Monthly Archives: October 2017

Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Release Info, Solo Activity

Duo from Fleetwood Mac goes its own way with new album, Minneapolis concert | Star Tribune

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By JON BREAM , STAR TRIBUNE
October 28, 2017 – 12:50 AM

Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham is notoriously meticulous in the recording studio. Remember how the band spent a then-record $1 million recording “Tusk” in 1979 because he was so particular?

So how did Mac keyboardist Christine McVie get Mr. Fussy to complete a duo album with her in near record time this year?

“This was not a concept we had in the beginning, to make a duo album. It just kind of happened,” said McVie, who will join Buckingham in concert Monday at Northrop auditorium in Minneapolis. “It didn’t take us that long.”

They worked on a few of her ideas, then went on tour with Fleetwood Mac in 2014 and later revisited the songs. Buckingham brought in five songs of his own, and before you know it they had an album.

“He and I always had a good chemistry musically,” McVie pointed out. “It seemed very natural to me. Easy, actually, to work with him in that way. We’re not the best of friends. We don’t hang out together. But when we get to the studio, we have a good connection.”

No Stevie, no tension

It could be because Stevie Nicks wasn’t involved. When Buckingham and his ex, Nicks, try to work together, there’s always, um, creative tension.

Nicks was busy doing a solo tour to promote her 2014 album “24 Karat Gold,” so Buckingham busied himself with the McVie collaboration.

The rest of Fleetwood Mac — founding drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie — also participated in the recording. Not that this was ever going to be a Fleetwood Mac project.

The resulting album “Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie” features five tunes by each, with Buckingham cowriting three of McVie’s numbers

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Continue reading Duo from Fleetwood Mac goes its own way with new album, Minneapolis concert | Star Tribune →

Books, Release Info, Solo Activity, Stevie Nicks

Book review: Rock biographer Stephen Davis chronicles Stevie Nicks in new book

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The Hutchinson News
By Jody Feinberg
Posted Oct 25, 2017 at 10:38 AM

“Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks” by Stephen Davis. St. Martin’s Press, 2017. 352 pages. $18.29 / £20.61

Stephen Davis has an unusual wish for a man prior to the release of his 18th rock book — a biography of Fleetwood Mac singer and solo artist and songwriter Stevie Nicks.

“The main thing is I want to be in the next issue of AARP,” said Davis, who wrote “Gold Dust Woman” out of his Milton, Massachusetts, home. “She’s almost 70 and I’m 70, and they send out something like 25 million copies (actually the magazine claims more than 47 million readers).”

Davis said he is fascinated by Nicks, who found stardom relatively late (for a rock star) in her 20′s and still fills an arena both solo and with Fleetwood Mac. She recently announced an 18-month tour starting in mid-2018 with Fleetwood Mac. Her 40 top-50 hits include “Don’t Stop,” the signature song of former President Bill Clinton’s campaign.

“The arc of the story is that initially she wasn’t really wanted in Fleetwood Mac and eventually she went out on her own and became a bigger star than Fleetwood Mac,” said Davis, who began researching “Gold Dust Woman” in 2012 and finished it in 2016. “When I started writing, I thought the book would be a valedictory thing about someone whose career is winding now. Now, I’m just trying to keep up with her and will need to update the book when the paperback comes out in a year.”

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Continue reading Book review: Rock biographer Stephen Davis chronicles Stevie Nicks in new book →

Books, Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood, UK Articles

Mick Fleetwood on the early days of Fleetwood Mac and why he’s a terrible drummer | BBC News

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By Mark Savage
BBC Music reporter
15 October 2017

Mick Fleetwood is the backbone of the band that bears his name; the man who kept Fleetwood Mac rolling through the best and hardest of times.

In the early days he was their manager, hiring and firing musicians like a soft rock Alan Sugar.

By the late 70s, he was the bandage that stopped them falling apart amidst drug abuse, infidelity and betrayal.

And sitting behind his “back to front” drum kit, Fleetwood is the band’s beating heart, constructing dozens of unforgettable rhythms – from the syncopated shuffle of Go Your Own Way, to the fidgety cowbell riff of Oh Well.

But surprisingly, the 70-year-old doesn’t rate his own drumming.

“There’s no discipline,” he says. “I can’t do the same thing every night.”

Anyone who’s listened to the deluxe edition of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk will know otherwise. There, you can hear multiple outtakes from the title track, with Fleetwood sitting doggedly on the song’s distinctive groove for more than 25 minutes.

Still, he insists: “I am very not conformed, I change all the time.”

The confession is prompted by a discussion about Fleetwood’s lavish new picture book, Love That Burns, which chronicles his early career and the first incarnations of Fleetwood Mac. Continue reading Mick Fleetwood on the early days of Fleetwood Mac and why he’s a terrible drummer | BBC News →

Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood, UK Articles

British blues: New book heralds early days of Fleetwood Mac | Daily Mail

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By Associated Press
Oct 6th, 2017

LONDON (AP) – Mick Fleetwood was 16 when he left school, told his parents he wanted to pursue a career in rock ‘n’ roll, and went to London in search of gigs.

A common tale, true, but this one has a happy ending. Fleetwood fell in with some talented blues enthusiasts, paid (barely) his dues, and soared to stardom with the first incarnation of Fleetwood Mac – and then into the rock ‘n’ roll stratosphere with the second, more pop-oriented version of the band.

“School was not a good thing for me,” said Fleetwood, dressed in classic British style, complete with a pocket watch on a chain.

Mick Fleetwood, the drummer and co-founder of the band Fleetwood Mac speaks before the start of an interview at a hotel in London, Thursday, Sept. 28, 2017. Fleetwood was 16 when he left school, told his parents he wanted to pursue a career in rock ‘n’ roll, and went to London in search of gigs.
A common tale, true, but this one has a happy ending. As a teen, Mick Fleetwood fell in with some talented blues enthusiasts, paid his dues, and soared to stardom with the first incarnation of Fleetwood Mac and then into the rock ‘n’ roll stratosphere with the second, more pop-oriented version of the band. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

“I had a learning disability, no doubt, and no one understood what those things were. I was sort of drowning at school academically. My parents were like, ‘Go and do it.’ They were picking up on the fact that I had found something. They saw the one thing that I loved with a passion was teaching myself how to play drums at home,” he said. “So they sent me off with a little drum kit to London and the whole thing unfolded.”

Fleetwood didn’t really have to rebel, though rebellion was in the air, and he had the good fortune to make friends early with Peter Green, the supremely talented guitarist whose blues sound shaped the band’s early years. Continue reading British blues: New book heralds early days of Fleetwood Mac | Daily Mail →

Lindsey Buckingham

5 Things You May Not Have Known About Lindsey Buckingham | Rhino

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Rhino Insider
Tuesday, October 3, 2017

He’s well known as the talented, often-astounding guitarist for Fleetwood Mac, but he’s also constructed a fantastic career as a solo artist. He’s Lindsey Buckingham, and today’s his birthday, so celebrate with our best-of-Buckingham playlist, which is filled top to bottom with solo songs, Fleetwood Mac material, and a number of tracks which feature Buckingham as either a producer or a performer. Also, we’ve taken some time to compile a list of five things that you may not known about our man Lindsey, so give it a read and have your mind blown a few times.

Lindsey Buckingham during Lindsey Buckingham in Concert at The Event Center at the Borgata – October 15, 2006 at The Event Center at the Borgata in Atlantic City, New Jersey, United States. (Photo by Nick Valinote/FilmMagic)
  1. His brother was an Olympic athlete.
    The Buckingham boys – Jeff, Greg, and Lindsey – were all athletically-inclined during their youth, with all of them competitive swimmers at various points. Although history obviously revealed that Lindsey dropped his athletic pursuits in favor of music, Greg subsequently won a silver medal at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.
  1. He wrote a song with Brian Wilson while the Beach Boy was under the questionable care of Dr. Eugene Landy.
    If you’ve ever investigated the expanded edition of Wilson’s self-titled solo album, then you’re probably aware of the track “He Couldn’t Get His Poor Old Body to Move,” the Buckingham/Wilson co-write in question. “Brian came up to my house with a song which was very catchy, but about exercising,” laughed Buckingham, in a 1992 interview with Q Magazine. “‘You don’t wanna do that,’ I said, so we rewrote it. It was a very unsettling situation. If Landy wasn’t there, he’d have these two little surf Nazis who would not let Brian out of their sight. I know Landy did him a lot of good in the beginning with his radical techniques, but in my opinion there was a role reversal where Landy glommed onto Brian as his ticket to a glamorous world. Brian was not happy, and there was no way he’d grow into a full adult in this situation. Musically, Landy was keeping him doing this ‘Baby, let’s ride to heaven in my car’ kinda stuff, when he really should have been getting into something a little more experimental, or adult at least. That was a little heartbreaking to watch.”
  1. He teamed with The Dream Academy to record a cover of The Korgis’ “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime.”
    The Dream Academy had taken a shot at covering the Korgis classic with Adam Peters, with the results sounding like an outtake from The Beatles’ WHITE ALBUM, but when the band didn’t feel like they’d quite nailed it, Lenny Waronker of Warner Brothers suggested that they send it to Lindsey Buckingham. “Mike Ostin had said, ‘If you’d like to we think you should work with Lindsey,’” recalled Nick Laird-Clowes, in an interview with Rhino.com. “And I was a huge fan, of course, particularly of Lindsey’s work with Fleetwood Mac because of TUSK. He obviously had great music-making and record-making sensibilities. Lindsey’s production can take a song and make it into a complete masterpiece. He’s an absolutely amazing record maker and a really original person. So, of course, I wanted to work with him. But when Lindsey heard it, he didn’t want to work on that version. He said, ‘That’s great, it’s like (THE WHITE ALBUM),’ but then he immediately set about tearing everything out and starting again.”
  1. Harold Ramis asked him personally to compose a couple of songs for National Lampoon’s Vacation.
    In her memoir Storms: My Life with Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac, Carol Ann Harris recalled Ramis “arriving on our doorstep with his wife and very young daughter” and that he “convinced Lindsey to venture into movie soundtracks.” The end result: “Holiday Road” and “Dancin’ Across the USA.”
  1. During the recording of “We Are The World,” he ran into Michael Jackson in the restroom.
    In a 2009 interview, Buckingham recalled the moment with considerable laughter. “I think I walked into the bathroom and he was in there, and it kind of freaked him out! He was quite nervous just to be startled by someone walking in and I just nodded my head. I didn’t feel comfortable trying to engage him in a ‘hello’ at that point. He was really at the top of his game and I think probably even then was dealing with a lot of demons that were probably from way back when he was a kid. You know, I just didn’t want to intrude at all on his trip…”
Solo Activity, Stevie Nicks, UK Articles

Tom Petty dead: How the singer inspired Stevie Nicks song ‘Edge of Seventeen’ | The Independent

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The Independent
Jacob Stolworthy

The track’s title came from a conversation the Fleetwood Mac star had wife Petty’s first wife in 1979

Music legend Tom Petty, who has died at the age of 66, spent his illustrious career collaborating with many other musicians ranging from ELO’s Jeff Lynne, George Harrison and, of course, Stevie Nicks.

Interestingly, the singer served as the inspiration for one of the Fleetwood Mac singer’s most famous solo tracks in a rather circuitous way.

“Edge of Seventeen,” released in 1982, was the third single taken from her debut record Bella Donna and while Petty may not have featured on the track, he and first wife Jane Benyo served as inspiration for its title – all thanks to a simple case of miscommunication.

After meeting Benyo, Nicks asked her when she’d met Petty to which Benyo replied “at the age of seventeen,” a comment Nicks misheard as “the edge of seventeen.” According to the singer, she originally planned to write the song about the couple – and was even willing to give Benyo credit for the inspiration – but, the death of her beloved uncle and John Lennon in the same week (December 1980) saw her find new inspiration for the song. The title, however, remained.

Petty married Benyo in 1974 when he was 24. The couple met in their hometown of Gainesville, Florida before moving to LA in an attempt to further his music career. Two years later, Petty would release his debut record – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – which featured the songs “Breakdown” and “American Girl.”