Fleetwood Mac Forum

Niki posted this on The Ledge but it must be posted here as well, it's hilarious!

http://blogs.courant.com/eric_danton_sou...d-mac.html


Quizzing Fleetwood Mac
By
Eric R. Danton
on February 10, 2009 3:20 PM
I've written before about teleprint conferences (like this one, with Maroon 5) -- essentially, press conferences by phone, wherein a bunch of reporters lob questions one by one at musicians -- but the one I'm on right now with Fleetwood Mac is a gem.

The band this spring unleashes Unleashed, a greatest hits tour tied to the re-release of "Rumours," and the Mac's first road trip in five years (including a date March 14 at Mohegan Sun). Highlights of the teleprint session include:

* Stevie Nicks declaring, "Basically, what we are is entertainers." Ah. That clears that right up.
* Lindsey Buckingham shows up 20 minutes after the scheduled start time, and says to the others, "Have you all been on the line for a while?"
* Apparently Buckingham is influenced by Radiohead.
* Mick Fleetwood, on the other hand, likes U2.

* The band attempts to steer a question to John McVie, who's been largely silent. "No, I feel so stupid today," McVie says. Mick offers, "We'll do one together."
* Stevie Nicks, addressing rumors that Sheryl Crow would take Christine McVie's place: "I told her, 'You've survived breast cancer and Lance Armstrong, and I think you're doing the right thing'" by not joining the band to focus instead on raising her child.
* Whither the significance of the tour title? Stevie: "To me, 'Unleashed' means unleashing the furies, throwing us back into the universe." Is it possible to roll your eyes so hard they fall out? To his credit, the reporter asks, tongue in cheek, "Will we be able to handle this fury?"
* The guy from the Plain Dealer asks, in reference to the USC marching band appearing with Radiohead at the Grammys, "Are you sick of Radiohead stealing all of Fleetwood Mac's good ideas?" The band laughs, then Buckingham says he told the director of the marching band, "Please go tell Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood how much their work has meant to me."
* Stevie: "I'm a fragile little old grandmother at this point, even though I have no grandchildren."
* The guy from L'Press (or some damn place) asks the band when the "Rumours" re-release is coming out. The band, of course, has no idea. Dude: Check Wikipedia.
* Aw, man, after I've spent 90 minutes on the phone, some guy asks a dumber version of the question I was going to ask.
* Jon Bream from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune asks why Fleetwood Mac tickets are so expensive, especially compared to the band's last tour. Stevie: "I can't even answer that, because I don't know. All I can say is that the price of life in general is a gazillion times higher than it was four years ago." Alas, this time the band can't afford to fly on a chartered 737, she says. They're taking a G4 jet instead.
* If brevity is indeed the soul of wit, Mick Fleetwood is witless.

The Twitter updates on the side are worth posting too:

Question for Fleetwood Mac's teleconference call : How is this greatest hits tour substantially different from any other since, oh, "Tusk?"

Stevie Nicks: "Basically, what we are is entertainers." Right. As opposed to ...?

omg I am cracking up

* Stevie: "I'm a fragile little old grandmother at this point, even though I have no grandchildren."

This is one of the funniest and most honest FM articles I have seen in a long time.

I am cracking up at Stevie essentially comparing Lance Armstrong to breast cancer
I also love the fact that John refuses to answer anything on the grounds that he feels stupid and he's obviously the smartest, most grounded person there.

lol. "You survived breast cancer and Lance Armstrong." I didn't even pick that up

My favourite part is: Question for Fleetwood Mac's teleconference call : How is this greatest hits tour substantially different from any other since, oh, "Tusk?"

Stevie Nicks: "Basically, what we are is entertainers." Right. As opposed to ...?

So fucking true

Stevie Nicks: "Basically, what we are is entertainers." Right. As opposed to ...?

ARTISTS.

To me, this is an admission of whoring themselves out this time. "Entertainers" is an excuse for not having any new material to tour with. The only material they're interested in, this time, is green.

Next time Sarah posts that awesome facepalm graphic, I'm saving it to my hard drive.

OMG, breast cancer equals Lance Armstrong.

Stevie's such a moron.

How can you say that Vanessa when Stevie is clearly so educated in economic inflation?

I can't even answer that, because I don't know. All I can say is that the price of life in general is a gazillion times higher than it was four years ago

She should be Obama's new advisor. Irish Mary can be her assistant. They've both got a good grasp on things.

Tell me, has the price of chiffon actually gone up?

More from the press conference:

http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/flee...0439.story

Fleetwood Mac Tuning Up For Spring Tour

February 11, 2009 10:42 AM ET
Gary Graff, Detroit
Not having a new album is working to Fleetwood Mac's advantage as the group prepares for its upcoming Unleashed North American tour.

"This is the first time we've gone on the road without an album," drummer and co-founder Mick Fleetwood told Billboard.com during a teleconference with reporters on Tuesday. "This is truly a new experience for Fleetwood Mac to go out and play songs that we believe and hope people are going to be familiar with and love."

Singer/guitarist Lindsey Buckingham added that not having to integrate new songs into the set -- which the group has been rehearsing since Jan. 5 in Los Angeles -- "just allows you to relax into the situation. We're not coming off a new group of tunes, a new album ... the stakes for that side of it become a little bit lower."

As for a new Fleetwood Mac album, vocalist Stevie Nicks said "there isn't any plan at this point ... for any album. We're going to get through this tour before deciding what to do with an album." Fleetwood, however, confirmed that "there have been discussions, for sure, that we would love to make some more music ... We hope it happens, and certainly it's been somewhat loosely touched on ... My heart says I believe that will happen. Certainly I know that all of the songwriting department, both Stevie and Lindsey are continually writing ... The whole creative bowl is very much intact, so I would love to see what happens."

While declining to get specific about the 46-date tour's repertoire, Fleetwood did say that hits such as "Dreams," "Go Your Own Way" and "Don't Stop" would be included, and that the group would be "paying some attention" to material written by former band member Christine McVie.

"Her songs are surviving very well in the set that we're doing," Fleetwood said. "Stevie and Lindsey are finding a fresh way in certain instances to present those songs. And then we are finding songs as we go along that we feel are special songs that maybe aren't considered the massive, massive hits but truly are emotionally connected to Fleetwood Mac."

Nicks, meanwhile, confirmed that the group seriously considered adding Sheryl Crow to the lineup in 2008, even setting up a rehearsal last Mother's Day to work on material.

"We needed Sheryl to come in and just play some music with us," Nicks recalled. "But it was Mother's Day. She had a brand new baby. She had all her parents and everybody coming and she chose not to cancel that, understandably. She called back and said, 'I have to pass,' and it was over. I said, 'You're making the right decision. You have a new baby, you survived breast cancer, you survived Lance Armstrong.'

"Sheryl is my very dear friend. We are best buddies, and that will go on forever. The fact she is not in the band does not mean she's not our friend."

The Unleashed tour, Fleetwood Mac's first road trek since 2004, begins on March 1 in Pittsburgh. The group is also planning to release a CD/DVD edition of its 1977 "Rumours" album with unreleased songs, demos and previously unreleased footage of the band from that era.

I just got the same link on a RH forum

And that's a reference to their performance of 15 step with the USC Trojan Marching band on the Grammys, which was utterly fucking brilliant.

Dunno if it's still up at youtube, the vids were deleted very quickly (I'll have a look)

ETA ermm... copyright crap... maybe overdoing it, but here's a download link to a highres file (biiiiig)
http://www.megaupload.com/nl/?d=FJUU2DT2

Really.
Really.

Is the DVD-A and the 2-disc remaster not enough?

Thanks for that Mari!

And Greg, yes another version of Rumours. This one apparently has a bonus DVD of live performances though, why they couldn't have released the DVD on its own I don't know. I guess they can charge more of a CD/DVD release.

More articles from the press conference

http://undercover.com.au/News-Story.aspx?id=7571

Cost Of Fleetwood Mac Tusk Was Privilege Says Mick

by Paul Cashmere - February 11 2009
Undercover.com

Fleetwood Mac founder Mick Fleetwood says that the cost of making the 1979 `Tusk` album, the first album with a budget over $1 million, was a privilege, not an over-indulgence.

In a conference call with Undercover today, Mick said, “For all of the blessings we had bestowed on us for being successful I always thought that it was a fully righteous thing that a band such as Fleetwood Mac would plough that money back into the very process that we’d been blessed by to have made that money because it was our money.”

‘Tusk’ was the follow-up to the classic ‘Rumours’. While ‘Rumours’ turned the band into a supergroup, they still paid their own way. “People often assume that you are the star of the show and some production company pays for everything. That is not the case literally by 100%”, he told Undercover. “I always thought it was incredibly righteous to taking the time to plough back the energy, time and expense to make an album like ‘Tusk’ coming out of the most successful album that this band ever had, not that we knew it at the time, ‘Rumours’”.

While the album did not achieve the same heights as its predessor, Mick is glad they did what they did to make ‘Tusk’. “It was our pleasure to do that,” he said. “We never looked at it as some sort of opulent indulgence. I think the lines got blurred more often by the lifestyles and the romance of the stories of the individuals in Fleetwood Mac. The music and the time making ‘Tusk’, we took a huge interest in the studio we were going to record the next album in. All of that stuff had to be paid for and I might add that it was paid for by the individuals that you are talking to to present something that in our world that was going to be more meaningful and more special”.

He says they did it because they could afford to do it in light of the success of the previous two albums. “That to me doesn't personally feel like any form of indulgence. It was always a cross to bear that we all had from ‘Rumours’ on, and in fact Fleetwood Mac ‘Fleetwood Mac’ and ‘Rumours’ and the characters in this particular play”.

The success of Fleetwood Mac not only made the group famous, it made Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks all individually famous. That fame has often gotten in the way of the music. “No doubt, there is a story to be told and continues to be told,” he says. “But behind it all is the music and we very often bemoan the fact that because we were so open as people, which was intriguing and interesting, or maybe not, behind some of that we did take some blows in terms of the music at certain points in time”.

The internal romances and break-ups became tabloid fodder. “We often wanted to talk about the music instead of the ongoing soap opera,” he said. “It is really about the integrity of what we do. We have always taken the responsibility to make the very best effort to do that”.

Fame gave them money and ‘Tusk’ was simply money well-spent, according to Mick. “That to me was never an indulgence. It was a privilege and in truth, everyone you are speaking to paid for that privilege to present something to the listener and the people who enjoyed this band and reinvest our “hey-day” ability to do that where you can’t believe you can actually be in a studio for nine months but then you have to pay for it”.

Anything less than perfection was not an option when recording ‘Tusk’. “The fact that we didn’t say “lets spend three weeks in the studio and get the hell out and shove something out” actually speaks well of where this band puts its metal,” he said.

Fleetwood Mac will begin their `Unleashed` tour, their first tour in five years, on March 1st in Pittsburgh.

http://vancouver.24hrs.ca/Entertainment/...6-sun.html

Mac is back

By GRAEME MCRANOR, 24 HOURS

A lot of stuff has changed in the world since Fleetwood Mac formed back in 1967. Hell, a lot of things in Fleetwood Mac have changed since 1967.

These days, Mick Fleetwood is the only founding member left in the band, even though the band is partly named after bassist John McVie, who already had a steady, paying gig when Fleetwood formed the band with guitarist Peter Green. McVie eventually joined the band and, in 1975, so did Stevie Nicks.

"[The many changes] turned out to be Fleetwood Mac's blessing," said Fleetwood in a phone conference with bandmates Nicks, McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and reporters yesterday to promote the band's upcoming hits tour, Unleashed. "Obviously, the people on the phone right now are responsible for most of the history of Fleetwood Mac. Having said that, there's a history, individually, leading up to the people coming into [the band], and there's the history of all the people who have been and gone from the ranks of Fleetwood Mac, which in truth, seems like a long time ago."

Unleashed will be a greatest hits tour and, while the band hasn't ruled out returning to the studio to record new material, this tour, the first in four years, coincides with a re-release of the CD Rumours as part of a boxed-set CD/DVD, which features previously unreleased tracks and concert footage.

"Unleashed to me meant unleashing the fury," said Nicks about the tour name, "which is what the band is ... a lot of the time ... one of the world's greatest furies. [It] was an edgy term of throwing this amazing musical entity back into the world that we had been away from for four years."

Buckingham added that with no new material to perform, it frees the band up to have a good time and enjoy each other a little bit more: "The dynamic between band members, you wouldn't think it after all this time but it is still to some degree a work in progress."

Fleetwood Mac plays GM Place May 15.