Montreal Gazette Article on FM

[michelej1]

[Mostly its all from that one press conference, but some additional stuff]

http://www2.canada.com/montrealgazet...tml?id=1410512

Fleetwood Mac a perpetual work in progress
The 1970s super group is on the move again with a tour that began March 1 and rolls into Montreal on Wednesday
Bernard Perusse, The Gazette
Published: Friday, March 20, 2009

Assessing the magnitude of Fleetwood Mac's popularity during the group's late-'70s heyday is impossible by 2009 standards. Too much about the music business has changed.

Take the group's double-LP opus Tusk, which sold 4 million copies in 1979 and was still considered a commercial disappointment. Similar figures for Duffy's Rockferry and Leona Lewis's Spirit last year landed both albums among the year's top sellers.

But unlike now, the music biz was booming in 1979: If you wanted to own the songs, you pretty much had to plunk down your cash. Home taping did not weaken sales like illegal downloading does now. That's one reason why 4 million – though impressive for a then-pricey, artistically daring double album – could fall short of expectations for a Fleetwood Mac album.

More telling is the context of Tusk's release: it was the follow-up to the group's 1977 album Rumours, which has sold 30 million copies worldwide. That's roughly a quarter of Fleetwood Mac's total career catalogue sales.

The sheer ubiquitous quality of Rumours – which is due to be reissued soon in a deluxe CD/DVD package – and the hit singles it spawned is hard to imagine in today's fragmented music world. After its release, you couldn't escape it. Rock 'n' rollers aligning themselves with the emerging punk sounds of that year were none too impressed, either: the album seemed to take the lush, hook-filled, radio-friendly pop of its 1975 career-reviving predecessor, Fleetwood Mac, a giant leap into the mainstream. Rumours seemed to find its way into the record collections of people who didn't even like music.

It was that big.

Part of it was the ongoing soap opera involving the group members: keyboard player Christine McVie and bassist John McVie were divorced during the recording sessions, while guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks were also ending a romantic relationship. Even founder Mick Fleetwood had split with his wife, Jenny. All that tension was reflected in the album's songs.

Not that plain old '70s chemical excess wasn't a factor in the mystique, too.

As writer Parke Puterbaugh put it, the group's "triumphs and travails mirrored the moods and mores of the ‘me decade': the impulsiveness and fun, on the one hand, and the emotional and physical wreckage of an unfettered lifestyle, on the other. It all added up to something that might best be described as sunny angst."

As Fleetwood Mac promoted its latest tour last month, the four members – Christine McVie has skipped all reunions since her departure in 1998 – sat for a conference call with several North American media outlets, including The Gazette. During the band's lengthy exchange with music writers, Buckingham considered the impact of Rumours.

"I don't believe we felt the songs on Rumours were so starkly autobiographical," Buckingham said. "It was really only (with) the kind of Rorschach that came with the audience recognizing something that maybe we didn't (that we noticed) a pretty unusual circumstance: three writers cross-dialoguing to each other. The whole idea of tabloidism, the musical soap opera aspect, was to some degree revealed to us by our audience after the fact."

Dynamics, personality conflicts and emotional baggage are still never far from the surface when it comes to Fleetwood Mac projects. Destiny Rules, a fascinating fly-on-the-wall documentary released in 2004, chronicled the minefield that was the recording of Say You Will the previous year. The film illustrated how delicate the balance is – particularly when it comes to Buckingham and Nicks.

To this day, a Fleetwood Mac press conference comes off as the Lindsey and Stevie show. Although Fleetwood and John McVie are the group's namesakes and co-founders, most questions tend to be aimed at the two songwriters.

"You wouldn't think it would be possible all these years later, but (the group) is still to some degree a work in progress, in terms of how we all interact as people," Buckingham said.

During the 95-minute conference call, John McVie said virtually nothing, but Buckingham, Nicks and Fleetwood repeatedly made the point that without a new album to record and promote – and nothing in the works – it has been easier to bypass the dynamics and have fun focusing on the back catalogue. By all accounts, the shows on this tour, which began March 1, are fully loaded with fan favourites.

"It's about getting out and playing the obvious ones – Dreams, Go Your Own Way, Don't Stop – but then we are finding songs as we go along that we feel are special songs that maybe aren't considered the massive, massive hits, but are truly emotionally connected to Fleetwood Mac," Fleetwood said.

For Nicks, the tour is also working because her one-time boyfriend and the group's most vital creative force is up for it.

"Lindsey has been in incredibly good humour since we started rehearsals," she said. "And when Lindsey is in a good humour, everybody is in a good humour. When he's happy, everybody is happy."

Like Buckingham, Nicks has also pursued a solo career, but said she has learned to be a team player when it comes to Fleetwood Mac.

"Being in a band, you're not the boss," she said. "I have gone back and forth about it in my head: Do I like not being the boss? I've decided that I really actually do like being the boss, but I've been in Fleetwood Mac so long that I understand how not to be the boss."

At one time, Nicks drew support from a camaraderie with Christine McVie, but she said she has had 11 years to settle into her role as the group's only woman.

"There's not a day that goes by that I don't wish she'd call up and say ‘I'm back,' but she's not going to," Nicks said. "We've all accepted that now."

At one point, Sheryl Crow was mooted as a full-time member. In fact, the singer announced last year that she was joining. Nicks said the deal fell through when Crow was unable to attend a rehearsal because of a Mother's Day party. Crow made her own decision to pass, Nicks said.

"We really realized that there wasn't going to be another woman to come in this band that was going to fix our problems," Nicks said. "Lindsey and I don't need a buffer. If we can't work out our problems by ourselves, we might as well throw in the towel."

But there's very little danger of that, Buckingham suggested.

"The members don't necessarily have any business being in a band together because the range of sensibilities is disparate," he said. "But that's, in fact, what makes Fleetwood Mac what it is: it's the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. It's the kind of energy that is created from that kind of contrast in personalities."

The conflicts that arose during the Rumours days were for the greater good, it seems.

"We saw that we had this destiny and we saw that we had to rise above the personal difficulties," Buckingham said. "And we saw that the music could have redemptive power for us and could be a symbol of that for other people.

"The whole struggle had a meaning to it that is symbolic of what music can be."


Fleetwood Mac performs Wednesday, March 25, at 8 p.m. at the Bell Centre. Tickets cost $49.50 to $149.50. Phone 514-790-2525 or go to www.geg.ca.

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