Uncut (UK) Reflects on FM

[michelej1]

[I guess Uncut is just putting a lot of their older reviews on online, because I've seen stuff that I haven't seen before this week. This one is from 2004]

http://www.uncut.co.uk/music/various...s/reviews/7315

COCAINE HEIGHTS

Various Artists

The most important body of work in mainstream '70s pop/rock is given the redux treatment to remind us why Buckingham and Nicks still matter

The arbiters of the rock canon remain suspicious about Fleetwood Mac-to be specific, the version of Fleetwood Mac rebuilt in 1975 around Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Yes, Rumours was bought by 30 million people, but are the Mac loved for their soap opera of heartbreak, cuckolding, divorce and neurosis rather than for the music they actually made? Were they anything more than the sound of rich coked-up hippies fiddling while punk burned? Here, in the form of remastered and expanded reissues of their three key 1970s albums, is the unassailable case for the defence.

Certainly, Buckingham's ostensibly cheerful "Monday Morning", which begins their eponymous 1975 LP, sounds like a wake-up call, the start of a new life for the group. Yet the song itself is about doubt (echoed by Buckingham's already restless guitar) and by album's end he is mired in the suicidal ideations of "I'm So Afraid". The album itself demonstrates how easily the new Mac were able to transform from a clapped-out blues band into a seamless soft-rock machine, and much of its initial commercial appeal was down to the benignly reassuring songs of the band's Third Way, Christine McVie ("Say You Love Me").

While Buckingham's approach was at this stage still conventional, Stevie Nicks' three contributions sound as if they have come from another planet; certainly not from any "rock" music. Vocally the missing link between Buffy Sainte-Marie and Kristin Hersh, she sings of untouchable witches ("Rhiannon"), as well as the mountains and the sea—"Crystal", with its long organ fade straight out of Wyatt's Rock Bottom, and the chilling "Landslide" find Nicks quietly beginning to reinvent the concept of the female singer-songwriter.

Rumours (1977) streamlined everything into elemental despair. The record is the pop equivalent of Kurosawa's Rashomon—the same tragedy witnessed from three different perspectives. As the individual musicians were pulling apart from each other, they miraculously pulled together as a group. Buckingham's songs are the most obviously passionate and brutal—the guitar thrash which finally consumes "Go Your Own Way" IS punk through and through—but Nicks' songs, sad and reproachful, pierce the heart more deeply. The closing chord of "Dreams" is the saddest of any pop song, and the hymn to cocaine oblivion that is "Gold Dust Woman" is the bleakest end to any '70s album not released by Factory. Note also the undervalued role of Christine McVie as the Voice Of Reason—her seemingly slight "Songbird" is the simple but heartbreaking axis which holds the whole record together. But the reason why readers will have to trade in their old CD copies of Rumours is the restoration of Nicks' "Silver Springs" to its rightful place on the album. Taken off the original vinyl issue for space reasons and released only as the B-side of the "Go Your Own Way" single, this is Stevie's greatest vocal performance—the passion which she has restrained elsewhere now breaks forth. Her devastating screams of "You'll never get away from the sound/Of the woman who loves you" are worth the price of this album in itself.

And then, in 1979, came Tusk. As Simon Reynolds noted in his 1994 article for Melody Maker's "Unknown Pleasures" booklet, this was the exact AOR equivalent of PiL's Metal Box, where a mainstream icon suddenly subverts their art from within the system; a double album, elaborately and unconventionally packaged, produced and entirely overseen—mostly locked away in his home studio—by Buckingham, a man by then aware of punk and post-punk (see panel left), a man desperate to drag his bandmates into the future.

It starts with the false security of McVie's "Over And Over" which, with its pleas of "Don't turn me away/And don't let me down," seems to be a warning not to expect more of the same. And scarcely has it ended than Buckingham storms in with his epileptic "The Ledge", sounding like the Gang Of Four trapped in Sun studios with scratchy guitar, near indecipherable vocals and Kleenex boxes for drums. The remainder of the album is an exercise in tripolarity, with Buckingham, Nicks and McVie all scrambling to state their cases in rotation. Lindsey's songs are by far the most elemental and experimental; hear the proto-Neubauten metal-beating of "What Makes You Think You're The One?" or the disturbing "Not That Funny", on which Buckingham's near-psychotic guitar and vocal screams approach Pere Ubu territory. Hear also, however, a true harmonic heir to Wilson and Rundgren—the gorgeously shimmering chord changes of the suicide note "That's All For Everyone"; the lovely doowop harmonies punctuating "Save Me A Place" and "Walk A Thin Line"; and the collision between Sousa marching band and free jazz/tribal drumming workshop which is the title track—along with "Death Disco", the most avant-garde hit single of 1979.

Stevie provides profundity. Her hymn to her best friend, "Sara", dissolves into a utopia of aqueous love (the single edit rather than the full-length album cut seems to have been retained, though on the second CD of demos and outtakes the version of "Sara" runs to nearly nine minutes). "Storms" is a quietly devastating meditation on loss, "Shadows Of The Moon" another explosion of rage, and "Beautiful Child" a tremulous prayer for the dying.

Even Christine's contributions are elevated out of the ordinary by Lindsey's production work—the slow-burning funk of "Brown Eyes", for instance, or the way in which the backing to "Never Make Me Cry" seems to be submerged in water, Julee Cruise-style. By the time of McVie's closing "Never Forget", Lindsey's ghost has invaded the machine—hear the strange electronic whooshes behind Christine's voice, and Kleenex drums again.

The new editions of Rumours and Tusk each come with a second CD of demos, outtakes and rough cuts of each album's songs. While this material will mostly be of interest to completists, mention must be made of the odd string of half-songs on the second Rumours CD with their thoughts of morbidity—try Nicks' passionate "Planets Of The Universe", wherein she spits out "Don't condescend to me!" or Christine losing it on "Butter Cookie" ("What do you think about death?"). As for the Tusk demos, the highlight is the extended "Sara" with its opening debate (Nicks: "I want to be a STAR!" Buckingham: exasperated sigh. Nicks: "NOT A CLEANING LADY!").

While last year's masterpiece, Say You Will, finally succeeded in squaring Rumours' emotionalism with Tusk's experimentalism, these three extraordinary records prove that experimentation and rawness were not alien to '70s mainstream rock; and it may be their most lasting testimony that, while punk burned itself out, the real radicalism of Buckingham and Nicks' Fleetwood Mac now shines more brightly than ever.

[shackin'up]

I remember reading this back then. Made me glow: a lot of things that I feel about this band were said by a "real" musiccritic. At last.

Thanks for repeating that "glow" Michelle, by posting this..

[aleuzzi]

It's a really well-written review, with some clever analogies in there, too. A couple of possible errors. I don't think Sara was written for Stevie's friend Sara Recor but for herself--or, more precisely, the relationship between her and Mick. Am I right? And the 2004 re-release DOES feature the 6:30 version of the song, as opposed to the 4-minute edit.

And as much as I love the original Silver Springs, the vocal on that studio cut doesn't hold a candle to the amazing job Stevie does it with it on The Dance-- a much superior version overall.

[michelej1]

[Here is the Simon Reynolds piece on Tusk mentioned in Uncut. It's on his blogspot: http://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/20...m-unknown.html]

FLEETWOOD MAC, Tusk
from Unknown Pleasures: Great Lost Albums Rediscovered booklet, free with Melody Maker, 1995
[director's cut version]

by SIMON REYNOLDS

If anyone remembers Fleetwood Mac's Tusk at all, it's as
the surprise flop sequel to 1977's Rumours. A soft-rock masterpiece (gorgeous melodicism charged with the emotional carnage wreaked by the inter-band tangle of break-ups and infidelities), Rumours was also an unprecedented blockbuster, selling a staggering 21 million copies worldwide. In America (where FM were just made for FM radio), the LP was even huger: 31 weeks at Numero Uno in the Billboard Charts (that's two-thirds of a YEAR!) and total sales that, at 14 million, still make it America's second best-selling LP ever. In the USA, Rumours was what happened instead of punk; even in Britain, where FM radio barely existed, it was the album in every suburban hi-fi cabinet, right next to Dark Side Of The Moon.

And so, by the fall of 1979, a tremendous head of anticipation had built up vis-a-vis the long-awaited follow-up. Los Angeles' Mayor Tom Bradley even made October 10th Fleetwood Mac Day to celebrate its release. Two years in the making, Tusk had swallowed up an astronomical, and back then virtually unprecedented, $1 million. Instead of Rumours # 2, though, fans were confronted with a sprawling double album, dense with detail, alternately over-done and oddly incomplete, and seemingly devoid of hits. Record biz insiders dubbed it "Lindsey's folly", a monument to the hubris and Brian-Wilson-complex of de facto producer Lindsey Buckingham (the guy who'd originally turned around the one-time Brit-blues band's ailing fortunes, when he and his folk-rock-maiden lover Stevie Nicks had joined in '74). Sheer post-Rumours momentum resulted in solid sales of 4 million, although whether anybody who rushed out to buy Tusk on its day of release made it through the four sides more than once is a moot point (the number of mint second hand copies in circulation suggests otherwise). A virtual radio black-out completed the sense of non-event.

Tusk ranks as one of the great career-sabotage LP's in pop history, alongside The Clash's Sandinista, ABC's Beauty Stab and Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique; one of those albums by bands apparently on a creative and commercial roll who nonetheless wilfully confound their audience, motivated by artistic frustration, or ****ed-up/****ed-off confusion, or simply because they've succumbed to a kind of collective death-wish.

The album that Tusk most reminds me of, though--as anti-populist refusal of the soft option and the easy money, as cocaine-addled exercise in superstar experimentalism--is Sly and the Family Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On. Musically, there's the same obsessively nuanced production, the same oddly disjointed rhythms; mood-wise, the same consumer-unfriendly aura of uncertainty (offputting to punters who felt they'd propelled their heroes up into the dizzy heights, and that the least they could do is sound like they were having fun). Hell, even the same two year gap between megahit (Stand, in Sly's case) and its down-tempo sequel. Tusk is soft-rock's Riot, a band's trademark sound fractured by the same forces of out-of-control fame and fortune that sent Sly spiralling off into paranoia and addiction; the document of a band half-defeated by, half-struggling against the soul-destroying poisons of luxury, sycophancy and party-powders. It's white So-Cal suburban blues.

You only have to look at the record to get a pungent whiff of not-rightness. Something's askew, from the oblique cover (an expanse of dun and beige textures, with a B/W snap of a dog savaging someone's ankle), to the even then terribly dated '70s prog packaging (inner sleeves within inner sleeves, trompe l'oeil, pseudo-surreal photos of the band) to the obtuse, inscrutable title (the perennial jester Mick Fleetwood's l'il joke, 'tusk' being his personal slang for the male sex organ). The not-right aura was positively trumpeted by the title-track single that trailed the LP, a daft little ditty whose mock-tribal rhythms, peculiar 'found sounds' in the back of the mix that sound like a restive mob, and pompous, punctilious horns (courtesy of the University of Southern California Trojan Marching Band, recorded live at Dodger Stadium) now strangely make me think of Faust at their silliest ("The Sad Skinhead", maybe). A 'novelty' hit, and doubtless by dint only of the blind-loyalty of the fans, "Tusk" sounded, to this 16 year old PiL-head, exactly like the hippy dinosaur drivel I'd read punk had set out to destroy. Mind you, I'd probably have felt the same about Faust, back then.



So I never actually heard Tusk the album at the time; but a few months later I astonished myself by tumbling head-over-heels for "Sara", the Stevie Nicks song that provided Tusk's one bona fide hit (in the USA, anyway). Gushing out of the radio in, I guess, early 1980, the single's gold-dust rush of sound was the perfect aural analogue of the song's central, arresting image: "drowning/in the sea of love/where everyone would love to drown". Unaware of the metaphor's ancient history--which goes back through Romanticism's wombadelic dreams of "the sea of seas", through Zen, perhaps all the way to primordial memories of when life emerged from the briny deep--I was hooked by that line, and the oozy, swoony way Stevie sung it. I'd felt that oceanic impulse, the urge to merge, to be subsumed in the plenitude of "us" rather than stranded within the paucity of "me". Drowning in the sea of love--yeah, I could go for that.

Of course, it never occurred to me to buy the single; hard-earned egg-stall money was reserved for 'relevant' releases, e.g. Gang of Four's second LP Solid
Gold (whose dessicated drudgery I now wouldn't submit myself to if you paid me).Only when time enough had elapsed for the punk-indoctrination to fade, and I
could actually listen to forbidden fruit (e.g. Led Zeppelin), did I actually buy Tusk, along with pretty much everything else Stevie had breathed on. I'd gotten this mad notion that Nicks' lachrymal, lump-in-throat (headful-of-snow?) voice was a precedent for the clotted, inconsolable-ness of Kristin Hersh.

Those who supervise admission to the Canon of Rock do not take Ms Nicks seriously, to put it mildly: "mooncalf", "space cadet", "hippy-chick" are the sort of pejorative hurled her way. And it's sort of understandable: how seriously can you take someone who named her publishing company Welsh Witch Music? Who--for her last interview with a UK rockmag--had her personal affects transported, at her own expense, to the photographer's studio, where her boudoir was
painstakenly recreated? In mitigation, I might propose her as the American Kate Bush (the same fascination for mythopoeic fancy, Celtic lore and old Albion). Actually, I'd rather up the stakes and make the case for Stevie as a pre-punk Liz Fraser, blessed with a voice so language-liquidising, so milk-and-honeyed, it's almost edible, definitely pre-Oedipal. Not only does Tusk contains two of Nicks' greatest songs--"Sara" and "Beautiful Child"--it also catches the Voice at its most perfect blend of husky and luscious, poised midway on the long dying arc from the nymph of "Dreams" (1977) to the rock survivor of the '80s/'90s, when age and abuse had worn her pipes down to a Marianne Faithfull croak.

A word of warning: the CD of Tusk contains a sacrilegiously truncated edit of "Sara". Avoid this travesty and hunt down the vinyl dubble, for the full
six-and-a-half minute glory. Siphoning sheer nectar from her throat, Stevie is cradled in Buckingham's shimmerscape production--cascades of scintillating acoustic guitars, susurrating plumes of angel-breath harmonies, drums that seem to billow in out and of the mix (I imagine a totally wired Buckingham, hunched over the mixing desk, Lee Perry with a Cali perm and chest hair poking out his open shirt). At the second verse, there's a key change, the rhythm shifts to an uncanny urgency, it's like we've passed through the looking-glass; Stevie's singing becomes modal as she falls into reverie. The lyrics are elliptical, but charged with dream-time vividness: "I think I had met my match/he was singing/and undoing/the laces". The chorus is more affirmative, less otherwordly, then the song plunges back again through veils of gossamer haze into the mystic-zone; so liquefacient and iridescent is Stevie's voice, as she sings "the starling flew for days", it seems to chime and twinkle. Then the chorus--just a little too uplifting--and the song cruises off into a glorious slow-fade. I've never been able to figure out what "Sara" is about: is it a love-song to a woman, or a strange account of some kind of emotional menage-a-trois, or just a mystical hymn to Love itself, its oceanic powers to dissolve boundaries? Actually, I don't really want to know.

Elsewhere on Tusk, Stevie's in her Billie-Holiday-of-FM-radio mode. The tale of a ships-passing-in-the-night tryst with an old flame, of consummated lust and unrequited love, "Beautiful Child" is exquisitely written, from the tentative, aching, dagger-in-your-heart melody to lines like "your eyes say 'yes'/but you don't say 'yes'", and it's framed in another bejewelled Buckingham arrangement. The final stretch never fails to crush the breath out of me: a roundelay of double-tracked Stevie, plus backing harmonies, with all the voices repeating the lyrics from the last verse in counterpoint. The effect is like the heart is literally broken, a clockwork device gone out of synch, or like the lover's inner monologue is in 'random shuffle mode': self-confounding thoughts tread on each other's tails, clash and overlap, furrowing out a locked-groove of unresolvable anguish. All this is emphasised by the fatalistic trudge of the rhythm section as the song fades (yet paradoxically mounts in intensity)--like leaden steps that take you further and further into exile-from-paradise.

"Storms", the third and last Nicks gem, is also on the angel-with-a-broken-wing tip. Drizzled in honeyed guitar, Stevie casts herself as an elemental wild-child: "never have I been a calm blue sea/I have always been a storm". "Angel" plays on the persona she established with "Rhiannon (Will You Ever Win)", the Celtic witch who "rules her life like a bird in flight", the proto-feminist sprite forever eluding male grasp. "Sisters Of The Moon" harps on the Woman-as-Mystery shtick too, but the stompin' stodge-rock brings to mind unwelcome images of Stevie whirling her scarves around onstage, and when she belts, there's a glottal wobble that reminds you why so many people regard her as kin to Kim Carnes et al, as opposed to unacknowledged precursor to Hersh, Fraser, Merchant and Archer (Tasmin, that is).


And what of Fleetwood Mac's other two singer/songwriters, Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham? (It's ironic that the band are named after the rhythm section, although Mick & John's supple, poised grooves--schooled in the British blues-boom--are vital to this music's sway, the way it breathes).


I've never cared much for Christine McVie's air-freshener tones. Greil Marcus hailed her as "the premier white female singer of the ['70s]" and even "rock's answer to Lorelei" (the siren of Germanic legend whose dulcet tones lured Rhine boatmen to shipwreck). But for me, her clarity of expression wholly lacks Stevie's grain-of-the-voice viscosity. (It seems appropriate that before marrying McVie she was Christine Perfect). Still, she has sung some of FM's (the band and the medium) prettiest songs, and on Tusk she has one stone killa in the baleful "Brown Eyes", a song trembling with the tentativeness of someone on the edge of falling in love but who's been burned too many times before. Elsewhere, McVie whips up her usual meringue of diabetic harmonies for songs like "Honey Hi".


As for Lindsey--eight songs and total hegemony over the mixing-desk make Tusk his album, really. The production is credited to "Fleetwood Mac (special thanks from the band to Lindsey Buckingham": is that a hint of sarcasm, or just Buckingham insisting on pre-eminence? Cramming every cranny of the soundscape with detail, fanatically tweaking the minutiae, overdubbing 'til the cows come home, Buckingham earns his special mention, and then some. In his guide to albums of the '70's, Dean of American rock-crits Robert Christgau notes the surreptitious avant-gardism at work here: the way the "passionate dissociation of the mix" means the music works "like reggae, or Eno--not only don't Lindsay Buckingham's swelling edges and dynamic separations get in the way of the music, they're inextricable from the music, or maybe they are the music."


All this is particularly evident in the placing and dislocation of the drums and in the intricate lattice-work of the harmonies. This So-Cal hallmark, from the Beach Boys to the Eagles, is on Tusk taken to an almost pathological pitch of complexity: on "The Ledge", peculiar acoustics turn the harmonies into a vocal labyrinth, while the backing voices on "That's All For Everyone" overlap, intertwine and converge in 3D, like the celestial geometry of close-formation jet aerobatics. Buckingham is also a bit of a bitchin' guitar player: dig his hornet-in-your-earhole fuzz solo on "Not That Funny" (Faust again, this time "It's A Bit Of A Pain"), or the gently weeping C&W filigree that adorns "What Makes You Think You're The One" (where Buckingham's saccharine sneer is reverbed like John Lennon on "Instant Karma").

Buckingham's songs--which I don't respond to as emotional statements so much as peculiar sonic objects--range from lurching ballads encased in
wedding-cake arrangements to an odd strain of hillybilly boogie, like the 1.58 minute canter of "That's Enough For Me" (imagine Carl Perkins filtered through Boston's "More Than A Feeling").


Back in '79, Greil Marcus was one of the few critics to defend Tusk, decrying its disappointed reception as sure and sad proof of "the growing conservatism of the rock'n'roll mainstream", and declaring that "the stand Fleetwood Mac has taken with Tusk is as brave as that Bob Dylan took with John Wesley Harding --braver, maybe, because Fleetwood Mac cannot rely on Dylan's kind of charisma, or on the kind of loyalty he commands.... With its insistence on perceptions snatched out of a blur, drawing on (but never imitating) Jamaican dub and ancient Appalachian ballads, Fleetwood Mac is subverting the music from the inside out, very much like one of John Le Carre's moles--who planted in the heart of the establishment, does not begin his secret campaign of sabotage and betrayal until everyone has gotten used to him, and takes him for granted".

Perhaps this is to attribute too much to a record only half of which really withstands close scrutiny. Still, Marcus' inclusion of the Tusk piece in In The Fascist Bathroom [aka Ranters and Crowdpleasers], his anthology of punk-related writings, is a striking feat of recontextualisation. Only 30 pages later comes a treatise on PiL's Metal Box. There are unlikely parallels between Tusk and Box: both were long-awaited double albums released late in '79, with bizarre packaging; both were essays in anti-rockism shaped by the input of dub; both were attempts (probably semi-conscious in Fleetwood Mac's case) to sidestep an audience's expectations and tamper with one's own mythology. But Marcus' juxtaposition appeals to me especially, because Metal Box was the absolute soundtrack of my angst-wracked adolescence, while "Sara", an 'aberration' in my punk-conditioned taste, was a brief glimpse of something ("the sea of love") beyond the prison-cell of misery-me.

[aleuzzi]

Interesting blog ^^^

I don't agree with all of it, but the writer frames Tusk in an interesting way and makes a case for its importance in musicological discussions of pop music. Thanks for posting it Michelle.