Quote:
Originally Posted by UnwindedDreams
If The Dance was a reunion of Stevie, Billy, Rick, Chris, Mick, and John playing the same set (heavy on Rumours songs), would it have had the same success as an album and tour?
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It would have been nothing. The spectacle around The Dance was pretty earth shattering at the time and the story was all around how it was the first time in 15 years that this specific incarnation of the band was playing together (live). It's hard to think now given how much media has changed, but they were EVERYWHERE in 1997. It was massive. They crossed generations - it wasn't just the boomers that got reinterested. Their kids (I was 16 when it was filmed) jumped on board. That concert was EVERYWHERE on TV that fall. In the days before social media and the internet being very usable, it was incredible how much that reunion was in your face. That tour could have gone on a lot more and likely continued to sell out across the world throughout 1998 if Christine didn't leave. And the template was surely Hell Freezes Over. The difference was with FM, you need the "couple drama" on stage to really sell it. You needed the five with their history of breakups and heartache and Stevie sleeping with Mick and Lindsey....all of that had to be there. Rick and Billy would have been blahsville as far as the soap opera aspect, not to mention their own songs with Fleetwood Mac were limited and relatively unknown. Stevie singing Silver Springs to Billy would have been beyond lame. For example, her harmonizing on GYOW while staring down Neil Finn was just...what?
The Lindsey/Stevie crap that we now lament was a huge piece of the sales pitch. Landslide with just the two of them. Silver Springs being unearthed in a legendary way and that clip of her singing to him at the end...a reunion with the 1987-90 band would have gone nowhere. Maybe if Behind the Mask was popular, but it wasn't. There's no way that reunion would have been 1/10th as successful as The Dance.