Cold embers of love make smokin' show

Family dynamics depend on each member. Take one person away and every relationship left standing has to find a new role. Fleetwood Mac put that principle into practice at Atlantic City's Boardwalk Hall Saturday night. For the first time in more than 30 years, this long-running band played an area show without one of its key songwriters, Christine McVie, who ditched the group at the end of their reunion tour four years ago. The result not only shifted Mac's sound and fury, but its meaning.

In a flattering nod to McVie, no less than six people were employed to make up for the loss, including two guitarists, two backup singers, a percussionist, and a keyboardist. It made Mac's sound more masculine than ever, a point underscored by the fact that Lindsey Buckingham had 33% more room to thrash through his often fierce playing and frantic songs.

McVie's departure put the spotlight more squarely on the juiciest plotline in the Fleetwood Mac soap opera - the relationship between Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Though their romantic association died more than 25 years ago (as famously chronicled on their 1977 blockbuster "Rumors"), the pair still draw on it for songs off their new album, "Say You Will."

In one offered here, "Say Goodbye," Buckingham sings, "I let you slip away/that was so long ago ... still I often think of you." Nicks answered back in the final song of the night, "Goodbye Baby," in which, resigned to their split on earth, she looks to the afterlife and vows, "I'll be with you one day."

The exchange mirrored the show's opening number, "Chains," whose lyrics view long-term relationships as unbreakable - if not always happily so. Chains can strangle as well as connect. Accordingly, the band's two-hour and 15-minute show acted as a kind of publicly aired group therapy session in which Nicks and Buckingham sang, by turns, about feeling sabotaged and supported by love.

They also sang of their individual issues. In "I'm So Afraid," Buckingham dealt with his fear of emotion. In "Landslide," Nicks mused on mortality, and earned one of the warmest cheers of the night for singing with an accepting shrug, "I'm getting older too."

The band's classic songs had worthy competition from the new ones. The six tracks offered from "Say You Will" stood as peers with those in the band's catalog. When performing the title cut, Nicks provided one of night's longest melodies. In the new "Come," Buckingham went far into quirkiness while still keeping a hold on pop hooks.

Buckingham's playing underscored his role as one of rock's most fast-fingered guitarists. In "Eyes Of The World," his quicksilver lines had a giddy thrill, and he flickered brilliantly through the breakneck pace of "Second Hand News." He even impressed in the more leisurely lines of "Never Going Back Again."

Mick Fleetwood flew his own flag by adding a theatrical drum solo to "World Turning." But in this new configuration of the group, it ultimately seemed less like Fleetwood Mac than like Buckingham-Nicks. (The duo cut one album under that name in 1973.)

The band only played one Christine McVie song, "Don't Stop," with Nicks affectionately singing the writer's part. It wasn't that McVie wasn't missed - here and elsewhere. But the group used that loss to add a new layer to their collective relationship - to reveal yet another part of the shared history, and mutual scars, which make families so potent.