Quote:
Originally Posted by iamnotafraid
What if this were a different time? Would Lindsey and Stevie be lining up to do an episode of Fantasy Island
and The Love Boat?
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It's funny you bring up that era because this discussion got me thinking about the reputation Fleetwood Mac used to have at that time. Probably not a lot of you even know or remember this, but in the mid and late 1970s, despite the overwhelming commercial success of
Rumours, the band was widely known as having a great deal of business integrity. It wasn't just a confidence trick played on the press, either. Mac was by far the biggest band in the world that was self-managed (Mick & Seedy Mgmt), and it regularly turned down and successfully avoided the crass marketing ploys that all the other big rock bands like the Eagles and Van Halen and albums like
Saturday Night Fever and
Grease all trucked in. Music journalists used to ask Mick about the band's self-management and he always was very honest about all five of them wanting to maintain integrity: He didn't want record buyers to open a Fleetwood Mac album and find coupons for products and marketing tie-ins, like the Peter Frampton albums. (There's one little address for a fan club on the lyric insert for
Rumours, but it's totally harmless, and there was nothing on
Tusk.)
Not to say that Fleetwood Mac never gave an interview to a mass-market magazine, because we know that isn't true. But they didn't accept any offers to go from one dumb TV show to another (you can bet your life that Stevie Nicks was asked to go on
Love Boat and
Fantasy Island and all that crap), and their concerts were run like old-fashioned rock concerts (beer, pot, and tourbooks), and they didn't put their names on lines of clothing.
That reputation of the band back then was palpable and gave a lot of us fans a pleasurable buzz. The next two albums (
Tusk and
Live) were quirky and personal and maintained the band's reputation for doing exactly what it wanted to do. It was only with
Mirage that Fleetwood Mac began to seem corporate in the bad sense of capitulating to commercial considerations.