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Old 03-09-2018, 04:59 PM
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Career Overview: Fleetwood Mac

Originally formed in 1967 in London, the original lineup of Fleetwood Mac only included two of its present members, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood. Though the first incarnation garnered success in Europe, it was only after the addition of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham in 1974, followed by their self-titled album in 1975, that the band rose to mainstream popularity.
The album “Fleetwood Mac,” known among fans as “The White Album,” includes two of Stevie Nicks’ songs that eventually came to represent the band’s era, one characterized by uncertainty and change as the band relocated from England to California and began to amass commercial success. In “Landslide,” written while Nicks admired the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, stripped-back acoustic guitar backs Nicks’ plaintive questioning: “What is love? / Can the child within my heart rise above? Can I sail through the changing ocean tides? / Can I handle the seasons of my life?” The song is contemplative, but in signature Stevie Nicks style, it equivocates—this time, between clinging to the past (“Well, I’ve been afraid of changing”) and trying to embrace change (“I’m getting older, too”).

“Rhiannon,” the second popular track from the album, is “about an old Welsh witch,” as Nicks famously prefaces the song in its music video. Based loosely on the story of a Welsh goddess, “Rhiannon” channels Nicks’ well-known obsession with the occult—but more generally, the song is about a woman who can’t be controlled, a “woman taken by the wind.” As guitars ascend on a minor scale, then descend again, there’s a constant, sonic swell and deflation, a rising and falling energy. In live versions of the song, Nicks delivered high-powered, knockout vocal performances, almost too passionate for comfort. “Her Rhiannon in those days was like an exorcism,” Mick Fleetwood said in a VH1 documentary.

As band members continued to flirt, fight, and fall in love, tensions within the group rose more than ever. By 1977, two couples—John and Christine McVie, as well as Buckingham and Nicks—had separated, and even Fleetwood was in the process of divorcing his wife. Coupled with this turmoil, there was a particular pressure to produce a stellar follow-up to the “White Album,” which drove members of the band to abuse drugs and alcohol.

But out of all this anxiety came the band’s most famous album to date: “Rumours,” released in 1977, stayed at the top of the Billboard Hot 200 for 31 weeks and went on to win a Grammy for Album of the Year in 1978. Its stand-out tracks provided a voyeuristic view of the interpersonal drama unfolding backstage. From Buckingham and Nicks’ earlier career as a duo, “I Don’t Wanna Know” proves that ignorance is bliss, a sarcastic end to a torrid affair: “I don’t wanna stand ‘tween you and love, honey, / I just want you to feel fine.” The love affair between Buckingham and Nicks served as the source material for the iconic songs on “Rumours.” “Go Your Own Way” was Lindsey Buckingham’s angsty, drum-heavy account of his quickly devolving relationship with Nicks, who wrote “Dreams,” her own, ethereal version of events in ten minutes with only a few chords. The tracks diverge tonally, but chart the same frustration. “If I could / Baby, I’d give you my world, / How can I / When you won’t take it from me?” Buckingham complains, while Nicks offers self-reflection and redemption, singing, “When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.” Redemption was a recurring theme for Nicks, who struggled with addiction, first to cocaine, and then to Klonopin. In “Gold Dust Woman,” penned and sung by Nicks, she warns herself of the tragic downfall that befalls a “pale shadow of a woman”: “Take your silver spoon, dig your grave.”

There’s not much optimism to be found on “Rumours,” with the exception of Christine McVie’s “Don’t Stop,” the most cheerful breakup song in music history. “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow, / Don't stop, it’ll soon be here,” Buckingham and McVie sing in the chorus. “It’ll be here better than before / Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.” Its message was so compelling that President Bill Clinton used it as the theme of his 1992 presidential campaign, even convincing the then-disbanded members to reunite for a performance.

The discography of Fleetwood Mac, a prolific band, long extends beyond “Rumours.” It includes “Tusk,” “Mirage,” and “Tango in the Night,” which feature quintessential hits like “Gypsy,” “Little Lies,” and “Everywhere.” Band members pursued solo projects outside of Fleetwood Mac, too—namely, Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen” on her album, “Bella Donna.” Yet something about the 1977 album resonates above the rest. Despite its release dating back 40-ish years, “Rumours” manages to sound new with every listen, its lyricism idiosyncratic enough to eschew cliché, yet general and humanly true enough to be universal. It’s a voyeuristic look at the heart of Fleetwood Mac, the story of their numerous entanglements: a fortuitous and complicated meeting of musical styles and love stories. It’s the music, which is simple and somehow always fresh, but it’s also their glamorous ’70s California style, their history of break-ups and make-ups, the melodrama and the forces that kept them together. As they sing in “The Chain”—symbolically, the only song that credits all five members—“I can still hear you saying, / You would never break the chain.”


http://www.thecrimson.com/article/20...fleetwood-mac/





'Rumours': The Greatest Breakup(s) Album

It’s the kind of knowledge more commonly associated with stalkers, but all longtime fans of Taylor Swift can rattle off a major segment of her “long list of ex-lovers,” including not only A-listers like John Mayer and Harry Styles, but also her high school flings. Even casual fans (and haters) might admit some voyeuristic interest in who inspired the cutting “Picture to Burn” or optimistic “Begin Again,” and Swift undoubtedly knows it. Why else leave hints in the liner notes? Most songwriters are less quick to publicly hint at the real-life inspiration for their work. But, as any acolyte of “Lemonade” or “4:44” knows, a touch of authenticity can make every production decision feel a bit more meaningful.
Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” celebrated the 40th anniversary of its Grammy win for Album of the Year last month. It did not win for any grand social statement—which the Grammys tend to ignore—or for shattering musical barriers, though little innovations like drumming on an office chair contributed to its impeccable pop-rock sound. It won for having 11 brilliant songs—some wistful, some buoyant, some haunting, and all seemingly directed at bandmates.

“Rumours,” was forged in the ugly aftermath of breakups and divorces involving all five of its members, all in the year directly preceding “Rumours”’s release, 1976. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, the guitar-and-vocals duo who had catapulted Fleetwood Mac to the heights of commercial success when they joined the band two years earlier, saw their relationship unravel. So did John and Christine McVie, the bassist and keyboard player respectively. So too did drummer Mick Fleetwood and his wife. The band channeled their personal pain into making some of the best, and most devastating music of their career. “Rumours” rightfully came to be considered an iconic breakup(s) album.

The legacy of “Rumours” is, in many ways, complicated to evaluate. It sometimes stands for the entirety of Fleetwood Mac’s “golden era” output (from their 1975 self-titled album to 1987’s “Tango in the Night”), which is a shame. All of those albums are classics to varying degrees, but the power and success of “Rumours” acts as a sort of black hole into which Fleetwood Mac discussions vanish. This reductionism is at least partly due to gender. Women comprise two of its three primary songwriters (Nicks and Christine McVie), making Fleetwood Mac a relatively feminine outlier in the classic-rock canon. Critics tend to minimize and simplify the female artists in that canon. Take, for example, Joni Mitchell, who had an incredible string of highly acclaimed albums in the early ’70s, but is mostly remembered only for her magnum opus “Blue.”

This trend persists 40 years later. Given her importance to the band, it is perpetually shocking to see how little space Stevie Nicks gets on “Rumours.” With only two solo lead songs (“Dreams” and “Gold Dust Woman”) and two more where she shares the microphone (“The Chain” and “I Don’t Want to Know”), she has the shortest spotlight time of Fleetwood Mac’s vocalist trio. Her impassioned and iconic “Silver Springs” was cut from the album because of its initial runtime and relegated to the B-side of “Go Your Own Way.” Contemporary critical analysis of Stevie Nicks is in retrospect stunningly problematic, with more space dedicated to her appearance than her music. One piece in the early ’80s by famed critic Lester Bangs was simply titled “Stevie Nicks: Lilith or Bimbo?”

In spite of this unfair treatment, Nicks leaves behind a legacy greater than those of her highly talented and interesting bandmates. On “Rumours,” she further develops the mysticism of earlier Fleetwood Mac songs like “Rhiannon.” Her lyrics on the closing “Gold Dust Woman,” complemented by the song’s captivating instrumentation, are more haunting and evocative than anything Fleetwood Mac had done previously. The mesmerizing two-chord simplicity of “Dreams,” the band’s only number-one single, has a similar effect. On Nicks’s third songwriting contribution, the country-inflected “I Don’t Want to Know,” she and Buckingham turn mutual bitterness into close-harmony fireworks. Often overlooked, it’s a career vocal highlight for both, which is especially clear in the vulnerability of the second verse: “You got me rocking and a-reeling / Hanging on to you.” All three of these songs poignantly turn her struggles with relationships, identity, and substance abuse into near-mythology. Nicks essentially created the image of the ethereal superstar. Artists like Lorde, Lana Del Rey, and even Madonna have all borrowed heavily from her mold to express themselves in similarly mystical ways.

Of course, the rest of the band pulls their weight, too. 1977 caught Nicks, Buckingham, and Christine McVie at their respective peaks. From the glimmering acoustic masterpiece “Never Going Back Again” to the barn-burning hit “Go Your Own Way,” Buckingham’s contributions amaze, though his chair-drumming adventurousness would peak with 1979’s “Tusk.” Meanwhile, McVie found some hope amid the despair: The album’s one unambiguously optimistic love song, “You Make Loving Fun,” alternates between grooving funk and soaring pop. But the irresistible Clinton campaign anthem “Don’t Stop” and heartrending mid-album breather “Songbird” conceal anxiety (“I know you don’t believe that it’s true / I never meant any harm to you”) and longing (“And I wish you all the love in the world / But most of all, I wish it from myself”) under their deceptively cheery surfaces.

And then, there’s “The Chain.” Tying together multiple song-fragments and crediting every member, the band’s signature song starts the second side with some of the richest vocal harmonies ever committed to record—and only builds from there. The chorus layers melodies from Buckingham, Nicks, and McVie over each other, creating a fitting echo: “I can still hear you saying (still hear you saying) you would never break the chain / (Never break the chain)” as John McVie’s bass and Mick Fleetwood’s drums crescendo, driving home this expression of betrayal and disappointment. One breakdown and bass-driven rebuild later, the vocalists sing with increasing desperation, “Chains keep us together.” We don’t need to fully understand this lyric. We know they mean every word.


http://www.thecrimson.com/column/sou...-fleetwoodmac/
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