The Unleashed Tour: Madison Square Garden (03/19/09)
Concert Review by John DemetryStevie Nicks: "Sometimes I think of Fleetwood Mac as The Furies. I came up with the idea of Fleetwood Mac: Unleashed because I felt we were once again unleashing the fury into the world, because we are that in a lot of ways."(1)
Right before Fleetwood Mac takes the stage, the menacing sound of frenzied insects fills the Madison Square Garden arena. The eerie artificial buzzing sound recalls the high-art antecedent of Jean-Paul Sartre's
The Flies (his own representation of The Furies of Aeschylus) or the pop-art metaphor of the Wings of Pazuzu (swarms of locust representing the reality of Evil) in John Boorman's
Exorcist II: The Heretic. In
The Oresteia of Aeschylus, The Furies avenge murder. However, each act of vengeance incites another -- an unbroken chain that threatens individual sanity and social stability. In the context of Fleetwood Mac, that endless cycle resides in the lore of lead singers and former lovers Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks' unresolved break up (documented in
Rumours (1977) -- a genuine pop phenomenon).
Whatever the reference, the insect static makes the point crystal clear: there's a disturbance in the culture. Something has gone wrong. Fleetwood Mac returns to set things right.
The band's signature track "The Chain" sounds the alarm: "Chain keep us together / Run in the shadows." The only song whose writing is attributed to all five members of the
Rumours line-up -- the fifth being the retired keyboardist/songwriter/singer Christine McVie -- it also stands as the band's mantra. Love, responsibility, and chemistry keep the band together as they struggle to make expressive art in the shadows of the Fleetwood Mac juggernaut. In the context of the
Unleashed tour, the anthem also encourages the audience -- driven by the primal appeal of John McVie's bass line and the urgency of Mick Fleetwood's drum beat -- to find the "chain" -- Love, humanity, culture -- that links them to each other in the shadow of a desensitizing popular culture.
Lindsey Buckingham: "Even though we were drawing on our own experiences, I don’t believe the songs on 'Rumours' were so starkly autobiographical. . . It was three writers cross-dialoging with each other. . . The tabloid (quality) of it was only revealed to us by our audience after the fact. . . [Now] you tend to see the irony in the songs. . . the heroicism we possessed. We saw. . . the music had redemptive power and could be a symbol for other people. The whole struggle had a meaning to it that was symbolic."(2)
Although a "Hits!" tour,
Unleashed is no nostalgia trip. The band organizes the song's set list and designs each performance to create an experience that speaks to the audience's deepest needs. The show's set (see below for complete set list) runs from opener Buckingham's "Monday Morning" -- the first track on
Fleetwood Mac (1975) -- to final encore Nicks' "Silver Springs" -- the band's last hit single, a b-side resurrected on the live album
The Dance (1997). Between those bookends, the band splits the show into four waves -- each complete with its own dramatic climax: 1) Nicks' exit on "Sara"; 2) Buckingham/Nicks duet on Christine McVie's "Say You Love Me" to close the acoustic set; 3) Buckingham achieves catharsis with "Go Your Own Way"; and 4) Nicks goes beyond catharsis with "Silver Springs" in the show's final encore. Those waves build dramatically, propelled by the "cross-dialogue" ("running in the shadows") formed by the songs. The presentation of each song heightens the sense of the Buckingham-Nicks affair as ritual experience.
It begins with their attire. Nicks' costume changes establish the aura of rock romanticism (and mystery) that swirls around her tales of love and woe. Dripping from head to toe with frill and lace (black, then red, then black-and-red), she's an abstraction of feminine ideal and romantic fate. She once cited Dickens' novels of obsession (
Great Expectations) and sacrifice (
A Tale of Two Cities) as her inspirations. So when she sings, "Women they will come and they will go" during "Dreams," she refers not only to her replacements in Buckingham's heart, but also the revolving door of female pop stars that she outlasted. Also on "Dreams," she recalls Edgar Allen Poe: "Dreams of loneliness like a heartbeat, drives you mad / In the stillness of remembering what you had." Like a tell-tale heart (or The Furies), memories of Nicks will haunt her lover during inevitable heartbreak and disappointment. In the abstract ("dreams of loneliness"), audience desire for redemptive art will remain unmet by insufficient pop culture. The song ends with the promise of a healing rain. It's that cycle -- love, heartbreak, healing -- all of the songs dramatize.
Nicks' Dickensian extravagance contrasts with the simple lines of Buckingham's black jeans, low-necked red shirt peaking out of his black leather jacket. Against the shifting colors and images of the giant moving screens behind and above the band, Buckingham's every movement pops. During opener "Monday Morning," the screens turn the same color red as Buckingham's shirt. The graphic result captures the intensity of the song's emotions and establishes that his every gesture will communicate feeling: desire ("Monday morning you look so fine"), disappointment ("First you love me, then you fade away"), despair ("Got to get some peace in my mind").
Each of Buckingham's and Nicks' gestures achieves maximum impact and emotional legibility. Every (rationed) twirl sends the audience to the edge of ecstasy.
The first set ends with Nicks completing "Sara" by moving from her microphone to Buckingham's on the other side of the stage. Unable to make the "home" she longs for in the song, Buckingham plays out the end of the song with his head on her shoulder and hers on his. Then, she abruptly exits the stage -- taking a moment to hold the hand of backup singer Sharon Celani. The stage clears after her, leaving Buckingham alone with the spotlight, his guitar, and his "magic fingers" -- simultaneously projected on the giant screens surrounding the stage -- howling about his guardedness and isolation for an unplugged "Big Love." Thus begins the acoustic set, which also includes Buckingham's "Never Going Back Again," during which Nicks provides some harmonizing. She waits for her cues by turning her back a quarter to the audience, allowing her long, straight hair to cover her face. The image of her huddled form on one side of the stage while, on the other, Buckingham sings about his promise never to return again (after breaking down "one time," "two times," and, ultimately, "three times") makes their longing and pain palpable.
That longing and pain takes a spiritual toll. Fleetwood Mac expresses this metaphysical perspective in "Gold Dust Woman," which describes the allure of cocaine for the heartbroken rock goddess. During the extended instrumental close to the song, Nicks turns her back to the audience, hunches down, swivels her neck and head, and spreads her "Gold Dust Woman" shawl to transform into a demon. The image -- so striking with the gold shawl complimented by blue lighting -- conveys how these universal experiences -- heartbreak, longing -- impacts the social world. In the song, the heartbroken seek respite in drugs or, as Nicks now envisions the song, this sense of loss results in the desolation of the song's war-like imagery.
Lindsey Buckingham: "I think you have to be realistic about the fact that "Rumours" was a success for reasons other than the music. . . We put ourselves out there, and people started to invest in us more emotionally. And that was part and parcel of the phenomenon -- it had to do with the mythology around the record, and it would be unrealistic to not acknowledge that. I don't think that it diminishes the appreciation of the music in any way; it was just a scope that went beyond the music. . . At the time, though some of it was reported, it really was more word of mouth, and there was an authentic sense of a lore that grew up around it."(3)
Fleetwood's drumming is off the hook, but the audience is not. An inspired Fleetwood seemingly improvises a new drum part for the Madison Square Garden performance of Buckingham's "I Know I'm Not Wrong." After being featured on the last two Lindsey Buckingham solo tours, that
Tusk (1979) track comes home. The Mac touch (a mystical chemistry) makes it shine: Fleetwood's drumming AND Nicks' harmonizing and playful shenanigans during Buckingham's horn vocalizations. (Imagine if X were a ska band.) Indeed, along with the McVie/Fleetwood rhythm section, the Buckingham/Nicks harmonies constitute the Mac magic. By this, the twelfth concert of the
Unleashed tour, the harmonies generate goosebumps. Those harmonies keep the love story alive: these voices belong together. Their performance of "Sara" reiterates that fact when Buckingham's harmonizing vocals heighten the poignancy in the line: "I think I had met my match -- he was singing." That voice haunts Nicks' "Gypsy," as Buckingham sings in backup: "Lightning strikes, maybe once, maybe twice." Doing so, Buckingham takes the part of the first lightning strike (former love), while the "maybe twice" finds concrete form in their musical partnership, here demonstrated, while keeping the audience hanging in delirious anticipation. Even when Buckingham feigns missing his cue to resume guitar after the dramatic pause at the close of Nicks' "Landslide" -- answered by Nicks' luminous smile and mimicry of an orchestra conductor to get him back on the track -- it acts as an adorable pantomime of the "complex and convoluted emotional history," pace Buckingham, of rock 'n roll's legendary lovers -- an affair held in suspense by the stage's proscenium.
This catalogue of songs -- Unleashed! -- rivets the audience to two compelling figures' distinct takes on cycles of attraction and love, sacrifice and heartbreak, recrimination and forgiveness, art-making and perseverance within their own relationship. Buckingham's "I Know I'm Not Wrong" reveals his insecurities ("Now it's gone / Don't blame me") while boasting about his artistic/sexual prowess ("Here comes the nighttime"). Meanwhile, in "Sara," Nicks channels her Romanticism with help from her artistic muse ("Drowning in a sea of love"). That's the Nicks fix: she knows the personal is the popular ("where everyone would love to drown"). By the time the set reaches its official climax, Buckingham's "Go Your Own Way" gives the audience its needed release via Fleetwood Mac's Rolling Stones-inspired roof-raiser. The partners may "go their own way," but as the song begins in the present tense -- "Loving you ISN'T the right thing to do" -- the love remains. The song's catharsis -- and bittersweet understanding -- allow them to persevere. But after that catharsis, there resides a desire for something more. Fleetwood Mac unleashes The Furies. Love will transform The Furies.
Lindsey Buckingham: "When you contemplate going out there and doing some songs of Christine's that we are going to do this time, to me, there was the potential of making it a bit loungey -- having someone come in and do her songs. I think we are better served to interpret them in new ways ourselves, and in a way that resonate[s] with our own history."(4)
Who knew that all these years Christine McVie was writing the ideal duets for Buckingham and Nicks? For the first time, the
Unleashed tour features Buckingham and Nicks trading verses and sharing the chorus on Christine McVie's "Say You Love Me" -- the
Rumours line-up's first break-out single. The song typifies Christine McVie's specialness as a songwriter: catchy pop structure, complex power dynamics in romantic relationships, and celestial imagery. That Buckingham and Nicks, who formerly provided the song's dreamy harmonies, take over the lead attests to their status in pop culture's romantic iconography. These former California hippies now embody Christine McVie's mature, hard-won, Blues-based expressions of love. In this rendition, Buckingham gets Nicks "tingling right from my head to my toes" (we join her). Nicks leaves Buckingham "begging you for a little sympathy," which he sings with a pleading folk whinny. Their singular dynamic revitalizes the song's pop structure and power dynamics because the chorus finds both parties (female and male): "falling, falling, falling." In Christine's song, the woman is the strong one, as the man is unable to say "I love you." In the new duet, apropos their iconography, B&N remain star-crossed equals.
Not only Christine McVie's songs ("World Turning" and "Don't Stop"), but the entire Mac catalogue makes itself available to the interpretations of the Buckingham-Nicks line-up. Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green's "Oh Well" unites the elements of Buckingham's concert persona -- sexual anxiety ("Tusk"), harlequin wit ("I Know I'm Not Wrong"), existential angst ("I'm So Afraid"). Green always explores his struggles with faith in his music, often through Blues-inspired wit (Green and Buckingham are both music fetishist-anthropologists): "Now when I talked to God I knew he'd understand / He said 'Stick by me and I'll be your guiding hand.'" Acting out the lines, Buckingham stares at his hand with the fascination, fear, and confusion of a pre-pubescent discovering that his body isn't entirely under his control. Yet, with that hand, Buckingham proceeds to thrash through the song on his guitar. The apparent dichotomy verifies Nicks' insight into Buckingham on the
Say You Will (2003) track "Thrown Down" (not played during the concert):
Faith is a hard thing to hold on to
Something inside you says I don't have to
You're not like other people, you do what you want to
Many of Buckingham's songs create this sense of dislocation. On the solo track "Go Insane," Buckingham identifies the source of this identity crisis ("I go insane / Like I always do") as the pressures of art-making ("I lost my power in this world / And the rumours are flying") and heart-aching ("And I call your name / She's a lot like you"). Performed in the
Unleashed set list after "Gypsy" while Nicks changes costume for "Rhiannon," "Go Insane" incorporates Nicks as a signifying absence -- a mirage conjured by the song's lyrical lightning bolts. She's the longed-for ideal -- the elusive "Gypsy" and "Rhiannon" -- Buckingham seeks to find reflected in other women. As an acoustic mainstay in the Mac set list since
The Dance (1997), "Go Insane" encouraged audience contemplation. Now, this full-band arrangement, honed on Buckingham's recent solo tour, calls for a dance response. In this culture, everyone is bound to "go insane." The return to the song's synth-rock roots feels like liberation. Just as Nicks impacts this solo Buckingham track, Buckingham playing guitar to -- and silently singing along with -- Nicks' solo hit "Stand Back" reinforces the spectacle of her holding out for more hopeful resolutions: "Take me home!" The song's fake-out ending signals an affirmative moan: "Ooooh yeah, Oooooh yeah, Ooooh yeah!"
Even when saying "goodbye my friend," Nicks "would like to leave you with something warm." A
Tusk track performed live for the first time during the
Unleashed tour, "Storms" proves a "warm" composition, indeed. During the acoustic portion of the set, the band recreates the song's enveloping atmosphere. Fleetwood comes down and plays drums on his "cocktail" kit, holding the song steady through the emotional storms of Nicks' lyrics. As Nicks sings, despite best intentions, the song leaves you with despair: "I have always been a storm." She explains the devastation of a failed love affair: "We were frail." Bassist McVie and the back-up singers fill out the spaces, seemingly to cradle the audience on the currents of a "blue calm sea" while Buckingham's guitar pierces the serenity with a haunting melody. Nicks and Buckingham close out the song -- acapella -- harmonizing on Nicks' repeated lament: "Not all the prayers in the world could save us." It feels like the bough breaks.
My body tries to cry
Living through each empty night
A deadly calm inside
Nicks now introduces the song as "Always Been A Storm" to emphasize its timelessness and its sense of pervasive, perpetual pain. Fleetwood Mac resurrect "Storms" to address the trauma of the post-9/11 era and the dearth of pop culture sustenance ("My body tries to cry") which created what critic Armond White refers to as a culture of
"hipster nihilism." Fleetwood Mac makes spectacle that "resonates with our own history" -- the world turning on the axis of our own feelings.
Stevie Nicks: "After 9/11, everything took on a different meaning."(5)
Just as Fleetwood Mac's crisscrossing narratives (and beds) dramatized the spiritual toll of the sexual revolution, their art today addresses the spiritual crisis of the post-9/11 era. In concert, Buckingham introduces "Second Hand News" by explaining that
Rumours reconciled "emotional opposites." Now, the entire culture needs reconciliation. After "Go Your Own Way" provides catharsis, the band returns for the encore. The set proper provided unifying spectacle and emotional release. Now, the encore invites the sensitized audience to expand its social imagination.
Don't dismiss Nicks when, in the above-cited interview, she refers to "World Turning" as a premonition of "a world in chaos" after 9/11 and the Iraq War. Understand that, as in her songs, a mystical concept like "premonition" provides a poetic way of explaining a truth. As a Christine McVie-Lindsey Buckingham scribed "Blues" song, "World Turning" speaks to timeless anxieties that fit post-9/11 malaise. The culture displaces emotional response and exploits spiritual need: "Everybody's trying to say I'm wrong / I just wanna be back where I belong."
The entire band leaves the stage mid-song, leaving Fleetwood behind for an extended drum solo. Here, the song takes on political immediacy. Fleetwood initiates a stream-of-consciousness call-and-response, first between his instrument and the "unleashed" vocalizations of his psyche ("Hi ho, Silver!"). Then, in a Brechtian move inspired by hiphop, Fleetwood poses a challenge to the audience, repeating: "Are you with me?" to the affirmative response of the Madison Square Garden crowd. It recalls Son of Bazerk's challenge to dismantle hiphop tribalism in the multi-city shout outs in "Are You Wit Me" on the essential
Bazerk Bazerk Bazerk (1991). Fleetwood invites the audience to appreciate that his drumming conveys his personality, to respond, and to join in the spectacle. As a dramatic representation of this concept, the members of the band return to the stage to complete the song. In a review of the Pittsburgh concert at the Fleetwood Mac fan board
The Ledge,
michelej1 describes the staging of the bandmates' return:
"It’s like a surreptitious invasion." That's appropriate as Fleetwood Mac's salute to Fleetwood carries political force. Fleetwood's drum solo establishes the psychological distinctiveness of each band member's "instrument." They come together to achieve a common purpose. And they take the stage to impact the spectator and the culture.
After the last two years' divisive election frenzy, the
Unleashed tour reveals how a rock concert can act as a real political convention (unifying spectacle) and a real inauguration (revitalizing meaning). Bill Clinton's successful Presidential campaign in 1992 reduced Christine McVie's "Don't Stop" to a political slogan: "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow!" Clinton exploited McVie's pop genius: she applied the buoyancy of a shuffle to the intimate circumstances of heartbreak and healing. On the
Unleashed tour, Fleetwood Mac restores the song's personal meaning (via the Buckingham-Nicks dynamic) and its expansiveness (to a responsive audience). They share the song's hard-earned wisdom by living it on stage.
Because the Buckingham-Nicks spectacle awakens audience's capacity for feeling and unity (culminating in the catharsis of "Go Your Own Way"), it also stands as a symbol for private pain and social distress (blue-state/red-state divisiveness, tribal war resulting in 9/11 and Iraq War quagmire). For the final encore Nicks conscientiously re-imagines her famous "Silver Springs" spell. During
The Dance, Nicks ended "Silver Springs" by turning to Buckingham and cursing him: "You'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loved you! Never get away! Never get away! Never get away!" Now, she audaciously aims this call directly to the audience. The gesture points up the significance of the word "sound" -- the art she makes of her pain and the drama the band constructs out of lost love. Through art, spectacle, ritual, Fleetwood Mac transforms The Furies into Justice, the radical shift in human possibility on which civilization was built in The Greek Tragedy of Aeschylus.
Crouched down (as low as her stiletto boots allow), Nicks delivers her unbridled moan. Stevie Nicks' body finally cries. Are you with her?
UNLEASHED SET LIST
I
Monday Morning
The Chain
Dreams
I Know I'm Not Wrong
Gypsy
Go Insane
Rhiannon
Second Hand News
Tusk
Sara
II
Big Love
Landslide
Never Going Back Again
Storms
Say You Love Me
III
Gold Dust Woman
Oh Well
I'm So Afraid
Stand Back
Go Your Own Way
IV
World Turning
Don't Stop
Silver Springs
Footnotes:(1)
101.9 RXP - The New York Rock Experience(2)
Lehigh Valley Music(3)
msn.music(4)
CNN.com/entertainment(5)
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