Huffington Post 09/16/2016 10:00 am ET | Updated 22 hours ago
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/..._entertainment
Chats With LOCASH, Mick Fleetwood, And Carl Palmer, Plus Rodney Parker & 50 Peso Reward, Firebug, Francis Cheer, And Huntertones Exclusives
A Conversation with Mick Fleetwood by Mike Ragogna
Mike Ragogna: I want to talk about the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band featuring Rick Vito, who was briefly part of Fleetwood Mac. Because of the amazing, off-the-charts success you had with Fleetwood Mac, a lot of people don’t associate you so much with the blues. When you do these tours as the Mick Fleetwood blues band I imagine it’s going full circle and you’re getting to the heart of what you really love about music.
Mick Fleetwood: No doubt. For me it’s sort of a seamless transition. I’ve never really not done this from time to time. I’m a blues player and Fleetwood Mac was a blues band and we went onto our merry way musically and developed into the band that people know and love, but there are hundreds of thousands that remember what we did, especially in Europe. This is always a pleasure, to go back and regroup. We do certainly focus on the old Fleetwood Mac but it’s also reconnecting more importantly for me. We’re a British band, it’s not that complicated, but you’ve got you’ve got to do it properly or else you fall very far away from the mark. There’s nothing worse than a bad blues band.
MR: [laughs] You’re going all the way back to “Black Magic Woman,” which I believe you were the first to record.
MF: Oh yeah, Peter penned that song with a band in 1968.
MR: When you play these songs are you still discovering things in them?
MF: Interesting question, especially to me. I’m not a super-slick player, but that turns out to be a benefit. I play most of these songs differently every night, which I always say is because I don’t know what I’m doing. Having said that, we do know what we’re doing, but every time it happens for me—there’s an old phrase: The band is as good as the drummer. I’m not back there ****ing it all up, but I am back there somewhat amazingly because of the nature of the way I do and don’t learn and retain information, which is nothing new. I’ve always been like that from childhood. I’m sort of on the edge of imploding, which is sort of a nice thing. If you get a player who is super slick there’s a danger that—yeah it’s all super great, but I know which choice I would make. It has to be a balance, I understand that, where you actually empathize with someone who’s on the edge of really pushing to express themselves. In this formula I’m really able to do that because there is more freedom to stretch and grab moments and change them if you like. When you don’t know what you’re doing, getting yourself out of trouble is what makes people take note. They ask, “What was that?” and you say, “We caught each other and turned it into something else.” That’s the magic that this platform affords. I think that’s the magic that you go after, and I really enjoy that and it really suits me because I’m able to express myself in the moment proportionally more than I am in the band as it is, and rightly so. It’s not hugely different, but it is different. Selfishly, I’m a blues drummer, so I’m out there and I need to do what I’m doing. It’s not more fun, it’s just more freedom.
MR: Within the format I understand how Fleetwood Mac recordings need to be more structured, and playing in the blues again allows you to improvise more and bring in other elements.
MF: Totally well put, in a much more succinct way than I did. For a percussionist I’m sort of speaking for myself, but it actually translates across the board. In Fleetwood Mac you’re playing with a hugely famous outfit all over the world and quite frankly beautifully, unbelievably successful. You’re on stage for three hours and you have a massive production with two hundred people working the show. It’s a very different situation to turning up to a five hundred, nine hundred, maybe twelve hundred people max little theater like on this tour. Of course the geography and the physicality of it is different. With a blues band there’s no fluff at all, meaning there’s no production. We don’t know the lighting guy, we do have our own sound guy, but every night is sort of on the come—you’re rolling the dice a little bit about what’s in the support team. When we come off it’s not about celebrating the same type of show as Fleetwood Mac. The element that applies to this band is, “Did I play well?” Then you have, “Did everyone have a good night?” Then you have “Did everyone in the road crew have a good night?” Was the production as good as we’d have liked it? Then you talk to the sound guy. “What was the sound like out in the front?” because you’re running a highly mechanized, huge studio really in the back of a circus truck. Then you go the audience and think, “How did they like it?” If you come out the other end with Fleetwood Mac you come out with all of those components in line and say, “Yeah, we had a great night playing, but apparently it sounded like **** out front.” The utopian statement is, “When everything’s right with Fleetwood Mac,” and there’s a lot more to be right, “That’s a good night.” With my band it’s really simple, and actually a lot more personal, since about the only thing you have is, “How did we play? Did the audience enjoy it?” It’s simple. Having said that, those components become hugely important and actually go right to the gut of a player, where you go, “The only thing we had to offer was to get on that stage and really, really pull it off.” That’s exciting, because you have to hit your mark.
MR: Within the blues, and especially in the live element, you have the experience of the creativity of setting up with a couple of friends and playing whatever comes up.
MF: There’s no doubt about that. The overview is, when I get going on a Fleetwood Mac gig or when I get going down at a three-hundred seat club, you hope you can get in the zone. Once you’re in the zone as a player, it’s really all the same thing, pretty much. In Fleetwood Mac, yes we have a production, but it’s not like seeing Beyoncé where there’s lights everywhere and bombs going off—with Fleetwood Mac or the Eagles, you feel like there’s some players on stage.
MR: You were nominated for a Grammy for Blue Again!. You’re getting recognition in your field. Where does the reward come from for you? Is it in playing, the creativity, the audience response—what is the blues doing for you?
MF: Selfishly, it’s a platform that is entirely my comfort zone. That’s really a huge, lovely thing for me, that I can go out from time to time and do this and really get to play in a woodshed that is in the backyard of your upbringing. That’s a good feeling. It’s like coming home. It’s not a huge statement, “Oh, I can’t stand playing the music with Fleetwood Mac,” absolutely not, but it is sentimentally a fun thing for me to do. It’s not that we sit there playing Fleetwood Mac songs, because we don’t. We play some of Rick’s stuff and change it up occasionally and just do stuff we like playing. That’s really the essence of it. I’m freer, if I want to get up from the drums and get on the microphone and start telling a story about a song, I’ll just go and do it. You can’t do that in a Fleetwood Mac show, the whole show would fall to pieces.
MR: There’s obviously going to be lots of loyal fans at your shows, but does your demographic also skew young at all?
MF: Good question. I think we’re blessed in Fleetwood Mac where we have a lot of young people going back into the archives as they do with people like Neil Young. We’ve got like thirty albums flying around, I think young, musically inclined, inquisitive guys and girls like that journey. We often get people that are going, “I started listening to you with Stevie and Lindsey and then found out there were albums before that.” We’ve got those elements, I think it’s pretty across the board and we do enjoy quite a young demographic that turns up. If we were doing this in Europe I think it’s fair to say that a lot more of the older generation that were weaned on early Fleetwood Mac, which was more popular in Europe than America, come out and enjoy hearing stuff they heard when they were nineteen years old. It’s almost a more refreshing area to be in over here because there’s a sense of the unknown. Sometimes you’re like, “Is anyone going to turn up at all?” I hope so, that’s why I’m on the phone with you.
MR: What advice do you have for new artists?
MF: I say, find your audience and play to them. There are a lot of people that have totally become privatized and made it all online and so forth. That’s a world I don’t know enough about, but I always end up saying, “If you have both, that’s great,” and if you haven’t got the live component and you’re capable of having a live audience, there is nothing more loyal, nothing more personable than looking someone in the eyeballs. Do you want to communicate with all of your school friends on an iPhone for the next fifty years and never see their face? An element of that is great, it often leads to a holistic, multi-purposed outcome, “Hey, we can arrange to spend the weekend skiing,” but I’m just saying to the young audience, explore the unknown. They come from a different world, but bodies in seats is something that’s going to keep you company, and you’ll be quite grateful for it if you’re interested in forming a career that’s going to make you a living until you push up daisies.
MR: Are you working on an album? What’s the future?
MF: That’s a long answer. Plenty of music. The hope is one way or another Fleetwood Mac is going to get some music out. This band, we’re going out with no album, just the simplest of thoughts: to go out and play. It’s sort of a nice innocent way of approaching it.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne