“It Wasn’t About Replacing Lindsey Or Replicating Him In Any Way”

Minus the persona non grata and now-incapacitated Lindsey Buckingham, FLEETWOOD MAC truck on towards a date with the UK in June. Their new line-up is controversial, but they claim it’s working and, what’s more, it was ever thus. “If you look at the history of Fleetwood Mac,” Mick Fleetwood tells DAVE DIMARTINO, “it’s a miracle that it survived. A miracle.”

IT IS MID-NOVEMBER OF 2018, FLEETWOOD MAC are performing at Moda Center in Portland, Oregon, and Stevie Nicks is introducing Landslide.

“This song was written in 1973 in Aspen, Colorado,” she tells the rapt audience. “just me and my little guitar, deciding what I want to do with my life. I want to dedicate this to my cousins Sandy and Eddie, who are here, and also to Lindsey Wilkinson, an old friend. Another Lindsey that I also really loved, you know.” There is a brief, barely perceptible pause. “Not like that.” The crowd laughs at her mixture of candour and innuendo, that wee wisp of Harlequin romance paperback covers long gone, and the band plays Nicks’ classic note perfect, as if it were 1975 all over again. But of course, it isn’t 1975 again.

Absent from the stage is guitarist/singer and one-time Nicks musical and personal partner Lindsey Buckingham, who with Nicks joined the band at the tail end of 1974 and helped guide them to an unparalleled level of fame. He’s not only gone, he’s really gone: a month previously Buckingham had filed suit in the Superior Court of Los Angeles claiming to have been unjustly booted from the band. Thus this long-planned, lucrative tour — which extends through 2019 and includes the States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, the UK, Australia and New Zealand — now features replacements Neil Finn, of Crowded House, and Mike Campbell, of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, and no Lindsey Buckingham.

Buckingham’s lawsuit was swiftly settled, though terms were undisclosed. And a skim through the legal paperwork reveals the canniest reading of it may be in the simple Variety sub-headline describing the band as, “People who just may not have liked each other anymore.”

So the Fleetwood Mac tour rolls on, garnering great reviews, selling tickets by the boatload, with Lindsey Buckingham out, Finn and Campbell in, and the drama of it all apparently subsiding. Except not subsiding at all, because in early February this year, Buckingham’s wife Kristen revealed that her husband had just undergone open- heart surgery that had resulted in vocal cord damage. “While it is unclear if this damage is permanent, we are hopeful it is not,” she wrote in a Facebook posting from Los Angeles. “This past year has been a very stressful and difficult year for our family, to say the least.”

And so. Google “Fleetwood Mac” and “soap opera” and you’ll get nearly as many results as you’ll get Googling”Fleetwood Mac” and “great band.” It isn’t because they aren’t a great band. It’s because their career, in the course of 52 years, reacts like a completely implausible work of fiction.

“LET’S JUST HAVE THE CONVERSATION,” SAYS MICK Fleetwood on the phone, less than a week prior to Buckingham’s unexpected slurry. We’re talking about how the “new” Fleetwood Mac now sounds. “With Lindsey leaving Fleetwood Mac, to me it wasn’t about replacing him or replicating him in any way,” Fleetwood says. “And we’ve never done that. God knows, if you look at the history of Fleetwood Mac, it’s a miracle that it survived, a miracle. I mean, I’m being slightly comedic and tongue-in-cheek, but it is unbelievable really. Bob Welch, Peter Green, they had no similarities at all. Lindsey and Stevie were about as far away from Peter Green as you could imagine, you know?

“All of that being said, for me as a musician, and I think I can speak for the core of the band, is that Mike Campbell, for instance, is a huge, very different player from Lindsey — and in many ways, it’s back to that sort of looser, communicative playing that for instance John and I would’ve had with Peter Green back in the day.

“And so it’s been fun,” Fleetwood says. “And this is no deference in any way to Lindsey, Lindsey is totally unique, and he always has that, and he will always have full kudos of being a major, major part of the history of this band. We know that. You know that. But it’s about once you’ve made a decision to go forward…”

Exactly why that decision was made isn’t something anyone’s eager to talk about, least of all the musicians involved in the settlement. But all signs point to Stevie Nicks being miffed at Buckingham’s on-stage behavior at the MusiCares benefit to honor the band in New York early last year.

Two days after that event, “[Band manager] Irving Azoff called me up and he was basically screaming at me,” Buckingham told CBS News in early December. “He was screaming at me on the phone saying, `You’ve really done it this time.’ And I had no idea what he was talking about. He said, `Stevie never wants to be on stage with you again,’ and I’m going, Why?”

According to Azoff, Buckingham said, Nicks had complained that the guitarist had smirked behind her that night when she gave her acceptance speech. “Irving told me a couple of days later she’d given the band an ultimatum, and either I had to go or she was going to go,” Buckingham said.

AND THERE YOU HAVE it, the proverbial rock and hard place, complicated by the fact that the last batch of new Fleetwood Mac product, if you will, was the Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie album, released in 2017 and probably the finest bit of Fleetwood-related product since Tango In The Night, 30 years and many dollars ago.

On it was every member of the “Rumours Five” but Nicks, who apparently had other commitments. A smallish, low-key tour featuring Buckingham and McVie followed, but it was emphatically not Fleetwood Mac — especially for those keeping box-office score.

Which means, of course, that Christine McVie was put in the awkward position of having to make a choice — to take one for the team, as is said — and essentially take the side not of her most worthy artistic collaborator, but of ensuring that Fleetwood Mac, the corporate entity, might continue as deserved. It was not an easy spot to be in.

“Well, truthfully,” she tells me, again a few days prior to Buckingham’s heart surgery, “I suppose that in the end we had to make a choice. Lindsey, you know… I really don’t want to harp on this very much, because what’s done is done. And for whatever reasons, a lot being personal, it was the only route we could take, because there was just too much animosity between certain members of the band at that point, and there was just no way it could’ve gone on as a five-piece, a group with Lindsey in the band. So it was either just completely break up the band, or try and make the best of it.”

McVie’s take seems a mix between looking on the bright side — an admirably positive approach — and genuine regret at how things turned out. But she gives Mick Fleetwood full credit for carrying on.

“Mick is the granddaddy of the band,” she says. “And he lives to make it survive. And he has a way of finding the right people at the right time. And it was Mike Campbell and Neil Finn — they fit the bill absolutely perfectly. “But it was a really bad time. I had really no bones to pick with Lindsey, I loved working with him, but I did see the point, and I did see what the problem was. And you know, we’re, a democracy, and we had to kind of make the best of a bad job, really. As it turns out, what we have now is better than what we ever had before, I believe.”

Mick Fleetwood puts it plainly. “We were not happy,” he says. “And can use the ‘we’ word. It is no secret that Lindsey and Stevie are in a continuum Liz Taylor/Richard Burton type of life, and it went in and out of valleys and mountain tops and God knows what through the years — and that support really could not be given to ask the situation to continue. It was too challenging.

“Someone in some interview said, ‘What’d you do, fire him?’ Well, you can say that if you want, but I think that’s an ugly word, knowing what this man has done in the ranks of Fleetwood Mac. And screw the people that want to go there and use that type of dialogue. But the truth is, call it that you want, a parting of company took place, and it had to take place, and it was supported by the remaining band members around something that for sure was a major problem to two people — Lindsey and Stevie.”

For those who keep track of such thing — and there are many who do — the history of Fleetwood Mac involves a series of changing contributors who systematically and unpredictably came and went. Aside from constants Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, there nearly from the beginning, there are the major players — Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, Danny Kirwan, Christine McVie, Bob Welch, and Buckingham & Nicks — and, with respect, a minor team including the likes of Dave Walker, Bob Weston, Billy Burnette, Rick Vito, Bekka Bramlett, and however briefly, even garlanded ex-Traffic man Dave Mason.

When some of the latter names are mentioned to Fleetwood, the man responsible for bringing nearly all of them in to keep the band afloat over 52 years, there is a brief moment of pride and even defensiveness at their inclusion. “Kudos to anyone and everyone,” he says. “You’ve reeled off a bunch of names — and anyone who’s been in this band has been someone who’s legitimately had something to say. And they’ve been given complete freedom to be who they are.”

And how do Neil Finn and Mike Campbell fit in?

“Well, they’re all different. The fact of the matter is, both of these artists had huge relevance in the here and now, and I look at it like that,” he says. “If you look at the real dynamics, it’s not like the game is over, or your life is over, but we’re not 18 anymore, so that alone makes this really different. We thought about this, when this happened. Of course there were thoughts of saying, Maybe that’s it, we just stop. But you wouldn’t even dream of stopping, in my world, anyhow. This is like we’re doing it; we chose and were blessed with those choices coming to us. We’re not 18 any more — so when we made this decision, it’s for real and it’s for keeps. And that’s as it should be. Neither of these people would have wanted to do some flippant thing.”

 

NEIL FINN RECALLS MEETING MICK FLEETWOOD AT the Concert For Linda (McCartney) at the Albert Hall in 1999. Finn performed., he remembers, “and Mick was there, not in an official capacity, he was just hanging out. And we just had a chat and got on really well. I think the thing that Mick do. is, he sows little seeds that get planted when he meets people — it’s not a conscious thing, but it’s a strategic thing in his life, when he’s very good at seeing into the hearts of people.”

The pair’s friendship blossomed; they met again later at the New Zealand Music Awards, had dinner, and “became friends again,” with Fleetwood stepping in to play drums on Light Sleeper, the 2018 album Finn recorded with his son Liam.

That’s a thing people don’t remember about bands that have been around for a while,” notes Finn. “They don’t play a lot, so there’s a lot of time between gigs. So Mick came down, we had a great time for 10 days, kept in touch since —you know traded photos of what we were doing, and all of a sudden he just called out of the blue. I was about to do an orchestral show for an album called Out Of Silence, and I literally was on my way to soundcheck when he called, in a rather elaborate and slightly long-winded way, and felt me out to see if I’d come to play with Fleetwood Mac to see how it felt.”

Significantly, Fleetwood told Finn that them was “no way” the band could continue inIt’ss current form, — that is, with Buckingham — that they had reached an impasse, and they had decided to act.

“You know, and it was a fait accompli,” Finn recalls. “And me coming to play was an attempt to try to put together a new form of Fleetwood Mac, that had potential to move into the future, potentially even with new music. And the thing that set it apart from the straight ‘Well you have to come in and replace Lindsey,’ was that they had got Mike Campbell already lined up. Which was an interesting strategic thing on their part, I thought, and quite clever. Because it kind of took the heat off me being cast as the Lindsey Buckingham replacement — at least as much as it would’ve been as a single artist. I think that Mike could be the part of Lindsey that was a guitarist. Some of what he does on guitar I relate to in terms of his ways of putting chords together — but the big intricate solos, I’m quite happy for Mike to take control of. He’s really an incredible guitar player.”

Finn still has much on his plate: a distinguished solo career, numerous musical projects with his wife and two sons, and more. But this was a call that was hard to resist.

“My kid said to me, ‘Why wouldn’t you want to stand in a room and sing songs with Fleetwood Mac?’ And I got a call from a friend, like you do when you’re forming bands in your twenties, you know? ‘Hey, do you want to come down and…? it’s not like that,” he says, “I know it, but I like thinking about it like that.”

Few could deny the talents of the players involved: Finn and Campbell actually do fit in. And while there are occasional jarring moments — Buckingham-penned classics like Go Your Own Way and Monday Morning delivered by an unexpected newcomer, Oh Well offered up by Mike Campbell, no less — it works, most of it, whether it be Nicks singing Black Magic Woman or duetting with Finn on his Crowded House classic Don’t Dream It’s Over, a Fleetwood Mac song title manque if ever there was one.

And there will be more unexpected additions to their UK shows, reveals Mick Fleetwood. “We’re looking at doing maybe a couple of different things in England that in truth they don’t know in America,” says the drummer, “and we’re having that kind of dialogue as we go forward with this massive tour. Chris was saying on the plane the other day — and it’s no complaint about what we were doing — `Wow, doing a blues shuffle and piano like that,’ she was like, `I hadn’t been doing that in years.’ She’s loving it, because she’s a blues player, she was in Chicken Shack, I’d Rather Go Blind. She used tee back Freddie King on piano.

“So we’re having a bit of fun, and both Neil and Mike have huge deference to this sort of vaguely historic talk that we’re having, even now in this interview. And actually it was Mike’s idea to do Tell Me All The Things You Do: ‘We need to do a Danny Kirwan song,’ he said, think that guy’s fucking great.'”

None of them — certainly not Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie or Neil Finn — say they are averse to recording projects down the line, if, as McVie says, they are “vertical and still have our energy.” But there is almost a year ahead of them on the road — and, as current unexpected events dictate, so very much can happen in a year.

“We are saddened by this news,” the band tweeted the day the news of Buckingham’s operation broke. “Our thoughts and love go out to Lindsey and his entire family. We are hopeful for his speedy recovery.”

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“Stevie Always Wanted To Join The Heartbreakers”

The ever-staunch MIKE CAMPBELL tells DAVE DiMARTINO how Mac Mk Umpteen honours Tom Petty and Lindsey Buckingham.

How did you end up doing what you’re doing with Fleetwood Mac?  I have a thread with Stevie for years and years, we’ve written songs and been friends for a while. But I got a phone call from Mick, actually- and he said, “This is not coming from Stevie, but I’ve been listening to your music, and Lindsey has left the band, and we want to know if you’d like to join Fleetwood Mac.” It was as simple as that. I had met Mick before at sessions, but we weren’t what you’d consider friends or anything. But we knew each other.

You penned a song with Stevie on Mac’s Behind The Mask-but how
far back did your friendship go, Was that from working on Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around?
Well, Stevie always wanted to join The Heartbreakers (laughs). She was always coming on like, “Let me be in your band,” and Tom would say, “There’s no girls in The Heartbreakers, I’m sorry- but you can sing back-up here and there.” But God bless her- she always connected with us musically and spiritually, and we’d cross paths over the years several times.

Does Lindsey’s specter haunt your current role? I suppose “replacing him” isn’t the correct term.
I was asked to join the band, and I was brought in not as a hired hand but as a member of the band, in all manners of the world. So I respect the band, and I love those songs, and my challenge, as the guitar player, is to honour those songs the best I can, play parts people want to hear, and in addition to that, in places where it’s appropriate, bring my spirituality and musicality to certain things. We do some Peter Green-era stuff, which is guitar-based, which I really get to explore and play quite a bit of guitar that I like to play. Then on the other songs that are more scripted like Rhiannon, you need to play certain notes, because it’s part of the songs, and I take that on as a challenge to honour that and do it as good as I can. I’m not trying to replace Lindsey, I’m just trying to honour him. And honour the songs.

Tom Petty &The Heartbreakers’ new set is The Best Of Everything. Tell us about the song selection.
We wanted to put all the best stuff we could think of right now into one tight package. We had just done the An American Treasure compilation, which was all unreleased demos and outtakes and things, and we thought it would be good just to have all the familiar things in one place, including some [proto-Heartbreakers] Mudcrutch stuff, remaster it and make it sound a little better, with a couple of unreleased things – but mostly just the hits and a few album tracks.

What happened with Tom and his ailments (Petty died of an overdose of prescription painkillers in October 2017, was that shocking to all of you?
Tom had a little issue with his hip which we were very sensitive to – like, “Are you sure you want to do this tour?” He said, “Well, I’ll get it fixed after this tour.) really want to do this tour, I’ll do it if I have to go in a wheelchair,” he said at one point. He wanted to play, and obviously he wasn’t in too much pain that he couldn’t do it and enjoy himself. He was in some discomfort, but we would that after the tour we would be in so much pain that he would accidentally medicate himself to the extreme he did. So we were very shocked, we’re still shocked, we’re still grieving and we probably will be for a long time.

And so now Fleetwood Mac. Has there been a particular moment on this tour that has stood out?
We do a tribute to Tom in the set. We do Freefalling, which Stevie sings the shit out of. And she’s put together a collage behind us on the screen of Tom and us and everything over the years. I cannot look at it, or I get too emotional. We do that song, every night, and the crowd seems to feel the loss and the healing and the honouring of our fallen hero. And it’s always a heavy affecting moment in the show.

 

Mojo Magazine
May 2019