Fleetwood Mac turns 50 !

A

anatta

100% recycled karma
They've sold more than 100 million records since they first took the stage in Windsor, England, 50 years ago. Their sound has changed and so have the band members, but the chain has never been broken.

The iconic band, Fleetwood Mac, will celebrate its 50th anniversary Sunday.

"I always look at it - and look at that date, and that it's been worth a damn," said Mick Fleetwood, the band's drummer.

He's been there from the very beginning and recounts the early days of the band in his new book, "Love That Burns: A Chronicle of Fleetwood Mac," reports "CBS This Morning: Saturday" co-host Anthony Mason.

A story that almost took a very different course. Just two days after joining Fleetwood Mac, he got a phone call from Jeff Beck inviting him to join a band he was putting together.

The Jeff Beck Group would feature a young singer named Rod Stewart but instead, Fleetwood joined another band of blues musicians.

"We had been in a band called John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, John McVie, Peter Green and myself."

The name Fleetwood Mac came about incidentally, in the middle of a recording session.

They'd laid down an instrumental, their first unofficial track together, and the engineer asked, "What are we gonna put on the box?"

"Peter goes, 'Call it Fleetwood Mac. John and Mick are playing on it,'" Fleetwood said.

Green, a guitar god who'd replaced Eric Clapton in the Bluesbreakers, would write the band's first British hit, "Black Magic Woman."

"He had no interest in being a solo creature," Fleetwood said of Green. "He called the band Fleetwood Mac for a reason."

The first album was called "Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac" which, Fleetwood said, made Green furious. "He was asked, they said, 'Why would you call the band Fleetwood Mac? Why did you?' he said, 'Well I pretty much felt that one day I would leave and I wanted Mick and John to have a band,'" Fleetwood said.
n 1970, Green did leave.

"When we survived Peter leaving, in my mind – I would always go back to, I said, 'Well, that was the most devastating thing that ever happened to me,'" Fleetwood said. "For better or for worse and the outcome has been this weird survival story."

Their biggest album, 1977's "Rumours", which sold 40 million copies, was the soundtrack of the band's breakups.

Guitarist Lindsey Buckingham splitting with Stevie Nicks, bassist John McVie divorcing his keyboardist wife, Christine. Yet the band endured, reaching for what Fleetwood calls the elusive "It."

Asked why they stayed together, Fleetwood said, "Corny, but because they get a dose of it. They definitely get a mega dose of it, which is challenging, you know to be able to attain that with this gloriously dysfunctional story, which is us bunch."

And when they're together, Fleetwood Mac has always come first.

"And that's the only way to be in a band, you know. Or you gonna have no more."
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fleetwood-mac-mick-fleetwood-on-bands-origin-new-book/
 
mick-fleetwood-mac-book-john-mcvie-on-tour-sunglasses-8cd5092d-32dc-4093-a83b-7538d419eb52.jpg

John McVie -1970

mick-in-maui-fleetwood-mac-book-a7457c38-7928-40fe-9568-0c650b9b5da0.jpg

Mick at his house in Hawaii
 
anatta said:
They've sold more than 100 million records since they first took the stage in Windsor, England, 50 years ago. Their sound has changed and so have the band members, but the chain has never been broken.

The iconic band, Fleetwood Mac, will celebrate its 50th anniversary Sunday.

"I always look at it - and look at that date, and that it's been worth a damn," said Mick Fleetwood, the band's drummer.

He's been there from the very beginning and recounts the early days of the band in his new book, "Love That Burns: A Chronicle of Fleetwood Mac," reports "CBS This Morning: Saturday" co-host Anthony Mason.

A story that almost took a very different course. Just two days after joining Fleetwood Mac, he got a phone call from Jeff Beck inviting him to join a band he was putting together.

The Jeff Beck Group would feature a young singer named Rod Stewart but instead, Fleetwood joined another band of blues musicians.

"We had been in a band called John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, John McVie, Peter Green and myself."

The name Fleetwood Mac came about incidentally, in the middle of a recording session.

They'd laid down an instrumental, their first unofficial track together, and the engineer asked, "What are we gonna put on the box?"

"Peter goes, 'Call it Fleetwood Mac. John and Mick are playing on it,'" Fleetwood said.

Green, a guitar god who'd replaced Eric Clapton in the Bluesbreakers, would write the band's first British hit, "Black Magic Woman."

"He had no interest in being a solo creature," Fleetwood said of Green. "He called the band Fleetwood Mac for a reason."

The first album was called "Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac" which, Fleetwood said, made Green furious. "He was asked, they said, 'Why would you call the band Fleetwood Mac? Why did you?' he said, 'Well I pretty much felt that one day I would leave and I wanted Mick and John to have a band,'" Fleetwood said.
n 1970, Green did leave.

"When we survived Peter leaving, in my mind – I would always go back to, I said, 'Well, that was the most devastating thing that ever happened to me,'" Fleetwood said. "For better or for worse and the outcome has been this weird survival story."

Their biggest album, 1977's "Rumours", which sold 40 million copies, was the soundtrack of the band's breakups.

Guitarist Lindsey Buckingham splitting with Stevie Nicks, bassist John McVie divorcing his keyboardist wife, Christine. Yet the band endured, reaching for what Fleetwood calls the elusive "It."

Asked why they stayed together, Fleetwood said, "Corny, but because they get a dose of it. They definitely get a mega dose of it, which is challenging, you know to be able to attain that with this gloriously dysfunctional story, which is us bunch."

And when they're together, Fleetwood Mac has always come first.

"And that's the only way to be in a band, you know. Or you gonna have no more."
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fleetwood-mac-mick-fleetwood-on-bands-origin-new-book/
Click to expand...


The Chain...
 
Response to post 1.

Being a hard rocker/metal head in high school, I thought Fleetwood Mac was what wusses listened to.

Many years later, I realized how brilliant that Rumors album is, and how notable Stevie Nicks is as a vocalist. She is not technically a great singer, but her rasping, somewhat haunting voice, is unmistakable and compelling.


p.s., loved her and Tom Petty's duet on Stop Dragging My Heart Around. Good stuff!
 
Lindsey Buckingham / Christine McVie
Drowned in Sound
by Joe Goggins
6/10


There’s a couple of possibilities in play when it comes to the title of this collaborative LP from Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie. One is that they’re especially paranoid about the possibility of falling foul of the Trade Descriptions Act, and feared that a simple Buckingham-McVie moniker might have had fans storming record shops in their droves and demanding refunds after discovering that this isn’t, in fact, some kind of creative partnership between the House of Windsor and Fleetwood Mac bassist John McVie, who by all accounts would rather be pursuing his love of sailing these days than touring the world in a famously tortured rock and roll band. The other line of reasoning, of course, is that comparisons with the highly-charged Buckingham-Nicks label would’ve been uncomfortable at best and an outright distraction at worst.


It’s exactly that line of thinking, though, that brings you to wonder what it is that Buckingham and McVie were looking to get out of this joint effort; after all, the former has always quietly served as his band’s musical director and the latter was, until recently, entirely off the radar, having effectively spent the best part of two decades as a recluse in the English countryside before finally rejoining Fleetwood Mac on the road. That said, the idea that their partnership was somehow less worthy of attention than that between Buckingham and Nicks is daft; after all, the last truly classic album that the band turned out, Tango in the Night, was built primarily around their songs, with McVie - who, of course, was a part of the setup before Buckingham - laying claim to the classics ‘Little Lies’ and ‘Everywhere’.
17634847_1863493410584851_8938451551563801571_n.jpg


It’s worth mentioning that McVie’s ex-husband and Mick Fleetwood both chip in on this album, meaning it’s only a Nicks guest turn away from basically serving as the first new full-length from the group since 2003’s tepid Say You Will. Perhaps that’s the best prism through which to view it, especially given that the last recorded output we got from them as a whole was Extended Play in 2013, prior to McVie rejoining. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely rubbish. It also felt really regressive, a cynical jab at recapturing some idealised Fleetwood Mac sound, when of course that in its genuine form relies on a cornucopia of different ideas from different songwriters.


Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie comes quite close to it. Both sound pretty free; there’s plenty of experimentation, which is ultimately for both better and worse. ‘Feel About You’ is slight and would barely be there without the peculiar, Grease-esque backing vocals, and yet it’s an earworm. ‘In My World’ is the opposite, thickly layered and constantly shifting shape - it’s deliberate and considered, with the midsection recalling ‘Big Love’ with the vocal back-and-forth.


There’s inevitably missteps. ‘Too Far Gone’ goes all-out in its pursuit of disco and falls short on pretty much every front; the guitars have a weird, off-putting buzz to them, and both vocalists sound achingly uncomfortable, to the point that it’s astonishing that they listened back to it and were happy to put it on the record. Additionally, ‘On with the Show’ is a mid-tempo plodder that might conceivably have been intended for Fleetwood Mac, given that’s what their last world tour was called - it certainly wears the lethargy of Extended Play.


Flashes of vintage Mac remain, though, from both Buckingham and McVie. The latter takes the lead on what might be the standout, the gorgeous ‘Red Sun’, whilst ‘Lay Down for Free’ has Lindsey pulling that strange trick of sounding laid-back but emanating urgency on what should otherwise be a breezy, country-flecked rocker; it’s proof that all of his songwriting faculties are still intact. The fascinating thing is the overall sound of Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie and its production; it’s intriguingly low-key, especially given Buckingham’s appetite for lush textures in recent years. Accordingly, the album falls somewhere between curio and convincing; there’s enough here to hold the attention of the casual Mac fan, however fleetingly, but diehards should find a bit more to dig into in the brighter moments. A worthwhile exercise.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top