Mick's 8 favourite Fleetwood Mac songs

[David]

Originally Posted by Nicks Fan

When I met Mick backstage in 2009 he claimed Lindsey said for the tour he wanted extra musicians on stage like back up singers, percussion, extra guitar players etc all so that the songs would sound as close to the records as possible. Who knows if he was telling the truth.

I believe that Mick was conveying what Lindsey felt. In interviews stretching back to his first solo album in 1981 — even to the Fleetwood Mac tour preceding that — you can hear Lindsey vent a certain frustration with what he used to call paraphrasing: transforming the character of a studio track into something that would work onstage, with messy live sound, fewer people than ideal, or even the need to program a set for momentum and vulgar energy rather than nuance or subtlety. (That’s why I spend so much time repeating myself that Lindsey’s particular character as a musician really doesn’t lend itself to arena rock — the concert history of Fleetwood Mac from 1975 to now is the history of taking the subdued, alluring stuff OUT, not putting more of it in. I even think Stevie would do better in small venues, where she could work with a broader emotional palette and not have to placate the beer-guzzling, stoned party-heads.)

You have a painstakingly crafted arrangement from a studio recording and if that song is a hit or it has some value that can be exploited in a live set (like, say, “Eyes of the World” or “World Turning”), it has to be paraphrased. The more complex its construction in the studio, the more paraphrasing it needs. Based on what Lindsey has always said, that necessity to rephrase songs differently for the live set seems to have been more confining than liberating. I’m sure he has always loved opening up and letting loose with searing solos and “yelling and screaming” (as he called it in his 1981 Innerview with Jim Ladd). But he’s also been bummed out with the live situation in Fleetwood Mac: four people, give or take an extra part here or there, to paraphrase all the voicings — and having to eliminate many of them because you’ve run out of hands or singers and nobody in the band knows how to use the prerecorded stuff so that it sounds real and not artificial. That frustration is what drove him to do what he did in 1993 for his tour. The Cradle set was intricately rehearsed and mapped out like a blueprint — they probably used guitar and vocal charts like horn charts for a jazz band (or like the charts Rickie Lee Jones and Tom Scott crafted for her amazing Pirates album).

Lindsey toured with Fleetwood for many years without getting the opportunity or the approval to do what he wanted with ambitious arrangements. Not that the others were to blame for blocking him. But imagine trying to get the 1982 band together for two or three months of serious rehearsal to plan something so sophisticated. It was probably all Mick could do to get his band into rehearsal for three weeks of facking around.