Live shows
Sackings? Lawsuits? New recruits? It’s all grist to the mill for the eternally fractious mega-band
Fleetwoood Mac, Ry Cooder
JuST four stops into a tour introducing their brand-new lineup, Fleetwood Mac take the stage in Louisville amid a barrage of headlines. Some are triumphantly announcing Stevie Nicks’ nomination for the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, but most involve Lindsey Buckingham’s ousting back in April and his lawsuit against his former band. The dispute stems from disagreements regarding this series of dates, which Buckingham had asked that they postpone so he could promote a new solo album. Six months later, he is suing the remaining members for breach of oral contract, among other charges.
In other words, it’s just another day for a band that has not only survived almost constant turnover but continues to thrive despite such shakeups. The current lineup change has been more profound, not only for the seeming finality of Buckingham’s departure but also for the startling jolt of energy his replacements bring to the band. Taking over male vocals, Neil Finn of Split Enz and Crowded House has a similarly high and jabbing delivery to Buckingham, although with a more relaxed presence on stage. Mike Campbell, a lifelong guitarist for Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, brings a very large rock’n’roll vocabulary to these songs, ranging from country licks to barbed blues-rock riffs to power-pop fanfares. Rather than slog through the same hits, the band sound rejuvenated as they explore relatively dark corners of their catalogue. In fact, some of these songs haven’t graced their setlists in decades, including Danny Kirwan’s “Tell Me All the Things You Do” (from 1970’s Kiln House) and Christine McVie’s “Isn’t It Midnight” (from 1987’s Tango In The Night).
They open the show with “The Chain”, that undying ode to commitment in the face of turmoil and tribulation. Despite a shaky, workmanlike performance that makes the coda sound like a foregone conclusion, there is an implied wink when they all sing the chorus, “The chain will
keep us together”. It takes a few songs for the band to settle into a cheery dynamic, to get comfortable with these new people on stage, to slip into their old familiar roles. Clips from Bride Of Frankenstein play on the screen behind them during one song, a reminder that Fleetwood Mac is famously a band made up of perfectly ill-fitting parts.
At the far end of the stage, Christine McVie sits behind a bank of keyboards and adds bluesy flourishes to her songs, often trading licks with Campbell. Her voice may not be as strong as it once was, but her sunniness is as unshakable as ever on “Say You Love Me” and “You Make Loving Fun”. A few feet away John McVie stands silent, toggling reliably between buoyantly melodic basslines and streamlined blues-rock propulsion. The other half of the rhythm section, Mick Fleetwood, is his old eccentric self, even if his wooden balls hang a little lower on the lavatory chains than they once did. Halfway through “World Turning”, the band leave him on his own to regale the crowd with a lengthy drum solo, an almost obligatory event in a Fleetwood Mac concert, but he still brings a disruptive insouciance to the segment: a septuagenarian drummer challenging a younger crowd to keep up and “dig deep”.
Stevie Nicks, arguably the primary point of connection for the audience, dances around the stage during a long guitar solo on “Gold Dust Woman,” perhaps a bit more carefully than her younger self would have. While the moment is scripted, the anger in her voice sounds anything but. She makes the song sound freshly defiant and pointedly relevant, while avoiding anything too explicit in the way of a political target. But you know what she’s thinking when she all but yells, “You can’t break me now… you can’t blame me!”
The two new faces on stage play up the eclecticism of this 50-year-old band. They shift fluidly from the pop bounce of “Second Hand News” to the West Coast breeziness of “Say You Love Me” to the raucous psych-blues of “Oh Well”, sung
There is an implied wink when they all sing, “The chain will keep us together”
by Campbell in a nasal twang similar to Petty’s. Almost every incarnation of Fleetwood Mac is represented, giving the impression that the band is not one thing or another but a complicated and contradictory beast that can even devour the histories of its newest members. Finn duets with Nicks on Split Enz’s “I Got You” and Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” while Nicks takes lead on a cover of Petty’s “Free Fallin’.”
Rumours abound that Nicks’ voice is faltering with age, and she does sing in a lower pitch and with a grainier burr. But she makes Petty’s hit sound surprisingly fresh. It’s a fitting memorial by Petty’s right-hand man and one of his most famous fans (in the ’80s Nicks joked that she would quit Fleetwood Mac if Petty asked her to join the Heartbreakers). Both in sound and in theme, it’s a perfect match for Fleetwood Mac: it’s a song about California, about being adrift in the sunshine, about getting older but not growing out of certain urges to “free fall out into nothing”. When Nicks repeats the first verse with unexpected power, she cuts through any calculation and gets at something poignant, even soulful, within the song.
Following a perfectly fine “Don’t Stop”, Fleetwood Mac close the show with a modest duet between Nicks and Christine McVie, a short number called “All Over Again.” “It’s a song I wrote a few years ago which Stevie found in the archives somewhere,” McVie explains. “It’s a song about change. It’s a song about surviving change. It’s a song about the future.” It’s actually from 1995’s misbegotten Time album, a low point in the band’s career and famously an album that did not feature Nicks. Singing together with almost no accompaniment, they turn the song into an affectionate and generous commemoration of Fleetwood Mac and its many, many iterations: “In spite of the heartaches and troubles in love/I’d do it all over again.”