Sound City Players I Classic Rock Magazine I Apr 2013

Review from Classic Rock Magazine, Apr 2013

Utah Park City Live, Park City
Grohl’s supergroup rocks Sundance.

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Groul anchors the supergroup with a childlike enthusiasm

In a packed-to-the-rafters venue on Park City’s snowy Main Street. Dave Grohl is kicking off the 2013 Sundance Film Festival in ambitious. history-making style. Here to promote his directorial debut Sound City – a documentary chronicling the hallowed LA studio where Nirvana recorded Nevermind – Grohl has assembled a roll call of its famous tenants to play their greatest hits and songs from the film’s accompanying album, Real To Reel.

It may be cold outside (freezing in fact). but inside the temperatures fuelled by the unique chemistry of the shape-shifting supergroup – anchored throughout by ringmaster Grohl (switching between guitar and drums) and his infectious childlike enthusiasm. During the course of the three-hour-plus show, we’re treated to lively vocals from Alain Johannes. Rick Springfield. Corey Taylor and Stevie Nicks, supported by the likes of Trent Reznor, Taylor Hawkins and Krist Novoselic. It’s a who’s who of rock’s finest. and it’s exhilarating to see them on stage together.

There’s barely room to breathe between baton passes. and the constantly rotating line-up keeps the excitable audience on its toes. Both Springfield’s Jessie’s Girl and John Fogerty’s Creedence hit Proud Mary are greeted with roof-raising mass singalongs. However. it’s the ethereal Nicks who alters the night’s real highlight. teaming up with Grohl for an emotional, acoustic version at Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide – a goosebump-inducing close to what been a superbly surreal evening.

Richard Jordan

Reel to Reel – Sound City is available now on CD

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Tall Stories I Classic Rock Magazine I Apr 2013

By Max Bell
Classic Rock
April 2013

On the eve of Fleetwood Mac’s UK tour to celebrate the 35th anniversary of their astonishing 40-million-selling album Rumours, we catch up with drummer Mick Fleetwood to find out how the band survived drink, drugs and affairs to record it. “We were all fucked up,” he says.

First impressions of Mick Fleetwood are usually something like (to paraphrase the Harry Nilsson song): “Jesus Christ, you’re tall.” Fleetwood doesn’t so much inhabit his swanky Berkeley Hotel suite as loom across the available space. From head toe, he’s immaculately groomed: the silver hair, the Maui suntan, the crisp striped shirt and hand-stitched brown brogues are evidence of his post-psychedelic dandyism. His socks are box fresh and match his scarf. His trademark headwear — today it’s a burnt orange cap — lies on the table underneath a CD copy of his band Fleetwood Mac’s reissued Rumours — the elephant in the room. His ponytail, a reminder of longer-haired days, is constantly teased, as are the opulent Native American bangles on his wrists. He offers water. “Usually I’d have got through half a bottle of good wine by now, but since we’re about to go on tour I’m trying to stay fit.”

Mick Fleetwood has been an American citizen since 2006. He’s lived in California and Hawaii for 40 years, and understandably speaks with a transatlantic accent. Pleasingly, there’s a detectable trace of West Country burr. He was born in Cornwall in 1947 and educated at a public school in Gloucestershire, at one of those institutions where six-of-the-best corporal punishment was the norm — the bat and the cane. No wonder he became a drummer — taken out on those tom-toms.

Suggestions of a whistle-stop tour his life are met with: “Go ahead. I’ll talk about anything. As long as I can get through the jet-lag.”

Does he still see the old gang?

“Peter Green? Once in a while I’ll ring him. I may do once you’ve left. He doesn’t know it and won’t be expecting it.” Continue reading Tall Stories I Classic Rock Magazine I Apr 2013

Fleetwood Mac rumours: What if Nicks and Buckingham hadn’t split?

Classic Rock Website
MARTIN KIELTY
March 25 2013

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Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours recently enjoyed a new lease of life in a 35th anniversary box-set release. It’s not only a defining moment in classic rock – it’s the ultimate break-up album, written and recorded as relationships disintegrated between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, while the same happened between Christine and John McVie.

For singer Nicks and guitarist Buckingham the scars have never fully healed. Now, as they gear up for a new Fleetwood Mac tour, they’ve both faced up to their past and considered what might have been if they hadn’t gone their own ways.

Nicks tells Oprah Winfrey: ““We were just finishing up Rumours and I said, ‘We’re done. I think that this is over, and we both know now that no matter what it takes, we’re going to keep Fleetwood Mac together.

“‘Our breaking up is not going to break up this band. I’m not going to quit and neither are you — and we were done.’”

Buckingham tells Mens’ Journal: “All I recall is that Stevie ran after me crying and yelling and kind of beating on my back. I don’t remember any physical confrontation – not to say there wasn’t.”

He continues: “There’s a subtext of love between us. It would be hard to deny that much of what we’ve accomplished had something to do with trying to prove something to each other.

“Maybe that’s fucked up – but this is someone I’ve known since I was 16, and I think on some weird level we’re still trying to work some things out. There will never be romance there, but there are other kinds of love to be had.”

He says he’s long since got used to working with Nicks despite their history, but reflects: “or me, getting married and having children was a positive outcome. I wonder sometimes how Stevie feels about the choices she made, because she doesn’t really have a relationship – she has her career.”

The singer says: “Lindsey always blamed Fleetwood Mac for the loss of me. Had we not joined Fleetwood Mac, we would have continued on with our music. But we probably would have gotten married, and we probably would have had a child.

“It would have been a different life. We were still young enough then that destiny could have taken us another way — but destiny took us straight into Fleetwood Mac.”

The band tour the UK towards the end of the year:

Sep 20: Dublin O2
Sep 24: London O2 Arena
Sep 29: Birmingham LG Arena
Oct 1: Manchester Arena
Oct 3: Glasgow Hydro

Stevie Nicks reveals Fleetwood Mac will play rare track on upcoming tour | NME

March 16, 2013 11:37
NME

Legendary group will perform ‘Sisters Of The Moon’ for the first time since the early 1980s

2012FleetwoodMacStevieNicksPA-11465019061212Photo: PA

Stevie Nicks has revealed that Fleetwood Mac will play a rarely performed track on their upcoming world tour.

Nicks was speaking to Billboard at the SXSW screening of In Your Dreams, the Dave Stewart-directed documentary about the making of her latest solo album of the same title, when she let slip Fleetwood Mac’s set plans, which includes playing ‘Sisters Of The Moon’.

On getting back out on the road with Fleetwood Mac, she said: “I’m in rehearsals with them now. We go from ‘Go Your Own Way’ to ‘Sara’ to ‘Never Going Back…’ to ‘Landslide’. This time we’re actually doing ‘Sisters of the Moon’ which we haven’t done since 1979 or 1980.”

The singer also said the band plan on doing twenty-four songs in the set, but said they still have a lot of rehearsal to do if they want to fulfil her promise when the tour kicks off in the US in April. “I’m sitting there looking at the board going, ‘Oh my God, we’re only halfway through’,” she said. “We have 12 songs to go and we’ve been playing for six hours!” Continue reading Stevie Nicks reveals Fleetwood Mac will play rare track on upcoming tour | NME

As Fleetwood Mac kicks off its first tour in four years, Lindsey Buckingham reflects on the band’s drug-fueled nights

Surviving Fleetwood Mac

As Fleetwood Mac kicks off its first tour in four years, Lindsey Buckingham reflects on the band’s drug-fueled nights, blowout fights, and unbreakable bonds.

By Brian Hiatt – Men’s Journal
April, 2013 issue

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For Lindsey Buckingham, recording an album used to mean doing just enough coke to nail a guitar part at 3AM, getting in screaming fights with Stevie Nicks, and, in one case, allegedly throttling an engineer who erased the wrong track.  But that was all long ago.  These days, he wakes up at six, has breakfast with his three young kids, hits his home studio alone, and is done by dinner.  “It’s a nice balance,” says Buckingham, 63, who is reuniting with Fleetwood Mac for an arena tour beginning this month (and has a solo live album, One Man Show, out now).  “That’s the whole lesson for me now.  For many years in Fleetwood Mac, it was a study in life out of balance.”

Q: You had your first child at 48.  Do you recommend late-life fatherhood?
ANS: It depends on the man.  You could almost say I’m someone who doesn’t practice age.  I went to a high school reunion a few years back, and all these people seemed 20 years older than me, physically and mentally.  So having kids late is good if you’re the kind of person who needs to wait – though in 20 years, I may have a different perspective.

Q: Your most recent studio album, Seeds We Sow, got great reviews but didn’t sell.  Why?
ANS: There’s a disconnect between the preconceptions that go with being the age I am and what the music is.  I sent the album to Daniel Glass, who runs [hip record label] Glassnote, and he loved it.  Then he played it for his staff, guys in their twenties, and they said, “Well, what are we going to do with it?”

Q: What do you remember about the argument that led to your leaving Fleetwood Mac for a while in 1987?
ANS: All I recall is that Stevie ran after me crying and yelling and kind of beating on my back.  I don’t remember any physical confrontation, not to say there wasn’t.

Q: Is it safe to say, though, that you had a temper in the past?
ANS: Sure.  It’s been well documented.  But we were doing all sorts of substances, too, that probably had something to do with blowing certain behaviors way out of proportion.

Q: Has age calmed you down?
ANS: Some of it was situational.  You’ve got to understand, it was very difficult for me to have Stevie break up with me and to still be in a band with her, to never get a sense of closure.  It took its toll emotionally.

Q: How come drugs never got too out of control for your?
ANS: The substances that were in the studio were not part of my lifestyle at home.  I had to take them so I could stay up till two our three, and even then, Mick [Fleetwood] would want to go later.  My MO if I really wanted to leave would be to say, “I’m going to the bathroom,” and then walk out the door and drive away.

Q: Now that pot is practically legal in California, are you tempted by it?
ANS: No.  I did a lot of that back then, and it was good for a certain kind of abstract thinking.  But we all thought we had to be altering our consciousness on a daily basis in order to be creative, which turns out to be crap.  It’s just about finding your center, that quiet place.

Q: You and Stevie broke up decades ago, but you have to deal with her forever. What’s that like?
ANS: You get used to it. And for me, getting married and having children was a positive outcome.  I wonder sometimes how Stevie feels about the choices she made, because she doesn’t have a relationship – she has her career.  But there are a few chapters to be written in the Stevie-Lindsey legacy.  There’s a subtext of love between us, and it would be hard to deny that much of what we’ve accomplished had something to do with trying to prove something to each other.  Maybe that’s fucked up, but this is someone I’ve known since I was 16, and I think on some weird level we’re still trying to work some things out.  There will never be romance there, but there are other kinds of love to be had.

Q: It’s about as complicated as a relationship can be.
ANS: Oh, my Lord, yes.