More Thoughts, PLS READ

[LukeA]

Originally Posted by David

It's important to make that point. The tour made a heck of a lot of money for the band & the buyers, but the band squandered a lot of that money & so the individual members apparently didn't see much. Still, let's remember that the tour brought in the biggest box office of any tour that year for venues the size of a typical sports arena, according to Billboard. Fleetwood Mac has never done that since then.

Yes. The Tusk tour was wildly successful, and one of the (if not THE) first true examples of a lengthy, fully coordinated world tour of major venues by a major band. The fact that the band spent money like they were U2 in 2010 was their own undoing.

[Villavic]

Originally Posted by David

It's important to make that point. The tour made a heck of a lot of money for the band & the buyers, but the band squandered a lot of that money & so the individual members apparently didn't see much. Still, let's remember that the tour brought in the biggest box office of any tour that year for venues the size of a typical sports arena, according to Billboard. Fleetwood Mac has never done that since then.

Mick explained so in his book:

Less man a month after the end of the Tusk tour, I realized I was in trouble with the rest of the band. The sh** hit the fan at a business meeting held to overview the Tusk tour with reference to the European leg. This turned into a vitriolic review of my behavior and management skills. The basic complaint, of course, was that we'd been on the road for eight months and hadn't made much money.

I explained that we'd undertaken this tour in order to sell a difficult record, which by that time was up to five million in sales. Yes, we'd grossed some big numbers, but our overhead was murderous. We spent a fortune on the road, running a fat ship. We decided to be comfortable, and we lost control. If Stevie wanted a hotel suite painted pink with a white piano in it, what are you gonna do? Say no? You can't do that in a Holiday Inn! Pink rooms and pianos cost real money. These were my decisions, because they had to be. There was no management company as a buffer between me and the band. To complain about anything, as musicians love to do, they had to address a band member me. People were honest with their feelings under this system, but they didn't like complaining about money. Even so, early in the tour I tried to change to cheaper hotels. All the others complained and I said the hell with it. From then on we went first-notch. We had everything.
....
Granted, some kind of split was inevitable, but it was real ugly the way it was done. It was a big meeting. Everybody was there, and all the recriminations of the past eighteen months were played out. We had been pilloried for making the most expensive record in history. Tusk had only gone to number three, where Rumours had been number one. We made no money on tour. Some money was unaccounted for.
.....
The end result was that I was off the throne. It was the democratisation of Fleetwood Mac. Ever since, we've had review by committee managers, lawyers, business managers. The Gang of Four.
I was very hurt by all this. I walked outside into my garden and just sat for a long time. Chris, John, Stevie, and Lindsey tried to make it clear that they weren't mad at me, that they considered me to have acted like an over-indulgent father. But I felt humiliated and flogged in front of my community. It was horrible. If that's what they want to do, I thought, Duck it. At that point there wasn't going to be much to manage anyway, since we were all about to devolve into solo projects for a few years....

That's why I think there were two eras during the Rumours lineup. Before and after Tusk tour.