Quote:
Originally Posted by David
Every time he talks to the press, it's nothing but pop-psychology platitudes and New Age jargon. In that recent TV interview he did with Christine before an audience, some kid would ask him a question all eagerly, and he'd answer with New Age jargon, and you could just see that poor kid's face drooping.
Also, I think it's a self-defeating mistake to expect every arrangement he makes of another band member's song to be great. He obviously wants everything to be great, but that's unreasonable, despite his orchestrational savvy. From time to time, he's going to take a demo from one of the women that we all love, and crap it up with a production misfire. There's actually nothing terribly rotten about that. What band's work doesn't have clinkers? Lindsey's real value as a producer and orchestrator for Christine and Stevie is to refashion those demos into something nobody expected. If you want to bring your demos intact to the public all the time, then you can make yourself an entire career of doing albums exactly like "24 Karat Gold" and "Christine McVie" (1984). Imagine if the Fleetwood Mac catalogue since 1975 looked entirely like that. Pleasant, but ho-hum. You've got to give somebody with the forward-looking vision that nobody else sees the opportunity to fail once in a while.
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Totally agree.
But I think with Stevie's songs, as she's noted many times over the years and which Lindsey himself has copped to in his later years, oftentimes his 'misses' were NOT honest attempts at arrangements that backfired, but rather deliberate mucking up her songs because of his personal feelings to/about her. THAT is unacceptable and unprofessional. For all his New-Agey talk (as another poster put it) about "rising above it" and being "heroic" yada yada, often times he *wasn't* his "higher self" when arranging her songs.
Someone mentioned Carol's book and her description of an (different) event and that prompted me to dig out my old copy and flick through it for the first time in forever. And in one part she's describing Lindsey working on one of Stevie's songs during Tusk (Storms, I think) and how Stevie played it to everyone, and was clearly very proud of it, and Lindsey, in front of everyone, just tore it apart and told her "this part is crap, and that part is crap" and that her melody had to change and he did it in a particularly un-necessarily vicious way that made everyone cringe. His goal seemed to be to humiliate her in front of everyone and show how stupid
she was and how brilliant
he was. At the end, after Stevie was devastated, she quotes him as saying something snarky like "But otherwise it's a really good song Stevie". Now, think what you will about Carol and her motives and whatever else, but her description jibes in many ways with the way he's been described at various times by Stevie, Mick, Christine, Ken and in his own way, Richard. So while he *is* absolutely genius when he wants to be, I totally was reminded why Stevie is reluctant to give him full control over her songs. You need to be able to trust your producer.
And I think nowadays his tendency is not to bring out the best in each of the other two writers' styles but to make them sound like versions of him (at least that's how it sounds to my ears) and it dilutes what makes this band so unique-- three distinct voices.