Five Tips For Saving FM (Chicago Sun Times)

[HejiraNYC]

^^I love how everyone loves to make career decisions for Fleetwood Mac, as if somehow THEY know what is best for them. After all, they deserve to control FM because, you know, they are, like, hardcore fans and stuff. Puhlease. The bottom line is that it would be impossible for FM to please everybody so, at best, they are trying to please as many people as possible. Invariably, that means appealing to the general unwashed masses whose FM collections may be limited to The Dance and one of the many greatest hits compilations. Sadly, there are not 15,000 hardcore FM fans in every major North American city. The number one rule of show business is do not be boring. And for 90% of the audience at an FM concert, that means keeping the hits flying at a decent, consistent pace. The worst feeling for any performer, especially a sober performer, is the feeling of losing an audience. When people are displeased, they vote with their feet. Literally; they get up and go to the restroom. Or you hear the loud cackling or people yelling at each other over that distracting, unfamiliar new tune that 90% of the audience did not come to hear. As evidenced by the first few dates of the SYW tour, some of the new songs went over like a fart in church, and were summarily dropped. It isn't because they were particularly bad or difficult to perform. It's simply because the audience passively voiced their disapproval. As such, we should be grateful that they are doing anything new/obscure at all in the current setlist. And I believe it is particularly ballsy, especially for an arena-level act, to perform new songs that haven't even been released commercially.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I caught a Rickie Lee Jones concert last week. Rickie, who used to play small-medium theaters, was at the City Winery- with a capacity of perhaps 250-300 people- most of whom I could tell were pretty diehard fans. It was just her and two accompanists on stage. Reviewing her previous setlists on setlist.fm, I already knew that Rickie played a different set every night. What I didn't know beforehand is that she doesn't have a setlist ! She wings it. She would start strumming some chords and once her players recognized the song, they would chime in. And when they didn't know what song she was playing, she would start humming into the mic or she would start singing without them. Or she would instruct one to take the low harmony and the other to take the melody. I could see puzzled expressions and then smiles of recognition on her guitarist's face all night. For another song, she forgot all of the guitar chords, so she sang the song acapella. It was all so off-the-cuff that, when the show came to an abrupt end and the houselights came up and recorded music started playing over the loudspeaker, the audience was so into the show that they stayed in their seats and clapped and cheered for, like, five minutes until Rickie, who had already put on a coat and hat (as if she was about to leave the building), came back and performed three more songs. I thought the show was pretty cool in the sense that it was so small, intimate and spontaneous. But on the other hand, I thought it was a bit thoughtless and perfunctory. And it is obvious why Rickie is no longer headlining bigger venues- she could never get away with this lack of professionalism on a bigger stage. But then again, this is probably who she really is- someone who has always resented the conventional rules of show business. Accordingly, from what I've read, she has always struggled financially.