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Originally Posted by EveryHour
Those of you who were fans before Tango (and had been to shows on previous tours) and went to Tango shows: How did you feel about Rick and Billy and the addition of backup musicians?
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Both struck me as somewhat nervous, maybe even unwilling, leaders of a megaband. They probably didn't have much time to adjust to the wild circumstances of joining the Fleetwood Mac juggernaut. There were things they did well:
Don't Let Me Down Again,
Go Your Own Way,
I Loved Another Woman,
Stand Back (those two forged the arrangement that is played to this day),
Seven Wonders. Other ideas they had I wasn't so crazy about
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World Turning,
The Chain,
Don't Stop (that lumbering, top-heavy arrangement has also lasted to this day).
Oddly, neither of them was able to evolve in any noticeable way in a live setting: e.g., compare Rick's playing of The Chain at the Capital Centre in October 1987 with Las Vegas in June 1990, & you'll hear virtually no difference in the riffs, the tempo, the attack or the general tone. This may have been the fault of the band in general, however. I call the 1987 tour the Digital Tour because everything went digital, & that gave a clinical dullness to the instrumentation (Mick's drums had never before sounded so bloodless & Christine's quirky keyboard presence was blunted) & the vocals, particularly the backup women. Speaking of which, there were the backup players. Oy gevalt. That was the year they all trouped out onstage for the duration of the concert -- one of the most unfortunate decisions the band's ever made, as far as I'm concerned. It was the tour that Fleetwood Mac got perilously closer to your worst MOR nightmare than it had ever been before.
Stevie herself was a different woman, but her stodgy comportment, which had only started that year, was sort of refreshing at the time, parodoxically enough. Christine was in great voice, but I wondered where that beatnik/bohemian quality of hers from years past had gone. I was sorry to see it go.
All in all, on okay big rock show (the catalog saved it) -- impersonal, not a lot of individuality & practically no idiosyncrasy -- about as far from the fey minimalism of the
Tango in the Night album as you could get. And I can't help thinking it was probably deliberate.