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  #46  
Old 06-25-2008, 01:56 PM
michelej1 michelej1 is offline
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[I was looking for whether Susan was older or younger than Mick, but her obituary made interesting reading on its own, especially the part about their childhood]

London Times, October 2, 1995

HEADLINE: Susan Fleetwood

BODY:
Susan Fleetwood, actress, died of cancer on September 29 aged 51. She was born on September 21, 1944.

WITH her expressive, dark eyes, handsome, mobile face and impeccable vocal delivery, Susan Fleetwood was for more than twenty years a leading figure on the classical English stage. From an early age she displayed such immense maturity that from the outset it was difficult not to think of her in terms of a much older generation of actresses, the Thorndikes and the Ashcrofts. It is astonishing to reflect that her electrifying Regan or her imperious Portia for the Royal Shakespeare Company of the 1960s and 1970s were played when she was still in her twenties. And yet up to thirty years later she was able to replicate girlish self-doubt or ingenue bemusement where they were called for in some of her television roles.

Indeed, her dramatic gifts and physical attributes enabled her to translate effortlessly to the small screen. There, she was properly in her element in the heavier kind of drama, though her performance as Kate Phillips in the BBC1 detective series Chandler & Co, seen as recently as this year, was an immensely successful feature of the channel's more popular output. To her film roles, too, though they were not numerous, she always brought unforgettable quality.

To the public who did not know her, it would have come as a surprise to learn that this achievement was sustained in parallel with a battle against cancer which had lasted for ten years. Among her later roles, her Arkadina in Chekhov's The Seagull for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991, was a triumph of innate accomplishment and sheer courage over the debilitating ravages of the disease.

Susan Maureen Fleetwood was born at St Andrews, the daughter of an RAF officer. Her brother Mick was to become drummer of the band Fleetwood Mac. Since her father chose to keep his children with him while he went on overseas postings, rather than packing them off to boarding school, she had a peripatetic childhood. She spent several years in Egypt in the period before the Suez crisis and then went to Norway where her father had a Nato job. There she had her first taste of drama with the role of Joseph in a school production of the famous Old Testament story.

With a precocious brother and sister, both of whom were interested in the arts in one form or another, she grew up as an articulate child, although the scant formal side of her education left her with reading difficulties that were to haunt her for some years.

When her parents returned to England she chose to help them to renovate the Thames barge they lived in rather than to be sent to school. Broadmindedly, they seem not to have objected. But the local education authority did, and she was tracked down and hauled off to school.

Since she was apparently incapable of passing her 11-plus, the choice had to be a convent school and it was to the influence of a nun there, who perceived what drama could do for this unconventional child, that Susan Fleetwood ever afterwards attributed her embarking on the right career path.

At 16 she won a scholarship to RADA from where, in 1964, she toured the United States, playing Lady Macbeth and Rosalind in As You Like It in Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona. Terry Hands, a contemporary at RADA with whom she was later to live for nine years, played Orlando. When she returned from America she went to Liverpool with a group of actors, which had Hands at the centre of it.

There she became a founder-member of the Everyman Theatre, which had encouragement from Liverpool City Council. It was hard, ill-paid work, but the commitment was unremittingly to serious drama, and this shaped her outlook on what the theatre should be.

This formative experience, which included teaching and performing in local schools, lasted three years. At the end of that period she was offered jobs at both the National and Royal Shakespeare theatres.

She decided to follow Hands to Stratford, and, unlike many young actresses who have to spend an apprenticeship playing soldiers, townsfolk or murderers, soon made her mark. In 1968 her baneful Regan in King Lear electrified audiences. Her Cassandra in John Barton's production of Troilus and Cressida was also an arresting one.

But, though she became well established at the RSC, she began to appreciate the drawbacks of working for the same company, and in 1970 went touring with the Cambridge Theatre Company. With them she did her first Seagull (as Nina), an experience that was to instil into her a love for Chekhov which never left her. She also toured with the Prospect Theatre, as Lady Rodolpha in The Way of the World and as Ophelia.

But, as was bound to happen, the RSC could never be far from the centre of her career and she was back at Stratford by 1972, playing Portia opposite Eric Porter's Shylock, the Woman of Canterbury in Murder in the Cathedral and a Bondwoman in The Island of the Mighty (the production of which so displeased its co-authors John Arden and his wife Margaret D'Arcy that they picketed the Aldwych Theatre and vowed never to write for the stage again).

By now Susan Fleetwood was unassailably established on the classical stage and it was only a question of which roles she would add to her repertoire as the years went on. A notable landmark was her Pegeen Mike in a production of The Playboy of the Western World at the Old Vic in 1975. This was the more remarkable in that she was the only English member of an otherwise all-Irish cast.

During the 1980s she became increasingly involved with films, including Heat and Dust (1982), a version of Ruth Prawer Jabhvala's novel of India, scripted by the writer herself, and White Mischief (1987), an account of the murder of Lord Erroll in Kenya's Happy Valley. But a film which meant a great deal to her was The Sacrifice directed in Sweden in 1985 by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. The director, then in exile, was also by then suffering from cancer (he died shortly afterwards) and a close artistic rapport sprang up between him and his leading lady.

Meanwhile, a television career had burgeoned; besides the popular success of Chandler & Co there was a recent version of Jane Austen's Persuasion and the enigmatic portrayal of the long-suffering Leonora Ashburnham in a fine account of Ford Madox Ford's novel The Good Soldier (1981).

But nothing could weaken her allegiance to the stage. As long as she was able, she continued to engage the major classic roles. A delightful Beatrice in the RSC's Much Ado About Nothing in 1990 was followed by a remarkable account of Chekhov's Madame Arkadina at the Barbican in the following year, which plumbed all the depths of The Seagull's subtleties. Had illness not cut short her career, Susan Fleetwood clearly had much more to give as she entered maturity. Her death removes one of its most gracious personalities from the English stage.

She never married.

[THEY HAD A MEMORIAL SERVICE THE FOLLOWING YEAR]

June 10, 1996

HEADLINE: Miss Susan Fleetwood

BODY:
A celebration for the life and work of Miss Susan Fleetwood, actress, was held yesterday at St James's, Piccadilly. The Rev Donald Reeves officiated.

Mr Gawn Grainger read the lesson. Miss Brenda Blethyn read Her Praise by W.B. Yeats and Mr Brian Cox read Sonnet XVIII by Shakespeare. Mr Michael Coveney gave an address. Mr Mick Fleetwood, brother, Ms Mopsy Heath, Ms Linda Clifford, Mr Luke Jones, Miss Angela Pleasence, Mr Peter Eyre, Mr John Tams and Friends and Mr Michael Gough also took part.
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  #47  
Old 06-27-2008, 02:12 PM
michelej1 michelej1 is offline
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Sharon Little compliments FM here, by saying no one ever thinks they're a pop band. Actually, people only think they're a pop band: a bad, schlocky pop band at that.

Tahoe Daily Tribune
http://www.tahoedailytribune.com/art...388170299/1058

Little stayed true to her philosophy when an investor brought her into a studio. He tried to make her a pop singer but she refused. That’s when she met Scot Sax, with whom she co-wrote the 11 songs on her album “Perfect Time for a Breakdown.”

“He never tried to pin me as a pop star but he got me to appreciate some of the pop stars,” she said. “Like Fleetwood Mac. They’re a pop band. You never think that because they were just great. The Beatles and the Stones, all of those guys, they were pop stars. I grew to like the more poppier stuff.”
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  #48  
Old 06-28-2008, 02:11 PM
michelej1 michelej1 is offline
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Time Magazine,November 29, 1982, U.S. Edition

SECTION: VIDEO; Pg. 97

HEADLINE: Cable's Rock Round the Clock;
Recording stars strut their stuff nonstop on fast-growing MTV

BODY:
They grew up together in the '50s, but television and rock 'n' roll have always been contrary siblings. One soothes, the other threatens. One offers visual Pablum, the other musical grits. Even in the packaged and homogenized forms developed by such entrepreneurs as Dick Clark and Don Kirshner, TV has rarely accommodated its more rambunctious relative. Until now, that is. Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Co.'s MTV (Musical Television) is uniting the rival brethren in amplified harmony.

MTV is FM Stereo with pictures, a 24-hr. cable service that rocks round the clock with contemporary rock 'n' roll. Launched 15 months ago at a cost of more than $ 20 million, MTV reaches 8.1 million subscribers via satellite across the country and, with the methodical expansion of cable, anticipates adding an estimated 7 million more by late 1983. It is building a reputation as well as an audience. At the National Cable Programming Conference in Los Angeles last week, MTV won an ACE award, cable's equivalent of an Emmy, beating out competition like the SignatureM interview series on the now defunct CBS culture cable.

The main ingredients in MTV's programming are "video records" or "videos": current recordings illustrated by 3-or 4-min. videotapes (provided free to MTV by the record companies) in which rockers strut or act out their stuff. These are punctuated every few songs by the patter of veejays (video jocks).MTV also feature some live concerts, a range of promotional graphics that are sometimes wittier than the musical segments surrounding them, and flashes of rock gossip ("Split Enz don't use a conditioner").

The simulated performance clips tend to be dull and repetitive: lip syncs sink clips. But the best videos enhance the mood of a song and expand TV's generally unadventurous visual vocabulary. Nightmarish images from Billy Joel's subconscious accompany his shouts in the song Pressure; Stevie Nicks floats through a moving Magritte painting in Fleetwood Mac's Gypsy.

Nearly all radio disc jockeys are cut from the same cloth: polyester. For the self-conciously hip veejays of MTV, the style is leather and vinyl. Earnest and anodyne, Mark Goodman may spin rebellious new-wave video platters, but no teeny-bopper daughter would be afraid to bring him home to meet Daddy. Nina Blackwood, sultry and sloe-eyed, evokes a Los Angeles chich that contrasts neatly with Martha Quinn's preppie punk.

MTV is guided by Robert Pittman, a 28-year-old Videokind who, in his pin-stripped Brooks Brothers suit, looks as if he would be more at home listening to the Brandenburg Concertos than the Clash. A veteran of rock radio, Pittman is an apostle of "narrowcasting" and "psychographics." He believes in cable's ability to reach a specific audience, in this case, ages twelve to 34, whose members offer a distinct marketing profile. Apparently Madison Avenue is being convinced. Although MTV has yet to break even, so far 100 national advertisers have pushed their products on the service.

Indeed, with record executives singing dirges over the worst slump in many years, MTV is a possible savior. The hoped-for scenario: record companies produce the promos; MTV broadcasts them, providing free advertising for the music; viewers watch a video on MTV, like it and dash out to buy the disc. Maybe next year they'll be buying the cassettes.
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  #49  
Old 06-30-2008, 01:08 PM
michelej1 michelej1 is offline
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[Well, I don't know if his theories will work in music because the measure of success he seems to be using is not really applicable. FM wasn't unsuccessful prior to Rumours and Rumours was anomaly, not only for the group, but for the record industry]

Book analyzes "success" and will discuss Fleetwood Mac in the study.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine...hievers30.html

Next 'it' book sizes up success
Author examines what sets high achievers apart
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Malcolm Gladwell's forthcoming examination of how mega-success is achieved will not be out until November, but judging by the buzz already surrounding it, "Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't" promises to be this winter's "it" book.

Perhaps the most prolific Gladwell-watcher has been blogger Jason Kottke, who has written several anticipatory posts on kottke.org about the book since last fall. "I've learned," he wrote in November, "that the subject of this book is the future of the workplace with subtopics of education and genius."

Well, sort of.

As Kottke noted in May, the book's Amazon page is up, and preorders are being taken. The publisher's description there says that Gladwell takes on the question, "What makes high achievers different?" The answer is that "we pay too much attention to what successful people are like and too little attention to where they are from."

Why did it take Fleetwood Mac so long before achieving superstardom with "Rumours"?

What makes a great soccer player great, rather than merely very good?

What about Bill Gates' "peculiar childhood" set him apart from all the other computer buffs who were around at the dawn of personal computers?

In a short excerpt, Gladwell writes that "I want to convince you that the way we think about success is all wrong."

It is hard to know what, exactly, he means by this, or to know what common thread there may be between Gates and Mick Fleetwood. But some hints can be gleaned from recent works by Gladwell in The New Yorker, and in his recent speeches, video of which can be found on the magazine's Web site, newyorker.com.

In May, Gladwell wrote that scientific discoveries are not necessarily the product of singular genius. He ticked off example after example of discoveries and ideas that occurred at the same time, independently.

"Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus," he wrote. "Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution."

In other words, great ideas are often, as the title of the article put it, "in the air," and true genius often lies with the people -- whether mathematicians or musicians -- who are able to snatch them down at the right time.
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  #50  
Old 06-30-2008, 05:32 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by michelej1 View Post
and that fella from Fleetwood Mac chased his bandmates through the hills with a loaded shotgun.
I don't remember an episode that literally happened like that.

I think the most well known eccenctricity of Fleetwood Mac was the way they used to wear on stage. Stevie commented once: This is weird, is like we are going to different places

Stevie wearing chiffon
Mick with his typical custom (hat, red shoes, wooden balls)
Lindsey with a indian shirt, or a "Miami Vice style" suit (Tusk tour)
etc..
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  #51  
Old 07-04-2008, 01:20 PM
michelej1 michelej1 is offline
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Excerpt From Amarillo.com

http://www.amarillo.com/stories/0704...10686114.shtml

TURNING 50 IS NOT SO NIFTY, by Jon Mark Beilue

Today, I turn ... Today, July 4, I turn ... Today, July 4, Independence Day, 2008, I turn 50. There are hundreds of us in and around the Panhandle experiencing the same thing this year, so I ask all of us from the birth year of '58, and the Class of '76: What happened? How did we get here from there?

I can remember distinctly sitting with my roommates hooked on this new thing called MTV, vowing not to leave the television until we ogled sultry Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac singing "Gypsy" just one more time on these new music videos.

Now I'm watching TV Land and trying to find my reading glasses and a pen to jot down the 800 number as actor Robert Wagner extols the benefits of the Senior Lending Network.
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  #52  
Old 07-06-2008, 12:14 AM
michelej1 michelej1 is offline
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This is from an article about the struggles of the Red Rocks venue, from the Denver Westward, September 16, 1999

Back then, Fey Concerts, headed by longtime Denver promotions impresario Barry Fey, was locked in a duel to the death with MCA, a corporation that had invaded Fey's turf. In 1988, MCA had built Fiddler's Green, an amphitheater that seats approximately 18,000, and allowed Fey to book concerts there for the next two years. But in 1990, MCA locked Fey Concerts out of its building and the fight was on, with MCA execs waving huge wads of cash at any act that would play Fiddler's for them, not Red Rocks (capacity: 9,000) for Fey. "I remember we offered Fleetwood Mac $150,000 to play two nights at Red Rocks, and Fiddler's countered with $250,000 for one night there," Fey says. "Because I knew them, they went with us, but I had to pay $200,000 for the two nights. Both shows sold out, but our profit, which should have been about $30,000, was only $6,300. And that was typical. We were winning most of the battles, but there was bloodletting on both sides."
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  #53  
Old 07-08-2008, 05:17 PM
michelej1 michelej1 is offline
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[Hey, I like the way Car Audio tests this automobile sound system!]

http://www.caraudiomag.com/features/...ers/index.html

Driver's seat: CenterStage didn't excel as anticipated from the driver's seat. My first track was from Fleetwood Mac's "Gypsy," I found the midrange to be a bit harsh at a fair volume but the highs stayed near the dash. Stevie Nick's voice was very forward but vague to the point that it was almost unfocused. I really didn't feel like she was singing directly in front of me and I couldn't get a sense of a full stage mainly due to the fact that I could localize the speakers from left to right. Gloria Estefan's "Remember Me With Love" was better in the vocal section and not as harsh, but once again the presence wasn't there for me. Some of the speakers seemed overpowering and didn't set a good stage; but the instruments had some good tones and I did like listening to "Indian Summer" by The Rippingtons. A lot of information came out of the 2" speakers, which managed to keep up with the music.

Passenger's seat: Sitting on the passenger's side I had a new perspective about this system. The stage was very nice and high with good depth and focus in the vocals. It was very odd to hear such a shift and even more so because the harshness in the vocals was absent and the overall tone was flatter. Increasing the volume a notch made it even more impressive. Both Nick's and Estefan's voices were right on cue directly in front of me, making me feel like I was at a concert. The stage was wide and the information was more accurate. The cymbals were sharp and a little brassy at times, but I could finally see the potential with this setup. Every instrument was laid out from right to left just like a good stage with no dominant speakers. As you'd guess, I sat on the passenger's side more than the driver's side.
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  #54  
Old 07-11-2008, 03:46 PM
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In this Dan Boeckner interview he mentions Tusk:

Vancouver's Straight.com

http://www.straight.com/article-1529...a-wolf-parade?

In + out

Dan Boeckner sounds off on the things that enquiring minds want to know.

On Tusk: “It was recorded when punk music was happening, and I think Fleetwood Mac was aware of punk, or at least Lindsey Buckingham was. I can hear elements of even Joy Division, and certainly a DIY guitar sound.”
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  #55  
Old 07-12-2008, 11:11 AM
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One of my favorite performers is Stevie Nicks, of Fleetwood Mac and solo fame. I don’t wear wispy scarves or claim to be a Welsh witch. (Although my husband will tell you that I can be an Italian-Irish-Venezuelan “rhymes with witch” from time to time.) Like Stevie, I love platform boots and have big hair. One of her lyrics goes, “You cannot know the dream, until you’ve known the nightmare.” And that’s why I would include some of my life’s failures, heartaches and crushing blows in my time capsule.

http://www.thedebutanteball.com/?p=1038
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  #56  
Old 07-12-2008, 07:29 PM
michelej1 michelej1 is offline
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[Always glad to see Husk getting some love]

This is an excerpt from an article about Dan Broekner from Drowned in Sound (UK).

http://www.drownedinsound.com/articles/2105835

“I do listen to quite a bit of pop music, not much contemporary stuff apart from some hip-hop and dancehall stuff. I don't really listen to great new pop songs, but I do listen to lots of ‘60s and ‘70s pop stuff, like Wings or Fleetwood Mac. It seems like everyone around me right now is heavily into Fleetwood Mac – it’s become this obsession with a lot of my friends who play music. There's this renewed interest in what they were doing. Some of it you could really take as a prototype kind of bedroom recordings – there’s this really weird production on their third record, Husk. You can pretty much hear the cocaine.”
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  #57  
Old 07-12-2008, 09:03 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by michelej1 View Post
[Always glad to see Husk getting some love]

There's this renewed interest in what they were doing. Some of it you could really take as a prototype kind of bedroom recordings – there’s this really weird production on their third record, Husk.
Of all the FM albums HUSK is my favorite.
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  #58  
Old 07-13-2008, 01:09 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by michelej1 View Post
Article About Village Recorder Studio, which mentions decoration, Billboard June 22, 1996
Much of Studio D, for example, dates back to 1978, when the room was redesigned by Geordie Hormel and Fleetwood Mac for the recording of the group's multiplatinum "Tusk" album. Stevie Nicks had much to do with the tropical motif in the studio's isolation booth, and Christine McVie chose most of the furniture. These elements and others were left intact when the studio was upgraded last year.
Here is a picture from Studio D that has a tropical image on the wall. Clearly they are not in an isolation booth, but maybe the booth is on the other side of the wall.

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  #59  
Old 07-13-2008, 01:40 AM
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Originally Posted by vivfox View Post
Of all the FM albums HUSK is my favorite.
[INSERT fat Stevie joke here]
__________________
On and on it will always be, the rhythm, rhyme, and harmony.



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  #60  
Old 07-14-2008, 03:57 PM
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Last night on my way to a meeting a local radio station was playing The Chain. After it was over the DJ said, "that was The Weight by Fleetwood Mac. Then he said, "the weight of the chain."
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