Mojo magazine says Rumours reissue January 2013 - with Rosebud DVD

[EnchantedKiwi]

Just finished listening to the entire reissue. It was so worth it Stevie's demo of The Chain is probably my favourite. Also awesome seeing Rosebud in such high quality

[mylittledemon]

^I still haven't even seen the issue for sale here in Welly. *grumble mumble*

[mike_nh]

If i'm not mistaken wasen't rosebud made for tv so at the most it would be 45 min long? not sure if i want to spend $90 on music i already own and a bunch of outtakes i'll only listen to once and a 45min dvd.

[michelej1]

Fleetwood Mac: Rumour has it
By Scott Kara scottkara, New Zealand Herald
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainm...ectid=10861408


7:00 AM Saturday Jan 26, 2013

Out of the pain of love turned sour came an album that has entranced the world for 35 years, writes Scott Kara

Mick Fleetwood was perhaps in the best position to see how rock 'n' roll's most famous soap opera unfolded during the writing and recording of Rumours.

He was, as he explains in his dapper and chatty drawl on the phone from his home on the island of Maui in Hawaii, the only one in the group not in a relationship with one of their bandmates.

You see, in 1976, following the breakthrough success of Fleetwood Mac from the previous year, it turned sour on a personal level. Bass player John McVie and his keyboard-playing wife Christine's marriage ended, and guitarist/singer Lindsey Buckingham and long-term girlfriend and singer Stevie Nicks also split up.

"Stevie and Lindsey were joined at the hip," remembers Fleetwood, "but that came undone, and I was the only one vaguely spared the day-to-day reality of having to be with your partner, but not be with your partner, because my wife wasn't in the band."

Although, around this time, Fleetwood's marriage to his first wife Jenny - they have been married and divorced twice - was also on the rocks and, just to add to the drama, on the world tour for Rumours he and Nicks started having an affair while in New Zealand.



"It was unbelievable that all five members had broken up at the same time with their significant others and that's how we went in to make that album. So it's a very memorable period in all our lives," he remembers with a laugh.

So if you combine the emotional turmoil with the amount of drug and alcohol excess that was going on - which they could now afford with the windfall provided by Fleetwood Mac's four-million-or-so sales - it sounded like it must have been a wild and turbulent time.

Not so, says Fleetwood.

"It was obviously an incredibly difficult album to make with everyone in the band desperately unhappy, but not in a nasty way - just emotionally, with all the break-ups of the marriages and the relationships."

The 65-year-old has told the "well-worn story" of Rumours many times, yet he's keen to explain his reasoning behind why, given all the obstacles, it turned out so damn well. Because as pop-rock albums go, they don't get much more famous than Rumours, and thanks to songs such as Buckingham's Go Your Own Way and the oddly seductive sadness and dancey lope of Nicks' Dreams, it is one of the top 10 best-selling albums of all time, with 40 million copies sold.

"The great part of it is that we were so dedicated to our musical focus, having come off making Fleetwood Mac, which, for us, did really, really well. We never had anything vaguely like that happen to us, even back in the day in England. We knew that we had a very exciting musical opportunity to keep going forward, so we did it against seemingly hopeless odds, and without strangling each other," he laughs.

"But it was definitely not an unpleasant and nasty thing, it was just incredibly thought-provoking and incredibly sad. We were all very vulnerable and I think having been in that position, the album became a chronicle of that dynamic that I've been trying to describe, which was incredible emotive sadness. A sense of, 'Could these people get back together?'

"So all we had was the music that we played, and that was how everyone communicated."

If your old vinyl copy is a little worse for wear, the 35th anniversary reissue was released in New Zealand this week - and the super deluxe edition is quite a package, with five discs, including the remastered album, a 1977 live set, two discs of rarities, a DVD of The Rosebud Film about the making of the record, and a vinyl copy of the album. It also comes in a three-disc deluxe edition and a standard release of just the remastered album.

Admittedly, the band's more accessible direction was ushered in on 1975's Fleetwood Mac, the first album to feature the poppier songwriting bent of Americans Buckingham and Nicks with the latter's Rhiannon a brooding and gutsy highlight.

But for Fleetwood it was Rumours that truly took the group from hard-rockin' British blues band to mainstream pop-rock mega stars - and, 35 years on, he reckons it stands up well.

"I really like the album," he says simply. "And the other part of it, which was a blessing, is when we crafted that album, as artists, players and musicians and the sensibilities that we had, we didn't get caught up in the latest gizmo stylings of recording."

Because rather than relying on the musical gimmicks many artists were using in the late 70s, such as drum machines and "obscene sound effects and certain types of echo that really dates music", Fleetwood Mac kept it real and pure.

"We produced it ourselves and we didn't have some whizz-kid producer who came in and said, 'Well, this is the sound that's hitting the radio these days ...' We so weren't in that world, thankfully, and I think you really can't tell when Rumours was made and it makes that album sonically honest. It's just a straight-ahead, really well-recorded album."

Fleetwood says the change to a poppier sound for Fleetwood Mac and Rumours was not that dramatic, because the band had already been through a number of different incarnations since starting out in London in 1967 when he and original guitarist Peter Green teamed up. There was the initial "straight-ahead blues" period, and then when Green left in the early 70s, he was replaced by Bob Welch who helped the band move in a more melodic direction. So Buckingham and Nicks joining was a natural and welcome progression.

"We weren't really aware of making that transition, we drifted into it in a very organic, normal way. Certainly, someone who picked up a Fleetwood Mac album five years before might have thought, 'Oh my God, what happened to them? This is all harmonies and melodies and not the blood-and-guts band I remember.' I'm sure that did happen to certain listeners.

"But for us it was really quite normal and gradual."

With his long, lean, 2m-plus frame and his ever-present beard, Fleetwood is arguably the most recognisable of the band, alongside Nicks and her big blonde hairdo. He's also been the cover star on many of the band's albums, starting with 1968 albums Mr Wonderful and English Rose, for which he was dressed in drag.

"Those were the start of using the creature known as Mick as an icon thing," he says.

On the Rumours cover he is posing, seemingly, rather romantically with Nicks - until you spy a pair of wooden balls ("my balls", he calls them) hanging strategically below his crotch.

The balls were a gimmick he has used right from the early days of the band and to this day he never walks on stage without them hanging off his trousers.

"I was never really a very clever drummer, so I would get up from the drums and do a ball solo. I'd grab my balls and start whacking them on the microphone. And one thing led to another," he laughs.

To be honest, Fleetwood - a self-confessed "nut" - got up to all sorts of other shenanigans on stage and off, which included flashing and showing off various parts of his anatomy... but then that's a whole other story.

Who: Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood
What: The band's 1977 album Rumours reissued 35 years on
On tour: Fleetwood says the band is looking to return to New Zealand at the end of the year or early 2014.

- TimeOut

[michelej1]

The Scotsman
http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/mu...lbum-1-2759984

By STUART BATHGATE
Published on Saturday 26 January 2013 00:00

It’s 35 years since the release of Rumours, but will yet another version add anything to the classic, asks Stuart Bathgate, or are reissues just a cynical ploy by record companies to capitalise on our memories?

YOU bought the record. You’ve got the CD. Perhaps, in the early days of the Walkman, you also had it on tape. All in all, you might well reckon you’ve done your bit by Rumours, Fleetwood Mac’s classic 1977 album. Bought it, bought it again, bought it a third time and given at least two versions to the charity shop.

Ah, but you don’t have the expanded or the deluxe 35th anniversary edition, do you? And you want them, don’t you? Or at least, that’s what the band and their record company hope.

More than 40 million copies of Rumours, in its various guises, have been sold to date, and now the aim is to shift a few more when those two new versions are released on Monday. Which, incidentally, as you may have noticed, is almost a month after the 35th anniversary ended. They always did take their time getting projects finished, Fleetwood Mac, and this one has been no different.

The expanded version consists of three CDs: the original album (with the additional track Silver Springs, which has been on most previous reissues), a dozen live recordings from the band’s 1977 world tour and a disc of previously unreleased out-takes from the Rumours sessions. The deluxe edition boasts all that and more: a DVD documentary about the album, another disc of out-takes (many of which were on the extra CD which came with the special 30th-anniversary edition) and the album on vinyl.

The cost? Needless to say, that’s also expanded. A modest £15.49 is the full price for the cheaper of the new releases, although it is already widely on sale at £12. The deluxe is £61.99 here, and just two cents short of $100 in the USA (although, again, an online search will turn up a better deal).

Remember, that does not include the price of the display case and stand you’ll need to show it off to best effect once you get it home. Or the cost of the duster and polish you’ll need to keep the display case and stand nice and shiny.

Because there’s a feeling, is there not, that when it comes to these luxurious reissues, it’s not about the music any more? That it’s more about paying homage to the greatness of the original with hard cash? Or perhaps simply paying homage to your own memories?

And in the case of Rumours, those memories still have the power to move. Memories of hearing Songbird for the first time as a 16-year-old at school and in love with a girl called Kim, in the case of this jaundiced reporter. So many memories for millions of us now in middle age.

The key element of Rumours, the essential component of its success, was its tension between the smooth and the raw. Between the consummate professionalism of the musicianship, the tightness of the band and the desire of its five members to get out of each other’s sight.

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham had called it a day. Christine and John McVie had divorced. Mick Fleetwood’s wife had taken up with his erstwhile best friend. This was a band on the edge of a collective nervous breakdown, but they somehow held it together long enough to record Rumours, and then to embark on a world tour.

Some of the tracks are syrupy sweet. Second Hand News, for instance, jogs along jauntily, and it’s only when you listen to the lyrics that you realise this upbeat tune is about someone who has been ditched by his lover.

On Songbird it’s the other way round. Christine McVie sings of her love and commitment, but she sounds inconsolable. It’s heartrending: a song for a funeral, not a marriage. You can write off much of Rumours as merely professional pop, but the stark, unadorned beauty of Songbird transcends that description.

It’s one of the great performances by an English singer, perhaps rivalled only by Sandy Denny’s Who Knows Where The Time Goes? (on Fairport Convention’s Unhalfbricking album) and Kathleen Ferrier’s What Is Life?, the aria from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice.

Mention of Ferrier, a much-loved figure in the immediate post-war years, returns us to the theme of re-releases. As last year was the centenary of her birth, while 2013 marks 60 years since her tragically early death from cancer, there has been a significant revival of interest in her work recently.

Proving that even the demure world of classical music is not immune from commercial pressure, Decca marked the centenary by reissuing its complete Ferrier recordings in a 14-CD box set with a documentary DVD thrown in. In an echo of the new Rumours edition, some previously unreleased live recordings were included.

But the difference is that much of Ferrier’s recorded output had been hard to come by for decades. And when she performed, she gave her all, every time. During her last public appearance, the femur in her left leg fractured. She carried on singing. In contrast, the Rumours live CD is throwaway stuff. And so, quite frankly, is an overwhelming percentage of rock re-releases, with their extras and out-takes. The clue is in the name. They’re called out-takes for a reason: someone at the time decided they were not quite good enough to make the final cut.

A swift sift through a CD collection of any size will reveal a good few examples, so let’s find a couple.

Exhibit A: The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, released in 1968. The original album consisted of 15 tracks, and while there were a few standouts, there were also a couple of fillers in there. In 2004 it was re-released as a ‘special deluxe’, three-CD edition: the original stereo album (with four bonus tracks), the original mono album (with six bonus tracks) and a third disc featuring 22 ‘rarities’. That made 62 tracks in total, with only the wistful Where Did My Spring Go? adding much of value to the original 15. Mick Avory’s Underpants, to cite one dispensable track, could easily have been left in the closet. Spotty Grotty Anna, to namecheck another, need not have shown her face.

Exhibit B: The Who’s 1965 debut LP, My Generation. Billed as ‘Maximum R’n’B’ in the days when that meant hard rock, not rap, My Generation was 12 tracks of snarling, amphetamine-fuelled aggression. In 1974, when the New Musical Express first did a critics’ poll of the best 100 albums, it came in at No 22.

Three decades later, the deluxe edition had 30 tracks in all, though quite a few were merely different takes of the original songs. The snarl and aggression were not enhanced. The new stuff just got in the way.

Same goes for the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen when it was given a 25th-anniversary re-release back in 2002. The superbly splenetic original was accompanied by two dance remixes. Imagine John Lydon on stage flanked by Pinky and Perky and you’ve got an idea of how incongruous that was.

The extra material on the new editions of Rumours is in no way so crass or incongruous. But the problem is the same with this and virtually every other reissue. Nothing compares to the original.

And if you know it so well that it’s lost its lustre, listening to some second-hand old stuff won’t help you recapture it. Instead, just refrain from listening to it at all for three or four years. That should do the trick. Although, of course, doing that won’t earn the record company an extra penny.


• The 35th anniversary expanded and deluxe editions of Rumours are out on Monday.

[robert32]

Originally Posted by EnchantedKiwi

Just finished listening to the entire reissue. It was so worth it Stevie's demo of The Chain is probably my favourite. Also awesome seeing Rosebud in such high quality

Any chance of seeing some screenshots? I remember first seeing the footage on VH1 in the late nineties, but it was an awful transfer from the film. One of the horrendous examples of the footage being projected onto a wall and then captured with a video camera.

Having evidence that this is good quality footage could really sway my purchase. Shame nothing has been put on youtube.


Cheers,

Rob.

[kak125]

Groupon is selling the entire set for $59.99. This is a great deal.
http://www.groupon.com/deals/gg-flee...ource=uu802229