[face of glass]

Originally Posted by chiliD

Au contraire! I think that's a cop-out statement...the problem was that Billy & Rick DID fit in...VERY nicely, too...and that's what scared all the Buckinham fans...he WAS replaceable...and they just couldn't handle it.

Even Rick Vito himself said in his Q&A that you can't really replace anyone. This is what he said when he was asked of what he thought about following up Lindsey Buckingham:

I've found that you can't really "live up to" anyone. You can only be yourself, and that's what I tried to do in the Mac.

Maybe Rick and Billy were capable of "replacing" Lindsey on stage (although I'd still rather speak of them being just themselves), after all, with a successful album under their belts Fleetwood Mac could have gone on stage with just about any professional guitar player and they still would have gotten a positive response from the tour. But in studio they couldn't replace Lindsey, after all Behind The Mask was a relative flop in the USA and at that point the public backlash against the members of Fleetwood Mac hadn't yet begun (Stevie's Timespace, released in 1991, still sold in significant numbers, etc.)

Originally Posted by chiliD

So, Rick & Billy get the condecending back-handed compliments..."Oh, they're good players, but they don't fit"...that's crap. They fit, TOO good, actually.

In my opinion they are both professional players with a lot of musical skill. And I agree with SteveMacD who has often said that Rick is the best guitar player Fleetwood Mac has ever had, technically.

But then a band could be made of the finest musicians in the world, and it still may not necessarily work in the best way possible. After all, the players' limitations and quirks may not always fit together. But when they do, it doesn't matter how limited a player is; it's the band chemistry in work that makes a band successful, and I don't just mean financial success here.

After all, even Christine herself admitted in her 1995 AOL chat that Lindsey is in terms of chemistry the most appropriate guitar player for the incarnations of Fleetwood Mac that she's been in.

Originally Posted by chiliD

What backup musicians? Ok, Isaac Assante played the miscellaneous percussion...Stevie brought "the girls"...other than that, it was just Mick, John, Chris, Billy & Rick. The Dance was the one where they first brought the orchestra.

That reminds me of a post that David wrote:

Originally Posted by David

Oddly, neither of them was able to evolve in any noticeable way in a live setting: e.g., compare Rick's playing of The Chain at the Capital Centre in October 1987 with Las Vegas in June 1990, & you'll hear virtually no difference in the riffs, the tempo, the attack or the general tone. This may have been the fault of the band in general, however. I call the 1987 tour the Digital Tour because everything went digital, & that gave a clinical dullness to the instrumentation (Mick's drums had never before sounded so bloodless & Christine's quirky keyboard presence was blunted) & the vocals, particularly the backup women. Speaking of which, there were the backup players. Oy gevalt. That was the year they all trouped out onstage for the duration of the concert -- one of the most unfortunate decisions the band's ever made, as far as I'm concerned. It was the tour that Fleetwood Mac got perilously closer to your worst MOR nightmare than it had ever been before.

A real band to me is a living, breathing organism that changes its arrangements and improvizes and feeds off from it's members constantly. I think of Fleetwood Mac on the Tusk tour as one of the ultimate peaks of this ideology (and add the Mirage tour as a continuation of that, if you will). I agree with David's statement, in that Rick and Billy didn't really evolve in the live setting of the band, even though they toured with it for a relatively long time. So clearly the chemistry that existed between the Rumours line-up was nowhere to be found after Lindsey left. Maybe that's what people mean by saying "Rick and Billy didn't fit in". The TITN tour/BTM line-up just played the songs professionally in a similar way every night and that was that, there was no real interest to see what the band could achieve in a live setting. And that's why there's no real dissimilarity between the TITN/BTM tour line-up and the line-ups for the Dance and SYW tours, in my opinion.