Analyzing album covers: The Dance
 

So this topic is about commenting an album cover. What you like, what you dislike, what you think about this, how a member looks, etc.

I'm starting with The Dance. It was celebrating a Rumours anniversary so no surprise Mick poses like in the original album, but at the same time I thought (the first time I saw the album) Why isn't he more creative? Again the crystal ball? He already posed like Rumours in his book "My 25 years in Fleetwood Mac".

Stevie looks gorgeous. I think she tried to transmit the "I'm still the hot girl in the band" message, and she really does it. Probably a bit of photoshop but not exceeded like in the IYD cover.

Christine, as in almost the entire Dance show, looks too serious. I don't knw if she was thinking "How did they convince me to come to America?" or she was just living a hard time that year, probably because of his marriage end or something.

What did you think when you saw the album cover?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...500_SS500_.jpg

What did I think?

Who is the new girl and what happened to Christine.

i can never find any of the hidden penguins. :lol:

I have to admit, I'm not a fan of this cover, I don't like the color scheme at all really but it's ok, it's a live album, it doesn't have to be perfect.

I *love* it- but that's because the first Fleetwood Mac song I ever heard was "Silver Springs." I am super sentimental about everything with The Dance because of that. This marks the beginning of my obsession ;)

I was 12 when this came out and would watch MTV play this concert and did not know until I bought the VHS and read the back of it, that Stevie was a woman and Lindsey was a man- totally mixed them up.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_se0zHB8H7o...over+(1-2).jpg


Lindsey looks like he's gonna mess someone up with that crowbar though haha.

I wondered since when had Lindsey taken up golf. And what the hell is going on with his legs.

I have always thought the exact opposite. Look at Stevie on that cover and then look at footage of her from The Dance. They look like two different people almost.

Anyway... I like the cover well enough, but yeah Lindsey should've been doing something else. Maybe if he'd been holding the cane in a different way or perhaps?

Christine McVie has been photoshopped almost to the point of "beyond recognition" on this cover. Don't get me wrong, it looks good, it just doesn't look exactly like Chris.

There is some photoshopping going on with Stevie as well, but not as extreme. Also, thank God for hair extensions. Where were these in the 70's? Both of our FM girls are rocking some serious clip-on hair.....:nod:

:laugh:

I always think "My God, what a mess! That must've been one helluva fight!" :D

Its ok, I guess
John looks the best and the coolest.
Mick, man enough of your balls! :laughs:
Chris, crack a smile please.
Stevie, really must your clothes cover the entire piano?
Lindsey, are you gonna whack somebody with that crowbar? :p

I think their poses are really odd and unnatural for everyone. Lindsey said they were trying to create their own little circle. Most of the press photos they did for the Dance were very strange. Kooky. But I appreciated the humor, I guess. If you can't revel in the band's quirkiness, then there's nothing left.

As for Christine, I always say some woman tied her up, threw her in a closet and took her place for that photo shoot. Same thing with the Meantime cover. Don't know who that woman was or why she hasn't been arrested. As mentioned above, Stevie was heavily photoshopped too, but she is recognizable as Stevie Nicks. The other woman . . . I don't know who she might be.

Michele

I always thought Lindsey looked like a little person, and that Chris' head looks smooshed sideways. John & Mick the usual. Stevie tho ravishing-WAY too much photo shop, imho, more so than IYD. There's a shot of this room minus the band members and I think that sould have been the cover. An element of each individual.

i LOVE David La Chapelle's pics... they are VERY stylized and unnatural. but they WISELY chose a modern photographer to do their big comeback cover pics!

Oh, I didn't realize that or, if I knew it, I forgot.

Because of the lack of color contrast, it's really hard for me to make out all of the objects in the photo, so If I saw the empty room, I might not be able to pick out anything -- except the piano!

Michele

He's super awesome but his work and the Mac just really didn't seem to mesh-again imo. But that said, I also have always wondered why the heck there aren't more Dance era shots of the band. There is the smallest handful from this time that aren't live shots. You'd think a big "Rumours" re-do would warrent a ton of pics, and that by now a hell of a lot more would have surfaced.

I never bought this album. At the time I was irritated that they performed the same tired setlist and couldn't sound as good as they had in their past, with the exception of Silver Springs. That song was the bomb. This cover is ok but still annoyed me because the walls are so white that they fade out the room. I have to look closely to see they are in a room with walls and a ceiling. Also that weird white doodling above Stevie's head is very distracting to her face. Is it trying to say some word? Stevie was not this thin in 1997 but I knew she was thinking about 100 years from now when people will view this and think she looked so hot. They'd never know the real numbers on her scale. Christine looks angry and Lindsey looks like he's going to take that golf club and whack a chiff. John and Mick are the only ones who look natural.

It looks like a fallen chandelier, or something, to me.

The thing in Lindsey's hand represents a guitar and I think it is a cane, right?

My fave pic of the Dance era is the Rolling Stone one of Lindsey and Christine with the swords. :thumbsup:

:thumbsup:

There are hidden penguins???

do we think they were really all there together, or were they shot individually and photo collaged together? (I tend to vote the latter....tho Mick and Stevie look like they might have actually been there together)

Agreed - and I love his photos of Stevie from 1994:

http://img168.imageshack.us/img168/3544/stewg5.jpg

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lb...augio1_500.jpg

Photoshop in 1997???? :laugh::laugh:
Christine looks so good, even serious. Her hair, her clothes...
Mick with the ball. Well, for their reunion, for their new tour, remember a part of Rumours and their best moments maybe was a good idea.
Stevie looks fine, but I never liked her hair there...And she's not trying to catch the ball.
Lindsey has a "golf stick", and wants to break something (maybe the piano).
And John is just...John!

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1kdi7SuPk1r8y09f.gif

S'been around for 20 years now... :nod:

True. They were together for the first time in 10 years. You'd think there'd be press pictures of them from every venue. Wish the reunion had happened when camera phones were ubiquitous and at least we'd have fan pictures.

Michele

:lol::lol::lol:

Maybe someone can get Neal Preston on the horn? He and I spoke in 2007 about printing up some photos from The Dance era. He said he "had so much unseen stuff it would make your head spin"... he farted around on the phone with me a few times... seemed keen... then he trailed off more and more until he just wouldnt return my calls or emails. Clearly the man is busy. ;)

I am not sure what you mean by this, but I had Photoshop in 1999 and it was definitely around in 1997. The program saw it's first release (1.0) in 1990.

And retouching photos was around long before that.....it just wasn't done with Photoshop. (Some of the young Ledgies don't know that TVs used to have knobs that you used to change the channel...after you got off the couch and walked all the way over to it.)

:laugh: Thanks much - I needed that laugh right now.

My grandmother still has one of those kind of TVs. I was 11 when I first used it. It took me forever to figure out how to change the channels. :shrug: I thought that my grandmother had hidden the remote to make me get off my lazy butt to change the channels. :lol:

:nod: I always wondered the same thing! He looks like he's lost on a mini-golf course looking for the restroom... For a guy who apparently was annoyed that he wasn't on the cover of Rumours (and other albums?), I was surprised that he was OK with this particular pose. I wonder if the photog wanted to insist on no instruments, and Lindsey had a hard time chilling without a guitar in his hands, so they handed him that club??
-About the title itself, is there a story to the album/tour name 'The Dance'? I know in a few rehearsal videos, LB and SN are kind of dancing around together, and it's been mentioned in (a few??) of their songs, like SYW : it always seems to heal the wounds if I can get you to dance... IS that a LB/SN thing?

Sorry people, I meant that I could not believe that photoshop was used as today. I say, even in the 90s, the pictures were maybe more "natural", without a little help from some software.
Regards!

I agree very modern great choice
-i would think Lindsey was gonna hit Stevie with that cane lol

I always wondered if Lindsey's odd, cross-legged pose was done to somewhat obscure the chubbiness that he had at the time. An unnatural pose is a trick that photographers sometimes use for that purpose.

There is something strange about the angle on Stevie's face in this photo; the picture doesn't really look that much like her. As someone else mentioned, I don't think her weight loss was nearly as significant as publicized. But her face was certainly thinner and she looked beautiful in the concert video.

My overall reaction to the cover photo at the time was...ho hum. The cover didn't reflect the vitality of the music contained within.

The 2nd photo is a classic. Stevie standing on a hookah pipe. But in the first pic she looks like she was dropped in a pile of old junk and her face is so pale, she looks dead.

What is on that record that is so exciting other than Silver Springs and Landslide? This is for you, daddy.

To me there are two kinds of FM fans. Before The Dance and AD(after The Dance). So many of you became fans after The Dance. But to me that was a crap live recording. Not worth ever listening to. Besides I had already had the live video of the show they played on MTV at that time. What did I need the CD for?

Here's an excerpt from an article where they discuss it:

So why is this CD called The Dance. What's The Dance?
Stevie: Go ahead Lindsey, it's Matisse.
Lindsey: Ya, we um, were attracted to a painting by Matisse called The Dance that's just five people holding hands dancing in a circle. Uh, it's a very well known painting and ah, there was a history to it that was very much analogous to our situation. And it just had, the feeling of the painting very much reflected how we were feeling when we first got into rehearsal. And so we tried to paraphrase - if you will -that painting in a photograph where we were sort of loosely in a circle of our own...atop the rubble of (laughs) 20 years of history, I'd say.

Source: Stevie and Lindsey Interview on WZLX Radio

If you're curious, you can see the painting here.

Are you excluding the Peter Green era fans like chiliD? ;)

What's so exciting? Well, The Chain for starters... it's still my favourite live version of that song. Bleed to Love Her, Silver Springs, Big Love and Landslide were all fantastic as well. I kinda consider those versions the "definitive" versions of the songs :shrug:

Anyway you're right, I had never been a "fan" before The Dance, but when the album came out, I was just coming to that time in my life where music really started speaking to me. That said, the more I started listening to them I realized that I already recognized half of the Buckingham/Nicks era catalog from my childhood anyway. ;)

So, who's that curly guy between Christine and Stevie on the front cover of 'Mirage'?

The studio janitor.:p