I picked up this box set,
not because I loved Fleetwood Mac,
but because, growing up, their music was
ubiquitous, everywhere, all the time, and
I hated none of it, and in 2019, felt some
obligation to have them in the collection.
Having owned as a young
person none of their records, I nevertheless
knew almost every song from their first two
albums in this 1975 configuration, in the age
of album-oriented radio, when the DJ’s were
free to play anything they wanted, whether
it was a single or not. Fleetwood Mac was
inescapable, and even to my unsophisticated
tastes, I could sense their greatness, their
tunefulness, their ability to write hit after hit.
And now, while I think both the eponymous
“debut” and the Rumours album are objectively
great records, are fun to listen to, stand up to
the test of time, they don’t have the resonance
or the power for me as, say, the Elton John records
from the same years. It’s almost more fun
to listen to Tusk, simply because it’s less familiar,
feels new to me, and the hits, while there are a
few big ones, were perhaps, in their time,
drilled into our consciousness to a lesser degree.
Christine McVie’s tunes on this record are lovely,
that Stevie Nicks song, “Sara” is pretty great,
all six minutes of it. Twice. Confession: I must
not have been paying very close attention,
because I played side one twice, and it wasn’t
until “Sara” came on that I wondered to myself,
didn’t I already hear this song?
Lindsay Buckingham’s tunes are super weird
and that title track is just a nutty but cool anomaly.
Three years would pass between Tusk and the
next studio album, Mirage, enough time for the
80’s to sneak in and ruin things, make the drums
big, add too much reverb to vocals, put in
synthesizers where they don’t belong. Happily,
none of this appears to happen on Mirage. While
it’s a little more crispy, and the drums are not
quite so 70’s dead as they are on previous records,
this album is pretty sleepy, gravitating on purpose
toward pop music, and ironically, not yielding as
much gold–until “Gypsy,” which for some inexplicable
reason, is a song that I love. Makes me feel something,
it does. The first track on side two, however, seems
to be flirting with new wave nerd rock with mixed,
mostly awkward results. Happily, it only lasts a song.
“Hold Me” is another pretty groovy tune. But I am
starting to notice that so many of their singles have
the same drum feel at about the same tempo
as the iconic “Dreams” tune from Rumours. If it ain’t
broke, as they say . . .
The 80’s do creep into the Tango in the Night
album, some four years later, in some unfortunate
cheesy ways, like the orgasmic moans in the opening
track. “Big Love,” indeed, complete with jungle drums.
The drums have become huge and the keyboards are
way more pronounced and there’s some hair band
tendencies and screaming guitar solos. This is not
your mama’s Fleetwood Mac. Is it bad? No. Is it
good or great? In moments, it is good or great.
Turns out that their skill as musicians and
songwriters and singers cannot be nullified by bad
80’s production, thankfully. But I find it fascinating
to listen to 70’s rockers who continued making
records through the 80’s and track how the new
decade influenced them. They were obviously
concerned with keeping up with the times, some
more so than others, and so they did
whatever they could to remain relevant. For
me, though, much of the 80’s music that I found
especially great were those artists that stood
outside their own time, that maybe were the
progenitors of some of these stylized moves, but
who evolved around it, or didn’t embrace it like
some kind of security blanket. Most of the 70’s
acts that I loved moved through the next decade
looking for that blanket. Fleetwood Mac, though,
even through the most embarrassing moments
of this last album in this box set, remained an
incredibly good band. I’m glad I have these
records, even though they are not as close to my
heart as other 70’s heroes, and are leap years
away from my heart compared to the 80’s bands
I loved and that shaped my brain, some of whom I’ve
already written about in this series, others are
just around the corner in the alphabet, and others
still at the very very end of it.
Notes on the vinyl editions: Fleetwood Mac (1975-1987), Reprise Records, 2019, boxed reissues of the five Warner Brothers original releases on colored vinyl. Includes Fleetwood Mac on white, Rumours on clear, Tusk on gray, Mirage on translucent purple, and Tango in the Night on dark green vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 