Josh
07-23-2000, 05:40 PM
In this book I'm reading called Rock Of Ages : the Rolling Stone History Of Rock & Roll, there are quite a few Mac mentions. It's an old book, from 1986, and I've had it forever and forgot about it. Just thought I'd post them to see what you guys think (warning, it's sort of a long and exausting read):
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pg. 505
Even as rock fragmented, there was nostalgia for the recent past, for the unity that the Beatles had seemed to provide for the rock audience. During the first half of the 1970s, a number of acts came along that tempted pundits to employ the phrase "logical successors to the Beatles" - Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, or name-your-fave-rave. What these acts had in common was that their appeal transcended the rapidly hardening genre classifications - they made hits that were both soft and hard, ballads and rockers, hits that borrowed from different genres (reggae, disco, country) while retaining the pop melodicism that pleased a huge mass audience.
pgs. 508-510
For the next five years, John Lennon dropped out from the music world, releasing no new music, tending to baby Sean, puttering around Manhattan. In this way, Lennon rejected the commercial rat race the rock industry had become in the mid-1970s and made way for other star acts that pursued their own eccentricities, such as, most dramatically, Fleetwood Mac. Fleetwood Mac must be considered the ultimate journeymen, excellent musicians who, through intelligent persistence, became one of the oddest acts to go multiplatinum.
Formed in 1967 as a blues-rock band led by former John Mayall's Bluesbreakers guitarist Peter Green, Fleetwood Mac's two constant members have been its rhythym section : drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie. Both men had been Bluesbreakers, and it was Fleetwood Mac's triumphant debut at the 1967 British Jazz and Blues Festival that secured the fledgling band a record contract. Green, Fleetwood, McVie, and guitarist Jeremy Spenser were instant hits in England, where the band's debut album, Fleetwood Mac, remained in the Top Ten for thirteen months. American acceptance was slow in coming, on their first American tour, for example, they were third-billed to Jethro Tull and Joe Cocker. This resistance is understandable: in England, the blues is a popular genre; in America, the blues is cult music.
The band shifted it's personnel with every album. In 1970, Green left the band, unsettled by a profound spiritual crisis. As he recalled at the time, "I woke up one night, sweating heavily and feeling like I couldn't move... That night I wrote 'Green Manalishi', a song that was written out of fear, really. I think I realized at the time that it was very powerful stuff." "Green Manalishi", with it's dark-toned, riven guitar lines, certainly suggested the rolling emotions Green was experiencing, but the song - an immediate smash in England when it was released a few months after its composition - didn't convey the repulsion Green had begun to feel toward his stardom.
"In May 1970, Peter told me privately that he felt it was wrong that a group of entertainers such as Fleetwood Mac should earn such vast sums of money when, in fact, other people in the world didn't have enough to eat," the band's then-manager Clifford Davis told journalist Sam Sutherland in 1978. "He put to the band the following proposition: That all profits other than running costs earned by the band be given to needy people by way of donating to various trust funds, etc. Fleetwood and McVie did not wish to go along with this line of thought, and although Peter respected their decision, he felt he could no longer be associated with the band merely for his own financial ends."
The result was that Green left the band and subsequently gave away vitually all of his small fortune to various charities. "I thought I had too much money to be happy and normal, and I got sort of panicky, I guess," Green said to Sutherland. "Thousands of pounds is just too much for a working person to handle all of a sudden and I felt I didn't deserve it. I didn't want it anymore." Guilt-ridden and depressed, Green made a brief retirement from the music business but reemerged to record two solo albums featuring hauntinly beautiful - if obscure and rather aimless - guitar compositions.
After numberous other personnel changes, stability of a very quirky sort was achieved in 1974 when guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks (who had recorded a spacey-folkie album called Buckingham/Nicks in 1973) joined the group. This lineup - Buckingham, Nicks, Fleetwood, McVie, and keyboardist-singer Christine McVie - inaugurated Fleetwood Mac's commencement as a pop/rock band, a different entity from the blues group the band had once been. The band gota new producer, Keith Olsen (indeed it was Olsen who had introduced Fleetwood Mac to Buckingham and Nicks), and on 1975's Fleetwood Mac, Olsen brightened and clarified what had been the group's increasingly murky sound. Buoyed by the pop sensibility of Buckingham, anchored by the Fleetwood-McVie rhythym section, given emotional maturity by Christine McVie's warm, grainy alto, and commercialized by Stevie Nick's space cadet/sex pot stage persona, Fleetwood Mac was a slow starter that eventually sold over four million copies, making it one of the bestselling albums in rock history.
pg. 521
And indeed, oblivious to the aesthetic niceties, the major record companies were cultivating their own growth with great energy. By the end of the 1970s, the rock market would be controlled by just six major companies: CBS, Warner Communications, Polygram, RCA, MCA, and Capitol-EMI. By comandeering the marketplace and streamlining the path between artist and comsumer, the industry would be able to reap maximum profits during the boom years 1977 and 1978, during which time the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours sold more than fifteen million copies each.
pg. 575
You might say the most valuble lesson learned by rockers over the course of the 1970s was how to be professional without turning into hacks. That is, as the industry expanded, artists as well as businessmen had to figure out a way to reconcile the music with the commerce it had inspired. Many of the new acts emerging at this time took the big-business aspect of the industry for granted (or, in the case of the punks, rejected the industry entirely). More established artists as various as Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan, and Fleetwood Mac found ways to pursue their various visions while remaining mindful of the commercial sprawl that had grown up around them.
pgs. 577-579
By now, Fleetwood Mac had settled in as bona-fide Los Angeles superstars, but the stability of the group was shaken when John and Christine McVie divorced in 1976 and lovers Buckingham and Nicks seperated soon after. But unlike Fleetwood Mac's other dissentions, these rifts yielded unifying art: Rumours, released at the height of the punk/rock fervor, remains one of the landmark pop albums of the decade and one of its most impressive commercial successes, with over sixteen million copies sold.
At a time whent too much of the world had succumbed to the slickness and smugness that punk rock was revolting against, Rumours suggested the finest possibilities of slick rock and roll. From the brooding sensuousness and precise details of Christine McVie on "Don't Stop" to Lindsey Buckingham's exuberant wail on "Go Your Own Way", this was middle-of-the-road rock for adult rock fans.
More than anyone, though, it was Buckingham who kept the music interesting. "We are five very different individuals," Christine McVie would tell Rolling Stone in 1982. "Also very strong minded...But this is a good group of musicians." For all that however, it was Buckingham who became the group's chief arbiter, co-producing songs no matter who else was officially producing a session, adding sound effects and emphasizing various details no matter who was singing or had written the song.
A Californian with a fondness for the Clash and a reverence for the Beach Boys, Buckingham aspired toward eccentricity in the Brian Wilson matter : lush, beautiful, almost abstract eccentricity. When the guitars roar and the voices mass on the chorus of "Go Your Own Way", it is Buckingham's tenor that is memorably, intentionally ragged, and when it became time to record the follow-up to Rumours, it was Buckingham who took command of this intimidating task and produced the most original, quirky, and intriguing album any superstar band has ever released : Tusk.
You could say Tusk was a failure because it didn't sell half as many copies as Rumours had ; neither did it yeild as many catchy songs as either Fleetwood Mac or Rumours - this despite the fact that Tusk was a sprawling two-record set. Nonetheless, Tusk, released in 1979 and featuring vocals Buckingham recorded on his hands and knees in the bathroom of his house, is a triumph of eccentricity. The title song featured African Burundi poly-rhythymic drumming and a chorus sung by the entire USC Trojan Marching Band ; another high point is "Not That Funny", and anti-pop song that is little more than Buckingham yelling, "Well it's not that funny is it?", over and over until his vocal chords fray and shred and finally give way. All this, and the other four "very strong-minded" members of th group still found it in their hearts to include a production credit that read, "Produced by Fleetwood Mac (Special Thanks to Lindsey Buckingham).
Tusk was a magnificent response to the huge popularity of the group's previous records : Yes, it was self-indulgent, but this was self-indulgence on a scale so vast it became absorbing to the general listener; self-indulgence became both theme and method of Lindsey Buckingham's confrontation with mass taste. If one of Buckingham's liabilities was his Brian Wilson-ish obsession with banality - no song is ever "about" anything more than feeling sad or feeling happy - he is also far more mature than Brian Wilson ever was in acknowledging the excruciating pain of feeling sad (or, for that paradoxical matter, feeling happy). For a massively popular musician, Buckingham operated like a closeted avant-gardist, layering vocals and sound effects, regularly exceeding the public's limits of sonic ugliness to achieve a dense, revelatory sound.
There is a sense in which Buckingham probably intended Tusk to ruin Fleetwood Mac's commercial stature, to so alienate the band's newfound audience of housewives and teenyboppers that they'd never call out in concert again for "Rhiannon" or "Say You Love Me". Buckingham made no secret about wanting to make solo records, and a bemused Mick Fleetwood recalled that Buckingham constantly worried that the band's popularity would hem him in : "I think he was seeing this big shadow over him, like he thought Fleetwood Mac was going to potenially stop him ... Lindsey was saying 'I don't know how to ask you or John this, but what if I want to play drums or do something on my own?' I had to say 'Well if it sounds good, who gives a shit?'. It doesn't say much for this situation if after fifteen years it can't take care of everyone within it."
Buckingham would go on to make solo albums, and one of them, Law And Order in 1981, was even a popular success, eccentricies and all. The rest of the band, feeling just as constrained, would soon embark on their own projects as well. Nicks would become by the most commercially successful, releasing Bella Donna in 1981 to such popular acclaim that is was rumoured that she had tried to buy her way out of her contract with Fleetwood Mac. In 1982, the band would reunite to record Mirage - "Rumours II" as Buckingham wryly (or was that bitterly?) described it. Once again, Fleetwood Mac's audience proved faithful - the album went to the top of the charts and sold a few million copies within the first few weeks of its release.
*********************************************
I haven't typed that much in a LONG time. I love the Tusk part of this. What do you guys think?
PEACE
JOSH
------------------
We are the genitals unto the gods ; they play with us for their pleasure...<br clear=all>
<font size=1>[Edited 2 times, lastly by Josh on July 23, 2000]</font>
*******************************************
pg. 505
Even as rock fragmented, there was nostalgia for the recent past, for the unity that the Beatles had seemed to provide for the rock audience. During the first half of the 1970s, a number of acts came along that tempted pundits to employ the phrase "logical successors to the Beatles" - Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, or name-your-fave-rave. What these acts had in common was that their appeal transcended the rapidly hardening genre classifications - they made hits that were both soft and hard, ballads and rockers, hits that borrowed from different genres (reggae, disco, country) while retaining the pop melodicism that pleased a huge mass audience.
pgs. 508-510
For the next five years, John Lennon dropped out from the music world, releasing no new music, tending to baby Sean, puttering around Manhattan. In this way, Lennon rejected the commercial rat race the rock industry had become in the mid-1970s and made way for other star acts that pursued their own eccentricities, such as, most dramatically, Fleetwood Mac. Fleetwood Mac must be considered the ultimate journeymen, excellent musicians who, through intelligent persistence, became one of the oddest acts to go multiplatinum.
Formed in 1967 as a blues-rock band led by former John Mayall's Bluesbreakers guitarist Peter Green, Fleetwood Mac's two constant members have been its rhythym section : drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie. Both men had been Bluesbreakers, and it was Fleetwood Mac's triumphant debut at the 1967 British Jazz and Blues Festival that secured the fledgling band a record contract. Green, Fleetwood, McVie, and guitarist Jeremy Spenser were instant hits in England, where the band's debut album, Fleetwood Mac, remained in the Top Ten for thirteen months. American acceptance was slow in coming, on their first American tour, for example, they were third-billed to Jethro Tull and Joe Cocker. This resistance is understandable: in England, the blues is a popular genre; in America, the blues is cult music.
The band shifted it's personnel with every album. In 1970, Green left the band, unsettled by a profound spiritual crisis. As he recalled at the time, "I woke up one night, sweating heavily and feeling like I couldn't move... That night I wrote 'Green Manalishi', a song that was written out of fear, really. I think I realized at the time that it was very powerful stuff." "Green Manalishi", with it's dark-toned, riven guitar lines, certainly suggested the rolling emotions Green was experiencing, but the song - an immediate smash in England when it was released a few months after its composition - didn't convey the repulsion Green had begun to feel toward his stardom.
"In May 1970, Peter told me privately that he felt it was wrong that a group of entertainers such as Fleetwood Mac should earn such vast sums of money when, in fact, other people in the world didn't have enough to eat," the band's then-manager Clifford Davis told journalist Sam Sutherland in 1978. "He put to the band the following proposition: That all profits other than running costs earned by the band be given to needy people by way of donating to various trust funds, etc. Fleetwood and McVie did not wish to go along with this line of thought, and although Peter respected their decision, he felt he could no longer be associated with the band merely for his own financial ends."
The result was that Green left the band and subsequently gave away vitually all of his small fortune to various charities. "I thought I had too much money to be happy and normal, and I got sort of panicky, I guess," Green said to Sutherland. "Thousands of pounds is just too much for a working person to handle all of a sudden and I felt I didn't deserve it. I didn't want it anymore." Guilt-ridden and depressed, Green made a brief retirement from the music business but reemerged to record two solo albums featuring hauntinly beautiful - if obscure and rather aimless - guitar compositions.
After numberous other personnel changes, stability of a very quirky sort was achieved in 1974 when guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks (who had recorded a spacey-folkie album called Buckingham/Nicks in 1973) joined the group. This lineup - Buckingham, Nicks, Fleetwood, McVie, and keyboardist-singer Christine McVie - inaugurated Fleetwood Mac's commencement as a pop/rock band, a different entity from the blues group the band had once been. The band gota new producer, Keith Olsen (indeed it was Olsen who had introduced Fleetwood Mac to Buckingham and Nicks), and on 1975's Fleetwood Mac, Olsen brightened and clarified what had been the group's increasingly murky sound. Buoyed by the pop sensibility of Buckingham, anchored by the Fleetwood-McVie rhythym section, given emotional maturity by Christine McVie's warm, grainy alto, and commercialized by Stevie Nick's space cadet/sex pot stage persona, Fleetwood Mac was a slow starter that eventually sold over four million copies, making it one of the bestselling albums in rock history.
pg. 521
And indeed, oblivious to the aesthetic niceties, the major record companies were cultivating their own growth with great energy. By the end of the 1970s, the rock market would be controlled by just six major companies: CBS, Warner Communications, Polygram, RCA, MCA, and Capitol-EMI. By comandeering the marketplace and streamlining the path between artist and comsumer, the industry would be able to reap maximum profits during the boom years 1977 and 1978, during which time the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours sold more than fifteen million copies each.
pg. 575
You might say the most valuble lesson learned by rockers over the course of the 1970s was how to be professional without turning into hacks. That is, as the industry expanded, artists as well as businessmen had to figure out a way to reconcile the music with the commerce it had inspired. Many of the new acts emerging at this time took the big-business aspect of the industry for granted (or, in the case of the punks, rejected the industry entirely). More established artists as various as Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan, and Fleetwood Mac found ways to pursue their various visions while remaining mindful of the commercial sprawl that had grown up around them.
pgs. 577-579
By now, Fleetwood Mac had settled in as bona-fide Los Angeles superstars, but the stability of the group was shaken when John and Christine McVie divorced in 1976 and lovers Buckingham and Nicks seperated soon after. But unlike Fleetwood Mac's other dissentions, these rifts yielded unifying art: Rumours, released at the height of the punk/rock fervor, remains one of the landmark pop albums of the decade and one of its most impressive commercial successes, with over sixteen million copies sold.
At a time whent too much of the world had succumbed to the slickness and smugness that punk rock was revolting against, Rumours suggested the finest possibilities of slick rock and roll. From the brooding sensuousness and precise details of Christine McVie on "Don't Stop" to Lindsey Buckingham's exuberant wail on "Go Your Own Way", this was middle-of-the-road rock for adult rock fans.
More than anyone, though, it was Buckingham who kept the music interesting. "We are five very different individuals," Christine McVie would tell Rolling Stone in 1982. "Also very strong minded...But this is a good group of musicians." For all that however, it was Buckingham who became the group's chief arbiter, co-producing songs no matter who else was officially producing a session, adding sound effects and emphasizing various details no matter who was singing or had written the song.
A Californian with a fondness for the Clash and a reverence for the Beach Boys, Buckingham aspired toward eccentricity in the Brian Wilson matter : lush, beautiful, almost abstract eccentricity. When the guitars roar and the voices mass on the chorus of "Go Your Own Way", it is Buckingham's tenor that is memorably, intentionally ragged, and when it became time to record the follow-up to Rumours, it was Buckingham who took command of this intimidating task and produced the most original, quirky, and intriguing album any superstar band has ever released : Tusk.
You could say Tusk was a failure because it didn't sell half as many copies as Rumours had ; neither did it yeild as many catchy songs as either Fleetwood Mac or Rumours - this despite the fact that Tusk was a sprawling two-record set. Nonetheless, Tusk, released in 1979 and featuring vocals Buckingham recorded on his hands and knees in the bathroom of his house, is a triumph of eccentricity. The title song featured African Burundi poly-rhythymic drumming and a chorus sung by the entire USC Trojan Marching Band ; another high point is "Not That Funny", and anti-pop song that is little more than Buckingham yelling, "Well it's not that funny is it?", over and over until his vocal chords fray and shred and finally give way. All this, and the other four "very strong-minded" members of th group still found it in their hearts to include a production credit that read, "Produced by Fleetwood Mac (Special Thanks to Lindsey Buckingham).
Tusk was a magnificent response to the huge popularity of the group's previous records : Yes, it was self-indulgent, but this was self-indulgence on a scale so vast it became absorbing to the general listener; self-indulgence became both theme and method of Lindsey Buckingham's confrontation with mass taste. If one of Buckingham's liabilities was his Brian Wilson-ish obsession with banality - no song is ever "about" anything more than feeling sad or feeling happy - he is also far more mature than Brian Wilson ever was in acknowledging the excruciating pain of feeling sad (or, for that paradoxical matter, feeling happy). For a massively popular musician, Buckingham operated like a closeted avant-gardist, layering vocals and sound effects, regularly exceeding the public's limits of sonic ugliness to achieve a dense, revelatory sound.
There is a sense in which Buckingham probably intended Tusk to ruin Fleetwood Mac's commercial stature, to so alienate the band's newfound audience of housewives and teenyboppers that they'd never call out in concert again for "Rhiannon" or "Say You Love Me". Buckingham made no secret about wanting to make solo records, and a bemused Mick Fleetwood recalled that Buckingham constantly worried that the band's popularity would hem him in : "I think he was seeing this big shadow over him, like he thought Fleetwood Mac was going to potenially stop him ... Lindsey was saying 'I don't know how to ask you or John this, but what if I want to play drums or do something on my own?' I had to say 'Well if it sounds good, who gives a shit?'. It doesn't say much for this situation if after fifteen years it can't take care of everyone within it."
Buckingham would go on to make solo albums, and one of them, Law And Order in 1981, was even a popular success, eccentricies and all. The rest of the band, feeling just as constrained, would soon embark on their own projects as well. Nicks would become by the most commercially successful, releasing Bella Donna in 1981 to such popular acclaim that is was rumoured that she had tried to buy her way out of her contract with Fleetwood Mac. In 1982, the band would reunite to record Mirage - "Rumours II" as Buckingham wryly (or was that bitterly?) described it. Once again, Fleetwood Mac's audience proved faithful - the album went to the top of the charts and sold a few million copies within the first few weeks of its release.
*********************************************
I haven't typed that much in a LONG time. I love the Tusk part of this. What do you guys think?
PEACE
JOSH
------------------
We are the genitals unto the gods ; they play with us for their pleasure...<br clear=all>
<font size=1>[Edited 2 times, lastly by Josh on July 23, 2000]</font>