Here we go again.
Don Henley once said the Eagles would reunite when hell freezes over. Robert Plant said he’d never again collaborate full-time with his former bandmate in Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page, because it would be “like dating your ex-wife; you might want to take her out to dinner, but you wouldn’t want to make love to her afterward.” Kiss’ Gene Simmons declared a few years ago that the band would never again put on the greasepaint and ghoul suits of its ’70s heyday because, “I don’t live in the past.”
But the Eagles did reunite, to the tune of $120 a ticket on a 1994-95 world tour. Plant and Page went on a tour of sold-out arenas in ’95 and are now working on a studio album. And Kiss? They made ’96 seem like ’76 as they broke the Halloween suits out of storage and raked in tens of millions of dollars in revenue.
So it’s hardly a surprise that the once-estranged Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks have found their way back into the waiting arms of John McVie and Mick Fleetwood to reincarnate the Fleetwood Mac lineup that from 1975 to ’87 produced 17 top-40 hits and such monster-selling albums as “Fleetwood Mac,” “Rumours” and “Tusk.” On Tuesday, a live recording, “The Dance” (Reprise), announces the quintet’s reunion. A 90-minute version of the performance will air at 10 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. Sunday on MTV, a home video will become available Aug. 26, and a 40-city national tour will be launched in the fall, with a Nov. 20 date at the Rosemont Horizon (no date has been announced for ticket sales).
Buckingham quit Mac on the eve of a world tour after producing the “Tango in the Night” album in 1987, and left his four longtime bandmates cursing his name. Five years after the bitter breakup, Buckingham said in an interview that his departure was a “survival move,” and there was “no interest on my part to do any more albums with them.”
What’s more, Fleetwood’s autobiography, published in 1990, ensured that whatever bridges had been burned would continue to smolder. “Some of the things he wrote weren’t true,” Buckingham said in ’92. “The part where he says I slapped Stevie (Nicks) — the next time I saw her, she came up to me and said, `God, I’m really sorry he said that.’ Everyone was hurt by that book in one way or another. He wrote either total falsehoods or gave very bitter interpretations of events.”
Yet last year, Buckingham invited Fleetwood to play drums on songs he was recording for his still-unreleased fourth solo album. “Then we needed a bass player, we tried somebody and they didn’t work, and so John (McVie) became the obvious choice,” Buckingham said.
Christine McVie dropped in to visit, and she and Buckingham had dinner. “I said, `I hope I can do something on your album,’ ” she recalls. “And he said, `You’re not going to do just something, you’re going to do a lot on this.’ The next thing I know there were the four of us together in one room for the first time in years, the old chemistry seemed there, and it only seemed appropriate at that time to invite Stevie.”
Buckingham and Nicks had reunited briefly for a two-day session to record a song for the 1996 soundtrack to the movie “Twister.” “And that was a nice thing,” Buckingham says. “I hadn’t seen her in so long, and she was singing much better than I can remember. It was very reminiscent of what we used to do together, before things got out of control. What was apparent to me is that we are not the same people we were in ’87, that we’d all grown a bit.”
But he didn’t foresee a full-blown Mac reunion because he was intent on finishing his solo record. “It was deja vu in the control room with the four of us in there, and this big lightbulb went off in my record company’s head,” Buckingham says. “Plus, since I finished my last record (the 1992 `Out of the Cradle’) I had gotten a new manager and some new lawyers, a lot of new influences, and they convinced me that this would not be a bad thing.”
Buckingham himself doesn’t sound so sure. He’s forgiven Fleetwood the indiscretions in his tell-all autobiography — “We’ve all done things we’re not proud of, and you just move on. You stay in the present. I feel he wrote some of that book while he was drinking, free-associating with some ghost writer, and he didn’t take responsibility for editing it later on down the line. I don’t think it was meant maliciously.”
But he was clearly unhappy about his final years in Mac. “I think back to the `Tango’ album, which we worked on for a year, and we saw Stevie during that time for all of three weeks,” he says. “We were all scrambling around the limitations of the situation because we had become a group of people who had ceased to interact as a band.”
After Buckingham left, Nicks and Christine McVie eventually drifted away, leaving Mick Fleetwood and John McVie to tour with the likes of Dave Mason and Bekka Bramlett in recent years. Says Christine McVie, who had joined Mac in 1970 when it was making its transition from a hard-core British blues-rock band to a West Coast-based pop band, “I understand why Mick wanted to keep it going. Fleetwood Mac is his life, and it really doesn’t matter who’s in it. But for me it was like a broken vase — you can only mend it so many times before you have to chuck it away.”
But as McVie sings on her “Temporary One” from “The Dance”: “The sea that divides us is a temporary one/And the bridge will bring us back together.”
The informal sessions at Buckingham’s home studio in California evolved into three reunion concerts last May in Burbank performed for a small, invite-only audience, which were recorded and filmed. And it is on that stage that the point to this reunion becomes apparent. As captured on “The Dance,” the music the Mac 5 made in their heyday holds up, not only as some of the best mainstream rock and pop of its day, but also as a sometimes moving commentary, applicable to the present, on how relationships grow and change over time.
There is Nicks singing, “Time makes you bolder/Children get older/I’m getting older, too,” 20 years after she originally wrote the lines on “Landslide.” And there is the prodigal son Buckingham roaring “Go Your Own Way” as if describing the circumstances not of his breakup with Nicks in the ’70s but of leaving the band in the ’80s. His cry of betrayal on “The Chain” now has a double-edged meaning — “I can still hear you saying you would never break the chain” — and so does its closing plea, sung in unison by the band: “Chain keep us together.”
In the ’90s, the chain that binds supergroups of the ’70s is made of paper: bank notes and big bills. Rarely have such reunions resulted in music that equals, much less surpasses, the art made in the original incarnation. Invariably, the formula has been the same: Regroup to rehash the greatest hits, toss in a few new originals, record a live album, usually with MTV’s participation, and then hit the road to clean up at the box office.
Just as invariably, these partnerships of monetary convenience fall apart afterward because it’s apparent that the participants have only the past in common. What makes the reincarnated Mac any different? Christine McVie acknowledges that, frankly, she’d rather be cooking and is thinking about opening a restaurant, while working leisurely on a solo album. And Buckingham leaves little doubt that his top priority is to get back to his solo album.
“It would be stupid for me to say it’s not at least partly for the money,” McVie says. “But I wouldn’t be doing it if we weren’t getting pleasure out of it. . . . Maybe we can show a new generation what it was all about.”
As he approaches 50, Buckingham undoubtedly views his next solo album as possibly his last shot at getting the kind of exposure his solo music has deserved but never drawn from an industry fixated on the next young face. And he’s practical enough to realize that a Fleetwood Mac reunion may be his best way of drawing attention.
“I was cynical myself about the Eagles reunion and any of the subsequent groups that followed formula in reuniting,” Buckingham says. “And I think we’re going to take some shots for doing this. It’s a strategic move to help my career, to get my visibility up with a younger audience and maybe open some political doors — MTV has not exactly been my friend.
“But going into it for those reasons, I have been pleasantly surprised at how much feeling there still is in the group. I think there is a level of love and truthfulness that was absent from, say, the Eagles reunion. We’re going to have to dispel the cynicism that surrounds this by going city to city and showing people what we’re still made of.”
