April 2005

A boozy night produces these rockin’ thoughts for your consideration…

Fleetwood Mac’s Then Play On(1969)

In the wee hung-over hours of the morning I think of rock and roll. I listen to my shiny silver discs and my scratchy black discs and my muffled spools of magnetic tape and I can’t go back to sleep. Sleep would make some of this nausea and disorientation go away, but when I woke up this morning I just happened to hit the play button on the stereo I keep by my bed and Fleetwood Mac’s Then Play On erupted from my speakers, effectively rendering sleep impossible.

Ok, maybe “erupted’ isn’t quite the term, because that album’s music seems to cough and sputter from the speakers, at least in the beginning, when the controlled spaz of the four-chord guitar intro gives way to what I like to call “bongos and shit” and the pulsating, repetitive bass guitar finally ties everything together. There certainly are some eruptions found on that album (so no slight is meant to Peter Green and the rest of the Mac), like the slightly pissed off  "Show-Biz Blues", which asks the pertinent question “Tell me anybody, do you really give a damn for me?” and which also manages to cause an eruption with only electric slide guitar, tambourine, and handclaps. But we all know that to cause such an eruption only a very electric guitar is needed. Just ask Eddie Van Halen. Of course this is followed by the second half of “Layla”-esque instrumental “My Dream”, which I like much better than the second half of “Layla”. And the first half. “My Dream” has a very haunting chord progression, not anything earth-shattering or complex, but one that always makes me think that it’s going somewhere else, somewhere mysterious and minor, but it never seems to go there. “Layla” never goes anywhere mysterious. It just seems to sit there instead of crackle over the airwaves, making me heavy with beer and cigarette smoke even if I’m nowhere near a pool table or a “Golden Tee” game. That song marks the death of Eric Clapton to me and claims his soul in the unholy transformation that he made from English-blues-obsessed psychedelic-rock-lick-meister with a white man fro and a guitar that sounded like an acid-drenched kazoo to an alcoholic perfectly-bearded-washed-out burned-out pusher of boring trite bullshit 70’s soft rock cocaine songs, fucking beer commercials, and a truly lame acoustic ditty about his dead son that just happened to make him a ‘big creative genius superstar’ to just about every nauseating yuppie in the early 90’s. Of course I bought the cassette single of “Tears In Heaven” when it was out, but I was like 13 or something. Give me a break! Ok, if you really want to get a glimpse of the shit-covered skeletons in my musical closet, my other purchase that same day was the cassette single of “Hazard” by Richard Marx. Let’s just say that I never bought another cassette single again. Ever.

Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac

Cassette singles weren’t around when Then Play On came out. That was late 1969. The main single (on a little piece of black vinyl) from this album was “Oh Well”, which was split into two parts for the 45 because the album version is about nine minutes long. Nine minutes, you say? For those of you that don’t know, Fleetwood Mac wasn’t always the cocaine-fuelled public soap opera fronted by a bitchy witch with a missing septum and a fierce finger-picking one-man-band with hair that’s looking more and more like Art Garfunkel’s as time goes on, snorting and fucking its way across the world’s stages and gracing the airwaves and thirty-somethings’ turntables with slick, catchy album rock. No, no, no. In the early days, the Mac were a motherfuckin’ blues band, part of the wave of Brits whose minds were completely blown by Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and the like and who decided to fuse that sound with dirty-ass rock and roll. Eric Clapton and the Yardbirds were part of that, the Stones were part of that, as well as the Pretty Things, the Small Faces, the Kinks, and countless other bands who I’m not familiar enough with (and frankly not all that interested in) were part of that. By the time Fleetwood Mac started recording albums, a good portion of those other bands who began as blues-rock outfits had already moved on to other sounds. The Stones were toying with psychedelia and on their way to re-emerging as the heroin-daze slop-rock kings we all know and love, Clapton had left the Yardbirds and the Bluesbreakers and was creating psychedelic blues with Cream, and the Kinks were singing about the British countryside. So the Mac were still singin’ the blues, which was more popular among young people in Britain than in the country of its birth, and didn’t start moving away from that until Then Play On.

Not Rick Wakeman, but close

I’ve read a review on that album that makes it seem like the band took a plunge head-on into prog rock territory. After reading that, my sick 70’s-tainted cape-wearing mind salivated at the thought of a combination of blues rock and prog, so I immediately went out and bought the CD. Well, ELP it ain’t, and thank Jeebus for that. I don’t know what the fuck some of these reviewers think prog rock is, but I’m sorry, one criterion of being a prog rock band is that one of your members had to have worn a cape at least once on stage. Although Peter Green by most accounts went completely bonkers after exiting Fleetwood Mac, I seriously doubt that he ever wore a cape this side of an asylum door. Now I may be causing some controversy with this cape statement among the 1% of people out there who actually even know what the hell I’m talking about, but fuck it, I know I’m right. I also must remember that most people out there have an extreme disdain for progressive rock and therefore don’t even come close to understanding it. They don’t want to, and that’s fine. It’s just that anything that was produced between 1968 and 1975 (especially by a British band) that contains a song over 6 minutes long with more than four chords in it gets labeled “progressive rock”. We all know that’s not true at all; it’s the flute solo that makes rock “progressive.”

So let me backtrack a little bit for those of you who haven’t yet stopped reading and still have no idea what I was talking about in that last paragraph. Guitarist Peter Green was pretty much the leader of Fleetwood Mac in the early days. They got their name from Mick Fleetwood, the skinny crazy-looking drummer with bug eyes and superhuman abilities in the realm of coke consumption, and John McVie, yet another “quiet man” bass player whom I know absolutely nothing about. Those were the only two guys to stick with the band throuout all the lineup changes that took place during the 70’s, especially after they hired the aforementioned Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, produced one of the biggest selling albums of all time (Rumours, for those of you who have lived your entire life in a coma, or worse yet, in Arkansas), and virtually kept the economy of Columbia afloat for over a decade (I hear that Stevie Nicks’ face is still pictured on Columbian currency). Anyway, Green, Fleetwood, and McVie played together in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (Green, in fact, replaced Eric Clapton when he left to join Cream – it’s all so incestuous, isn’t it?), quit that, hooked up with guitarist Jeremy Spencer, and formed Fleetwood Mac. After releasing their debut album in 1968, they added guitarist Danny Kirwan and put out a few more records, including Then Play On, which would turn out to be Green’s last one with the band. You see, it seems he went the way of Syd Barrett, supposedly frying his brain with LSD and probably free love. He quit the band, recorded a couple of solo albums, and disappeared. Spencer later went crazy from drugs as well, quitting the band to join a cult. Christine Perfect joined, married John McVie, and the soap opera had its premiere episode. They went through various lineup and stylistic changes that I won’t discuss here because a) it’s irrelevant to this discussion and b) I don’t know a damn thing about the albums from that period. Then, in 1975, with the band in disarray and their future uncertain, the remaining members heard a little album put out by a duo called Buckingham-Nicks, auditioned them for the band, and they were soon on their way to having great pop success as well as black holes for nostrils.

Commercial success = Dignity

Some purists who like the early Mac don’t care for the later pop stuff, but you really have to look at them as completely different bands. It’s almost a cliché nowadays to say that Rumours is one of the best pop albums ever, but if you’ve ever really listened to it, you know that it’s true. I must admit, it’s been a bit of a guilty pleasure album for me all these years, but as time goes on I care less and less what people might think of me when I say that Rumours is fucking great. There are so many songs on that album that are a part of our public consciousness: “Dreams”, “Don’t Stop”, “Go Your Own Way”, “The Chain” – that’s like almost half the album. As annoying as Stevie Nicks might be and as grating as her voice can get to some people, I totally fell in love with her the first time I really sat down and listened to her vocal performance on “Dreams”. Sure, she’s slurring the words and was probably dancing around in flowing witch-like robes when she was in the studio recording the song, but man, just the soaring, airy quality of her voice gets me, especially when she goes up high on the line “It’s only right that you should play the way you feel it.” Wow. The other thing that I really love about that song is the extremely loud cymbal crash that comes in on beat two of the chorus, right on the “-der” of   “Thunder only happens when it’s raining” (which isn’t really true, by the way). The crash kind of comes from out of nowhere and it’s really fucking loud! Ok, obscure 60’s garage rock it’s not, but I never claimed to be hip.

Just listen to Lindsey Buckingham’s acoustic guitar picking on the next song, “Never Going Back Again.” I’m going to go listen to it right now. I’ll be right back…. Just listened to it and I must say, that’s some damn fine pickin’. I know there are bluegrass guys out there who could make Buckingham’s playing sound like the Troggs or something, but there’s an intricacy in it that isn’t found in your normal Top 40 album rock stuff. It certainly isn’t found in any music that’s played on the radio today, or at least what I’ve heard since I banished myself from the radio all those years ago. You know, Lindsey Buckingham wrote some strange shit on those Fleetwood Mac albums. “Never Going Back Again” is kind of strange and quirky in its structure, and have you heard “The Ledge” from Tusk? What a paranoid, plastic, frantic, creepy, goofy, cheesy, and scary sounding song. Even a song like “Big Love” from their synth-dominated period has a strange quality to it; maybe it’s just his guitar playing. And speaking of Tusk, there’s some other wacky stuff going on there. “What Makes You Think You’re The One” has that incessant snare drum that sounds like a gun shot, “Not That Funny” has the cheesy Casio sound that comes in and jams itself violently in your ears, and of course “Tusk” has that freakin’ marching band on it… you know, come to think of it, most of the songs on Tusk sound like the band members are attacking their instruments as if those drums, guitars, and keyboards are responsible for leading them into a hellacious lifestyle filled with pervy sex and, you got it, mountains of ‘Grade A’ cocaine. Some of you might be saying, “Ok, man, we get the fact that this band did a lot of coke. Get off it. It’s getting old.” But I’m here to tell you, as long as the part of my brain that remembers Fleetwood Mac remains untouched by chemical abuse or physical damage, I will always have an endless supply of cocaine jokes armed and ready.

Stevie Nicks as Mystic Altar Boy

What in the hell was I talking about? Ah, it doesn’t really matter. What started out as some grand proclamation of what rock and roll really means to me has become me trying to dissect an album I know very little about (Tusk) and a band that is kind of far down on my imaginary list of all-time favorite bands (the Mac, for those of you who nodded off). Well, at least I haven’t gone on and on about the genius of the Monkees. I’ll leave that for another rambling session. The hangover has subsided, and I’ve listened to Then Play On about four times today, so perhaps I should give it a rest. Oh, wait! Did I tell you about the Danny Kirwan songs on that album? Hmmmmm. Forget it.