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Originally Posted by Nicks Fan
My point was that they are playing numerous songs they have played before on many tours so I don't get how that is considered fresh. They are playing the songs very much in the same way they always did. No real different arrangements etc. They didn't in my opinion change up the set enough. Opening up with The Chain yet again??? Dreams in my opinion has been performed the same way for decades and pretty much sounds stale. It should be retired. I also think they should have dropped some of the other standards (World Turning, GDW, SHN etc) for some other songs. Wish You Here, Why, That's Alright , Angel, Think About Me, Brown Eyes, Over and Over would have been great additions. A handful of new songs or covers built around the same core songs is not very adventurous.
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The band's in sort of a pickle at this stage. They are prisoners of their big-budget tours, which have to fill cavernous arenas in order to recoup costs and deliver expected payouts. In terms of your show, you can't move on to a new stage when you have to attract 15,000 customers every night. These are decisions the band makes, a cycle of big money. I have nothing against big money (in fact, I'd rather enjoy it), but I understand that it does lock you in. The way Fleetwood Mac is "set up" ever since its 1997 reunion, it must play big halls and sell tens of thousands of tickets. In order to do that, it must play
Dreams and what-all. A set and a style that are recognizable by the widest number of customers is the locking mechanism. I was thinking about the first time I saw Springsteen, back on the
Darkness on the Edge of Town tour in 1978. So I tracked down some interesting info on
Wikipedia. It was a rather chaotic but refreshing mix of arenas (like the Inglewood Forum, 13,000), auditoriums (like the San Antonio Memorial, 5,000), and theaters (San Jose Performing Arts, 2,500). Springsteen is an excellent example of a superstar whose tours these days can accurately be said to follow no particular historical pattern. Fleetwood Mac, with its body of work from 1967 to the present, could if it wanted to dispense with its own historical patterns and create something really new for every tour, but it chooses not to, and I call it a shame.
I'm talking about more than just a set list, by the way. I'm talking about an entire approach to entertainment. Lindsey's first solo tour was a great example of true newness: He and his band orchestrated or reorchestrated a whole show in an intricately detailed and precise way, solving any number of aesthetic problems along the way (and creating a few others). His guitar "army" had to figure out exactly what to do, when to do it, and how to do it, and everything was as precisely planned as the assembling of a model. Stevie's first solo tour, which I saw in Beverly Hills, was also truly new—the show was inextricably tied to Bella Donna, not to Fleetwood Mac. Imagine if her subsequent tours had displayed the same care and intelligence for the "moment," the new album!
At the other end of the spectrum, Fleetwood Mac this year is doing what? Backdrop videos of galloping horses and breaching whales? Where's the aesthetic intelligence in that? It isn't worth a damn.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nicks Fan
I have seen them 7 times from 2003 tour to the 2014 tour not missing one of those tours. Each of those tours had something I liked. If they simply had to tour this year then they should have changed up the show much more then they did and make it clear that they were going to really change things up for this tour. They could have still played some well known songs and deep cuts with a show that would have had a nice balance between the familiar and the more obscure tunes.
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Hiring two big names would have been a perfect opportunity to create some new traditions and make some waves, but instead the organization opted to go back out on the road with a big, expensive circus and all its old traditions intact. Pauline Kael once said that a "classic" is usually just a stunted perennial.