Klees Fleetwood Mac

In The 1980s
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-644-8
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

Out of the dozen different line-ups since Fleetwood Mac formed in 1967, there's only one incarnation that truly matters for most listeners. During their time together, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham created some of popular music's most enduring records, including 1977's Rumours. Written and recorded as multiple relationships within the band were collapsing, the landmark album became a worldwide hit that still attracts new fans. Disbanding might have been the rational response to the turmoil surrounding the making of that album, but they continued touring and recording even as tensions within the group continued to accumulate.
Although Fleetwood Mac only recorded two albums together in the 1980s, four of the five members released solo albums that brought their individual contributions to the band into focus. After the group splintered in the late-1980s, it took a request from a US President to fix it, if only temporarily. The underlying tension between the band members' individual and group efforts - the truth that they worked best together but could only do so for limited periods - continues to the present day and reflects that even more so than the 1970s, the 1980s were the pivotal decade for Fleetwood Mac.

Don Klees literally watches TV for a living. When not basking in television's glow, he enjoys debating the merits of theatre versus film with his wife, telling his kids about music from before they were born and writing about the pop culture of then and now. Don regularly contributes to Chromakey, CultureSonar, and We Are Cult as well as various anthologies, such as the David Bowie-inspired Me and the Starman. He lives in Maryland, USA.

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Klees, Don

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Chapter 2

1980: When You Build Your House

Fleetwood Mac began the 1980s with the second single from Tusk – Stevie Nicks’ ballad ‘Sara’ – ascending the charts around the world, reaching the top 10 in the United States. Inspired by the singer’s relationships with Don Henley and Mick Fleetwood, and Fleetwood’s relationship with Sara Recor, the breathtaking song was one of the few things about Tusk that listeners collectively agreed they enjoyed.

Many viewed the album as a whole as self-indulgent – a side effect of the more than 12 months and $1,000,000 spent making it. But it still contained undeniable moments of pop greatness. Presenting the work of multiple talented songwriters across an eclectic double album made comparisons to The Beatles’ White Album inevitable and plentiful. Among the album’s critics on its release, Greil Marcus offered one of the more distinctive reviews. In his ‘Real Life Rock Top Ten’ recap for 1979, in the magazine New West, Marcus described Tusk as ‘radical in its refusal of the mainstream’s limits.’ He added a radical notion of his own, suggesting that ‘Fleetwood Mac is subverting the music from the inside out, very much like one of John le Carré’s moles who – planted in the heart of the establishment – does not begin his secret campaign of sabotage and betrayal until everyone has gotten used to him and takes him for granted.’

In hindsight, the album’s initial perception as an unconventional or difficult record, was less about the music than the way audiences viewed its makers. Aside from a few outliers – mainly written by Lindsey Buckingham – the songs were no more unusual than a track like ‘World Turning’ from the 1975 Fleetwood Mac album. Considering that one of those oddities – the borderline-primal title track, featuring the University of Southern California’s marching band – ranks among the band’s biggest hits, it’s hard to credit the idea that Tusk was an intrinsically unapproachable record. At the same time, the massive popularity of Rumours had shaped public expectations of what a Fleetwood Mac album should be, and Tusk undeniably confounded those expectations.

One of the most subtle aspects of the artistry of Rumours is how perfectly sequenced it is. ‘Second Hand News,’ ‘Dreams’ and ‘Never Going Back Again’ are strikingly different from each other, but each song plays off of those around it. The shift from one to the next – not to mention the remaining tracks on side one – never feels jarring. Tusk likewise opened with a diverse group of songs, but deliberately emphasized the contrast between tracks, veering from Christine McVie’s graceful ballad ‘Over & Over’ into Buckingham’s weirdly catchy ‘The Ledge.’ Side one also featured two legitimate hits – McVie’s ‘Think About Me’ and the aforementioned ‘Sara’ – separated by Buckingham’s ‘Save Me A Place’: a piece as gentle as ‘The Ledge’ was nervy.

This contrast, which continued over the album’s next three sides, was another manifestation of Buckingham’s embrace of the musical possibilities opened up by post-punk and new wave. In a 1981 profile for music magazine BAM, the guitarist observed that while he wasn’t influenced by specific new wave artists, the general approach ‘instilled a sense of courageousness in me and solidified a lot of the ideas I had about my music.’ The shift of gears on his part was especially pronounced against the backdrop of Fleetwood Mac’s dominant place in American pop music in the late-1970s, both within and outside of the band. In the period between Rumours and Tusk, every member of the group contributed to major hits by other artists. Buckingham and Christine McVie produced and played (along with Mick Fleetwood) on former member Bob Welch’s 1977 remake of ‘Sentimental Lady,’ making the song the hit it always should’ve been. Buckingham and Rumours co-producer Richard Dashut produced Walter Egan’s ‘Magnet And Steel’ with Nicks (who happened to be Egan’s inspiration for the song) singing background vocals. Nicks also sang on Kenny Loggins’ hit ‘Whenever I Call You ‘Friend,’,’ while Mick Fleetwood and John McVie played on Warren Zevon’s ‘Werewolves Of London.’

By accepting the challenge posed by the less-mainstream music that excited him at the time, Buckingham was placing his bet on future audiences. Based on the improved stature of Tusk within Fleetwood Mac’s work over time, his bet paid off. However, before that reappraisal could take place, the band had a job to do. In February, they resumed the concert tour, which had started shortly after Tusk was released – an occasion marked by Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley declaring 10 October 1979 as Fleetwood Mac Day; the band receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

While Tusk had failed to produce a Christmas windfall for Warner Bros. Records, no one can say the band themselves didn’t do everything they could to boost the album’s fortunes, playing over 100 shows across 11 countries. According reliable accounts, as well as those of band members, the tour was a case study in rock-star excess. Fleetwood – who also managed the band at the time – described this in both of his autobiographies. But his account in the first one – Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac (1991) – is more evocative:

We ordered some of the priciest hotel suites in the world repainted in pastel shades for Stevie and Chris, and fabulous expense. The refreshment rider written into our contracts with the local promoters, provided an immense backstage buffet for an army of California gourmands, although many of us were too coked-up and glazed-over to actually eat anything. A king’s ransom was spent on keeping the tour’s cocaine supply adequate.

The substance abuse – which stood alongside music as a driving force for the Tusk tour – wasn’t just limited to cocaine and marijuana. Christine McVie’s well-documented fondness for champagne, continued on the road, while brandy was Fleetwood’s drink of choice. By his own account, this didn’t help his disposition when communicating with Sara – at one point arguing with her for hours on a transpacific phone call – and pointed to how chemical overindulgence was intertwined with another driving force of the tour: personal animosity. Not surprisingly, the most calamitous incident in this regard involved Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Describing the band’s post-Rumours dynamic in a 2007 interview for Performing Songwriter, Nicks recounted: ‘You went up on stage and tried to keep your problems off that stage, and then went back to separate dressing rooms and hotels and didn’t go to the bar after the show, because you didn’t even want to take a chance of having a run-in in front of people.’ The limits of that approach were exposed at a 22 March 1980 show in Auckland, New Zealand, where the tension between her and Buckingham spilled over in front of the audience. It’s generally accepted that during the show, Buckingham mocked Nicks and kicked her (behavior Mick Fleetwood attributed to the guitarist having ‘hit the old scotch bottle a little too hard before the concert’), and Christine McVie slapped him and threw a drink in his face after the show. Beyond that, in another indelible example of Fleetwood Mac tradition, accounts of the event varied from one member to another, and over time. In a 1997 Rolling Stone feature, Nicks’ description is very similar to Mick Fleetwood’s from several years earlier:

Lindsey and I had another huge thing that happened onstage in New Zealand. We had some kind of a fight, and he came over – might have kicked me, did something to me, and we stopped the show. He went off, and we all ran at breakneck speed back to the dressing room to see who could kill him first. Christine got to him first, and then I got to him second; the bodyguards were trying to get in the middle of all of us.

Buckingham claims not to remember specifics, and quite possibly doesn’t, but nor does he deny acting atrociously on the tour. When the incident came up in a 2003 band profile in Mojo magazine, he acknowledged, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t doubt that I mimicked Stevie onstage. And kicked her? That could have happened too.’ Fuzzy recall aside, the guitarist disputes Nicks’ more-recent description of events, which includes him throwing a guitar at her midway through the show, narrowly missing her but nevertheless angering not just McVie but everyone else with the band. In a 2007 Mojo article, Nicks said, ‘Let’s just say he was told by everybody – from tour manager to everybody involved – if you ever throw anything at her or kick her again, the crew will attack you and kill you.’ Nicks punctuated her account by adding, ‘It never happened again.’

For his part, Buckingham questioned whether the incident happened at all when asked about it for a 2013 Daily Mail article. While this piece included Christine McVie’s comment, ‘Oh, it happened, all right,’ the evidence is unclear. That something awful happened at the Auckland show, has been known for a long time, yet it seems strange that such a vivid detail – especially one from a concert attended by tens-of-thousands of fans – would be such a relatively-late...