Nicks at night

Fleetwood Mac: Comeback of the year

by Matt Ashare

Wild-eyed Mick Fleetwood looked like an escaped mental patient in his black-velvet Errol Flynn outfit, replete with knee socks and knickers. John McVie could have been mistaken for a member of the road crew, outfitted in faded jeans with a red bandanna tied around his head.

His former wife, Christine McVie, had a vaguely sour and annoyed expression on her face for much of the set. Lindsay Buckingham has certainly aged the best, but he couldn't help coming off as a bit of an egomaniac. And Stevie Nicks just seemed blissfully clueless in her patented flowing gowns, high-heeled boots, and gypsy scarves. She even forgot where she was momentarily, on just the second night of a tour that has brought together the most famous line-up of Fleetwood Mac on the 20th anniversary of their Rumours triumph.

Nicks and the rest of Fleetwood's big Mac were, in fact, in Massachusetts, not New York City, for the first of two sold-out nights at Great Woods. Even as recently as a few months ago I don't recall anyone predicting that this reunion would generate more than a couple of headlines. But out of the blue Fleetwood Mac seem to be just about everywhere. In part that has to do with an exceptionally well-timed and perfectly executed marketing campaign that beat the Stones to the punch by offering an Eagles-style (cf. Hell Freezes Over, 1994) high-profile comeback with an MTV special airing just as The Dance (Reprise) arrived, jam-packed with new live versions of all the old hits. But there's no denying that Fleetwood Mac have struck a chord. They've appealed (much as Bill Clinton and Al Gore did in '92 by resurrecting "Don't Stop") to a certain nostalgia for a receding past, when the future didn't seem quite so bleak or confusing for people who like liberal politics and AOR pop.

I'm a little too young to remember that, or to have seen the platinum line-up of the Mac the first time around. (I came of age during Reagan/Bush and will always pine for the days when one could comfortably feel alienated and marginalized from a well-defined mainstream.) Indeed, Fleetwood Mac always seemed like one of those soft, bloated '70s institutions whose mere existence justified the raw tenacity of even the most mediocre early punk bands. (I also always thought of them, along with the Eagles, as a warning that snorting piles and piles of drugs doesn't make everyone cool as Keith.)

Time, however, has been strangely kind to the Fleetwood Mac of Rumours. Not only have songs like "Second Hand News" and "You Make Loving Run" remained AOR staples, but "Gold Dust Woman" was covered by Hole (whose Courtney Love interviews Stevie Nicks in the current issue of Spin), and an indie-rock tribute to Fleetwood Mac titled Patron Saints of Pop: An Apostolary Homage (including tracks by Seattle's Faster Tiger, Boston's Jumbo and $50, and Memphis's Those Bastard Souls) is due soon (from Undercover Records, Box 14561, Portland, Oregon 97293). The passage of two decades, it appears, has made it easier to listen to the songs Fleetwood, Buckingham, Nicks, and the two McVies created outside their historical context -- to hear, for example, Tusk (the first album in history whose recording budget broke the million-dollar mark) as a challenging sonic experiment rather than Lindsay's folly or a self-indulgent commercial failure (it sold only four million copies after Rumours' 25 million).

Although it does rework "Say You Love Me" as a hillbilly banjo-driven number and feature the tune "Tusk" replete with marching band, The Dance doesn't aim to challenge, only to remind you that Fleetwood Mac remain a super group. It succeeds, not just because "The Chain," "Rhiannon," and "Go Your Own Way" are at this point pop standards, but because the band remain more than the sum of their disparate parts, because Buckingham is a somewhat unsung guitar hero who tears it up on "I'm So Afraid," because the songs (including four new ones) bristle with a kind of subtle friction that suggests a spark of creative spontaneity.

Anyone familiar with the disc probably noticed that much of the between-song banter from The Dance was repeated, almost word-for-word, before the same songs at the Friday show, right down to Christine McVie shouting "Lindsay Buckingham!" after "I'm So Afraid" and Buckingham segueing from McVie's new "Temporary One" to his new "Bleed To Love Her" with an unrevealing story about the reunion. That shattered any illusions of spontaneity -- I imagined a room full of lawyers representing each of these formerly feuding lovers and hammering out a pre-tour deal specifying who talks when on stage ("Stevie got the house, so Lindsay gets to introduce the song"). But even that couldn't diminish the impact of what will likely be remembered as the surprise comeback of 1997 -- Errol Flynn outfit and all.

Matt Ashare can be reached at mashare[a]phx.com.