[SteveMacD]

Originally Posted by David

There’s an enormous musical difference between Lindsey’s band setup in 1993 and the direction Fleetwood Mac went in the 1980s and 1990s up to today. It boils down to a lot more than just an onstage head count. The Buckingham band was a precisely orchestrated approach with an experimental spirit, which you can clearly hear live in the interplay of acoustic and electric guitars, percussion, and vocal lines in all those sonically immaculate conceptions on Out of the Cradle: “All My Sorrows,” “Soul Drifter,” “You Do or You Don’t,” “Surrender the Rain,” and others. That show was designed to create a cinema soundtrack, almost, with a massive canvas of emotional moods.

What Fleetwood Mac did was much more formulaic and less thought out: to double, triple, and quadruple the instrumental and vocal onslaught merely to project everything outward in the cavernous halls of a sports arena or outdoor amphitheater. It was an IMAX event, not an experiment in orchestration. Maybe some of the songs benefitted, like “Go Your Own Way” (because the three member singers had got so sloppy over the years). But not everything did. Several songs lost their subtlety and their groove, no thanks to all that hardware backstage in the form of keyboard modules in Dan Garfield’s arsenal. In 1987, the band pared things down again for a few blues songs, as you know, and those blues songs were lovely, even though the arena setting was all wrong. Buckingham’s first live experiment in 1993 was an elegant, inspired melding of setting and production; the size of those “intimate” venues fit the scope of the show. As for LB’s stated desire to bring along another guitarist or two on tour with Fleetwood Mac in 1987, we’ll never really know exactly what he meant, will we? I think he had something a little more interesting in mind besides just filling sound holes and going 11 on the amps. I think he even said he wanted a second guitarist onstage so that he could try different things he had never had the opportunity to try before.

Point being that Lindsey didn’t have an aversion to adding auxiliary musicians, even in 1987. It wasn’t just coming from Stevie.

With all of the different sonic layers on TITN, it’s hard to imagine songs like Little Lies or Isn’t It Midnight working without an extra keyboardist and a percussionist.