NME January 19, 1980
(by Chris Salewicz)
Of course, Fleetwood Mac is The American Dream.
The band's success story is the stuff of which the mythology of modern day America is made: Mick Fleetwood, John and Christine McVie, down on their luck in the Oulde Country, make the decision to move to The Promised Land. Travelling as far west as possible these humble immigrants settle out on the most advanced technological frontier in the world, Los Angeles.
Operating within rock'n'roll's picaresque tradition, a surprise encounter teams the three English people up with two down-and-out American natives, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Within a year, following closely the code of the WASP work ethic, their fortunes are changing for the better.
Within three years of moving to America they have become part of the aristocracy to which you are granted entry in the United States of America by virtue of your material rather than by virtue of your blood. When in Washington Fleetwood Mac are invited to the White House for social chitchat with President Jimmy Carter.
By now they are so rich that Mick Fleetwood tells a friend he knows he need never work again in his life.
Gosh, it's like a good made-for-TV movie!
'Rumours' was a musical soap opera detailing diary entries of the emotional chaos within Fleetwood Mac following the breakthrough of the 'Fleetwood Mac' album. The romantic traumas it dealt with, though, were those of wealthy Beautifully Tanned People. A very glamorous record really, a sort of musical Dallas.
Incorporating as many emotional buzz-words and buzz-areas possible 'Rumours' rather simply discussed the romantic problems of many people in their late twenties or early thirties. By so doing it established once and for all the viability of what has now become known as AOR - Adult Oriented Rock.
In what seemed so apt in Me Generation, Self-fixated ("Buddy, from now on I'm looking after number one!") mid 70's California, the state with the highest divorce rate in the world, Fleetwood Mac's position became something like the group-as-group-therapy. Easier than EST, safer than Synanon,'Rumours'seemed as Californian as any of the new quasi-religious texts like Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance or the collected works of L Ron Hubbard.
That was not the sole factor, of course, behind 'Rumours' selling close on twenty million copies. All that was just the in-depth back-up team, really. The real reason 'Rumours' sold so many copies was that it became bigger-than-life-itself was because, in the words of Warner Brothers' Derek Taylor: "It's just a very, very good double-sided pop record."
Fleetwood Mac's music is rock'n'roll - just the rhythm section alone would ensure that but it's a very poppy rock'n'roll, closer to Abba than Elmore James, the inspiration of the band's original guitarist.
But can you imagine what the vibes must've been like in the studio during the making of 'Rumours'? Fleetwood Mac probably shouldn't be begrudged a single cent of their wealth.
Even now - perhaps more than ever - there is something indefinably sad about Fleetwood Mac, especially about the three English expatriates, or so it appears when I travel to San Francisco to see them play two dates at the Cow Palace at the end of their American tour.
Mick Fleetwood, for example, as well as apparently being still deeply in love with Jenny (sister of Patti) Boyd, his ex-wife of two divorces, suffers from both diabetes and a related condition that is the exact opposite of diabetes - i.e. Fleetwood mustn't eat sugar and must eat a lot of sugar. One wonders at the possible cause -of such an imbalance within his body. Meanwhile, the re-married John McVie (the band's "Penguin" logo stems from the bassist's fascination for the bird - he even has one tattooed on his forearm), for many the definition of A Good Bloke, continues to seem happiest when he has a glass in his hand though most people have a favourite drug, of course. Christine McVie, who has taken up with recently fired Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, seems to epitomise the paradoxes scattered throughout all aspects of the group: a Cancer, with all its mother (Earth) implications (her pure, rich vocals can only be described by the word "fecund") she's had herself sterilised, a very Californian thing to do.
Really, though, the sadness of Fleetwood Mac has a very large responsibility for the band's popularity and for making so many people so happy.
The regally named Lindsey Buckingham, the youngest group member at just thirty, is the one F Mac Person who is very much in sympathy with the newer ways of thinking. There's obviously a link between this and the fact he has nine songs on the new album, as opposed to the six of Christine McVie and the five of Stevie Nicks.
When we meet for a formal interview session he quizzes me about the English music scene and reveals a fair knowledge of such acts as Talking Heads and The Gang Of Four. By contrast the tapes playing in the suite of Stevie Nicks - a very '60s of person, really - are Derek And The Dominoes and Steve Miller. Her tastes, though, are probably more representative of what the band listen to than Buckingham's. Fleetwood Mac are essentially conservative in their musical outlook - not just in their music, either: John McVie has a bit of a hard time relating to my pink socks.
So at a time when most younger bands are seeking to destroy the once assumed divinity of the, massive studio bill, it's hardly surprising that the production costs of 'Tusk', the 'Rumours' follow-up, should make it the first million dollar album. 'Tusk' seems closer to a mega- production than to good ol'funky rock'n'roll ... which is appropriate, really, because with their homes in Bel-Air, Beverley Hills and Malibu Fleetwood Mac are part of The New Hollywood.
Though no-one will admit it, part of the expense of 'Tusk' must've been (unconsciously, perhaps) justified internally within the band as a weapon to fight the uncertainty and insecurity that would've inevitably been present in trying to follow up as huge a success as 'Rumours'. Besides ivory's expensive. Ask elephants.
According to Buckingham, anyway, the cost of the record has become a little overstated. Basically, 'Tusk' cost so much because someone cocked up: Partially as an investment, no doubt, F Mac were going to have their own studio built, until they were strongly advised against it by people at Warner Brothers who told them costs would be absolutely prohibitive. Of course, if they'd listened to their own advice - a rare slip for the self-managed outfit they'd have something more to show for all that money spent.
"In the context of the whole," Buckingham's high metallic voice tells me, "the'Rumours' album took longer to make than 'Tusk'. One of the reasons why 'Tusk' cost so much is that we happened to be at a studio that was charging a fuck of a lot of money.
"During the making of 'Tusk' we were in the studio for about ten months and we got twenty songs out of it. The 'Rumours' album took the same amount of time. It didn't cost so much because we were in a cheaper studio.
"There's no denying what it cost, but I think it's been taken just a little out of context."
In addition, the much touted digital recording hardly affected the band at all, its real use being in preserving the quality of the master-tape and the records that are pressed from it.
Anyway, as Nick Kent wrote in his review of the double album,'Tusk' is a pretty fine traditional pop/rock record. It's only when Fleetwood Mac play some of it onstage, that you become aware of its deficiencies: the band did spend too long in the studio. Live, the 'Tusk' songs have a freshness and vital spirit that has become muted during all that studio time. It's still a good record, though. "You've got to play it a lot," says John McVie. "It keeps getting better." Yeah, but if you keep doing that do you eventually reach saturation point, as happens with 'Rumours', a basically inferior record, incidentally, to the 'Fleetwood Mac'album that preceded it?
Warner Brothers, of course were anxious that the delay between 'Rumours' and its successor was too great. For a while they wanted to release the first record of the two record set as soon as it was completed. That was nixed. So was a heavy advertising campaign that the company had a New York agency present to the band. Mick Fleetwood: "The record company let this agency try something and when we saw it it was ... just nothing ... It was scrapped immediately.
"I said I didn't think they'd be able to do it, because for pretty obvious reasons we're pretty preoccupied with not overselling ourselves. I think it's very unfortunate that someone like Peter Frampton let his music be cheapened by doing things like putting adverts for Peter Frampton watches in his albums. That just shouldn't happen. A record's supposed to be there to listen to. I think that's sick. I can't understand how people let that happen. I think it's real crass."
All this balance sheet stuff aside, it may interest fans of the original Fleetwood Mac to learn that none other than Peter Green himself plays on the album. "That's right," confirms Fleetwood, "he plays literally about eight notes at the end of one of Chris's song - 'Brown Eyes', I think it is. He just wandered into the studio whilst the track was being done.
"But," continues Fleetwood with sudden despondency, "I've given up with Peter. I've totally given up. He's just given up where anything to do with money is concerned. After a while it just wears me down." The drummer confirms what I'd heard, that on the recently released Peter Green solo album the guitar hero actually handles very little of the work on his chosen instrument: "A lot of the guitar is done by a friend of his. He told me that he'd handed over the guitar duties to someone else, ridiculous. "
It was Mick Fleetwood - a good-natured fellow who presumably wanted to hand some of his new fortune Green's way in the same manner that he's assisted former Mac guitarist Bob Welch -who set Green up with a contract with Warner worth nearly a million dollars: "The day he was supposed to sign it he freaked out. I looked a bit stupid. After all, who would believe that he didn't want to sign a contract because he thought it was with the Devil?"
(Well, quite a few chaps, actually ... )
Fleetwood Mac may be part of the New Hollywood but they're not taken in by all the LA bullshit -three of them are British, after all, and all three old lags in this rock'n'roll circus: they've seen it all before.
Buckingham, meanwhile, would far rather live in his native San Francisco than Los Angeles. Stevie would probably favour living on a flying carpet.
"America is my home," says Fleetwood, "but I don't plan to live in Los Angeles much longer - none of us do, in fact. There is definitely going to be an earthquake. LA will be flattened. I'll have no regrets at all about moving."
He claims that the flakiness of Hollywood hardly affects him: "We work a helluva lot so we don't get much chance to think about it."
Fleetwood Mac tour a lot for a band of their status (and age). "Out of the next thirteen -months," Mick tells me, "we're spending nearly nine months on the road. That is the sort of commitment to what we do. It's not that we just want to throw out an album and say,'Oh, it'll do alright!' "
As the new royalty, of course, it's necessary for the band to occasionally hold court to meet local media dignitaries. These press conferences are fairly appalling affairs with - at the one I attended in San Francisco prior to the band's final three shows of their American tour, anyway -the local press and TV and radio fielding their questions with strained, reverential smiles, like forelock tugging supplicants come to beg for boons.
Held in one of the bland conference rooms at the San Francisco hotel in Union Square in the centre of the city, the event was strictly showbiz Presidential, with the band - except Buckingham who'd gone to visit his mother sitting at a dais at one end of the room as questions of the weight of "Who is 'Sara?" and "Mick, do you ever sneak out at night and go to clubs?" were put to the tolerant Mac. The killer was when some mutant got up and asked Stevie what she was doing for dinner that night.
In the middle of an hour and twenty minutes of this nonsense Mick Fleetwood's whole body appears to go into spasms. Christine McVie, sitting next to him, massages his shoulders and arms with thoughtful concern. Mick's having one of his diabetes attacks. He'd been late arriving at the press conference because he'd felt so lousy he thought he might have to blow it out altogether.
At times like this one wonders, "Is it worth it?"
Onstage Fleetwood Mac are a great rock band. Whatever Mick Fleetwood may say about attempting to step away from the LA soft-rock sound on 'Tusk' the band haven't gone far enough - or at least they probably did go far enough and then just stuck around for too long in that overpriced studio blowing their 'Rumours' bread on overdubs. Onstage, though, they really burn, with the new short-haired Buckingham - the somewhat -camp shots of him on the 'Tusk' sleeve being only stage one of a metamorphosis into Beverley Hills New Waver that has now been completed - spurring the band on from his Centre-Stage stance. By the third number the sweat's running down his face and neck like a waterfall.
John McVie, who with Mick Fleetwood makes one of the hardest, most inventive, rhythm sections in rock, adopts a most unusual stance for a bassist by moving about a lot and entering into duelling partnerships with Buckingham, himself a feisty rather than academic or soulful guitarist.
On stage right Christine McVie provides the Mother Earth image she is so keen to renounce, an anchor behind her keyboards.
Stevie Nicks has, as you might expect, six or seven dress changes (though, equally, Mick Fleetwood, who looks very late '60s and Jethro Tull-like in his boots and waistcoat, has a gong at the back of his kit (often the sign of a dodgy band) but, in fact, these are just part of the show, and Nick's real strength is her superb voice, deep -maybe deeper than 'Buckingham's, actually -(until I saw F Mac onstage in London I couldn't figure out which parts were sung by the chaps and which by the gels) and resonant and clear, as though she'd been gargling with redwood sap. Nicks is a bit of a clown sometimes but she's okay, really think what you'd be like if you lived in California.
Each individual's instrumental and vocal accomplishments aside, however, what really makes this show work is that there are so many great songs in the set - since the release of 'Tusk' Fleetwood Mac have effectively twice as many songs at their disposal.
Backstage at this show promoted by Bill Graham (as featured in Apocalypse Now) at the Cow Palace (a mere twelve or thirteen thousand seater) there is a very good vibe. There is an undeniable elegance about the benchwood furniture and potted palms that fill the ressing-rooms. John McVie is very happy. lumping around in an old army fatigue jacket looking to put something in his empty glass he seems pleased at my praising the show. "This is a great band," he nods to himself, and picks up a bottle of vodka.
Christine McVie and Dennis Wilson sit on a couch, canoodling and spooning like teenagers at a drive-in movie. Dennis seems pretty drunk, actually, or that's my interpretation of the near-total failure in communication that we experience when we try and talk to each other. Maybe it's just a bad case of culture gap. Oh well, Surf's Out: Don't Make Waves. What seems like the entire Buckingham family tree is also present.
Mick Fleetwood and myself end up sitting round a tape recorder in the middle dressing-room, the one that has the urinals and toilets. It also has the F Mac oxygen cylinder and mask. This was a new one on me and didn't seem to work when I tried it. Presumably, though, if all you do is breathe air-conditioned air in hotels and limos all your life, maybe you need a drop of the bottled stuff now and then. Perhaps it's the sort of breathing equivalent of Perrier water. I can't see it catching on in Bradford, though.
Mick Fleetwood was the original founder of Fleetwood Mac in July, 1967, following his being kicked out of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers after only a couple of months for drinking too much. Apart from Mayall himself the line-up Fleetwood had been part of was completed by John McVie, who'd played with Mayall since the beginning of 1963, and Peter Green. Green followed Fleetwood shortly afterwards and an initially reluctant McVie joined in September of that year.
Prior to working with the Bluesbreakers, Fleetwood had been working as a decorator for a law weeks following the break-up of white soul roadshow The Shotgun Express, also featuring Rod Stewart. He is a man with a very absurd sense of humour that is rarely revealed in interviews when he seems keenest to play the political spokesman role that is presumably a development of his also managing the band, a position he took over following the notorious occasion when their former manager Cliff ord Davis, claiming to own the name "Fleetwood Mac" and to be able to use it as he saw fit, sent a bogus F Mac out on the road in America in January, 1974.
He loathes the idea of managers now, and thinks that no band or artist should need one: "A good accountant and lawyer and a good tour manager - an old roadie can do that - are all you need."
Along with John McVie, Fleetwood's the real backbone of Fleetwood Mac. He's a formidable drummer, which is why it's very puzzling that his actual drum solo - with hand-held "talking" drum - should be so duff.
These days with his beard he can look a lot like Donald Sutherland, which is very confusing considering that Sutherland starred in the remake of Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers which was, of course, set in San Francisco.
I try not to think about that too much and make a general opening remark about the manner in which the music scene, in England anyway, has changed since the New Ascension of F Mac. I tell Fleetwood the F Mac don't appear to have the same amount of abuse hurled at them as the likes of The Eagles or Led Zeppelin.
"Well," he replies, in not too practised a manner, "we've never stayed one way for very long, and I don't think we ever will. When the band first started Peter was writing and then 'Albatross' came out and people said, 'What the fuck's that?'- though people stayed loyal.
"We've always changed a lot whether or not players have changed. We're actually afraid, I think, of getting into that rut, which can be very easy to do, and very awful, too. Especially when it's just so you can'make a lot of money'. Doing a double album didn't make any business sense at all. But it meant a lot to us, artistically whether we could still feel challenged. We really, really are pleased with it. We've also, I think, got enough discretion to know if the songs aren't up to standard, in which case we'd have just put out a single album.
"We've got a great advantage, though, in having three very different songwriters. We're very lucky. When Danny, Peter and Jeremy were in the band they all wrote and played very, very different stuff. So in a way we're back to that sort of situation - again we have the advantage of three very different styles. So it's come something like full circle."
Were you aware of just how strong the punk / New Wave thing had become in England?
"No-o-o-o, "Mick Fleetwood shakes his head, perhaps with no great passion, shrugging his shoulders as he continues in the slightly slurred, drawn-out syllables of the Home Counties rock'n'roll accent first popularised by such near-contemporaries of the drummer as Mick Jagger "because we're not physically there ... But I know there's a whole social thing going on.
"The good musical things," he continues, more confidently, "will stay behind. Most bands that I know of didn't really have any great master-plan. They just started off listening to the blues and the Rolling Stones and Chuck Berry records, played the school dance or whatever and went on from there. Just went off and did it. And developed.
"It's not that evident over here. England's such a tiny place - all those great bands always come out of it. England brings out some kind of hardcore staying power. I don't think this country has that, because it genuinely isn't as hard here. I'm not saying people don't have a hard time here. Stevie and Lindsey certainly did ..."
With Jungian synchronicity, or maybe just good timing, Stevie Nicks sticks her rather shattered-looking head round the door with all the experience of ... someone who's done a lot of waitressing. "Cheeseburger fries, kidney pie, potatoes and starch ... well, anyway, I'm sorry I broke in your little tea-party . . ."
She disappears. The door closes. Mick Fleetwood scratches his head, as though bewildered - at this display of Rock Star Looning. "Gosh', he says, just like that.
Enough of this frivolity. On with the questions - of course, one of the reasons you left England in 1974 was because you were so pissed off with living there ...
"We were just pissed off with the whole thing, because basically Fleetwood Mac didn't mean a shit then in Europe. The band had changed, whatever we played wasn't appealing - the balls of the band, namely Peter, had gone. At that point, anyway, we were playing more and more over here.
"Also, I thought England was very grey and full of depressed people. All those kids were just reacting to that. I know that. We just got out. But it can never have that same effect in terms of the nucleus effect here, simply because of the size of the country. You can go through the whole Mid-West and it's just not there."
Actually, when I was watching you onstage tonight I was thinking of the colossal sense of history in your songs...
"Yeah," agrees Fleetwood, pleased, "before I went on tonight I shouted out 'You know what this is? This is the last three gigs of the decade'. And then while I was playing I was trying to count the years I'd been with John. I thought, 'God! Not so long now and it'll be something like 20 years!' That's what I mean; there's a lot of feeling up there, of people that have developed together.
"There's a lot of waste of talent that starts up and just fizzles out. You just see the spark of something and then they all start throwing TVs out of windows and showing they're a load of bastards."
You had the Youth Success thing ...
"Yeah. But we held it together as a band. We were lucky - because of the people in the band we became involved in the thinking process of what we were trying to do. For ourselves. Selfishly, if you like. And we're still doing that. It's not just a crank it out and let it roll in until it stops rolling in number: 'Oh, I'll just do it for a few years and clean up'. This is a career. This is what we do.
"It's just a question of having some integrity about what you do, and we definitely try to have that. And I suppose when we stop having that feeling then it will be time to stop altogether ... Rather than just an 'Oh, we'll do a quick tour and rake it in'.
"There's a lot of that goes on."
I think for quite a while after 'Rumours came out it was assumed that the next F Mac record would be a live album, after which you'd all retire ...
"We've recorded some gigs on this tour. We do it every tour and they just get put away. They might be used some time. Who knows?"
At one stage, though, wasn't there talk of this double album being one record live and one record studio?
"I don't remember that. I think we thought of the possibility of going into a concert hall and just cutting these songs literally live. Live these songs are very different. Without all the overdubs they really kick ass.
"I think it'd be an interesting thing to do to just go in an empty hall and just develop the number in the same way you have to play it onstage. We don't do a lot of the stuff onstage. You can't get all those little tinkles and cymbals and tom-tom overclubs. You play the gut of the number. To approach doing some new tunes in that way could well be an interesting thing to try.
"A good live album can be great, but it's often treading water a bit, and a very easy thing to do. People say we must be crazy that a band as big as we are haven't put out a live record ... or a Greatest Hits in between 'Rumours' and 'Tusk'. But it takes the freshness away of what we're trying to do. Of course, there'll be a Greatest Hits sometime. One day. As a final curtain, perhaps.
"But certainly now the intention is to keep on recording new stuff. Hopefully the next album will be out a lot quicker than other people think. I think we'll just go for a quick one."
Did 'Rumours' do your heads in? "Just the colossal success?" - very matter-of-fact - "we were working a lot of the time on the road. Again, I just think we're lucky."
But did you feel it was becoming just a commodity?
"No. Because we don't let that sort of thing happen. If we wanted to utilise all the marketing resources we could make 'A Lot More Money', a lot more cash-in stuff. But," - derisively - "that's going for a real cheap one. You shoot your integrity out the window... Because we're internally very... well, we look after our own affairs for a start, so we don't have anyone feeding us a load of bullshit on.how great we are... So we're constantly having to make-our minds up ourselves, which keeps you open... And I think that's kept us relatively sane."
"Of course, there is pressure. And you just have to hang on to the same thing as you've hung on to for the last however many years it is. You just don't presume that you're anything special, ever. As soon as you do that, then forget it.
"There's a lot of natural energy in this group. Without it it wouldn't work. It's apparent to me that onstage there's just genuine rapport. We know what numbers we're going to play next, but in point of fact it is relatively different every night. We need the subtleties that go on between us onstage. We need to look at each other and know you're looking at someone and it feels good. I enjoy myself as much now as I ever have. It has nothing to do with how much money you've made or how well you're doing.
"I really don't think we'd be doing it if we weren't enjoying it. And equally I know there are lots of people that make the choice to continue doing it, presumably because they're making a lot of money.
"This band," he adopts a Mancunian accent, "has got guts in it!"
Warners presumably wanted to do a huge number on 'Tusk' to equal 'Rumours'? The advertising campaign, etc...
"I think with any record company you have to just acknowledge that they want to make the record successful. And their measure of success is money. It would be naive of me to say we're totally oblivious to how much money you can make. But the