Preview

Rockers are back on stage and enjoying their good fortune

Friday, September 10, 2004

By Alan Sculley / Special to The Detroit News

In spring 2003, as Fleetwood Mac got set to release its new studio CD, “Say You Will,” drummer Mick Fleetwood knew any extended future for the reunited group might hinge on the CD tour.

“Hopefully, this will be a happy and successful tour,” he said in a March 2003 interview. “If that is the case, I think everyone is really open to making more music and doing it quickly.”

The fact that Fleetwood Mac is wrapping up a return trek across the United States that began in the spring, says volumes about the quality of life within the group, which includes guitarist/singer Lindsey Buckingham, singer Stevie Nicks and bassist John McVie. (Longtime singer/keyboardist Christine McVie did not rejoin the band for “Say You Will.”)

“It could have turned into a nightmare, and it didn’t,” Fleetwood says of the 2003 tour.

The key to the group’s future was how Buckingham and Nicks would mesh on tour. Fleetwood confirmed that even after finishing “Say You Will,” the two still had issues dating back to their 1970s romance that fell apart around the time of the band’s 1976 landmark album, “Rumours.”

“What was really important was our new front line,” Fleetwood says. “It’s really Stevie’s and Lindsey’s deal. They’ve never necessarily seen eye to eye on a lot of things.” The sure sign that the two are getting along, he adds, is the simple fact that “we are still out here doing this (tour).

“They have really found what they had when they were Buckingham/Nicks, and it’s been magical.”

All current bandmates have expressed hope for doing another studio album, and Fleetwood says he expects it will be more of a collaborative work than “Say You Will,” which was spearheaded by Buckingham.

Meanwhile, there are several current projects for Fleetwood and the band. He has a solo CD coming out this fall, and earlier this year three classic Fleetwood Mac albums, “Fleetwood Mac,” “Rumours,” and “Tusk,” were re-released. The latter two each feature a bonus CD of previously unreleased demos and outtakes.

Those reissues were followed by “Live in Boston,” a two-DVD, single CD concert recording culled from last year’s two-show stand.

“It’s certainly an important document to me, as they (live recordings) all are,” Fleetwood says. “This is the first one without Christine, so, in many ways, it’s very different in terms of what’s happening between the four of us up there on stage, and it turned out real good.”