[David]

I'm in Southern California, so that's where I saw several gigs, in December (Los Angeles & San Diego). Everything seemed sort of staid to me, & bland. A few things were interesting: some old blues numbers, & a good "Buckingham Nicks" cover, plus an excellent "Blue Letter." But I wondered what happened to all the former weirdness. From Peter Green to Danny Kirwan to Bob Welch to Lindsey Buckingham, these guys were all such nifty writers & performers because of their idiosyncrasies; & here was an incarnation of the band where nobody weird was left.

Stevie Nicks might have continued to be satisfyingly weird if she hadn't cleaned up from dope earlier that year.

Still, I looked slightly forward to hearing this incarnation record something. The two tracks on the hits album the following year were pretty bad, so I adjusted my expectations accordingly. When "Mask" finally was released, I didn't even think of Fleetwood Mac any more in terms of magical weirdness. They were just a big expensive contraption of an arena band. They had become what the punks ten years earlier had accused them of being.