Quote:
Originally Posted by BigAl84
Ever since the Dance, although song titles have come and gone out of the set, the overall sound/tone and arrangements of the live music have been very similar, in my opinion.
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Yeah, I defy anyone to listen to a recording of
The Chain or
Dreams from 2003, 2009, and 2013, and tell me which is which. We used to be able to do just that listening to a song from 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, and 1982, and could even identify (just based on listening) at which
point in a long tour it was done. (Many of us can easily tell the difference between any number of songs they played on the first leg of the Tusk tour, the middle, European leg, and the final US leg. I don't think people can do that anymore with the past twenty or so years, maybe even stretching back to the 1987 touring band.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by BigAl84
Regarding Stevie - I was personally never a fan of her '81 arrangements of Fleetwood Mac tunes - the synths on Sara etc. Although, that was a different time and it may have sounded more current at the time. I do give her credit for not trying to replicate the FM arrangements verbatim.
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I'd have to agree. I don't consider what Stevie did in 1981 to, say,
Angel or
Gold Dust Woman necessarily superior to what Fleetwood did with the studio tracks. But the direction was the right direction to go in: Get in there and re-envision them, and take big liberties with the familiar.
Angel, for example, from the Nicks touring band in 1981 is virtually an entirely new song. Its tone, its atmosphere, its tempo, its emotional palette are all entirely different from the Mac recording. Same with
Gold Dust Woman. You've got to appreciate the 1981 tour as a primal creative force and a lasting one, because arrangements and other formalist treatment decisions stuck with Stevie and her subsequent solo bands to this day, even despite constantly changing players.
Despite Stevie's successes in 1981, you have to give Lindsey the edge in this realm. His live solo arrangement of
Big Love, which we're so sick of today, so completely displaced his earlier studio version that most people don't even think about the earlier version when they think of the song. You mention
Big Love to people and they're going to think of the solo guitar version. The later one completely superseded the earlier. That treatment also had a huge influence on his successive solo albums, which he talked about plenty of times in interviews: getting back to his guitar "center" and writing an arrangement that swirled around his specialty modified Travis picking. He has dozens of studio songs that are musical mirrors of what he did with
Big Love in 1993. (In fact, some of us may wish he had not been quite so insistent with that style, and had developed some other ideas.)