Fleet of foot
Classic folk-rock legends Fleetwood Mac hasn’t stopped thinking about tomorrow.
MICK Fleetwood remembers sitting backstage with Elton John, hearing about his plans for retiring from touring.
“He said, ‘No one believes me – not even my band, but as soon as my children are old enough to go to a proper school, I’m going to hang it up and be that parent that’s available for them,’” recalls Fleetwood Mac’s drummer and co-founder. “He’s keeping to his promise.”
It’s a question that a lot of Fleetwood’s contemporaries wrestle with. “For a while, the question was always: ‘Is this the Stones’ last tour?’ But here they are going out again in grand style,” he says. “We have our own version of that in this band.”
And Fleetwood, 71, says there was a point last year when the members of Fleetwood Mac were battling about a tour that coincided with its 50th anniversary and wondering if it was time to hang it up as well.
“It was a huge deal that the band should change its dynamic this far down the road,” Fleetwood says. “We thought long and hard – though not too, too long because we knew we had to make our minds up. But we did some serious thinking about whether this was going to be end of the band really. We decided, the four of us, that was not going to be the case.”
Instead, Fleetwood, singer Stevie Nicks, singer-keyboardist Christine McVie and bassist John McVie decided to fire long-time guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, who joined the band in 1974 with Nicks, and replace him with Crowded House frontman Neil Finn and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell.
Even that surprising announcement last April didn’t end the band’s worries. “Then the joyride and the not-knowing ride of ‘this has to be the right decision’ begins,” Fleetwood says. “And it only becomes the right decision with the right chemistry and the right players.”
With the first leg of the tour successfully in the books, Fleetwood says the band is pleased with its new course. “We’re definitely all very happy,” he says. “We’re also blessed that the audiences have been beyond stellar and have come on this journey with the band on a level that’s beyond anything that we could have imagined . ... But you can understand that going out at the beginning of this excursion, there was a lot at stake – a lot of musical integrity. We were just really incredibly fortunate we found two very talented gentlemen that fit incredibly well with the band and have a musical, fantastic story to tell in their own right.”
Fleetwood says the band is enjoying its latest chapter, eager to try new things. They have already added Don’t Dream It’s Over from Finn’s band, Crowded House, and Free Fallin’ from Campbell’s time with Petty into their sets. And they have brought Fleetwood Mac’s 1968 single Black Magic Woman back into its set-list, which Nicks rediscovered when Fleetwood performed it with his band in Maui.
“Stevie sees it and says, ‘Oh, my God, I love that song. I wanna do it’“Fleetwood recalls. “And she did. And she does. It’s fun. It’s just a twist. It’s one of those songs that most people believe is not a Fleetwood Mac song. They would associate it with Santana. But it was written by Peter Green with John and myself back in the day with Jeremy (Spencer, from the band’s original lineup), so we have fun with that. And Chris gets a great rip around it . ... A song like that gives her a chance to do something, in truth, that she hasn’t done in many years, which is get back to her roots and it’s of course very much in John and my backyard. And Mike couldn’t wait to be playing guitar on Black Magic Woman .Ithinkif there was any thought of not doing that song, I think Mike would have said, ‘You are not pulling that out of the set.’”
Yes, Fleetwood Mac hasn’t stopped thinking about tomorrow. “We’re very happy and we’re having a ball out here,” Fleetwood says with a laugh. “That’s something that we needed.” – Tribune News Service