Mick's new book: 'Play On: Now, Then and Fleetwood Mac'

[Jondalar]

Originally Posted by bombaysaffires

but for anyone thinking of buying the audiobook, just know that Mick does NOT read the whole thing (like other authors have done). He is credited with reading parts of it, but some guy named Martin Drew reads most of it. With the exception of a brief introductory statement, I haven't come across Mick reading anything else yet.

OMG I thought that was him narrating the whole thing.

[Macfanforever]

I found this in Rollingstone .



It looks like they gave him 3 stars.

[HomerMcvie]

Originally Posted by Macfanforever

It looks like they gave him 3 stars.

So did fate.

[teedeerocks]

Originally Posted by HomerMcvie

So did fate.

Ain't that the truth

[michelej1]

Play On by Mick Fleetwood Now, Then and Fleetwood Mac

By Kirk Curnutt January 23, 2015 Paste Magazine

http://www.pastemagazine.com/article...fleetwood.html

Halfway through Mick Fleetwood’s new autobiography, Play On: Now, Then and Fleetwood Mac, I found myself listing important historical figures whose life stories I know next to nothing about: Joan of Arc, Stonewall Jackson, the Romanov sisters, Django Reinhardt, Le Corbusier.…

I was feeling guilty. I’ve never cracked open a book about Ada Lovelace or the Dali Lama, but this was my second jaunt through a memoir by a drummer who nicknamed his band’s most misunderstood album after his penis. (That would be 1979’s Tusk, of course, although 1973’s Penguin is a more creative guess). While I can’t begin to describe what George C. Marshall did to merit a 560-page biography this past October (other than rebuild Europe after WWII), I could easily, if challenged, recite in order the 16 different guitar players and singers who’ve rotated in and out of Fleetwood Mac since its founding in 1967.

And while I possess only a fuzzy sense of Mata Hari’s nationality and exactly which of the Allied nations executed her in 1917, I can tell you the small role that Birmingham, Alabama, played in Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks’ fledgling pre-Mac career, and why Nicks’ “Silver Springs” had to wait 20 years to become the show-stopping tearjerker it’s been since 1997’s The Dance. I can even tell you which of Christine McVie’s songs on 1982’s undervalued Mirage are about her tempestuous, two-year romance with the Beach Boys’ doomed Dennis Wilson. (Basically, every Christine McVie song on that album).

This is my way of admitting that listening to pop music has always gone hand in hand with reading. I seem to feel incomplete doing one without doing the other, so as I cycle in and out of an obsession with a performer or group as I’ve been doing with Fleetwood Mac this fall, my bookshelves swell.

On a practical level, this means that the sucker who shells out 60 bucks for the 35th-anniversary edition of Rumours on DVD-Audio is the same guy who manages to accumulate not only both Fleetwood autobiographies but all three editions of original bassist Bob Brunning’s biography of the group (1990, 1998, 2004), two books on the making of Rumours, one on Tusk, a tell-all by Buckingham’s girlfriend in the band’s heyday, some patchy overviews of Nicks’ romantic entanglements and a coffee-table tome whose pictures allow me to chart, with archeological precision, the evolution of John McVie’s facial hair.

Clearly, I need an intervention, but it didn’t happen before December 17, when I occupied Row V at the Atlanta stop of the Mac’s On With the Show Tour. Play On is basically a souvenir of this nostalgia-stoking, money-making juggernaut, which has been filling arenas since September 2014 and which is slated to continue deep into 2015. As far as rock ‘n’ roll memoirs go, the book is an amiable career recap, rehearsing once again Fleetwood Mac’s oft-documented evolution from its birth as a British blues troupe through its rudderless years at the mercy of a revolving door of songwriters and front men before the arrival of Buckingham and Nicks catalyzed success and excess.

The chief appeal of this latest installment of the long-running soap opera? Its sense of closure: after a 16-year retirement, Christine McVie came back to the lineup, performing “Over My Head,” “Say You Love Me” and “Songbird.” John McVie has survived a cancer scare. As Fleetwood reports in his closing pages, all signs point to a happy, collegial 2015 for a band that once upon a time nothing short of a presidential inauguration could reunite.

Yet that same sense of coming from a happy place is one reason that Play On doesn’t feel half as candid as Fleetwood’s previous autobiography, the long-out-of-print Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac (1990). That book appeared as the band entered its early-nineties’ nadir after the departure of the mercurial Buckingham, FM’s de facto leader and musical conscience. One major omission from the new autobiography is the earlier book’s detailed description of an August 7, 1987, confrontation in which the group’s self-styled Brian Wilson lashed out physically against Nicks when his bandmates tried to browbeat him into touring behind their hit album Tango in the Night.

To his credit, Fleetwood concedes in Play On that Buckingham had legitimate reasons for ditching the group even as it enjoyed its biggest commercial success since 1977’s gazillion-selling Rumours: both he and Nicks were in the throes of addiction. Nevertheless, reading this new autobiography, one senses Fleetwood’s aversion to stirring the pot by referring to Buckingham’s once volatile reputation, making the anecdote feel all the more conspicuous by its absence, especially when the story is detailed in any number of other FM books. “Historically that was not a happy day,” Fleetwood simply writes, and the passage feels sanitized and evasive.

Ultimately, the differences between Fleetwood and Play On remind us that most rock ‘n’ roll books are designed to serve a specific narrative at any given moment in a performer or group’s biography. Rarely are they written for the ages. If a definitive Fleetwood Mac memoir ever publishes, it’s most likely to come from Nicks, whose interviews display the wit and savvy self-awareness needed to elevate an autobiography to the must-read status of Patti Smith’s Just Kids or Keith Richards’ Life (both 2010).

This past fall, Billboard published a conversation with the songstress in which she confirmed long-running gossip that Tusk’s “Sara” was inspired in part by an unplanned pregnancy with the Eagles’ Don Henley. The story received a great deal of blogosphere attention, thanks to Billboard’s blatantly sensational headline (“STEVIE NICKS ADMITS TO PAST PREGNANCY WITH DON HENLEY AND MORE ABOUT HER WILD HISTORY”). The interview even inspired Gawker to republish a passage from Marc Eliot’s To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles (1998) that included a rather cavalier quote from Henley about the ensuing abortion. Overlooked amid the hubbub over Nicks’ admission was her insistence to Billboard that she didn’t plan to write her autobiography any time soon:

“The world is not ready for my memoir, I guarantee you. All of the men I hung out with are on their third wives by now, and the wives are all under 30. If I were to write what really happened between 1972 and now, a lot of people would be very angry with me. It’ll happen someday, just not for a very long time. I won’t write a book until everybody is so old that they no longer care. Like, ‘I’m ninety, I don’t care what you write about me.’ I am loyal to a fault. And I have a certain loyalty to these people that I love because I do love them, and I will always love them. I cannot throw any of them under the bus until I absolutely know that they will not care.”

In the absence of that book, Fleetwood’s second autobiography serves as a pleasant—if somewhat predictable—reminder of his band’s claim to rock ‘n’ roll history. The best moments tend to be personal: the recent end of Fleetwood’s marriage is poignantly discussed, and there is something warm and reassuring about the obvious affection that radiates for his first love, Jenny Boyd (sister of Pattie Boyd of George Harrison and Eric Clapton fame). Musicians will enjoy Fleetwood’s descriptions of his drumming style, while fans who still wince at clips of Hillary Clinton clapping on the wrong beat to “Don’t Stop” at Bill Clinton’s first inaugural ball may blanch at some of the more fawning references to the First Couple. Ultimately, the book is a reminder of why Fleetwood remains a father figure even to his peers: he works as hard at mending fences and treating bandmates fairly as he does at keeping a steady beat.

[michelej1]

CBC Books Friday, February 27, 2015

http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/02/mick...twood-mac.html

Mick Fleetwood's life as the backbone of Fleetwood Mac

When it comes to rock n' roll, everybody pays attention to the singer, and guitarists are worshipped for their face-melting solos. But the drums -- the drums are the backbone of the music. And if there has ever been a drummer that has been the backbone of his band, it's Mick Fleetwood. As co-founder of the legendary group Fleetwood Mac, the 67-year-old British musician has remained the one constant in a rock act that's had more than its fair share of line-up changes and inner turmoil. From the band's blues-driven beginnings with Peter Green to its folksy pop-rock incarnations during the Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks eras, Mick Fleetwood has been there, done that, and publicly shared the whole sex, drugs, and rock n' roll saga.

In his 2014 autobiography, Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac, the band leader recalls moving to London as a 15-year-old and beginning his exciting but rocky journey to the top of the music charts. He spoke with CBC Radio Q guest host Tom Power about his memoir, and particularly the earlier years of Fleetwood Mac. Here are some highlights from the interview:

His thoughts on why English youth were so drawn to blues rock in the 1960s:

"Well, it's fair to say coming out of the Second World War, we were ripe for the picking. I think we just so didn't want to become conformed into [conventional British society]. There were huge amounts of depressed people, half of England was flattened with all the bombing that went on, and you just wanted to see a way out. And blues -- blues is about a way out. They sang and they chanted their way out of the misery that faced black Americans way back when, so there was an identification of sorts, by no means as acute, but that was a type of music we were hooked on."

He's not known as a flashy drummer, but he's legendary for his ability to keep the beat. Here's how he developed his reputation as a master timekeeper:

"You can't play your way around complicated jazz structures and weird time structures - you have no idea what that is, and you're probably never going to," he said he told himself. "But at least I hung on to that one thing -- which is the feel, which you learn from blues. And you follow it like a hawk."

His first impressions of iconic blues guitarist Peter Green, who he co-founded Fleetwood Mac with:

"I learned very quickly Peter had that magic, which is: less is more."

In one of the more bizarre stories of rock n' roll history, a dispute with the band's former manager led the manager to assemble an imposter Fleetwood Mac band in 1974 and booked a tour under the group's name. It took a fierce legal battle for Fleetwood to regain control of the rights. His memories of the experience:

"It was astoundingly not a great period. We had to fight for our lives and for our right to be in a band that I'd formed in 1967 with Peter Green. And my name was [being used by the fake band]. It was pretty mind blowing. The band that toured even had someone with blonde hair who vaguely looked like Christine McVie, except he was a guy."

[bombaysaffires]

Originally Posted by michelej1

If a definitive Fleetwood Mac memoir ever publishes, it’s most likely to come from Nicks, whose interviews display the wit and savvy self-awareness needed to elevate an autobiography to the must-read status of Patti Smith’s Just Kids or Keith Richards’ Life (both 2010).

wow… really?? I couldn't disagree more. She is TOTALLY savvy, but self-aware? Not so sure. I mean, no one can be 100% self aware, we all have our blindspots to our own personalities and foibles, but Stevie takes it even further than that. His evidence that she'd be the most honest if she wrote a book is that she admitted to having gotten pregnant by Henley. Well, that cat was already out of the bag-- thanks to Henley, and then later an interviewer who brought it up while she was still vulnerable after rehab. She did NOT bring it up voluntarily and in commenting on Don's bringing it up she admitted she would never have told the world about it if left to her own devices. So I have to disagree with his assessment. That said, of course I would loooove to read any autobiography she wrote!

[michelej1]

Times Live (ZA)

Play it again: In and out of the muso mind

http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/...the-muso-mind#

Andrew Donaldson | 03 March, 2015 00:01

The rock memoir hit a purple patch with the publication in 2004 of Bob Dylan's acclaimed Chronicles, Volume One and over the past decade we have been graced with wildly entertaining autobiographies from Keith Richards, Rod Stewart, Pete Townshend, Neil Young, Anthony Kiedis, Patti Smith and Morrissey, among others.

These were books that managed to reach audiences outside the traditionally niche market of music fans and consequently dominated the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic.

That said, it is difficult to imagine the two titles here - Mick Fleetwood's Play On: Now, Then & Fleetwood Mac and Carlos Santana's The Universal Tone - striking a note with anyone other than their most devoted followers.

Of the two, the latter is perhaps the better - if only because Santana's life has been more interesting than Fleetwood's. His Mexican childhood was rough. His father, a musician, had tried to make his wife drink an abortifacient tea when she became pregnant with Carlos, but a housekeeper switched teas without his knowledge. He was sexually assaulted when he was 10 by an American tourist who had befriended his family. By the time he was 15, he was playing in Tijuana strip club bands.

Shortly afterwards he moved to San Francisco, where he fashioned his trademark blend of Latin-fused rock, blues and African rhythms and put together the group that bore his name.

He had an ardent supporter in rock impresario Bill Graham, who managed to get Santana on the bill at Woodstock - quite a feat considering the group had yet to release an album and would have been unknown to that festival's audience. That remarkable performance, captured on film, is now the stuff of legend - but it's surprising to learn how out of his mind he was on stage. The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia had dosed him with mescaline and he watched his guitar turning into a snake as he played.

"The rest of the show is a blur - really a blur," he writes. He vowed never to trip again during a performance, but does admit: "Hallucinogens had a lot to do with the Santana sound."

Although cocaine would become their drug of choice, hallucinogens also indirectly fashioned Fleetwood Mac's sound. They were a modestly successful UK-based blues-rock group in the late 1960s but kind of lost their way when their founder, guitarist Peter Green, had an acid-induced mental collapse and abandoned the group.

After muddling about for a few years, the group relocated to Los Angeles, where they recruited vocalist Stevie Nicks and guitarist Lindsay Buckingham to complete their most familiar lineup.

Their best albums - 1975's Fleetwood Mac, 1977's Rumours and 1979's Tusk - were made on cocaine. The tours to promote them were fuelled on cocaine. Their intake was prodigious.

Drummer Fleetwood - "the King of Toot" - once tried to work out how much of the drug he'd snorted in his life - and, assuming 3g or 4g a day for 20 years, came up with a solid 10km line.

There's nothing new in this, of course. Fleetwood himself chronicled much of this in 1991 with Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures with Fleetwood Mac

So why "Play On"? Well, a new Fleetwood Mac album is on its way, and a major tour.

[michelej1]

AFR Weekend Nov 21 2014 at 1:04 AM

http://www.afr.com/lifestyle/arts-an...0141120-11rab1

Fleetwood Mac – now there they go again

by Mark Ellen
There’s a moment that perfectly captures the soft-centred and supine mid-1970s that Fleetwood Mac came to epitomise – more than the “love pentagon" of their *affairs, more than their gossamer stage garb or exotic parties or therapists. It’s the time they roll up at a studio in Sausalito, California, to assemble the all-conquering Rumours.

The idea is that the five members should live together communally in the way the original line-up did seven years earlier and they choose the Record Plant because it has a house attached, overlooking San Francisco Bay.

This comes with two limousines and a speedboat. There is also a conference room with a waterbed and tanks of nitrous oxide for those requiring a mood change. The entire place – walls, ceilings, floors and stairs – is coated with a maroon shagpile carpet. There is even a loft, accessible through a pair of giant red lips, where another capacious bed is available, with audio jacks in its headboard: if you ever thought the laid-back vocals of Dreams sounded as if they had been recorded by a naked woman lying between satin sheets, it’s entirely possible you were right.

The group’s first crack at communal living in the late 1960s had held a mirror to the era in much the same way: the members of what was then a blues band at the peak of their success (Albatross, Black Magic Woman) had moved into a 20-room mansion with a tennis court in seven acres of forest, a sumptuous Victorian pile they had bought for £23,000 in 1969. Rest and recreation in those days centred around getting “gassed" on booze and smoking hash in the billiard room. In the 1970s, the template is much the same, only times have changed.



And here lies the core fascination of this long-awaited and colourful book. Fleetwood Mac managed something that only the Rolling Stones have also achieved: they produced two distinct types of music that caught the essence of two very different decades, while supplying a living soap opera as an illustration of both.

Sometimes there is a rich pageantry about the story, a poise and dignity, but mostly the whole thing feels like a farce: a collection of highly driven eccentrics pursuing their musical vision with a barrelling, single-minded dedication, who leave a string of casualties in their wake, the author and his old friend John McVie being the only real constants in the narrative (the enduring “Fleetwood" and “Mac" rhythm section that gave the band its name).

Fleetwood paints himself as the ship’s captain, steering the tattered barque through the tempests of the music business and the band’s supposedly creative but slightly poisonous internal relations, as if constantly assuring himself that he’s the figurehead and not just the rarely composing drummer. And, for the most part, he is attractively self-aware. “Look at me," he hoots as he reclines in yet another presidential hotel suite. “I’ve got all this money because I can hit things with two bits of wood!"

Shake-ups and break-ups

Entertaining though it all is, some baffled and responsible part of you wonders why the band seemed to learn precisely nothing from the traumas of their early years when a large slice of their woes were amplified by drugs.

The lead guitarist and godhead *Peter Green takes a ton of acid, starts wearing robes and a huge wooden crucifix and has a breakdown and complete personality change, from which he has never fully recovered. He threatens to shoot his manager for sending him royalty cheques. The band’s second guitarist, Jeremy Spencer, flips out and joins a cult called the Children of God, among whom he will “only answer to the name Jonathan". Its third guitarist, Danny Kirwan, falls for the bottle and ends up “living in a shelter, scratching himself".

When the reborn, US-based version of the band takes off in 1975 – with Mick, John and his wife, Christine McVie, forming a two-nation alliance with the Americans Stevie Nicks and her boyfriend, Lindsey Buckingham – they run into what Fleetwood calls “a tsunami of white powder", the quintet embarking on trysts so tangled that you get a headache just thinking about them.

Buckingham and Nicks split up, Nicks having a love affair with Fleetwood (whose wife, Jenny Boyd, bunks up with the new guitarist Bob Weston, whom Mick immediately sacks); the McVies split up, Christine going off with the lighting engineer. By the end of the book, Fleetwood and Boyd have married and divorced twice, the long-suffering Boyd’s patience once so sorely tried that she threw several “ramekins of chocolate mousse" at him, making a terrible mess of his Porsche.



Fleetwood’s eye for this level of detail is what sustains the whole enterprise, not least when he attends a fairly typical west coast party to find his ex-wife’s sister, Pattie Boyd, “dressed as Minnie Mouse" and Eric Clapton “in one of Pattie’s see-through dresses with his Y-fronts showing underneath and a sponge on his head".

If this volume occasionally loses focus, it is because the author forgets that he is writing for the people who helped to fund his trajectory and starts publishing a series of apologies – to his three wives for being an arse, to his four daughters for his absence, to luckless band members whose predicaments he might have modified if he hadn’t been so self-absorbed.

At one stage, you feel the book is a love letter to Stevie Nicks, who seems to obsess him in the same way that she has captivated great swaths of the general public. She is like a “living sculpture you couldn’t take your eyes off", he thinks on meeting her – “otherworldly and in possession of a vibrato as haunting as Edith Piaf filtered through the lens of a cowgirl beatnik poet".

Months later, she is “a seductive songstress in wispy, witchy black dresses". He affects great embarrassment that their love affair ruffles so many feathers but, boy, does his inner teenager want you to know it happened.



His whole world seems like an endless extension of adolescence: his penchant for pantomime stage-wear; his deathless fondness for the early song Rattlesnake Shake because it is “an ode to masturbation"; his habit of stopping off at magic shops to buy “fake blood and joke cigars" when band morale is low; his wistful estimation that the cocaine he’s consumed in his lifetime would amount to a single line “seven miles long".

He comes across like some roguish aristocrat capering through a series of stately homes in pursuit of creative new ways to spend his mountain of cash.

So it is fitting that when Fleetwood commissions a 60ft inflatable penguin to float above the band’s stadium shows and it never gets off the ground that it should be his father who takes him aside for some words of wisdom. “Mick," he says softly, “you do know that penguins don’t fly, don’t you?"

[He's So Unusual]

I had it for Christmas. I love reading about the things that went on behind the scenes. The Tara Browne part intrigued me. I googled him after I finished the book.

[michelej1]

Shore News Today by Marjorie Preston 6/26/2015

http://www.shorenewstoday.com/free_t...a2b3b5133.html

Play On: Now, Then and Fleetwood Mac

by Mick Fleetwood, Little, Brown and Company

A rock star life, by definition, is exciting. Maybe that’s why there are so many great rock memoirs out there: “Life” by Keith Richards, “It’s So Easy and Other Lies” by Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses, “My Cross to Bear” by Gregg Allman, “Rocks” by Joe Perry of Aerosmith and scores of others. When I picked up “Play On,” I expected the same kind of wild story, filled with sex, drugs, and backstage intrigues. But Fleetwood’s second memoir (the first was published in 1990) falls flat. The Fleetwood Mac drummer and co-founder repeats himself again and again. And again. Some stories are interesting, especially the introduction of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, who helped propel the band to superstardom. It’s also fun to read how the “Rumours” album came together. But much of “Play On” reads like a tour itinerary, and on the personal side, Fleetwood reveals himself to be a less-than-stellar husband and dad. This sketchy, unfulfilling portrait doesn’t rank with the best of the genre.