oh shut up sharon...
 

anyone have the demo where stevie says this? I don't believe I've ever heard it. danke!!!

I think thats from the Castaway reel, but I can't remember for sure. :shrug:

Yeah, I think that's the one where Stevie says "We were singing good, we were playing good. Don't rain on our parade Tom".

I don't have this (I don't think), but I like the 24 Karat Gold demo where she tells Lindsey to shut up.

Yep. There goes coked out Stevie stretching the truth again. Her vocal "performance" (if you can call it that) on that demo is abysmal. Who was she kidding? Singing good?!? Playing good?!?!? Whoever was playing the Casio that night was more stoned than Stevie. Oy, that demo just runs on and on and on.

Poor Stevie.

here you go!
 

I knew I had heard that "Shut up Sharon" in a demo, but I wouldn't have known where to look if you hadn't mentioned "Castaway". It is almost unbearable to listen to that drum machine, but I am a sucker for the candid Stevie Chatter - I guess that's why I kept these demos.

http://s22.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=1...N227D221FKCLT8

That's why I like them too. But yes, the drum machine is awful. :distress:

:laugh: Ooh that's funny ...

That's Stevie herself. Could be a prerecorded track, though.

This is the demo that everyone said, "Oh, Tom must be Tom Petty!" But it's bass player Tom from Buckingham Nicks days.

me too - I'm not a big fan of this demo, but I love to hear Stevie's little banter

and THANK YOU

I have to give credit where credit is due- Stevie must have some massive balls if she had the nerve to submit demos like this one to Fleetwood Mac for album consideration. I'm not sure if she did- however, the conflicting "Tom Moncrieff helped with demos" vs. the "Christine McVie claims that most of what Stevie writes is 'rubbish'" leaves the question open for me.

I know that Stevie always talks about giving over the skeleton of an idea to the likes of Lindsey- but how much of a skeleton? If I was a member of FM at the time I would have howled at this demo of "Castaway".

it's funny you say that because I was watching Destiny Rules the other day and I found it interesting that when Stevie came in with her 4 new songs, when she played them for the band, they actually sounded fairly complete. I wonder how she gets them that far before going in front of FM.

I know that these days she works with Al Ortiz on some stuff. Maybe he helped her out. She did "produce" (if you can call it that) "Bombay Sapphires" from TISL, so maybe after thirty years she's got some engineering skills down. :shrug:

LOL. This is true.

Your second sig picture -- I LOVE IT!

:lol:

Stevie's not a musician like Lindsey and Christine though, so I imagine the rest of Fleetwood Mac never really expected her demos to sound anything more than exactly that... a fairly bare-bones track demonstrating the melody, lyrics and general feel of the song.

I think the "rubbish" demos Christine was referring to, are the ones that most of us generally consider to be rubbish, too. The ones that seem to have no real melody or true inspiration. And there's a lot of those.
My theory on those particular demos though, is that Stevie was just doing a stream of consciousness kind of thing, in order to go back through later and pick out anything usable. That's why those demos sound like they were recorded at home, with just her, a piano and a metronome.

Considering she still pounds on the piano as badly as she did 30 years ago, I wouldn't bet money on that.

That's why those demos sound like they were recorded at home, with just her, a piano and a monotone.

Ooh, Truman Capote, look out! ;)

Me neither, there's no way she knows how to manage any of those levers and such. However, I'm sure by now she can communicate very well what she wants to the people that can do this. This is a woman who has her assistant work her VCR (hopefully DVD player by now), does not drive, and says she dislikes technology. Why can't I find people to take care of me like that? :lol: She sure is a diva!

Well, there is a difference between this "Castaway" demo and, let's say, the "Sisters of the Moon" piano demo where Stevie says at the end, "Weird, huh?". It is possible to have quality bare bones demos- even if said artist isn't that great of a musician. Light guitar strumming and/or simple chord progressions are much better than the hideous drum machine and clunky Casio playing that's heard on "Castaway".

My overall question/point was- I wonder if she ever submitted demos of this quality to FM? Sooooo.....

This would infer that the answer to my question would be "yes".

If Stevie ever thought that there would be anything usable from such gems as "Night Gallery" and "Ooh Ooh Baby", then she was more coked out then I ever could have imagined.

It sounds to me like Stevie herself is playing the Casio. Do you think? Sounds like the way she plays from what I've heard.

I don't understand.
I think the other Fleetwood Macsters, when hearing a Stevie demo for a new FM album, were generally just listening for the lead vocal: where it went, how it wended its way there, was there a decent hook, did it give the sense of something that could be expanded on with vocal harmonies, was there something interesting in the words like a good story or a clever or cute chorus, etc. etc.

If you're fairly good at conceptualizing musical arrangements for pop songs, like Lindsey, you get to the point where you can do it fairly quickly in your head while you're hearing the rough draft or the demo. It just happens if you think in musical terms of blocking & structure & track composition. Ideas will occur to you automatically, & you'll be able to process enough of them quickly enough (in the space of a 5-minute demo---played through two or three times) so that you can say at the end of it all whether the band should attempt to record it.

Christine would give the band something like the Everywhere demo (I think it's the only demo I've heard by Chris from the FM days), & some of that musicality is already there: the structure, the style, even the tempo. So some of your mental work is unnecessary. But that's not to say that ten months down the line, full-band tracks weren't scrapped & tried again from different angles. We kinda hear that with all the "Isn't It Midnight" stuff.

The same kind of thing happens in amateur bands that play originals. Even though they're not necessarily recording, they're all still arranging something from its chord-&-lyrics state to something the whole band helps support. It's musical ideation, with each member stepping up to the plate & contributing with specific decisions as to tempo, style, dynamics, etc., because all of that is created by each member's part (whether it's piano or lead vocal or bass or drums).

By hiring a band (or by recruiting musician friends).

She didn't record those in their entirety by herself.

I've never been coked out but still think they're both unused gems, that needed some work, but the concepts of both are powerful.

Romy

It is possible that they weren't formally submitted though. Christine and Stevie were close in the '70s and lived together briefly, so it's possible that Christine heard them outside of the band environment.

I bet when she sits at the board with a wise elder beside her, she can turn knobs just like Lindsey can (although her ear isn't as good as his ear is -- or was). There's no reason why she can't adjust EQ & gain & effects & so on.

But if you were to literally sit her down at the board by herself, I doubt she'd know what to do. I doubt she could even get the power on.

Plus, it seems doubtful that she can arrange (i.e., compose & in many cases notate the varied collection of individual tracks from all instruments) a complete track.

I've always been very curious as to exactly what she knows and what she doesn't know how to do.
She's had a few co-production credits on various songs over the years, and a few remixing credits ("Fireflies" and "The Nightmare")... so I wonder what makes these particular songs different from, say, a situation where she just says, "Rupert, I wanna little more echo on my vocals, please."

Yes I think you're right. The bulk of all those--what we are pleased to call "demos"--are probably just tapes & tapes & tapes of her song ideas, akin to her pages & pages of journals.

If you have a recording device set up right on top of your digital piano & a drum machine on the other side of your piano, it's pretty natural that you turn it all on whenever you start playing & singing stuff from your journal that you're working on. You tape everything. That's I think what we're hearing--much of it in her house (although a lot of it is in proper recording studios, too, with other people present).

The concept that Stevie had Tom there to help her leads me to believe that she took the time to submit semi-finished demos (such as the Cleaning Lady demo), whereas the Christine comment about rubbish leads me to believe that Stevie may have submitted extremely subpar metronome/drum machine, clunky piano playing, poorly sung material. They conflict. Or perhaps, she submitted both types of demos.

Yes, my band wrote music on this level sometimes. Bands like REM and U2 write with the style of building a song from the ground up and seeing where it ends up. However, because of Stevie's relationship with both Christine and Lindsey, I believe that she wrote the basic concepts, melodies and progressions on her own. And with that relationship from that time period in mind, I find it interesting that she might have submitted subpar demos to them all the while knowing that they might trash her for her poor musicianship and/or spacey lyrics and ideas.

I have piles of cassettes at home with these kinds things on them. However, I would never play them for anyone. Anything I submitted to my band was either demoed live or recorded as a very clean version. Are we to assume that all these subpar things were just one-off's that someone stole from her or is it possible that some of these recordings were submitted to the band?

Ah, I see what you're saying. Hmm...I don't know. From the psychological point of view, it's easier to believe that Stevie did not submit all the looser stuff to Fleetwood Mac because she would have been self-conscious about it & leery of being insulted.
Yes I'll have to agree with this possibility. I think it highly likely that the material she brought in for Fleetwood was as top-notch as she could make it at the time--except for anything she happened to write *in* the studio.

From '84 to '87 she may have slapped them some sloppy demos. But I think she is too concerned about what FM would think of her music to do this while in her right mind. I think the stuff we are hearing was never meant to be public. Its just rough stuff to play around with, like the journal analogy used earlier.

No wonder she doesn't want this sh*t circulating, people are going to trash her (which has been done here by her die hard fans). It's like an artist submitting a sketch for a drawing that may be terrible until you've seen the finished product. I'm all for demos but I can definitely see why she would not want this stuff to get out. So much of it is what Johnny Stew said - just ideas and concepts in her head and her f*ucking around with them. If people judge her musicianship based on this it's really an unfair assessment.

Nor was that the first time the band had ever heard those songs. :o Perhaps it might be the first time John heard them and maybe even Mick but the producer? He probably heard them in earlier versions.

But constructive criticizm is an important part of every writers process. As a writer she should be used to people telling her they don't like something and not take it as personally as some of her fans do. Otherwise demos like "Old Fashioned" might have been released. I don't think these raw demos can be judged on production or vocal performance. Basically they can and should be judged on the lyrics and melody. Without having those two things as a strong starting off point, why bother taking a song any further?

I've always wondered about Stevie's participation as well. I actually submitted a question somewhere along these lines to the Nicks Fix a month or so ago.

I remember her saying the 'skeleton' thing as well, though she is credited as the sole songwriter for most of her songs despite their clearly being a combination of some other things. I've always wondered how much (especially in the BuckinghamNicks era) Stevie and Lindsey collaborated--being as it seems that Stevie lacks that 'musician' element that really helps to define some of her songs (ie the Rhiannon riff, the Landslide guitar arrangement)--where does production begin and when would it affect who gets credit (& subsequent royalties) from songwriting?

Dang that was painful. The best part was when she was talking, not singing.

I just want to point out that the "Rhiannon" riff does seem to be Stevie's own invention... it's exactly what she plays in all of the various piano demos floating around out there... just translated by Lindsey to a guitar part instead.
Same thing with his guitar riff from "Sisters Of The Moon"... it's the hook from Stevie's own piano demo.

Lindsey essentially fleshes out Stevie's songs, building on the original melody, arranging them, editing them, and so forth. It's really what he does/did for Christine's songs, too.

^^^

and in many ways, they all helped LB in the production of many of his songs as well mand no matter how much LB tinkered with them on his own. No one plays piano quite like CM - same for John and Mick on their instruments. Similarly, no one can harmonize or tuen a phrase quite like La Nicks. A goiod example is the lyric she gave CM for Oh Daddy ("And I can't walk away from you, baby - If I tried" wasn't that it? ) and she got no writing credit on that song -- So, I think from the beginning, they all realized each had their own charm.

Correct Superman, that would be the line!

Someone has been listening to their Rumours DVD audio...:wavey: