Mirage Reviews

[michelej1]

[Just uploading articles that I do not believe were not previously online]

Washington Post, August 1, 1982

HEADLINE: Fleetwood Mac's Magic 'Mirage'

BYLINE: By Geoffrey Himes

BODY:
LOS ANGELES has long harbored some of rock 'n' roll's most reclusive, most brilliant studio wizards: Phil Spector, the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson and Steely Dan's Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. Now Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie must be added to this select company. "Mirage" (Warner Bros. 23607-1), the fifth and latest album by the current Fleetwood Mac lineup, carries on this pop baroque tradition splendidly.

Spector, Fagen, Becker and McVie come from elsewhere, but they (and Buckingham and California native Wilson) have found Hollywood the most conducive environment for manufacturing their dreams. This is the appeal of their art: By the sheer force of their imagination they have created complex, new worlds on record where seemingly disparate elements harmonize perfectly. For many American suburbanites--forced to compensate for their drab world by acts of imagination--these records are reassuring proof that it can be done.

If you subtract the three dreary Stevie Nicks tracks, the nine remaining cuts on "Mirage" marry the melodic accessibility of "Fleetwood Mac" and "Rumors" with the experimental boldness of "Tusk." Christine McVie's four songs feature the intoxicating romantic melodies of her famous singles, but Lindsey Buckingham's production fleshes them out with more intricate imaginative detail than they ever had before. Buckingham's own five songs are clearly rooted in the bouncy simplicity of early rock 'n' roll. He then proves how a little jingly melody and basic lyric wish can be musically expanded into the grand importance they have subjectively for the wisher.

The album's first single is "Hold Me" by McVie and singer-songwriter Robbie Patton. Much like the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda," the song builds from heartbroken verses aching with sustained notes to a punchy, repeating chorus making a plea for love. McVie has constructed one contagious melody for the first verse and still another for the chorus. The body of the song is sung as a duet between McVie's hopeful alto and Buckingham's anxious tenor. Buckingham takes over on the tag: He plays a slow, high guitar solo that extends the plea beyond words; he pits a groaning bass vocal against the pretty, high harmonies.

McVie's "Love in Store" has a couple more gorgeous mid-tempo melody hooks. Buckingham once again expands the romantic moment--this time with layers upon layers of odd, twangy guitars. On "Only Over You" (dedicated to Beach Boy Dennis Wilson) and "Wish You Were Here" (written with John Mayall's drummer Colin Allen), McVie's melodies are suffused with angelic choirs that give the romantic themes the swooning feeling they need.

If McVie's songs are romantic without irony, Buckingham's songs are romantic with irony. Long a musical wizard, Buckingham is finally developing skill at words, too. He now strips his lyrics to simple catch phrases that sound as if they came from "Teen Angel" of 1962, but in fact suggest far more than they explain. "Can't Go Back" suggests in short four-word lines the inevitable but impossible desire to return to one's youth. The irresistible opening theme--a cabaret piano phrase answered by a circus synthesizer phrase over a fast heartbeat rhythm--suggests that it may indeed be possible via one's musical imagination. Buckingham's synthesizer-treated vocal bends in and out of focus magically.

"Book of Love" and "Oh Diane" are even more rooted in the pre-Beatles' era. But the innocence is lined with irony--Buckingham suspects that God knows no more about love than we mortals; he suspects his Diane is slipping away with time. The potential of the original doo-wop harmonies are heightened by Buckingham's control over his greater options in the studio. As his lead vocal fades on each line in "Book of Love," the harmony vocals rise in a crossing arc. Two of Buckingham's biggest influences have been the Beach Boys and the Kingston Trio. He practices his odd brand of folkie-surf music on "Empire State" and "Eyes of the World."

Stevie Nicks is the album's big disappointment. Once one of the band's best writers, she has deteriorated into penning overly long tales about vaguely defined dream landscapes with minimal melodies and the blandest of chord progressions. Whereas McVie and Buckingham evoke dreams through the lovely complexity of their music, Nicks simply talks about dreams and gypsies and evokes very little. Nevertheless Nicks is still an excellent harmony singer, and her echoing vocals on McVie's "Love in Store" give the song an incredible lift. And let's not forget Fleetwood Mac's two founding members; drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie are still important to their band . The rhythm tracks on "Mirage" are sparer yet far more effective than the rhythm work on the solo albums by Buckingham and Nicks last year.

Heart is another West Coast rock quintet with two female singer-songwriters. This Seattle band's co-leaders, sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson, have indisputable talent but seem to have little idea of how to apply it. They can rock out as well as any hard-rock band, and they even pen an appealing melody now and then. But too often their ambitions outstrip their intelligence and lead them into totally wrongheaded songs. Heart's newest album, "Private Audition" (Epic FE 38049), contains one great song, a couple near misses and a bunch of embarrassments.

The great song is "Bright Light Girl," a hippie tribute to an idealistic woman. It is graced by a gorgeous melody hook kicked home by the tight-charging band. Ann Wilson's siren voice cries out the catch chorus with convincing sincerity, while Nancy Wilson's echoing vocal brings out the pop harmonies. "Fast Times" is a furiously paced hard-rock charger that never pauses long enough for excess or indulgence. "The Man Is Mine" blends a big beat with lush vocal harmonies.

By contrast, the title tune is an ill-advised attempt to mimic Broadway's backstage songs. Even worse are the ballads that descend to mawkish sentimentality without compensating melodies. Sue Ennis' lyrics awkwardly attempt great meanings and end up sounding silly. "Angels," dedicated to John Lennon's son Sean, is full of trite advice about death over trite acoustic guitars and spacy harmonies. "America" reduces great historic movements to throwaway cliche's and then tries to puff them up with pompous synthesizer chords.

[michelej1]

October 8, 1982, Washington Post

Stevie Nicks, vocalist with Fleetwood Mac, is recuperating from a bout with the flu at her parent's home in Phoenix. Her illness forced the band to postpone concerts in Los Angeles and Oakland, Calif.

[michelej1]

Newsweek, December 20, 1982

Mirage, Fleetwood Mac (Warner Bros.). Here's living proof that a predictably popular album can be good smart fun: gossamer ballads and gypsy croaks -- fans know the formula -- plus loony tunes from pop's flakiest prankster, Lindsey Buckingham.

[michelej1]

People Magazine, September 6, 1982

HEADLINE: MIRAGE; Fleetwood Mac


BODY:
For a long time the intragroup romantic intrigues made this veteran ensemble rock's answer to The Young and the Restless. They have survived intact despite that notoriety and the ho-hum critical response to their obtuse Tusk album. The dozen richly textured cuts of this set are a reminder that these people can still make magic together in a studio. The material is all new and either written or co-written by band members Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie. Bassist John McVie and percussionist Mick Fleetwood craft expert rhythms to keep their partners' melodies afloat. Stevie's voice has lost some of its rasp since she solved her longtime problem of nodes on her vocal cords, but it hasn't lost its edge and can still bewitch, as it does in her tunes Gypsy and Straight Back. Lindsey's Oh Diane is a wonderful send-up of those dreamboat love songs Paul Anka and Fabian used to sing. Christine's songs, though, are the ones that show Fleetwood Mac at its best, with harmonies wafting in and out of focus like hallucinations in a desert.

[michelej1]

Newsweek, August 30, 1982

BYLINE: JIM MILLER

BODY:
Spending a day listening to the current crop of rock albums is a little like window-shopping at a suburban mall. The packaging is bright, the mood bustling, the wealth of goods striking, any sterility a calming sign of safety.

Old-fashioned brands of pop predominate. Last week's Top 10, for example, included Pictures at Eleven, by Robert Plant (Swan Song), lead singer for Led Zeppelin, the archetypal "heavy metal" band of the '70s; Abracadabra, by the Steve Miller Band (Capitol), the low-key blues-rockers popular since 1968; Daylight Again, by Crosby, Stills and Nash Atlantic), the classic hippie harmonists, who look older and plumper but still sound like dewy denizens of Woodstock Nation. Even the one brandnew band on the list, Asia (Geffen), consists of seasoned veterans, in this case playing progressive rock, a type of grandiloquent pop fashionable in the early '70s. Most of these albums have an up-to-date aura of resplendent spectacle. Like a Las Vegas showstopper, they're flashy, lavish -- and monumentally vapid.

The nation's No. 1 album, Mirage, by Fleetwood Mac (Warner Bros.), is a showstopper, too, but in this case we feel like we're backstage, where we can see that the props are papier-mache. Much of the record follows the band's own well-known formula: start with an understated, rock-ribbed rhythm section; add a filigree of guitars, chiming with harmonics, plucking out muted chords; top it off with Christine McVie's honeyed sighs or Stevie Nicks's warbling, pseudo-mystical bleats.

Enter guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. He helped to produce the album; he sings 5 of the 12 songs, and he acts like the impish kid who was always blowing up his experiment in your high-school chemistry class. Whenever he sings, he's fooling around with someone else's style: on "Empire State" he's the Beach Boys; on "Oh Diane" he's Paul Anka; on the oddball "Eyes of the World" the backup vocals sound like the Swingle Singers while he's Eddie Cochran (or is it Rod Stewart?). His songs are rough jingles: the detritus of a 34-year-old's rock 'n' roll memories. By sprinkling such jokey, atavistic pranks between the sumptuous ballads, Buckingham deflates the band's own mannerisms. By itself, "Only Over You," ; new song by Christine McVie, sounds like classic Fleetwood Mac -- pensive, pretty, wistful. Coming midway through this particular album, it also sounds contrived, artificially polished, a "mirage" -- all form and no content.

A similar sort of legerdemain is at work on Marshall Crenshaw (Warner Bros.), this season's sunniest debut album. (Like most first albums, it's had no luck so far in cracking the Top 40.) A 28-year-old veteran of Michigan bar bands and a road company of the show called "Beatlemania" (he played John), Crenshaw, like Buckingham, affects an innocent stance. The difference is that he plays the game with a straight face. Brisk, upbeat, richly lyrical, his music reenacts rock 'n' roll as an exuberant ritual. On a track like "Mary Anne," what matters isn't the words, it's the punch of the guitar, the snap of the bass, the crashing tambourine, the sweet, slightly nasal vocal. His music echoes with influences: Buddy Holly, the percussive production of Phil Spector, the jangling guitar sound of the Searchers and the Byrds. The fun comes from hearing such influences seamlessly joined in catchy songs, sung with apple-cheeked spunk.

Still, there's a lot missing from this music: a personal voice, artistic daring, a sense of inner conviction. Just compare the other recent noteworthy debut, "Ji," by Junior (Mercury). He's British, black, with a funk band focused on guitar and synthesizer. His singing and writing sometimes recall Stevie Wonder, but he's clearly after a style of his own. Two cuts achieve just that. Noisy and roiling, "Mama Used to Say" erupts with a cacophony of clanging bells, congas, wood blocks -- synthetic ones probably -- and a horn section that sounds like it's riffing in a shower stall. "Too Late," by contrast, is a lilting lament. The tale of an alcoholic husband, it's a declaration of independence ("now's my time to go") written from the wife's point of view and sung in a high tenor, gliding into falsetto. The melody soars, the words sting. Both of these tracks were hit singles on black radio -- a good place to look for pop music with a bite.

[strandinthewind]

Rolling Stone:

Fleetwood Mac boasts the rarest of chart-topping, adult-oriented rock virtues – a group personality. In the three-part harmonies and the assured snap of the rhythm section, we hear five distinct personalities merge into a sound that is unmistakably Mac. On Mirage, Lindsey Buckingham once again reaches into his bag of magicianly production tricks and pulls out an elusive gem of a Fleetwood Mac record that, to borrow some lines from his own "Can't Go Home," has "a face as soft as a tear in a clown's eye."

"Can't Go Home" would sound comfortable in a music box. As with most of Buckingham's tunes, we're hooked before the first word. The melody is sprung from beat one as vibes and guitar play tag atop John McVie's ticktocking bass, and just when you expect it, Mick Fleetwood's snare drum locks the machinery into gear. Fleetwood and McVie, rock's classiest rhythm section, know how to make the simple sublime.

Fleetwood Mac, a vocal group with a beat, doesn't scrimp on harmonies. Voices make a feather bed for Christine McVie's pulsing "Love in Store," adorn the edges of Stevie Nicks' fairy tales and jump all over Buckingham's quirky contributions. Whether answering the lead voice or chanting "bom, bom, bom," the singing keeps Mac's fuzzy face in focus.

Nicks, whose easy allure has made her the most popular of Mac's front three, is also the most problematic. While Buckingham steals from everybody, Nicks picks her own pocket. Is there a witch in the house who could banish "dream," "gypsy" and (gasp) "velvet underground" from her vocabulary? "That's Alright," with a countryish melody and a demonstrative opening image ("Meet me down by the railway station"), is far and away her best new song. Still, when Fleetwood drops extra drum beats into the belly of the belfry on "Gypsy," it's clear that nobody can weave Stevie's velvet and lace like Fleetwood Mac.

Christine McVie might turn out to be the Alberta Hunter of the future. "Only over You" is Mirage's inevitable breakup blues: "I'm out of my mind," she sings in an ascending arch, and while that's not too far from "I'm over my head," Christine's wisdom is in her honey-toned voice. And though "Wish You Were Here" is a Jackson Browne soundalike with really bad words, "Hold Me" bristles with randy fun. Singing in tandem, Christine and Lindsey snuggle up to the rhythm ("Slip your hand inside my glove"), she smoothing his edges and he pushing her over the top.

Hellbent on becoming the silliest of rock stars, Lindsey Buckingham takes Fleetwood Mac's limp language to its logical extreme. He composes mint-fresh pop tunes, but the words are strictly recycled: i.e., "Love is like a grain of sand" or "Who wrote the book of love?" While Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and Brian Wilson ignite his imagination, they also tangle his tongue. How lucky they were to have said it first! "Empire State," which crosses the space-cadet Byrds with the car-hopping Beach Boys, is as aggressively asinine as anything to come from Brian's sandbox. Minimally deeper are "Oh Diane" and "Eyes of the World," the former coaxing the dreaded "grain of sand" over a Buddy Holly-ish chord structure, and the latter launching a riveting guitar solo from a "Tusk"-like beat. The finely turned details that illuminate these tunes are deployed throughout Mirage, from the enthusiastic "hey" on "Empire State" to the tiny organ telegraphing "Only over You." Pop touches like these make a few grains of sand seem like a beach.

Fleetwood Mac have never pretended to be heavy thinkers. But like E.T. or baseball's pennant race, Mirage is another of 1982's sunny entertainments: it sounds great in the morning and fine over a sunset with wine.


Yahoo! BuzzJOHN MILWARD

(Posted: Aug 16, 1982)

[Gailh]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

Singing in tandem, Christine and Lindsey snuggle up to the rhythm ("Slip your hand inside my glove"), she smoothing his edges and he pushing her over the top

That to me was always how Fleetwood Mac was at its best

Gail

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by Gailh

That to me was always how Fleetwood Mac was at its best

Gail

I agree. I also think La Nicks adds to that song as well. In a way, that was the last of the "three" voices coming together. They did on TITN, but it, to me, was not the same.

I also love the sort of coughing sound in the chorus.

Also the Alberta Hunter reference is cool, but a little confusing.

[michelej1]

New York Times (NY), August 11, 1982

Section: C

THE POP LIFE, ROBERT PALMER

FLEETWOOD MAC'S "Mirage" (Warner Bros.) has already climbed to the top of the album best-seller charts, just a few weeks after its release. It sounds as if it could repeat the phenomenal commercial success of "Rumours," which made the present Fleetwood Mac lineup into a supergroup several years ago and went on to become one of the best-selling pop-rock albums of all time.

It also sounds a lot like a tinkly, trebly musical wind-up toy. The group's experienced rhythm section and founders, Mick Fleetwood (drums) and John McVie (bass), lock into step so perfectly that they seem to go puttering along on their own momentum. And the dabs of glockenspiel, vibraphone and chiming guitars and stacks of sighing vocal harmonies float so ethereally that one has to remind oneself that there originally was a human agency behind them.

Yet human agencies are precisely what separates Fleetwood Mac from its competition. Lindsey Buckingham, one of the group's three singer-songwriters and the album's chief producer, has always had a quirky voice (high-pitched, like so much of the rest of "Mirage"), and a quirkier knack for worshiping and subverting pop conventions at the same time. Stevie Nicks, whose voice is so trebly it can sound positively adenoidal, has a penchant for soft-focus, quasi-mystical hippie-airhead imagery that's certainly individual, if not very deep, and Christine McVie, the most mature and consistently satisfying of the band's frontpersons, brings a simple, bluesy elegance to everything she writes and sings.

That puttering rhythm section has personality, too; closer listening reveals its tick-tock patterns to be the fruits of a seasoned, tersely eloquent ensemble style that recalls, if only distantly, Fleetwood Mac's roots in the British blues revival of the 1960's.

Couple of Former Couples

The ostensible subject of most Fleetwood Mac songs is the romantic entanglements and disentanglements of the group's five members. The bassist John and singer-keyboard player Christine McVie used to be married but aren't anymore, and Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were a couple whose romance hit the skids after they joined Fleetwood Mac and hit the big-time. Most of the 12 new songs on "Mirage" relate to these romantic ups and downs in one way or another, but increasingly the band's real subject seems to be pop music itself, and particularly the way pop music sounds.

Mr. Buckingham's corny lyrics for his "Book of Love" take a back seat to his ravishing vocal harmonies, which constitute an overt homage to the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. There are so many Stevie Nicks vocals overdubbed on her "That's Alright" that the somewhat unfocused words seem to evaporate like smoke; the song's feeling of loss is communicated more by the singer's inflections than by anything she says. Only in Christine McVie's "Love in Store" and "Hold Me" do the simple emotions expressed in the words and the artful arching simplicity of the melodies and arrangements successfully complement each other.

But these are quibbles. The wind-up-toy sound of "Mirage" clearly has seduced the nation's pop listeners. Like this summer's most successful movies, the album is pure escapist entertainment. But the music has been so cleverly crafted, and polished to such a mesmerizing high-gloss sheen, that by the time one notices that nothing much is being said, it's too late.

[michelej1]

Boston Globe, August 8, 1982

Section: ARTS/ FILMS

RECORD / REVIEW WHILE FLEETWOOD GROWS STALE, CS&N ADD BREATH OF FRESH AIR, by Steve Morse Globe Staff

The beat of the music industry used to slow down in the summer. Most major albums were released in the spring - when it was believed college students would spend money to celebrate the end of school - and in the fall, as a buying lure for the Christmas season.

But that psychology has changed. Many bands no longer want to get caught in the crunch of the spring and fall release periods, so with increasing frequency they're putting out records during the dog days of summer.

This has been the biggest summer of superstar albums in years. Some of them have been live albums - the Rolling Stones' lukewarm "Still Life" and Genesis' ambitious "Three Sides Live" - and some have been greatest hits packages with a few new songs thrown in, such as Stevie Wonder's exultant "Musiquarium."

Superstar solo artists have been busy: The Who's Pete Townshend has released his superb "All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes," Elvis Costello has shown a new, mature side in "Imperial Bedroom," and Robert Plant has creatively expanded upon his Led Zeppelin legacy in his fine "Pictures at Eleven" LP.

Much of the superstar focus has come from California. Two veterans of the 60s, Fleetwood Mac and Crosby, Stills & Nash, who both have been based in Los Angeles, have led the way with long-awaited albums.

Since Fleetwood Mac dominated the pop charts during the late 70s, while Crosby, Stills & Nash were floundering, the natural assumption would be to think Fleetwood's album would be the more compelling of the two. Not true.

Fleetwood has retreated from the experimentalism of its monolithic "Tusk" album (made at a preposterously high cost of $1 million two years ago) and come back into a mainstream pop mold, but its new record, "Mirages," is lacking in energy and nerve. It is a pleasant, but slight work.

On the other hand, Crosby, Stills & Nash's "Daylight Again" is just that - a luminous breath of fresh air that restores the power of their fabled harmony singing and also has a depth of lyrical insight that leaves the often frothy doggerel of "Mirages" far behind.

First, the Mac album. It is not that "Mirages" is hideous. It just never rises above an uncourageous easy-listening level; virtually every song lopes at a mid-tempo pace and is saddled with a sappy, electronically processed production. Emotional highs are absent, and the listener is left mostly with nice, professional exercises in how to write and arrange mild pop songs.

There are no real rock tunes on the album - none of the punch of their 16- million-selling "Rumours" LP from 1977 - and the couple that pretend to be, "Empire State" (yet another unnecessary song about New York) and "Eyes of the World" are derivative. The former even cops a bad Cheap Trick imitation (singer Lindsey Buckingham trying to sound like Robin Zander and breathily curling his phrases, so the word "late" becomes lay-ee-yay-ee-ate"), while the latter is not only incoherent ("Monday's children are filled with face/ Tuesday's children are filled with grace . . . huh?) even finds Buckingham straining to cop Bruce Springsteen's raspy vocals on the verses.

"Eyes of the World," which also borrows some baroque Pachelbel canon riffs, finally has some electric guitar lines toward the end of it. They're the only electric guitar lines that penetrate on the album, since the few others (such as a lame, noodling solo on "Empire State") are brief and curiously undermiked.

The mystery is that during Fleetwood's last tour, Buckingham made a point of playing - overplaying, for that matter - electric guitar. He strove to give off a rock 'n' roll impression, and yet "Mirages" comes off as nothing so much as a parlor rock, or lounge rock, record.

The problem appears to be Buckingham. As the chief producer of the record, he makes it sound like one of his solo LPs - plenty of acoustic guitar fillips and catchy, cute touches, but no guts. With him at the helm, this just doesn't seem to be a band that cares about rock 'n' roll anymore. Even drummer Mick Fleetwood, who once propeled the Mac and wouldn't allow for the dissolution of energy seen here, is sedate and metronomic. One longs to at least hear some of the African influences he picked up during the making of his outstanding "The Visitor" LP (recorded in Ghana last year and inexcusably overlooked by radio programmers), but one hunts in vain.

Some high-minded critics are already saying that "Mirages" represents the best of "Rumours" and "Tusk," but I just don't see it. There are traces of the slow songs on "Rumours" (especially by the reliable Christine McVie, who again intones a pair of sincere, soft-candlelight love ballads), but otherwise it sounds much more contrived. And as for the experimentalism of "Tusk" (a remarkable tour de force, though it bombed by Mac standards - only 4 million sold), that LP contained more originality than anything on the safe "Mirages."

Thankfully, Stevie Nicks sounds lighter and less pompous than on her overrated solo LP, "Belladonna," but she's lost some of her old exotic witchiness and sounds like a striving English major singing Shelleyesque romantic lines like, "The dream is not over/The dream is just away/And you will fly like some little wing straight back to the sun . . . Ah, in the gleam of my shadow in a gleam/He remembers how good it can be."

Lovers of quiet, sentimental pop will likely enjoy this album, but its hushed, sugary textures makes it seem like the Mac has been leading an hermetically sealed existence. (Which in a sense is true, because the band recorded the album in the plush, rural Le Chateau in Herouville, France.)

The band must be getting lazy, because they've left too much to Buckingham, who outwits himself. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of pop (his "Book of Love" is an obvious lift from the same title of the 1958 Monotones hit) and his "Oh Diane" is a chortling rewrite of Frankie Lymon's "Teenager in Love," but these add up to mere pleasantries. And one expects more from the Mac than pleasantries.

[daniellaaarisen]

These are very interesting. Thanks for posting!

[David]

Fun reading -- & kind of surprising to find some of Mac's biggest fans among reviewers (like Steve Morse & Robert Palmer) rating Mirage only a ho-hum.

[aleuzzi]

From this sampling, all but one reviewer considered Christine's contributions to be excellent. And even that exception was not harsh.


I agree with the last review posted that FM needed to rock out more fully on Mirage...but I still love half of the songs very much.

[michelej1]

Drop Off in Sales

New York Times, August 14, 1982

"It's the 1980's, and the cream is definitely off the top of the business," said Irving Azoff, manager of some of the biggest rock stars. Back in the 70's, five of Mr. Azoff's clients, the Eagles, sold 15 million copies of their "Hotel California" album and broke attendance records across the country. He also manages members of Fleetwood Mac, whose "Rumours" album almost matched the Eagles' sales.

Now the Eagles have disbanded, and the band's members are pursuing solo careers, with varying degrees of success. Fleetwood Mac has another No. 1 album, "Mirage," but sales are in such a slump that it is unlikely to achieve more than a fraction of the sales of "Rumours." While the group is going on the road this month, it will not be raking in the money at stadium concerts and outdoor festivals.

"Fleetwood Mac only had offers to do two outdoor shows in the whole country," according to Mr. Azoff. "One was in a town that doesn't have a large indoor arena; the other was the Us Festival, which is scheduled to take place Labor Day weekend in San Bernardino County in California and is going to be the summer's only really big festival. There's a very good reason why groups like Fleetwood Mac aren't doing more stadium shows - the kids aren't buying tickets."

[David]

Originally Posted by michelej1

Fleetwood Mac has another No. 1 album, "Mirage," but sales are in such a slump that it is unlikely to achieve more than a fraction of the sales of "Rumours." While the group is going on the road this month, it will not be raking in the money at stadium concerts and outdoor festivals.

"Fleetwood Mac only had offers to do two outdoor shows in the whole country," according to Mr. Azoff. "One was in a town that doesn't have a large indoor arena; the other was the Us Festival, which is scheduled to take place Labor Day weekend in San Bernardino County in California and is going to be the summer's only really big festival. There's a very good reason why groups like Fleetwood Mac aren't doing more stadium shows - the kids aren't buying tickets."

I don't think they played any stadiums in the United States on the Tusk tour, either.

And didn't they do three or four outdoor festivals on the 1982 tour? There was the one in Florida in early September (with John Mellencamp & Loverboy on the bill) . . . . I mean, the band toured September & October -- those aren't traditional outdoor festival months like July & August.