later finish it and release it in 2001. "Did you get that? It wasn't wonderful or anything," Nicks says at the end of this demo. She's wrong. Her early Gold Dust Woman rocks too.

There's Christine McVie's Keep Me There (once called Butter Cookie) which ended up being an album highlight and The Chain (a Nicks solo version of which is a find here).

One of McVie's songs that did make the album (and made the album), Songbird is here in simple demo form - it'd be honed vocally later to become a soundtrack to weddings for decades to come. There's also an instrumental Songbird for Mac trainspotters' karaoke competitions.

Deluxe versions have a warts-and-all, un-airbrushed live concert from 1977 (check out Rhiannon), which captures a band who really loved each other flying high in their prime.

In stores in Australia - Friday, February 1st.

Fleetwood Mac Live in Spokane, WA June 29th - Pre-Sale begins 10am Thursday

TicketWest Pre-Sale for Fleetwood Mac Live in Spokane, WA begins Thursday January 31st.

Code is RUMOURS and tickets begin selling for this pre-sale at 10am local time.  Use this link here.

There is currently an American Express Pre-sale running. American Express Preferred Seating Presale: please enter the number on the back of your card without any dashes, click here

Here's a detailed seating chart

Spokane ticket prices are amazingly low and amazingly all over the place ranging from $27.50 for the Upper Bowl High Ends to $125.5 for Front Floor.

Public on Sale February 2, 2013

High Praise For Fleetwood Mac's song "Tusk" from @TheAVClub


Fleetwood Mac’s strangely savage “Tusk” was the band’s weirdest hit

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well—some inspired by a weekly theme and some not, but always songs worth hearing.

For most of Fleetwood Mac’s life, the band has been a hits machine, and it used that reputation to propel a singularly weird song—one vastly different from its usual output—into the Billboard top 10 in 1979. “Tusk,” which is featured prominently and often in the première of FX’s The Americans tonight, is a work of strange savagery, overlaid with jungle sounds and a thudding, endlessly repetitive drum riff that drives everything that happens in the song. The lyrics are simple enough to be a Dr. Seuss exploration of a relationship that’s crumbling, Lindsey Buckingham softly crooning “Why don’t you ask him if he going to stay? / Why don’t you ask him if he’s going away?” over the horrors building up beneath him.

Continue to the full article

Mick Fleetwood Interview TODAY 2pm on Planet Rock UK #Fleetwoodmac


Tune in at 2pm to PLANET ROCK - Join Darren Redick on his show TODAY when he'll be interviewing drummer and band-namesake Mick Fleetwood.

They will be discussing the Rumours reissue, fear and loathing within the band (Mick's words, not ours), the upcoming tour and the possibility of Christine McVie returning to the band.

LISTEN LIVE HERE

updated 1/30 5pm:  Not sure if anyone caught Mick's interview this afternoon in the UK (early morning in North America, but regarding Christine McVie's visit with him in Hawaii, he was bringing her back to Hawaii for a 3 week visit and that she hasn't been back there in 25 years so he was looking forward to spending quality time with her.