The True Life Confessions Of Fleetwood Mac

(By Cameron Crowe, Rolling Stone Magazine, 24 March 1977)

Fuck it...

 Peter Green didn't want his 30,000 [pounds] a year. The money was royalties from his work with his old blues band, Fleetwood Mac. He'd quit the band in 1970, saying he wanted to live a Christian life. He gave his money away and eventually took various menial jobs, including one as a gravedigger.  But now, as more and more people acquaint themselves with Fleetwood Mac and dig back to old reissues, this money keeps arriving. He tries to get rid of it, but it's all just a bother. "I want to lead a new life," he would say. "I don't want to be followed around by the past".  When Green could tolerate it no longer, he paid his accountant a visit, brandishing a pump-action 22 shotgun. He wanted the money stopped. Soon Green was standing in Marlebone Court in London, listening calmly as the judge read this verdict. Peter Green, blues-guitar-star-turned-ascetic, was ordered committed to a mental institution.

After ten years and a particularly lean time just before the group's 1975 smash, Fleetwood Mac, broke loose, everybody loves this quiet little British-American band that could. Fleetwood Mac's music has evolved into a sophisticated pop and rock sound that's just right for the Seventies, thanks primarily to two women, old-timer Christine McVie and newcomer Stevie Nicks. The group's latest album is being shipped out in greater quantities than any other record in the history of Warner Bros. There are, of course, reasons for Warner's optimism: Fleetwood Mac produced three hit singles ("Over my head" and "Say you love me" by McVie; "Rhiannon" by Nicks), sold 4 million units, has danced around the top half of the album charts for over 80 weeks and is Warner's all-time best seller.

And adding to everyone's enthusiasm were shows like the one at LA's Universal Amphitheater last fall. There, in front of an adorning crowd that included Elton John and two princesses of Iran, FM looked like they were feeling good. New energy was being supplied by Stevie Nicks and the other most recent addition Lindsey Buckingham. What with Buckingham prowling around the stage, dropping feisty lead runs into all the right places, and singer Nicks playing the whirling dervish Welsh witch Rhiannon, the group's dignified reserve was clearly a thing of the past.  Even drummer Mick Fleetwood finally ventured out from behind his drum kit to play the African talking drum on "World Turning". And Christine McVie, Fleetwood Mac's brandy-voiced keyboardist of six years, recently overcoming a phobia against talking to the audience. Only John McVie, perhaps in the grand tradition of bassists, remains impassive and faultlessly proficient.

But one would soon learn that their minds were elsewhere - namely, in the tiny studio across town from the Amphitheater, where they were still struggling to finish their very latefollow LP, a trouble child, called Rumours.  Work on the album began in February '76, immediately after the group had introduced their new lineup on a marathon six-month cross-country tour. Traveling to the Record Plant Studios in Sausalito, just north of San Francisco, FM had walked straight into an emotional holocaust. Christine and John McVie, married for almost 8 years, had recently split up and weren't talking to each other. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were about to do likewise. And Mick Fleetwood certainly wasn't talking to anybody. The father of two children, he and his wife Jenny were in the midst of divorce proceedings.  "Everybody was pretty weirded out", Christine McVie explained. "Somehow Mick was there, the figurehead: "We must carry on... let's be mature about this, sort it out. - Somehow we waded through it."

They returned to LA, but the tapes from their nine weeks in the Sausalito studio - many of them mangled by a "recording machine" that earned the nickname "Jaws" - sounded strange wherever they played them. They were almost resigned to starting all over when one of their crew found a cramped dubbing room in the porno district of Hollywood Boulevard, a studio that perfectly accommodated what they had recorded. A fully booked fall tour was canceled, and there, while films like Squirm and Dick City played next door, Fleetwood Mac started the mixing process. As the songs took shape, the album began to sound like True Confessions: the band's three writers - Christine McVie, Nicks, and Buckingham - were all writing about their crumbled relationships.

As they added finishing touches to an album more intimate than they had ever anticipated, the band firmly closed their studio doors. "It was clumsy sometimes," said John McVie. "I'm sitting there in the studio and I get a little lump in my throat especially when you turn around and the writer's sitting right there." So they asked that interviews be done separately.

I always did have a kind of candle shining for Peter Green. I mean, he was my god. I thought, "Give me one chance at him..." Christine McVie, who looks considerably younger than her 33 years, grew up alongside Fleetwood Mac on the British blues circuit. Mick Fleetwood and John McVie are loath to dwell on FM's many past lives, but sitting in this cluttered office adjoining the studio where she has just finished mixing Rumours, Christine is happy to play the keeper of the FM legacy.

She pours a tall glass of white wine and surprises even herself with a fan's diary that is by turns, melancholy and passionate. "I dearly remember the old days... FM had this one-of-a-kind charm. They were gregarious, charming and cheeky on-stage. Very cheeky. They'd have a good time. Peter Green just made the audience laugh at this funny little cocky Jewboy. Jeremy Spencer was really dirty on-stage. At the Marquee one night he put a dildo in his trousers, came out and did an impersonation of Cliff Richard. Half the women left, escorted by their boyfriends." Green had also created a dark, mystical aura about the band. "He had this tremendous, subtle power," says Christine.

By the time she made friends with the group, Christine Perfect was already a journeywoman blues-circuit rocker herself. As a "real tubby" teenager - she weighed 160 pounds at 16 - Christine and a girlfriend/singing partner snuck away from their strict parents in Birmingham and visited every talent agency they could find in London. Their act consisted of strumming guitars and warbling Everly Brothers hits. Their career, which was highlighted by a obe-song pub appearance backed by the Shadows, was cut short when their parents found them out. Christine was sent to art college in Birmingham where she joined a folk club. "We'd meet every Tuesday night, above a pub somewhere, and drink cheap beer. Whoever could, would play a folk song or violin, whatever they could do. Anyway, one night in strolls this devastatingly handsome man, who was from Birmingham University. It was Spencer Davis. I just fell in love with Spence. I swore I would get thin and go out with him.  "And I did."

Christine and Spencer began singing together, fronting the university's jazz band, but, she says, their relationship proved more musical than illicit. "Stevie Winwood was about 14, still in school and playing at a jazz club called the ChappelPub at lunchtime," Christine says. "He met Spencer Davis Group.  I used to trail around religiously. Boy, they were so hot. Nothing was like that. Stevie Winwood played like I'd never heard anybody play before. It just gave me goose bumps. They were just a blues band, but a really, really great blues band. He [Winwood] could yell the blues. A 15-year-old boy. No one could believe it. The 19-20-year-old girls would have the hots for him."

Christine joined another blues band called Chicken Shack. The gruesome cover photo, showing severed fingers in a can, won as art award for their first album. Forty Blue Fingers Packed and Ready to Serve. "We had an underground following," Christine deadpans.  Chicken Shack did occasional gigs with Fleetwood Mac, and Christine, now, playing piano, was invited to guest on some of Fleetwood Mac's early sessions because she "played the blues the way Peter liked." She never had designs on any of the band, she says. Besides, both Green and McVie already had girlfriends.  Christine stops and slaps her forehead. "I'm forgetting a whole two-year episode with a Swedish guy I was engaged to. Ended up totally traumatizing my kitten who hated me evermore 'cause I just ran around the house screaming when he left me. I scared the shit out of it."

Caught up in her story-telling, Christine in not the same woman Stevie Nicks has characterized as "very private, very much to herself." She shakes her head, as if she's been talking too much. "I can't believe I'm remembering all these things." But, she continues, "I went to see Fleetwood Mac one night. John didn't have his girlfriend... He asked me if I wanted to have a drink and we sat down, had a few laughs, then they had to go on-stage. All the time I was kind of eyeballing ol' Greenie. After the concert was over, John came over and said, 'Shall I take you out to dinner sometime? I went, 'Whoa... I thought you were engaged or something.' He said, 'Nah, 'sall over.' I thought he was devastatingly attractive but it never occurred to me to look at him."

They went out for a time, then John McVie disappeared overseas for Fleetwood Mac's first American tour. "By this time I was really crazy about him," Christine recalls, "but I didn't know what was happening with him. Chicken Shack did a ten-day stint at the Blow-Up Club in Munich and I had this strange relationship with a crazy German DJ who wanted to whisk me off and marry me. I turned him down... and wrote John a big letter."

Fleetwood Mac returned from America and McVie proposed. They were married ten days later, mostly to please Christine's dying mother. But John and Christine didn't see much of each other. Both bands toured often and when she left Chicken Shack, she tried a disastrously unprepared solo tour and LP. Christine gladly retired to be John McVie’s old lady.  "I thought it was extremely romantic," she says. "Obviously a little bit of the glamour of what Fleetwood Mac was in those days rubbed off. It was almost like someone marrying a Beatle. You married one of the locks in the chain and you were part of them.  "We were very very happy. Very happy for probably three years and then the strain of me being in the same band as him started to take its toll. When you're in the same band as somebody, you're seeing them almost more than 24 hours a day. you start to see an awful lot of the bad side 'cause touring is no easy thing. There's a lot of drinking... John is not the most pleasant of people when he's drunk. Very belligerent. I was seeing more Hyde than Jekyll."

Peter Green, in a sudden plea for Christ, left the band in late '70, and Christine McVie came out of her retirement, adding keyboards to the band. Green's departure, says Christine, "was an out-of-the-blue shock to everybody. Peter had been quite happy and was starting to write this really incredible music like "Green Manalishi." It was like he was being lifted. He'd wrung the blues dry and already played 50 times better than most of the black guitarists."  In the midst of a German tour the group's first peak of popularity, Green fell in with some people Christine remembers as "jet-setters." The band had recorded a Green composition, "Black Magic Woman," and, ironically, the group he ran into were reportedly into black magic and the occult. They turned him on to acid. He left Fleetwood Mac on that same tour.  "Something snapped in him," Christine says, looking saddened. "He dropped this fatal tab of acid and withdrew. He still has this amazing power, but it's negative. You don't want him around. We've all cried a lot of tears over Peter. We've all spent so much energy talking him into more positive channels. He'll just sit there and laugh. "Fuck it..."

Not long ago, exasperated at being asked the perennial reunion question, Mick Fleetwood told an interviewer that sure, someday, maybe on an English tour, the original Fleetwood Mac might get on-stage one night.  Later, when the band arrived in London, Peter Green was waiting for them in the lobby of their hotel. Unannounced, Christine didn't recognize the flabby, slept-in figure carrying a disco-droning cassette machine. "I heard this voice say, Hello Chris, I turned around and see this rotund little guy with a big beer gut and pint in his hand. I couldn't believe it. I said, Aren't you embarrassed?, Nah, he says, fuck it, what the hell." We gave him a room at the hotel for a few nights. He'd knock on your door, come in and just sit there on your bed. He wouldn't volunteer anything."

Jeremy Spencer left Fleetwood Mac a year after Peter Green, under vaguely similar circumstances. He stepped onto a Children of God bus in Hollywood and never returned. The writer met Spencer recently on a London Street, blank-eyed and selling Children of God books. His pitch: "I used to be in a group called Fleetwood Mac until I found..."  Christine meticulously recollects the details of all the ensuing clock-in/clock-out personnel changes during Fleetwood Mac's lean years between their Future Games and Fleetwood Mac LPs. But she places particular emphasis only on Bob Welch. "I have so much love for Bob," she says, "He is such a big part of the band. I don't really get off on what he's doing in Paris [Welch's current band]. When he quit, he was getting into a real feel of the kind of guitar playing that Peter used to have and Lindsey definitely has got a lot of. It's very nebulous quality, very difficult to explain. It's a question of what note not to play."  Welch's last LP with the groups was Heroes are Hard to Find, their first as a transplanted LA band. After breaking up with their manager they had moved to LA to start all over. The McVies lived in a small three-room in Malibu. It was there, on a portable Hohner piano in the bedroom that she wrote "Over my Head" and "Say you Love me."

"I don't struggle over my songs," she offers. "I write them quickly and I've never written a lot. I write what is required of me. For me, people like Joni Mitchell are making too much of a statement. I don't really write about myself, which puts me in a safe little cocoon... I'm a pretty basic love song writer."  Christine shrugs off the suddenly massive acceptance of Fleetwood Mac as "a lot of rewards for a lot of hard work." And it wasn't the flush of super-stardom, she stresses, that caused her to split with John McVie. She explains compassionately: "I broke up with John in the middle of a tour. I was aware of it being irresponsible. I had to do it for my sanity. It was either that or me ending up in a lunatic asylum. I still worry for him more than I would ever dare tell him. I still have a lot of love for John. Let's face it, as far as I'm concerned, it was him that stopped me loving him. He constantly tested what limits of endurance I would go to. He just went one step too far. If he knew that I cared and worried so much about him, I think he'd play on it.  There's no doubt about the fact that he hasn't really been a happy man since I left him. I know that. Sure, I could make him happy tomorrow and say, yeah John, I'll come back to you. Then I would be miserable. I'm not that unselfish."

Then there were the Sausalito sessions. "Trauma," Christine groans. "Trau-ma." The sessions were like a cocktail party every night - people everywhere. We ended up staying in these weird hospital rooms... and of course John and me were not exactly the best of friends. Stevie and I spent a lot of time together. She was going through a bit of a hard time too because she was the one that axed it. Lindsey was pretty down about it for a while, then he just woke up one morning and said, Fuck this, I don't want to be unhappy, and started getting some girlfriends together.   Then Stevie couldn't handle it...

Almost immediately Christine McVie entered into a romance with Curry Grant, FM's strapping lighting director. They lived together for a year in Christine's home, above Sunset Strip. "I haven't been without a man in my life for... God, it must be 12 years. I can't imagine what it's like not to have an old man... but I have no intention of getting married. I don't think I'm in love..." She considers that for a few seconds. "I don't really know what the hell love is." Then, she suddenly adds, "I'm proud of having been John's wife." She still wears McVie's ring, but on another finger. Maybe we don't feel the same about each other anymore, but I wouldn't like to wipe that off board. John can't handle Curry too well, even though he's much more at ease with other women around me than I am with men in front of him. He's making an effort. But if I was the kind of girl who wandered in with a new boyfriend every week, enjoying my newfound freedom, I don't know how he could handle that."

Isn't she tempted to play the field?  "It would be a new experience," she says shyly, growing amused at the thought. "Sure, you know." She leans toward a telephone. "Kenny Loggins! Call me up. I'd love to have a load of dates. I haven't done that since I was at college. But it's really out of the question. I mean I hardly meet anybody. I'm so involved in the band."  Christine McVie's eyes light up with a revelation. "Seven more years until I'm forty. Then I'll start all over again..."  John McVie stares silently out across a windy Marina del Rey, a half-hour away from Hollywood. "Two choppy today," he mumbles. "We shouldn't take the boat out." Having had this 41-foot schooner a year now, he is brisk and expert at tidying it up, taking down the sail and draining out side compartments before we find seats outside, on the stern, to talk.

For years, McVie dreamt about buying a boat. With the success of Fleetwood Mac, he was able to get one of the best. And when Christine asked for a separation, he moved on board, storing away everything, but some sailing books, a radio, a television set and numerous statuettes of penguins.  McVie, who is 30, claims that he's "much more comfortable here than in a house anyway." But he seems oddly unhappy. He is a solemn man. If he is pleased with realizing one of his fantasies, his poker face doesn't show it.  One wonders what success has meant to him.  "This," he says quietly, knocking the stern of the boat, "the freedom to be here, rather than slogging your heart out in Hollywood. But this isn't... would you say this is a luxury? If there was a house with it, I'd say so. But this is half the price of a house."

John McVie, the Mac in Fleetwood Mac, started the band with Mick Fleetwood, Jeremy Spencer and Peter Green in '67. Before that he was a four-year charter member of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. He has seen Fleetwood Mac through the complete musical spectrum - 6 guitarists, 3 label changes, innumerable tours, every album and many, many, times more bad than good.  If Fleetwood Mac had been a mediocre-selling album for the band, there would have been no desperation or breakup. If Buckingham or Nicks hadn't worked out, McVie would have dutifully helped find replacements. He's a strange creature to rock and roll: a patient man.  "Fleetwood Mac was doing fine before that album," he figures. "People are always asking me how does it feel to have made it. If that's the case, what do I do now? Now that I've made it. I hate that phrase." For once, his voice is audible above the din of the marina. "I didn't anticipate all the commotion around the last album," he says. "Not as much as 4 million sales. There's a lot of good albums we've done. It's just one of those things - the right album the right time. But that's the criteria of making it in this business: a big album. Then you get your own TV show, you go make a movie. It's not important. Being seen wearing a Gucci suit... that syndrome is so sad."

So what's the motivation to be around it for more than 14 years?  "Playing bass," comes the ready reply. "I'm not a dedicated musician particularly, but it's the one thing I enjoy doing."  Would he soon consider retiring?  

What would I do? Sit on the boat, but that would get as boring as sitting around the studio..."  One cautiously broaches the subject of his split with Christine. It must have been a major turning point...  "Yeah," McVie agrees. "It still affects me. I'm still adjusting to the fact that it's not John and Chris anymore. It goes up and down."  Feeling suddenly awkward, McVie stops and assembles a statement explaining himself. "Its difficult to tell someone, yeah, I'm this kind of person... the quiet thing is fine," he says softly. "If I had anything that I thought was world shaking or profound, I'd say something. I really can come up with anything on politics, state of society, the relation of music to society... it's just horseshit. I play bass."

McVie sounds like his soft-spoken fellow member from the Bluesbreakers, Eric Clapton, in both philosophy and personality. (Christine McVie: "those two? They're like two peas out of the same pod").  Clapton has said he finds his personality by drinking...   "I drink too much, period," McVie bristles, "but when I've drunk too much, a personality comes out. It's not very pleasant to be around."  In the end, John McVie is a droll, likable gentleman with a sullen aura. Used to touring and recording with his wife and band, he is suddenly alone on his boat.  "He'll cheer up," an associate of the band says with a laugh. "He always does. Everyone's attitude is just leave him to himself. They know there's only one thing that could bring him around instantly: an affair with Linda Rondstandt."

McVie wistfully admits to this crush. Last year, suspiciously soon after learning that Fleetwood Mac would be on the Rock Music Awards show with Rondstandt as a fellow nominee, he bought an exquisitely tailored burgundy velvet, three-piece outfit. He wore it that night, and Fleetwood Mac won Rock Group of the Year, among other honors.  Rondstandt never showed up.

Mick Fleetwood's the tall menacing-looking one who is, for all purposes, the manager of the band. When former manager Clifford Davis burned his bridges by sending out a bogus band with the same name and owners of the name, Fleetwood Mac was too broke to find another. Decisions fell directly to Fleetwood and McVie, the original members and owners of the name. McVie held no ambitions as a businessman, but Fleetwood became obsessed with the music business. He grew to love the new responsibility of managing himself. Fleetwood retained a lawyer, Michael "Mickey" Shapiro, and together they guided the band's career.

Fleetwood is surely in his element this morning. We're sitting in the executive conference room at the tip of a private Warner's jet returning to LA from a last minute Fleetwood Mac benefit in Indiana for Birch Bayh.  

"Everything has taken a very natural course," he reflects pleasantly. "We've never made records with the attitude of making hits. With us, it's potluck. The fact that they are is great. That's not just from the present lineup of the band, that's going back years and years. Like when Peter Green wrote "Albatross" [FM's first successful single in England]. Everyone thought it was a concerted effort. It was a complete accident that it was a hit. The BBC used it for some wildlife program and then someone put it on Top of The Tops and it was a hit. If Rumours was a radical failure, I'm sure we'd all be disturbed, but we wouldn't feel disillusioned."

Mick Fleetwood, like John McVie, cannot think of a time when he was ever frustrated with the band's stalled sales figures. After ten years, they value Fleetwood Mac more as a way of life than as a business investment. Success was a pleasant surprise. "You go to the office every day and you don't think about it in the end, you just go," Fleetwood explains. "That's what we were doing. Being part of Fleetwood Mac, playing through the ups and downs."

Fleetwood is resolute: "I could have never planned any of this. I don't even believe in making plans. They only create an atmosphere of disappointment. So, it's not a day-to-day situation with us, but there's always full potential of either great things happening. That is very important to me personally... Fleetwood Mac, from point one, has been like that. We'll always be able to move without breaking a leg... I definitely want to have a baby in the next four years. For sure, I want to have one or two children and I don't want to wait any further than, say, 34. This is all part of my plan. By that time I hope that I'll be living up in the mountains somewhere with a very pretty house and a piano and a tape recorder, just writing, and then going to New York every once in a while to shop. I love that too, but I mostly like to be in a really warm place with a bunch of animals, dogs and cats."

It's a long way from Peter Green.

Twenty-eight-year-old Stephanie "Stevie" Nicks is an endearing blend of beatnik poet and sassy rock and roller. One thing is for sure: success does not faze her. She has, in fact, lived around it much of her life. Until heart surgery forced him into early retirement two years ago, her father, Jess Nicks, was simultaneously executive vice-president of Greyhound and president of Armour Meats. Stevie, the only girl, was "the star in my family's sky."  Born in Phoenix and raised along her father's corporate climb in LA, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and finally San Francisco, she nearly graduated from San Jose State with a degree in speech communication. Instead, she quit a few months early to go on the road in 1968 with an acid-rock band called Fritz.

"That did not amuse my parents too much," Stevie notes wryly. Just out of the shower and toweling off her mousy-brown-flecked-with green-tint hair on an antique couch in her Hollywood Hills duplex, she makes easy conversation. "They wanted me to do what I wanted to do. They were just worried I was going to get down to 80 pounds and be a miserable, burnt out 27-year-old."

Despite a senior citizen's penchant for detailing her various aches and pains - she's always got a sore throat or a cold - the one thing Stevie Nicks does not exude is weakness.  Through the three and a half year existence of Fritz, her all-male band members made a private agreement: hands off Stevie. That included Lindsey Buckingham, the slender, curly-haired bass player with whom she shared lead vocals.  "I think there was always something between me and Lindsey, but nobody in that band really wanted me as their girlfriend because I was just too ambitious for them. But they didn't want anybody else to have me either. If anybody in the band started spending any time with me, the other three would literally pick that person apart. To the death. They all thought I was in it for the attention. These guys didn't take me seriously at all. I was just a girl singer, and they hated the fact that I got a lot of credit."

 

Nicks flouts the memory, laughing with defiance, "They would kill themselves practicing for ten hours, and people would call up and say: 'We want to book that band with the little brownish-blondish-haired girl.' There was always just really weird things going on between us." Now she is charged up and scoots to the edge of her sofa to make her point: "I could never figure out why I stayed in that band. Now I know that was the preparation for Fleetwood Mac."

But it would be another two years between the inevitable breakup of Fritz and an invitation to join Fleetwood Mac. Stevie and Lindsey chose to stay together as a duo, calling themselves Buckingham Nicks. "We started spending a lot of time together working out songs. Pretty soon we started spending all our time together and... it just happened."  They moved down to LA, started knocking on doors, and eventually signed a contract with Polydor Records. They released an album and toured to good audience reaction. The band even developed a cult following in Birmingham, Alabama.  In New York, however, Polydor was not impressed and dropped them before they could finish a second album. Lindsey resorted to a phone-soliciting job. Stevie became a $1.50-an-hour waitress in a Beverly Hills singles restaurant.

Waiting on tables? What about mom and dad?

"I'd get money from them here and there," says Stevie, "but if I wanted to go back to school, if I wanted to move back home, then they would support me... If I was gonna be here in LA, doing my trip, I was gonna have to do it on my own."  They auditioned for Russ Regan, head of 20th Century records, who, Buckingham recalls, "thought we were a smash act but couldn't sign us" and Ode records president and artist's manager Lou Adler, who listened to half of one song and thanked them very much. Another manager recommended they learn the Top 40 and play steak and lobster houses.

When she visited home just seven months before joining Fleetwood Mac, her father was also discouraging. "He saw me getting skinnier and I wasn't very happy. He said, 'I think you better start setting some time limits here,' they saw, I really think, shades of my grandfather A.J. (Aaron Jeff Nicks). He was a country and western singer and he drank way too much. He was unhappy, trying to make it. He wanted to make it very badly. He turned into a very embittered person and he died that way."

In late 1974, Keith Olsen, engineer on the Buckingham Nicks LP, met with Mick Fleetwood. Olsen, pitching himself and his studio for the Fleetwood Mac account, presented Stevie and Lindsey's demo and his studio portfolio. Fleetwood listened to the album and made a mental note. When Bob Welch left Fleetwood Mac six weeks later, he looked up Stevie and Lindsey.  They went up to Mick Fleetwood's house in Laurel Canyon to talk. Buckingham offered to do an audition, but Fleetwood declined. Instead, he simply asked: 'Want to join?' The two looked at each other and said, 'Yes.'  "John and Mick," Buckingham says, "have always been open to having a lot of different people in the band - which is odd. I would never be able to do that. I would think it was real important to keep an identity. I remember being a kid - if a new member joined a group, I just didn't like that at all. But that openness is what's kept them going for so long."

But he and Nicks had one more commitment: a headlining concert in Birmingham. The show drew a screaming sellout crowd of more than 6000 fans who knew all the words to their songs. "We went out in style," says Buckingham.  Fleetwood went directly into the studio, reworking such Buckingham Nicks material as "Monday Morning," "Landslide," and a new song written originally on acoustic piano about a Welsh witch Stevie had read about named "Rhiannon." "Everything was already worked out," says Buckingham. He plucked up a belly-backed acoustic guitar and played the introduction to "Rhiannon."

The newest members of the band were happy with the album, but Stevie Nicks went through an anxious period of self-doubt. She can quote entire passages from a review in Rolling Stone that, she says, almost caused her to quit. "They said my singing was 'callow' and that really hurt my feelings." She began to think that maybe she wasn't that good, and that she had been asked into the band only because she was with Buckingham. "Time after time I would read: '...the raucous voice of Stevie Nicks and the golden-throated voice of Christine McVie, who's the only saving grace of the band.' When it comes to competition, I won't compete for a man and I won't compete for a place on that stage either. If I'm not wanted, I'll get out. I was bummed."

But the bum didn't last long: Fleetwood Mac immediately became a gold album and Christine's ethereal song, "Over my head," broke big in both pop and easy-listening radio. Nicks, who'd done harmonies on the track, felt better. And when "Rhiannon" found an even bigger audience, with its mainstream rock and roll getting both AM and FM airplay, she forgot all about quitting.  She also became Rhiannon, a witch in Welsh mythology. "I see her as a good witch," Stevie says. "Very positive. I sink into that whole trip when I'm on stage." With her diaphanous black outfits, her chiffon and lace, and a graceful way around the stage, she just as quickly became the band's first willing star/focal point.  There was, of course, a price for all this. Last year, during the ill-fated stretch in Sausalito, she separated from Buckingham after over six years.

"The best explanation is: try working with your secretary... in a raucous office... and then come home with her at night. See how long you could stand her. I could be no comfort to Lindsey when he needed comfort."  She cites an example from Sausalito. Lindsey was feeling depressed because he couldn't quite get some guitar parts down right. "So we'd go back to where we were staying and he would really need comfort from me, for me to say, 'it's all right, who cares about them?', you know, be an old lady."  One problem, "I was also pissed off because he hadn't gotten the guitar part on. So I'm trying to defend their point of view at the same time trying to make him feel better. It doesn't work. I couldn't be all those things."

Stevie has kept mostly to herself since the breakup with Lindsey. Outside of a short romance with drummer/singer Don Henley of The Eagles, she's spent her days either in the studio or at home writing and taping her songs. She icily denies talk of an affair with Paul Kantner.  "It's strange for me," she says in confidential tones, "I've never been a dater. I don't really like parties. I'm very alone now. I'm not one of those women who are just willing to go out and sit at the rainbow. In my position I could meet a lot of people just because of the band I'm in. Well, I don't want to meet anybody because of the band I'm in."  Stevie doesn't mind airing her personal life like this at all. "I don't care that everybody knows me and Chris and John and Lindsey and Mick all broke up," she declares. "Because we did. So that's fact. I just don't want people to pick up a magazine and go, 'oh, another interview from Fleetwood Mac,' if it's interesting, I'm not opposed to giving out information".

"On this album, all the songs that I wrote except maybe 'Gold Dust Woman' - and even that comes into it - are definitely about the people in the band... Chris' relationships, John's relationship, Mick's, Lindsey's and mine. They're all there and they're very honest and people will know exactly what I’m talking about... people will really enjoy listening to what happened since the last album".

The sun sets in Hollywood and Stevie lets her house darken along with it. "I'll tell you an interesting thing that hit me after the Rock Awards," she says. "We won the Best Group and the Best Album awards - that was very far out and everybody was really blessed out over that and we went to some party at the Hilton or something afterward and just stayed about 30 minutes. My brother Chris and I got in our limousine and came home. And it really struck me, driving home in the back seat of a black limousine. I was so lonely."

"I thought, 'Here I am, we just won these fantastic awards, we've just been on TV, everybody is singing our praises and here I am driving home in my black limousine,' terribly alone. Sort of knowing how it would feel to be Marilyn Monroe or something. It was a very strange feeling and I didn't like it at all."  Stevie Nicks opens her eyes very wide. "It scared me."

Lindsey Buckingham is no doubt the first member of Fleetwood Mac to list Brian Wilson as a major inspiration. Lindsey's California influence on the band is legitimate too. Born and raised in Palo Alto, Buckingham was "another jock in a family of swimming jocks." His brother Greg won a silver medal in the '68 Olympics. Late in high school Lindsey drifted into a rock and roll band and was sufficiently smitten to spoil family tradition. He quit the water polo team. "My coach went insane," Lindsey says. "He started screaming, 'you're nothing, you'll always be a nothing.'"

And he was nothing for a while, when that band went psychedelic and became Fritz. Buckingham couldn't master mind-blowing lead guitar and was put on bass for the next three and a half years. "I was just a young kid who thought it was really neat that we were in a band," he says. Then he teamed up with Nicks, and finally they joined Fleetwood Mac.  Now, Buckingham lopes into the house of a mutual friend, looking a little dazed. Listening to the radio on the way over he'd finally heard himself singing the just released single, "Go your own way." "It sounded real weird," he shrugs. "I just want it to be so good that I got paranoid. I have to relax, get this whole time behind us..."

Ten months devoted to Fleetwood Mac's album has left Buckingham spindly and studio wan. He gives a rundown of how a group can spend so long taping 45 minutes of music: "there's one track on the album that started out as a one song in Sausalito. We decided it needed a bridge, so we cut a bridge and edited it into the rest of the song. We didn't get a vocal and left it for a long time in a bunch of pieces. It almost went off the album. Then we listened back and decided we liked the bridge, but didn't like the rest of the song. So I wrote verses for that bridge, which was originally not in the song and edited those in. We saved the ending. The ending was the only thing left from the original track. We ended up calling it "The Chain," because it was a bunch of pieces."

His face lights up as he realizes that it's all behind him now. "I feel really lucky that I've had the opportunity to go through some of the heartaches and shit we've been through the past year. it's had a profound effect on me. I feel a lot older. I feel like I've learned a whole lot by taking on a large responsibility slightly unaided." Buckingham laughs to himself. "Being in this band really fucks up relationships with chicks. Since Stevie, I have found that to be true. I could meet someone that I really like, have maybe a few days to get it together and that's about it. The rest of the time I'm too into Fleetwood Mac".

Buckingham has overcome the breakup with Nicks. "It was a little lonely there for a while," he admits. "The thought of being on my own really terrified me. But then I realized being alone is a really cleansing thing... as I began to feel myself again. I'm surprised we lasted as long as we did."  Buckingham doesn't object to the confessional tone of Rumours either. "I'm not ashamed of my personal life," he proclaims. "Just 'cause you're in the public eye doesn't mean you don't go through the same bullshit."  Lindsey Buckingham sets down the guitar. "Tonight I just want to get drunk," he announces. "I know the exact place too. They let me throw the foos..."

The two doormen at Kowloon's Chines restaurant greet Buckingham and his party warmly. They know him as the young gentleman who leaves a big mess and a bigger tip.  "Do you know who he is?" one doorman asks the other.  The other doorman nods casually. "He's an actor or something. I think he plays in a soap opera..."

 

http://www.fmlegacy.com/articles/article_rs235.html

 

Lindsey Buckingham And Fleetwood Mac

 

 

NIN, QOTSA, Dave Grohl And Lindsey Buckingham To Perform At Grammy Finale

(By Jem Aswad, Spin.com, January 21 2014)

Nine Inch Nails, Queens of the Stone Age, Dave Grohl, and special guest Lindsey Buckingham will give the closing performance at the 56th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday night, SPIN can exclusively reveal.  "We're incredibly excited about this number," Grammy executive producer Ken Ehrlich said in a statement. "There's nothing better than when the Grammys can rock out, and to have these artists all together on one stage, doing a number that, when they presented it to us, knocked us out, is going to turn out to be one of those Grammy moments that people talk about for a long time. Long live Trent, Josh, Dave and Lindsey and these great bands!" It will be the first-ever Grammy telecast performance for Nine Inch Nails and QOTSA.

Thirteen-time Grammy winner Grohl, as usual, is the connective tissue, having performed extensively with both bands, most prominently on QOTSA's 2002 LP Songs for the Deaf and Nine Inch Nails' 2005 album With Teeth. Fleetwood Mac guitarist/singer Buckingham, of course, is the wild card, and his role — singing a kickass version of "Tusk" or "The Chain," maybe his solo hit "Go Insane"? — remains to be seen. Buckingham appears in Sound City: Real to Reel, the Grohl-directed documentary about the legendary, now-shuttered L.A. studio where many classic albums were recorded; his Fleetwood-Mac-mate, Stevie Nicks, appears in the film and also joined Grohl on the Sound City Players album and tour last year.

While the Foo Fighters did not release any new music during this year's window of eligibility, Grohl has two nominations, both connected to Sound City: Best Rock Song for "Cut Me Some Slack" (with Paul McCartney and the other surviving members of Nirvana, a group often dubbed "Sirvana"), and Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media; separately, he appears as a songwriter (again, with Nirvana) on a Best Rap Song nominee, Jay-Z's "Holy Grail." Queens are up for two awards: Best Rock Album (for …Like Clockwork), Best Rock Performance with the album's "My God Is the Sun," and, indirectly, Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. Two-time Grammy winners Nine Inch Nails' Hesitation Marks is nominated for Best Alternative Music Album. Buckingham is not nominated but is featured on the Delta Rae song "If I Loved You," which garnered Rob Cavallo a shot at Producer of the Year, Non-Classical.

While there's no official word yet on the latest rumor – that Madonna and Beyonce will perform on the show – Sunday's telecast, to be held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, already boasts formidable star power: The most recent official additions were Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr — who will accept a Lifetime Achievement Awards for the Beatles — plus performers Jay Z and Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Kacey Musgraves, John Legend, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Keith Urban, and Sara Bareilles (with Carole King). They follow previously announced performers Daft Punk (with Nile Rodgers, Pharrell Williams, Stevie Wonder, and several Random Access Memories session players), Kendrick Lamar (with Imagine Dragons), Lorde, Metallica (with pianist Lang Lang), Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Pink (with fun.'s Nate Ruess), Robin Thicke (with Chicago), and multiple country legends (Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson, with current nominee Blake Shelton).  The Grammy Awards will be broadcast live at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CBS. Stay with SPIN all week for much more on the show, the performers, the parties and beyond.

http://www.spin.com/articles/grammys-nine-inch-nails-dave-grohl-queens-lindsey-buckingham/?utm_source=em&utm_medium=weeklynl&utm_campaign=012114&utm_content=coverstory

 

 

Fleetwood Mac's John Mcvie Faces Cancer As Band Cancels Shows

(By Marc Hogan, Spin magazine, 28 October 2013)

Fleetwood Mac have scrapped their Australian and New Zealand tour dates as co-founder John McVie seeks treatment for cancer. McVie, the Rumours hitmakers' bassist and the "Mac" in their name, didn't reveal the type of cancer in an official statement from the group. But Fleetwood Mac said the 67-year-old will be receiving treatment during the time of the band was previously scheduled for a 14-date Down Under stint.  "We are sorry to not be able to play these Australian and New Zealand dates," Fleetwood Mac said in the statement. "We hope our Australian and New Zealand fans as well as Fleetwood Mac fans everywhere will join us in wishing John and his family all the best."

The news comes just months after the release of the four-song Extended Play EP, Fleetwood Mac's first set of new material since Say You Will a decade ago. Christine McVie, keyboardist and singer of some of the band's better-known tracks (as well as being John's former wife), briefly rejoined the group in September during a London show.  Fleetwood Mac members have also been active outside their band recently, with Lindsey Buckingham playing guitar on Nine Inch Nails' Hesitation Marks and Stevie Nicks taking part in Dave Grohl's Sound City: Real to Reel project.

http://www.spin.com/articles/fleetwood-mac-john-mcvie-cancer-tour-dates/?utm_source=em&utm_medium=dailynl&utm_campaign=102813_test&utm_content=article3

 

Stevie Nicks And Lindsey Buckingham Reveal Lingering Tensions In Fleetwood Mac

(By Andy Greene, Rolling Stone, January 2013)

As previously reported, Fleetwood Mac will head out on the road next year for a massive world tour. It turns out the tour was originally scheduled for 2012, but Stevie Nicks decided to take an extra year for her own solo trek. The rest of the group decided to make the best of things and use the time to cut a new album, but that ultimately fell apart, too.  Rolling Stone spoke at great length to Nicks and Lindsey Buckinham about all the drama, their disagreement over how to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their long out-of-print collaborative LP, Buckingham Nicks, and how the ex-lovers manage their fragile partnership. They got on the phone separately, about a week apart.

 

Stevie Nicks

Is there any chance that Christine McVie might guest at some point on this Fleetwood Mac tour?
I would say there's no more a chance of that happening than an asteroid hitting the earth. She is done. You know when you look in somebody's face and you can just tell? She doesn't want to do it anymore. She doesn't want to fly. She doesn't want to come back to America. When she left, she left. She sold her house, her piano, her car. She went to England and she has never been back since 1998, so it's not really feasible, as much as we would all like to think that she'll just change her mind one day. I don't think it'll happen. We love her, so we had to let her go.

I've been hearing rumors of this tour for a couple years now. How did it all come together?
In 2010 I made a record, and I toured all that year. Then I decided to take this year and give this record that I'm really proud of one more year. I thought it deserved it, and now I'm done and I'm letting it go. I'm ready to go into Fleetwood Mac. In my opinion, whenever we work we should be off the road for three years. It feels special when you haven't seen us for three years. You didn't just see us a year and a half ago. That's why I make an effort to not do it every two years.

Are you thinking about making any new material with Fleetwood Mac before the tour?
Well, we don't have a lot of time. We go into rehearsal on February 15th. We do actually have two new songs. I went into Lindsey's house two weeks ago and spent four days there. We also recorded a very old Buckingham Nicks song that we loved and couldn't figure out why it didn't go on the album. It got brushed under the carpet somehow. We recorded it, so that's a third song.

Next year is the 40th anniversary of Buckingham Nicks, and we're hoping next year to get the record out. Then we'll take that lost song and put it on the record. That's kind of exciting, though it doesn't have anything to do with Fleetwood Mac. People have been waiting forever for that record to come back out. Fleetwood Mac is totally good with us doing that. They know.

It was great spending time with Linds. We're old enough now that we've laid down our weapons. We started this whole thing in 1968 and we're proud of what we've done. We look each other in a slightly different light now. It's a good light.

Do you think the set list is going to be very different than the last tour?
What we do is go through our entire catalog and everybody makes a list of the songs they want to do. There's about 10 songs we have to do no matter what. You have to go "Go Your Own Way" and "Landslide" and "Dreams." You can't get out of that, but when you're Fleetwood Mac you do a two-hour-and-20-minute set. It means you have eight or nine other songs you can pick from your catalog. That's what we do. We put them all up on a board, like in school. We play all of them and see what works.

A lot of your peers have been playing their classic albums straight through on recent tours. Has there been any talk of doing Rumours straight through?
Well, no. But we do a lot of songs from Rumours. If we did that, we would really be left with only a certain amount of time to do the hit songs that people want from all the other records. So that would be a very different tour. That's not to say we couldn't do it, but that's not the tour we're doing this year. It might be fun at some point though. It might even be a good idea to film that. Then we could talk about each song and all the experiencers that went along with them.

Do you envision Buckingham Nicks coming out as a deluxe edition box set?
It is the 40th anniversary, because it was released in 1973. We have this new version of an old demo. So, we should put the album back out, and if we can make that happen then Buckingham-Nicks should go out on the road next year. It would be great to do it in the 40th anniversary year. This might not just be the year of Fleetwood Mac, but we might throw in the Buckingham Nicks album for a special, sparkly, extra present.

So you might actually reform the original band and take them out on the road?
There's always a possibility. That is a situation where we would actually go onstage and do the complete Buckingham Nicks album. It would be a trip to bring it back with Waddy Watchtel and some other people from San Francisco. It would be trippy for Lindsey and I to revisit those songs.

Do you think a new Fleetwood Mac album is possible at some point in the future?
We did record two songs when I was at Lindsey's house those four days. He and the boys recorded in the beginning of the year. I didn't go because my mom had just died and I wasn't in the frame of mind to go into the studio or write songs. They recorded some songs, which turned out great. So I chose one and Lindsey chose one and I put my vocals on them. They came out great. I'm really proud of them. They tried hard to pretend I was there recording with them.

We have two new Fleetwood Mac songs and one Buckingham-Nicks song. We have new product, but I don't know what we're going to do with them. Maybe we'll throw one of them out in January and the second one in February. The music business is very different right now. I don't understand it. I don't have Internet. I don't have a MySpace Face page. I don't have all that and I don't want it. Nobody is really interested in buying albums with 14 songs on them anymore. It breaks my heart, but that's the way it is and I have to accept that.

Maybe the thing to do is release five or six songs at some point during the year. We can record four new songs and throw them out when the tour is done. I don't really know. I'm so not a part of today's music scene. I really couldn't tell you because I just don't know.

I could be wrong, but I'm sort of sensing that lots of the drama from the band's past is gone. Things seem pretty functional right now.
Well, don't seriously fall for that. We're a dramatic bunch, but a lot of the anger is at least tempered now. There was a lot of anger and resentment and crazy things that went on for a long time. It's always going to show up here and there, but we're not focusing on it right now. We're going to try and never focus on it again. But that does not mean we aren't full of drama.

I guess it's mostly behind the scenes these days.
You might see a little of it onstage. That's who we are. We're dramatic. Lindsey and I will always be dramatic. When you were almost married for seven years, and then you've been in a band for 30 years, it's never not going to be dramatic. We are who are are and we were dramatic kids going together. That never really goes away.

I guess it's a very complicated relationship, to put it mildly.
Yeah, mildly.

Lindsey Buckingham

I spoke with Stevie last week. She said she wanted the band to be gone for three years, because anything less would make the tour seem less special.
There might be a little bit of rationalization to that. We had actually planned to tour last year. We hadn't done any routing yet, but there had been a commitment from everyone, and then it got put off. Stevie had done her album and I had done mine as well. Hers came out a bit later and, to be fair, someone is always causing trouble in the band. She would look at me doing these small, solo things where I nurtured myself and brought that back into the band. I don't think she had one of those experiences, whether it was an album or touring behind an album for a while. She needed to have that experience.

It was fair enough for her to want to extend that until she felt it had been played to her satisfaction. There's no judgment on putting the tour off for a year, but it was a surprise to everyone. We had planned on it for a while, and she had planned on it. But things change, and that's a part of Fleetwood Mac. We're a moving target. We're a group of people who, you could make the argument, don't belong in the same band together. It's the synergy of that that makes it work.

It also sort of makes us the anti-Eagles, in terms of never, ever being on the same page. One thing I admire about the Eagles is they always seem to know what they want. They always seem to know why they want it. They always seem to want it at the same time. We're just the opposite. It's kind of a political minefield out there. It's interesting.

It's interesting that the drama is now entirely out of the public eye. Back in the 1970s, it was all laid bare for everybody to see.
We're still doing what we're doing, but we're not this year's model, per se. We're in the fabric and people want to see what we're doing and we can do business. But we're not in the public eye. Can you imagine if we'd done Rumours in today's media climate? Oh my lord. But the thing about that album is that we were laying bare out personal lives through the subject matter of the music. It became detached from the music and became more about the success and the tabloid-ism. That's fine, but it's not something you want to do everyday.

Speaking of Rumours, have you thought about playing it straight through on this tour? It might be a nice way to switch things up.
That's not a bad idea. That would be pretty cool. I'll bring that up, see where it goes. It could cause problems in terms of how you make the arc of a set that works and isn't too long. You'd have to frame it somehow and it would potentially disruptive to the bigger picture of what we're trying to do. But, hey other people do it. Why can't we? What do they do? Do they come out and play the album and that's their set? Do they do other things too?

It varies, but usually they do the album in the second part of the show. They do an hour or so of other material, maybe take a break, and then do the album straight through, followed by encores.
Well, let me think about that. The only problem I can see with that, and I'm just shooting the shit with you here, is that it was vinyl. Side A builds to a crescendo with "Go Your Own Way." Then it sat back down with the piano song by Christine. Side Two starts off strong and then tapers off into a . . . it doesn't have a . . . unless we mixed up the running order. I suppose we could do that, but that really isn't in the spirit of what you're talking about here. It'd be problematic, unless you followed it up with some other stuff. Ending the set with "Oh Daddy" and "Gold Dust Woman" doesn't sound right to me.

Maybe there's something inherently unfriendly about that for that album. It certainly worked as an album and it worked very well as something that was resonant with all of our personal lives whimpering out at that time, too. I'll give it some thought. I will.

Stevie didn't think it would work for this tour.
Of course she didn't. [Laughs] Well, that may be not be a fight I want to fight then! I gotta pick my battles here.

How do you envision the set being different from the last tour?
Good question. Good question. It's kind of a mystery. You have to understand you do come to a point where people aren't . . . where it isn't a prerequisite to go out and do things people haven't heard before. In a way, they don't want to hear anything new. They are coming to hear a body of work. When you come to terms with that, it's kind of freeing.

For right now, I don't have a particular vision of what this tour is going to be. I don't have an agenda for it. Knowing Stevie, she probably talked about this one track she wants to put on Buckingham Nicks, right?

Yeah.
[Laughs] What did she say about it?

It's the 40th anniversary, so it's time to finally put it out on CD and maybe do a tour with the old band, possibly including Waddy Wachtel and the other guys.
Oh, the old band with Waddy Watchtel. Wow. Well, listen, I would love to do a tour with Stevie. I think that would be very appropriate. She was talking about doing it in between legs of a Fleetwood Mac tour, which is not going to happen. It's logistically impossible. It's economically suicidal because you can't do enough touring it make it worthwhile.

Putting out Buckingham Nicks, I'm totally down with that. To do what she's talking about, we need some bonus tracks. We need to do one from each of us. I'm totally down with that. I'm not necessarily opposed to doing that in a Fleetwood Mac set, although it hits me a little bit like we're going off message. But did she mention any other new material to you? I bet she didn't.

She said you cut one new Buckingham Nicks song from an old demo, and two new Fleetwood Mac songs.
Here's what happened. She was on the road. I was aspiring to do a new Fleetwood Mac album, because that would have been really nice, wouldn't it?

Yeah. It's been almost a decade.
It would have been really appropriate at this point. Stevie wasn't really into doing it. She wasn't into it at all. But I went ahead and got John and Mick over from Hawaii and we cut eight new songs of mine. All of them were done in the proper key for Stevie's voice, if she were to sing the songs. I had no ideas for what she could sing.

My intention was that she would come in, hear the songs and then get engaged and want to bring some material to the table and we could have a new album. That didn't happen. I really just think she didn't want to do an album. And that's OK. I think the reason probably was she didn't feel like she had a bunch of material sitting around that she wanted to give up, or she didn't have any material sitting around, period, any new stuff. That I don't know.

I think she felt maybe a little bit intimidated by the fact that all this stuff just showed up. I mean it really was pretty spectacular, I thought. John and Mick were playing their asses off. I wanted to use a really under-the-radar producer to help me, because I didn't want it to seem like a big deal. I really wanted Stevie to be engaged with it without it being anything that there was any public awareness of at the time, so we got Mitchell Froom in. I had never worked with him before.

It kind of languished there. I think she was very defensive against the idea of making an album. When she came over here with this song that she's talking about for Buckingham Nicks, she really had initially brought it in as one of her contributions for a Fleetwood Mac bit of material. Now, originally someone had said, "Let's just put out two tracks, one of yours, one of Lindsey's, and it'll be downloadable at time of ticket sales." And I said, "Well let's at least do an EP. If Stevie doesn't want to do an album, let's at least do an EP. It's got more credibility. It is something of substance."

I got her to sing on two of my songs. We had a great time, by the way; we had a really fun time hanging out. It was just so much fun, which was just really reassuring and we hadn't had that much fun together in a long time. But, in the meantime, she decided to take this track that was supposed to be for Fleetwood Mac, and put it on the Buckingham Nicks album. At that point I sort of glazed over. In my mind, she still needs to come with a few things for Fleetwood Mac. She's vacationing in wherever she is, Key West or wherever. Is that where she is?

I don't know where she was calling from.
Somewhere in Florida . . . In theory, she is going to come back with a couple of tracks to balance it out. We've got these two great things that she's singing and she likes very much. They should be something we do in the set. If we decide to put out an EP, maybe around the time we hit the road, we have a lot of time. That's in April. I'm hoping that will happen. We'll see.

But you definitely think that Buckingham Nicks tour is not going to happen this year?
How could it? Let's look at the logistics. We've got about 40 dates right now on the books for America, starting April 3^rd. We're running into the middle of the summer, and they may add more dates. We're going to take a break, maybe a month, I'm going to go vacate with my family in July probably. I'm thinking probably then, obviously if things are going well we're going to go play in the U.K. There are a ton of places we've never played that we could play, but let's just say we play only the places we have played, which is Germany, Scandinavia, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand. Let's just leave it at that. I mean . . . now we're into . . . Obviously you do maybe Australia last, because the weather's going to be better down there in the fall. So how do you even contemplate doing a Buckingham Nicks tour anytime in 2013?

I guess you can't. Will the album finally come out at least?
Well, she's all big on that and I don't have a problem with that. I mean, I don't know how many people actually care that it's the 40th anniversary. If it were up to me, and it may be to some degree . . . this is just something that was an idea off the top of Stevie's head, in the same way she brought in a song for Fleetwood Mac and turned it into a Buckingham Nicks song in a couple of days.  You can't follow this stuff because it's a moving target. It complicates a set of preconceptions you already have about Fleetwood Mac, which is really the message we're on now. But, okay, if it were just you and me I would say it doesn't matter it's the 40th anniversary.

Stevie, if you're serious about touring behind Buckingham Nicks, let's wait. I would have two scenarios. One would be to wait and put it out close to the end of the Fleetwood Mac tour. When the tour is done and go rehearse a proper show and do it. Another thing would be to go ahead and put out Buckingham Nicks as a sort of secondarily level of awareness around a Fleetwood Mac tour. It's a little off message, but that's fine. When the tour is done we can go into the studio and cut a new Buckingham Nicks album. That would be the most credible thing you can do. Then you'd have to enough material to do a whole show.

There's nothing expedient about any of this. It's a total commitment to the idea of the past and the present as regards Stevie and Lindsey. Again, if you contemplate doing shows as Buckingham-Nicks, there's only nine songs on that album. Even if you do the whole album, you don't have enough for a show and you're back to doing your other stuff. That isn't necessarily bad, but it isn't a huge statement. I don't know. There are a lot of questions surrounding how we'd do this. Stevie said to me, "We could do five shows." Five shows!

That's a lot of work for five shows.
And what are you accomplishing by doing that?

The two of you have a very complicated relationship.
Now that you've talked to the two of us, are you starting to feel like a shrink?

A little. I'm just hearing different visions for the future of your partnership.
I've been saying to Stevie for years that we should revisit Buckingham Nicks. I know there's a market for it. I'm not saying . . . I know we're not going to go out and play arenas . . . I think something elevated happens with the two of us and there's an interest in that . . . It's a bit of an intangible. But I've been saying that for years. To me, if you're going to do it, do it properly. I just feel like a lot of what she's talking about is kind of skimming and isn't necessarily well thought out. She does things from the heart, but you have to do things that have logic, too. And make some sort of sense on any number of levels. I don't know what she's thinking even. She's going to take Waddy and all these people out? We can't do that. We have to reinvent that whole thing.

[Publicist: Alright Andy, can you ask your final question?]

OK.
You can make it long. I have nothing else to do today . . . Is this article going to get me in trouble?

No, of course not.
[Laughs] Oh, it's funny. You know what's really funny is that for so long we've had to keep all this stuff under wraps. Then the two of us start talking on the phone, and she's talking about it . . . everything just comes out. It's almost like the old days where we were talking to each other through songs, and now we're having conversations through you. It's very strange, isn't it?

Yeah. I've been here before. A couple of years ago the guys in Aerosmith were all yelling at each other through me.
[Laughs] That's very funny. Well, you're doing a good job then.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/q-a-stevie-nicks-and-lindsey-buckingham-reveal-lingering-tensions-in-fleetwood-mac-20121205

The Rock Star Hits Midlife

(By Ann Powers, Washington Times, Oct. 3, 2006)

Lindsey Buckingham, the sonic architect of Fleetwood Mac, has been through a lot: megastardom during the decadent 1970s; a split with bandmate and girlfriend Stevie Nicks that defined the rock 'n' roll breakup; 20 years of balancing pop stardom with an irrepressible avant-garde urge; the only band reunion by presidential request (for Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration); first-time parenthood at 48. But he never expected to live in Brentwood.  "I was living in this Neutra-style house way up in the hills in Bel-Air," Buckingham said, chatting in his comfortable den just west of the San Diego Freeway. "I'd had that property for 30 years- it was my bachelor pad. Fleetwood Mac cut 'Tango in the Night' there in 1987, and Mick [Fleetwood] lived in a Winnebago in the front yard.  "When my wife and I started having children, I decided to knock it down," continued the 57-year-old father of three. "We built a Spanish.  But it's not a great area for kids, you can't really go outside the gates or you'll fall down the hill. So we decided to get into a more 'Father Knows Best' environment."  Soon the Buckingham clan will inhabit a freshly built fairy tale home-  complete with turret-  a few blocks away from this rental. The children will have space to run circles around their dad. But Daddy will certainly also claim a room with a locking door, where he can protect his other progeny: his well-nurtured songs.

Today, Buckingham releases "Under the Skin," his first solo album in 14 years. Recorded mostly in hotel rooms during Fleetwood Mac's reunion tour in 2003, using little more than a guitar delay pedal and an acoustic guitar, it includes material dating 10 years or more. Two songs were recorded in the studio with Mac drummer Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, and one features Memphis-style horns arranged by Beck's father, David Campbell. Otherwise, it's all Buckingham, chasing that part of himself that life's responsibilities often steal away.  "I spent a long time focusing on something very narrow, probably in reaction to being part of such a large machine," he said of these songs. "With Fleetwood Mac, I walled up a lot of things. Part of the process is taking down those walls to see if there's anything left inside."

"Under the Skin" is a locket portrait of the pop star at midlife, trying to honor but also escape a weighty reputation. "Cast Away Dreams" and "Not Too Late" confront the conflict between domesticity and the artist's way. "Hearts will break with the choices we must make," Buckingham sings, sadly noting the rift that often arises in a family (including that other kind of family, the band) and the individualism that inspires enduring art.  On this quiet, intense album, Buckingham's guitar lines form delicate knots around incantatory melodies, and the echo of heavy delay helps his quavering tenor capture the full-court press of time. Buckingham finds the cadence of one of life's most difficult passages- the journey into unequivocal adulthood.  Artists have a particularly hard time with that transition; Buckingham's personality, friends say, is quintessentially artistic. That may be why his music so vividly captures the tension between imagination and real life. "His driven sensibility — it's almost childlike," Fleetwood said in a separate interview. "Lindsey protects his own innocence. You think he realizes something, and then you see he really doesn't. He's in his studio, focused, and that's that."  Having children blew open Buckingham's well-guarded self-absorption. "As a parent, there is a push-pull," he said. "When I was trying to finish, and one of my kids would say, 'Dad, you wanna ... ?' I had to make a choice, and not a very good one. I was either shaming myself as a father, or shaming the idea of following through on something that's been in motion for many years."

Buckingham has been tormented by conflicting loyalties before. After the record-breaking success of Mac's 1977 album "Rumours," he felt coerced into generating hits. "Tusk," the double album that came next, was Buckingham's act of resistance. It's a benchmark of experimental rock.  "Tusk was an impulse," he said. "Over time, everyone in the band got drawn in. And then, because it didn't sell 16 million albums — it sold four or five — there was a backlash. There was a meeting. The band said, 'Lindsey, we're not going to do that anymore.' That's the only reason I started making solo records."  Buckingham made three fantastically odd solo albums. He also stayed in Fleetwood Mac for one more decade, then left the band, returned and repeated the cycle. It was a Fleetwood Mac song, "Big Love," that set the template for "Under the Skin." It became his spotlight number during Mac shows, a whorl of guitar picking and swooning vocals. 

 

He began exploring other artists' songbooks in search of similarly powerful guitar vehicles; two, the Rolling Stones' "I Am Waiting" and Donovan's "Try for the Sun," appear on the new disc. His own material began to coalesce. But the machine asserted itself again, when Buckingham found himself at odds with his label, Warner Bros., over the album's focused sound.  "They didn't want me to put it out," he said, quickly adding that he's on good terms with the company now. "They wished me to put some rock material on, to make a hybrid, normal album. It might have been easier for them to market. But for 14 years I'd been trying to get something out from my heart, and I'm sorry, this is it."  The final version of "Under the Skin" is an innocent thing, more in sync with the experiments of younger artists such as Sufjan Stevens and Joseph Arthur than with typical rock-legend side projects. He hopes new fans will find him on tour. "I don't know who my audience is," he admits.  He does know where to find the old machine, and the fans who keep it well-oiled. Fleetwood Mac will tour again, and Buckingham is planning an electric record, maybe with a producer, probably with input from Fleetwood and McVie. The world may not have to wait a teenager's lifetime for his next release.  "After Christmas, we'll start, in theory," he said, not letting this project peep too far out of the cocoon yet. "I think it's going to rock. I don't know what it's doing yet."

Gentle Goes The Old Mac Mainstay

(By Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, Oct. 11, 2006)

     Lindsey Buckingham's intimate new solo album, aptly titled "Under the Skin," sounds like it might have been recorded inside the echo chamber of his own head. Monday night at the State Theater, the Fleetwood Mac mainstay started in the same mode, singing the album's opener, "Not Too Late," accompanied only by his classical-style acoustic guitar and lots of reverb.  The vibe barely shifted when Buckingham was joined by his band, a percussionist and two singer-guitarists. The additional musicians merely simulated the multiple Buckinghams of multitrack "Under the Skin" tunes like "Cast Away Dreams."  This spare approach might have been enough for the enthusiastic audience, especially since Buckingham mingled Fleetwood Mac standards ("Never Going Back Again") with the new material. The arena-rock veteran wasn't taking any chances, however. Two-thirds of the way through the show, the guitars went electric and the gestures got broader. In a five-song blitz that included several guitar-hero flourishes and even a drum solo, the group drove toward the climax: one of Mac's biggest Buckingham-penned hits, "Go Your Own Way."  It was an effective assault, but a predictable one. The concert's highlights came earlier, and during the encore, with gentler numbers (the new "Show You How") and a slow, stark version of the once-playful "Go Insane."  Not that these introspective moments ever suggested that Buckingham is losing it. Whether peering inward or rocking out, he was always the canny old pro.

Lindsey Buckingham's List Of Music You Should Hear

(From Amazon.com, 2007)

Lindsey Buckingham's new album, "Under the Skin," is a distillation of all his previous efforts, both with Fleetwod Mac and as a solo artist. Recognized as the musical visionary behind one of the biggest-selling groups of all time, Buckingham approaches his art as a balancing act between the considerations of a mainstream group and the more esoteric approaches to solo work."Hopefully at the end of the day," says Buckingham, "the equation makes sense, and I think it has. We've been touring in support of the album (which will continue on and off through the summer), and I sense that the understanding and appreciation of my choices has hit a kind of critical mass."  "Under the Skin" is Buckingham's first solo project in nearly 14 years. "A lot has happened, a lot of questions have been answered," he says. "I've been waiting all my life for this time."  Here are a few songs Buckingham feels helped define and chart the evolution of rock and roll. (Find more artists' picks on our main Music You Should Hear page, http://www.amazon.com/mysh)

Lindsey's List

1. Of all the artists who pioneered styles that would be built on by others, Chuck Berry is probably the most essential. His country/rhythm and blues hybrid was copied by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and countless others. Even punk could be said to be a restatement of Chuck Berry. One song that deviated from his usual tone and drew from the New Orleans sound was "You Never Can Tell" (from the album The Definitive Collection), a marvel of light touch and Creole atmosphere down to the use of French in describing the marriage of a teenage Cajun couple.

2. Johnny Cash always cut across style lines. He was just Johnny Cash. Many of his greatest achievements were on Sun Records at the beginning--glorious conceptions of minimalism and slap echo performed with his band, the Tennessee Two. Yet it's a later song, after he signed with Columbia, that I always come back to. "Ring of Fire" (written by his wife June Carter, from the album The Legend of Johnny Cash), with its staggered time signatures and completely committed use of mariachi-style brass, could have been overly camp, but Cash's dominating authenticity and Carter's background vocals propel "Ring of Fire" to a magical place that, again, transcends categorization.

3. A great sense of possibility was ignited by rock and roll's impact on a mainstream audience. While pioneers such as Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis and their labels took a song-for-song approach based on the idiosyncrasies of their artists, some to follow would reverse that role, in an approach that was philosophically closer to Tin Pan Alley or the movie studios of decades earlier. Lieber and Stoller were a writing and production team known for sophisticated "adult" production, unsurpassed string and vocal arrangements, and sonic quality that was ten years ahead of its time. "Save the Last Dance for Me," by the Drifters, is one of these quintessential efforts. It's also a song in which the meaning is greatly deepened by the knowledge that its writer, Doc Pomus, was in a wheelchair.

4. Another figure whose vision mattered more than the artists he produced was the great Phil Spector. His legendary "Wall of Sound," created by using multiples of instruments, was a blurring of the edges, a surreal soundscape that was still youthful, "teenage," like a symphonic garage band. One song I really love is "Walking in the Rain" by the Ronettes (from the album The Best of the Ronettes). It's an unearthly ballad of great emotional and sonic range, and one that demonstrates the strange quality in much of Spector's work: the tension between heaviness and innocence.

5. I first became aware of Burt Bacharach as the writer of a song performed by Marty Robbins, a fairly straight ahead country shuffle. Within a few years, Bacharach had found his definitive style, using angular, surprising combinations of time signatures, chord shifts, and melodic range, all somehow still true to the sensibilities of rock. Burt Bacharach and Hal David are one of the greatest writing teams in popular music. Many of their best recordings were performed by Dionne Warwick, whose emotive, soulful vocal style was the perfect vehicle for their material. Particularly fine is "Anyone Who Had a Heart" (from the album The Dionne Warwick Collection: Her All-Time Greatest Hits).

6. Jumping to the other extreme, one of the important subgenres in rock history is one that could be labeled "Dumb." From the beginning, an aspect of rock and roll's validity, its power to liberate, its point of departure, was the fact that it was heard differently, responded to differently, judged differently. It was about feel, not skill. Artists such as the Rolling Stones or Neil Young would have been much less without elements of "Dumb," but there were many other "garage" type bands who took this concept to its ultimate conclusion, certainly not as an intellectual choice. My favorite is the rock classic "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen (from the album Louie Louie: The Very Best of The Kingsmen), with its unintelligible vocal and one of the great raw drum tracks in rock.

7. "I Want You," by Bob Dylan, never fails to bring tears to my eyes. It seems to me to be a complete emotional picture of a young man, alienated and in need, cruel and tender, in the center of a world of pretense and hypocrisy--a world he'd wished for and helped create, but could not anticipate.

8. John Lennon's first solo album, "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band," is one of the great albums of rock. In a masterstroke of raw minimalism, producer Phil Spector broke all his own rules to help Lennon define this psychologically charged work, which looks at the dynamics of family and how those dynamics are impacted by society. Though the album is generally up-tempo, reflecting his recent experiences with primal scream therapy, there are ballads as well. "Working Class Hero" is a powerful, haunting song that laments the cookie-cutter society imposed on us from a young age--a society that rock and roll has thumbed its nose at and offered escape from. Yet Lennon observes that even those escaping may yet find the same kind of tyranny in another form.

9. In the wake of Brian Wilson's failure to get his band to rally around "SMiLE," the Beach Boys were fragmented, losing momentum. The album "Surf's Up" (released on CD as Sunflower/Surf's Up) was inconsistent, and it felt as if Brian were on the verge of withdrawing and the others taking over. And yet, the title track, "Surf's Up," is a masterpiece, among a handful of Wilson's greatest efforts.

10. Joni Mitchell's genius was never more clear to me than on the album "Blue." She had left behind too optimistic a landscape for one a bit more ambivalent, but was still working with instrumental simplicity. The oneness, the personage that comes through on "A Case of You," for example, is stunning and completely moving.

11. The Clash was one of the greatest bands to come out of the new wave/punk scene. For me, at a time when the success of Fleetwood Mac had become at odds with taking creative risks, they were one of the groups that meant a great deal to me. "Train in Vain" (from the album London Calling) is a wonderful example of their simplicity and buoyancy.

12. Bruce Springsteen built an image on a kind of East Coast gypsy bravado, and much of the music, especially given the nature of his band, reflected that. Yet after a short marriage that quickly became a crisis of trust and identity, he pulled himself in, recorded an album virtually alone, and released "Tunnel of Love." The whole back half of "Tunnel of Love" [it was called Side Two when it was released] is a quiet, transcendent reflection. "Brilliant Disguise" is the defining song, and also the pivot with which Springsteen turns the mirror on himself.

13. Given its limited melodic and rhythmic range, rap has had an extraordinary run. Two things I can think of that have contributed to this are that it has trained people to pay more attention to the constructions of the tracks, where most of the melodic content is (creating a kind of inverted listening experience), and that it tends to be more connected to authenticity in a world increasingly resembling a house of mirrors. Eminem is an artist I like. His nasal, adolescent voice has an undertone of sweetness that deepens the feeling of his lyrics and is very musical with the tracks. "I Just Don't Give a F*ck" (from the album The Slim Shady LP) is a great example of his extreme musicality, to the point where it begins to transcend the genre.

14. Anything by Radiohead from "OK Computer" on (including Kid A, Hail To The Thief, and I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings).

 

33 Things You Should Know About Fleetwood Mac
(By Adam Higginbotham, Blender Magazine, 2005)

1. Fleetwood Mac were named for their rhythm section.
Legendary (and legendarily nutty) British blues guitarist Peter Green formed the band in 1967 around drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie. “None of us would be here without Peter Green,” Fleetwood says.

2. Green, the band’s first guitarist, left after taking too much LSD.
After a 1970 show in Munich, Green went to an acid party thrown by a group of rich German hippies. “I just sat around thinking and thought about everything,” he said. “I was thinking so fast; I couldn’t believe how fast I was thinking! And I ran out of thoughts. I must have been thinking solid for about an hour.” Afterward, Green announced that he wanted to join a commune, and insisted that the band donate all of its earnings to charity.

3. The star of early Fleetwood Mac shows was a dildo.
A pink, 16-inch rubber dildo named Harold. “Our roadie would bring out Harold on a big platter, as if he were the butler delivering tea,” Fleetwood says. “Harold would be attached to my bass drum by way of a suction cup at his base and would spend the evening quivering and vibrating in an erect position at the ladies in our audience.”

4. Mick Fleetwood never plays without his balls.
Two wooden balls hanging from his belt. “My drum solo consisted of me stepping out in front of the kit and dancing while clacking my balls together. I still have these wooden balls, and I never play without them. If I didn’t have them, I’d be very loath to play at all.”

5. John McVie is fascinated by penguins.
When he lived near the London zoo, he spent hours watching the flightless birds. On the Mac’s 1972 album, Future Games, there’s a photograph of a penguin where McVie should be. The following year, the band named an album Penguin. Fleetwood Mac’s publishing company was named after a species of penguin, as was McVie’s yacht. Finally, McVie went out one night, got extremely drunk and had a penguin tattooed on one of his forearms.

6. They lost their second guitarist to a freakish Christian sect.
The day before a gig in Los Angeles in 1971, Jeremy Spencer said he was going out to a bookstore and never returned. Road managers combed the streets for him; the FBI, Interpol and a renowned psychic were involved in a lengthy search. Eventually, the band’s manager found Spencer in a warehouse with the Children of God. He had shaved his head, renounced his possessions and taken the name Jonathan.

7. Their third lead guitarist left because nobody would talk to him.
In 1972, the band was touring America in a pair of station wagons, but everyone had stopped speaking to Danny Kirwan. Five minutes before one show, he went into the bathroom and repeatedly smashed his head against the wall, spattering blood everywhere. He then destroyed his guitar and refused to go onstage. Instead, he watched from the audience as the band struggled to play without him. He gave Mick Fleetwood a critique of the performance afterward. Then Fleetwood fired him.

8. And the fourth guitarist was fired for having an affair with Mick Fleetwood’s wife. On tour.
“I couldn’t take it,” Fleetwood says, “mentally.”

9. Next up: the Phony Fleetwood Mac.
After yet another tour disaster, their manager, Clifford Davis, announced he was fed up: “I fucking own Fleetwood Mac,” he explained, and with the real band scattered around the world, he promptly assembled his own version to tour the U.S.: the New Fleetwood Mac. Nobody was fooled. “At a few gigs,” recalls road manager John Courage, “people threw shit at the musicians.”

10. Peter Green told the manager to stop sending him royalty checks - or he’d shoot him.
The manager reported the threat. British police arrested Green, who was committed. “I don’t think it was a real gun,” Fleetwood says. “But he made quite a bold statement.”

11. Before they joined the band, L.A. folkies Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks released an album of their own.
They were both topless on the cover. Nicks bought a new blouse for the shoot, but Buckingham didn’t like it, so he made her pose with nothing on. “I spent my last $111 on that blouse,” Nicks says. “I didn’t eat for days. I was crying when we took that picture.”

12. Success did not make them happy.
The 1975 album Fleetwood Mac made them millionaires. But by the time they began to record Rumours, the couples — John and Christine McVie, Nicks and Buckingham — had split up. Fleetwood, too, was getting divorced. The band spent 18 hours a day in the studio but didn’t speak. “Making Rumours was an exercise in denial,” Buckingham says. “Trying to get the music done, minimizing the distress of having to produce songs for Stevie when I didn’t even want to see her.”

13. Drugs made recording Rumours a rather painstaking process.
For instance: The band required four days, nine pianos and three tuners to find Christine McVie a keyboard that “sounded right.” They enlisted the help of a blind man and someone known only as the “Looner Tuner.” “We felt that the piano was not holding tune,” Fleetwood says. “Whether the piano was wrong, or whether we had lost our marbles — ” Buckingham cuts in: “That’s what it was.”

14. They can’t remember how or why they started taking cocaine.
“Everybody across the board was indulging in cocaine at that time,” Buckingham says. Notes Fleetwood: “I wandered into it — and then I turned around and I was in the middle of a train wreck. It was in my life for a long, long, long time. About 25 years.”

15. Fleetwood wanted to give his coke dealer a credit on the album.
“Unfortunately,” he says, “he got snuffed — executed! — before the thing came out.”

16. “The Chain” is the only song ever written by all five members of the band.
“John does not write,” Buckingham says of McVie. “His contribution to that was so fundamental: The riff that starts the whole tag — boom da-dad-doo-da-da-doo-doo-doo — was so thematic and dramatic.”

17. Without all the relationship drama, Rumours would not have been nearly so successful.
Buckingham: “A great deal of the appeal was that people could look at the whole soap-opera aspect. It’s like being a voyeur and looking into people’s bedrooms.”

18. And it made Fleetwood Mac the “soap-opera band.”
“We were pigeonholed into a clichéd way of being looked at,” Buckingham recalls. “Two couples: two chicks, two guys, breaking up, writing songs to one another.”

19. But it also made them very powerful.
Mick Fleetwood was even able to broker a record deal for Peter Green. The deal was set until Green sat down with record-company executives. “And then, in the office,” Fleetwood says, “he suddenly said, ‘I can’t do this. It’s the work of the devil.’ ”

20. In 1977, the whole penguin thing got really out of hand.
The band designed a giant dirigible version of the flightless bird, 70 feet tall, intended to rise up from the back of the stage at the climax of stadium shows and then float out over the audience. “It would never fully inflate — it must have had leaks or something,” Buckingham says. “This thing was limping and floundering at the back of the stage. It never flew.” Adds Fleetwood: “It was a disaster.”

21. Not all of the band embraced Buckingham’s “new direction” on the 1979 album Tusk.
He discovered punk and New Wave. He recorded vocal parts on his knees in a bathroom. The rest of Fleetwood Mac, however, did not become fans of Talking Heads or the Clash. “You could say that,” Buckingham says. “Nobody did. Nor are they now. But what are you gonna do?”

22. They built an entirely new studio to make Tusk.
Everything was built to the band’s specs: echo chambers developed to Buckingham’s requirements (including a special tiled room because of his fondness for recording in bathrooms) and English lager on tap in the lounge. When the meter stopped running, their bill for studio time was $1.4 million. “By the time we got out of that studio,” Fleetwood recalls, “we could have bought it.”

23. But that still wasn’t enough for them.
Fleetwood wanted the song “Tusk” to feature a brass band as accompaniment. He hired the 112-piece Trojan Marching Band from the University of Southern California and recorded them outdoors at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. He still plays with the USC band from time to time. “Even Lindsey’s done it with me,” he says. “I’ve done it quite a few times. They still play ‘Tusk.’ And now they play ‘Don’t Stop’ as well.”

24. They practically invented prerelease album bootlegging.
In 1979, before the release of Tusk, Fleetwood Mac staged a landmark event: The entire double album was broadcast on the radio network Westwood One. “They played it from top to bottom,” Fleetwood says, “without interruption.” From all across California came the click of tape recorders being switched on. Who thought up the idea? “That would be our record company. It wasn’t a very good idea at all, actually,” Fleetwood notes. “They,” Buckingham points out, “were doing cocaine, too.”

25. On a European leg of the Tusk tour, they spent three weeks traveling in Adolf Hitler’s old train.
“It was beautiful,” Fleetwood says. “Like those train trips you get around Europe now, all velvet and walnut.” Says Buckingham: “We didn’t ask for Hitler’s train.”

26. The Tusk tour proved to be very, very expensive.
There were limousines for everyone — even the lighting guys. Hotel rooms were redecorated in advance to make the color schemes suitable for Nicks and Christine McVie. Nicks had to have a piano in every suite she stayed in. Fleetwood: “We were all crazy. I remember a piano winched up- ” Buckingham: “Nine floors up.”

27. Buckingham finally succumbed to the curse of Fleetwood Mac guitarists.
At one show in New Zealand, as Nicks sang “Rhiannon,” he pulled his jacket over his head and began performing a grotesque imitation of her. Christine McVie slapped him. “I might have chucked a glass of wine over him, too,” she says. “I didn’t think that was the way to treat a paying audience.”

28. Eventually, Fleetwood Mac had to introduce drug rationing.
Their road manager handed out one Heineken bottle cap full of cocaine to each member of the band before they went onstage. “Even in the lunatic days,” Fleetwood says, “there was a sense of responsibility. We would rein ourselves in. I would not want to walk onstage completely coked out to the point where it was … not acceptable.”

29. In 1984, Mick Fleetwood went bankrupt.
“People were saying that I’d put $8 million up my nose, but if I’d done all the things they said, I’d have been dead long ago.”

30. Buckingham has never attended the “Night of a Thousand Stevies.”
Nor will he be turning up for the annual New York gathering of drag queens and Nicks look-alikes anytime soon. “She gets a lot of people at her shows who dress like her. I don’t know if I could handle that, though.”

31. Even the President had a hard time getting Buckingham back into Fleetwood Mac.
When asked to rejoin the band to perform “Don’t Stop” for Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993, Buckingham couldn’t make up his mind. “I called Lindsey,” Nicks says, “and said, ‘If you cheat me out of this moment, I’ll never speak to you again.’ So he did it.”

32. But Clinton didn’t join them on sax.
“No. I’m a little surprised,” Fleetwood says. Adds Buckingham, “He probably wanted to.”

33. Making their first new studio CD in 16 years, Say You Will, was not at all like Rumours or Tusk.
“Mick and I both have little children now, so we can’t live, nor would we want to live, the kind of lives we did,” Buckingham says. “It’s more meticulous. And the hours are better.”

 

Obama’s 2006 Speech Against Boosting The Debt Limit

Annotating Obama’s 2006 Speech Against Boosting The Debt Limit

(By Glenn Kessler, The WashingtonPost, 15 January 2013)

 

“I think if you look at the history, getting votes for the debt ceiling is always difficult, and budgets in this town are always difficult.”   

— President Obama, news conference, Jan. 14, 2013

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. ... I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”

— Then-Sen. Barack Obama, floor speech in the Senate, March 16, 2006

 

As the saying goes, “where you stand depends on where you sit.” This is certainly true of the votes to boost the national debt limit, where almost by tradition, the party not holding the presidency refused to support an increase in the debt limit. (One big exception, as we have noted, is in 1953 during the Eisenhower presidency.)  The president has acknowledged that his previous vote against the debt limit was “a political vote.” On Monday, at a news conference, he urged lawmakers to boost the debt limit without conditions: “We’re going to have to make sure that people are looking at this in a responsible way, rather than just through the lens of politics.” (In other words, don’t do what I did back when I was a lawmaker.)

In making his case, Obama noted: “The debt ceiling is not a question of authorizing more spending. Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize more spending. It simply allows the country to pay for spending that Congress has already committed to.” He added that he was willing to have a “conversation” about reducing the deficit, but the debt limit was not the right vehicle.  With that in mind, we were curious to look back at Obama’s 2006 speech and examine the case he made at the time for not supporting a boost in the debt limit. Below is the entire speech. At key points, we will offer commentary or further explanation.

Obama’s 2006 Speech On The Debt Limit

“Mr. President, I rise today to talk about America’s debt problem. The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills.”

Here, Obama is sounding a bit Tea Partyish.

“It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies. Over the past five years, our federal debt has increased by $3.5 trillion to $8.6 trillion. That is ‘‘trillion’’ with a ‘‘T.’’ That is money that we have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, borrowed from China and Japan, borrowed from American taxpayers.”

Obama’s language is remarkably similar to charges made by the Mitt Romney campaign against Obama during the 2012 election, though Romney mostly focused on the debt held by China. (Japan was ignored.) When Obama took office in the midst of the Great Recession, the total national debt was $10.6 trillion; it is now $16.4 trillion.

“And over the next five years, between now and 2011, the president’s budget will increase the debt by almost another $3.5 trillion.”

It actually increased $5 trillion by the start of fiscal 2011.

“Numbers that large are sometimes hard to understand. Some people may wonder why they matter. Here is why: This year, the federal government will spend $220 billion on interest. That is more money to pay interest on our national debt than we’ll spend on Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.  That is more money to pay interest on our debt this year than we will spend on education, homeland security, transportation and veterans benefits combined. It is more money in one year than we are likely to spend to rebuild the devastated gulf coast in a way that honors the best of America. And the cost of our debt is one of the fastest growing expenses in the federal budget.”

Despite the increase in the debt the past seven years, interest costs actually have dropped, to about $200 billion a year, because interest rates have fallen so much during the economic slowdown. But if interest rates go up again, interest expense will soar.

“This rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy, robbing our cities and states of critical investments in infrastructure like bridges, ports and levees; robbing our families and our children of critical investments in education and health-care reform; robbing our seniors of the retirement and health security they have counted on.  Every dollar we pay in interest is a dollar that is not going to investment in America’s priorities. Instead, interest payments are a significant tax on all Americans — a debt tax that Washington doesn’t want to talk about. If Washington were serious about honest tax relief in this country, we would see an effort to reduce our national debt by returning to responsible fiscal policies.”

“But we are not doing that. Despite repeated efforts by Senators Conrad and Feingold, the Senate continues to reject a return to the commonsense pay-go rules that used to apply. Previously, pay-go rules applied both to increases in mandatory spending and to tax cuts. The Senate had to abide by the commonsense budgeting principle of balancing expenses and revenues.

“Unfortunately, the principle was abandoned, and now the demands of budget discipline apply only to spending. As a result, tax breaks have not been paid for by reductions in Federal spending, and thus the only way to pay for them has been to increase our deficit to historically high levels and borrow more and more money. Now we have to pay for those tax breaks plus the cost of borrowing for them. Instead of reducing the deficit, as some people claimed, the fiscal policies of this administration and its allies in Congress will add more than $600 million in debt for each of the next five years. That is why I will once again co-sponsor the pay-go amendment and continue to hope that my colleagues will return to a smart rule that has worked in the past and can work again.”

The rules were restored in 2010.

“Our debt also matters internationally. My friend, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, likes to remind us that it took 42 presidents 224 years to run up only $1 trillion of foreign-held debt. This administration did more than that in just five years.”

This is also similar to another line used by Romney against Obama during the 2012 campaign.

“Now, there is nothing wrong with borrowing from foreign countries. But we must remember that the more we depend on foreign nations to lend us money, the more our economic security is tied to the whims of foreign leaders whose interests might not be aligned with ours.  Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”

***

Reading the speech seven years later, Obama is correct that it was a political vote. He never really explains what he would do differently or how he would provide leadership on reducing the deficit. He just decries the rising debt, though he hints at possibly supporting tax increases, since he complains that tax cuts have been deficit-financed.

After Obama finished speaking, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) rose to rebut his comments.

“Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of final passage. Raising the debt limit is necessary to preserve the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.  We cannot as a Congress pass spending bills and tax bills and then refuse to pay our bills. Refusing to raise the debt limit is like refusing to pay your credit card bill — after you’ve used your credit card.  The time to control the deficits and debt is when we are voting on the spending bills and the tax bills that create it. Raising the debt limit is about meeting the obligations we have already incurred. We must meet our obligations. Vote for this bill.”

Here, Grassley has found his inner President Obama. The increase in the debt limit passed on a vote of 52 to 48, with a handful of Republicans joining all Democrats (including then-Senators Joe Biden and Hillary Rodham Clinton) in opposition. (Grassley has no great record on the debt ceiling, generally voting for increases when Bush was president and against them when Obama was president.)

The Pinocchio Test

This is why many Americans hate politics.  The young senator from Illinois presumably did not want to buck the rest of his party establishment in voting for increasing the debt limit — not when there were just enough Republicans willing to support a president from their own party. But Obama would be on much more solid ground today if he had given a speech back in 2006 that sounded more like his news conference in 2013.

For making an argument that the president now decries as politics, he earns the upside-down Pinocchio, signifying a major-league flip-flop. (We have rarely given this ruling, but are eager for other examples from readers.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/annotating-obamas-2006-speech-against-boosting-the-debt-limit/2013/01/14/aa8cf8c4-5e9b-11e2-9940-6fc488f3fecd_blog.html

Brent Musburger Has Nothing To Apologize For

(By Tracee Hamilton, Washington Post, 10 January 2012)

Thank goodness the PC police took down that filthy Brent Musburger. At 73, he’s clearly past the age limit at which you can compliment a young, beautiful woman. We all know that’s, um, well, I have no idea. But apparently there is a limit. Old geezers can marry young women, but whatever you do, don’t say they’re beautiful.  During Monday night’s national championship game, Musburger had the temerity to call the 23-year-old girlfriend of Alabama quarterback A.J. McCarron – who also happens to be Miss Alabama – “a beautiful woman” and suggested that youngsters in Alabama start throwing a football around with their dads, implying, I suppose, that they should all aspire to be quarterbacks so they can all get girlfriends that beautiful. It was a weak joke, perhaps, but it’s hardly offensive.

Kudos to Katherine Webb and her parents, who refused to get worked up about the entire kerfuffle. Personally, I’ve read and re-read the quotes, and I don’t understand the outrage. Yet ESPN felt it necessary to issue this statement: “We apologize that the commentary in this instance went too far, and Brent understands that.”  Does he? Well, he’s one up on me. How did the commentary go too far but the camera work did not? If the camera continues to linger on the beautiful girlfriend in the stands, what exactly is Musburger — who is there to comment on what you, the viewer, is seeing — supposed to say? He has game notes on the players, but beyond saying she was a former Miss Alabama, he doesn’t have a lot of talking points to work with.

All the networks are guilty of too many pointless shots of wives, girlfriends and parents during games. Wimbledon telecasts may be the worst offenders, what with the Royals in the stands and the very attractive wives/girlfriends of the players. That’s right, I said it. They’re “very attractive.” (Editor’s note: The Washington Post apologizes for this commentary, and Tracee understands that.) Oddly, we seldom see the “good-looking” — another of Musburger’s offensive phrases — boyfriends of the female athletes.

Musburger has been in the broadcast booth since the days when very few sporting events were televised. He was among the very first announcers I heard as a kid. I don’t recall him ever making an inappropriate remark. I think his age is catching up with him — as it does with all of us — but I didn’t see anything offensive in what he said. An older gentleman commented on a pageant queen’s looks, but he didn’t do it in a creepy way. If he said, “Boy, I’d like some of that,” then fire him. But he didn’t. He didn’t even come close to that.

Commercials during game broadcasts are far more offensive than anything Musburger said. For example, during the Redskins-Cowboys game two weeks ago, we were treated to a commercial for the remake of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” followed immediately by a tight shot of a McRib being lifted out of a pool of barbecue sauce in a McDonald’s ad. Ugh. Most horror movie promos should not be viewed by children, but then again, I still have nightmares over “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.”  And don’t get me started on the hypocrisy of the willingness to make money peddling erectile dysfunction medication, but the unwillingness to let a 73-year-old say that a beautiful woman is, in fact, beautiful. Maybe if Musburger and Webb had sat in adjoining bathtubs, that would have made it okay.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/brent-musburger-has-nothing-to-apologize-for/2013/01/10/d0e0403e-5b45-11e2-9fa9-5fbdc9530eb9_story.html