No current superstar band is as much fun to hear live as Fleetwood Mac, and no current superstar band takes as many chances. The quintet closed out a year-long world tour at the Hollywood Bowl this past weekend, and they used the occasion to reinvent many of their hits, and pulled off a wildly odd, fascinating show.
Fleetwood Mac had been preceded on-stage by opening act Christopher Cross, whose brand of smooth rock-pop is just the sort of stuff that sells hugely right now (his "Sailing" is the No. 1 single in the country), and just the sort of puffy music that Fleetwood Mac's catchy-but-brainy pop constantly rebukes. To his credit, Cross, a beefy Texan, is a lot less wispy than his music, but his set couldn't help but turn into an invidious comparison to Fleetwood Mac's bold, unorthodox pop.
Those characteristics abounded on Mac's last album, the double-record quirky "Tusk," but after a year of playing "Tusk's" anomalies in front of real people, this frequently perverse music--the title tune alone is a combination chant/drum solo/marching band riff--has taken on its own sense, gathered its own compelling power. At the Bowl on Sunday, the band tore through Lindsey Buckingham's whimsical tantrums like "What Makes You Think You're the One?" and "Not That Funny," and treated them like concise Chuck Berry songs, emphasizing the supple, cool melodies that lie beneath the ranting lyrics.
This is a band of lovable eccentrics whose personalities and appearances clash and collide only to produce fiercely coherent music. This night, for example, Lindsey Buckingham was decked out in Urban Cowboy chic, from his white 10-gallon hat to black rodeo-rider boots. Wagging his head in rhythm to the notes he plucks off his lead guitar, Buckingham is an oddball leading a band of oddballs: singer Stevie Nicks in her flowing gypsy robes; singer-keyboardist Christine McVie with her dark, sarcastic tenor; and the most wittily malevolent rhythm section in rock--deadpan John McVie on bass and the looming, pounding Mick Fleetwood on drums.
What makes Fleetwood Mac great superstars is the fact that they can sell millions of records while remaining true to their eccentricities. Thus Stevie Nicks turned their breakthrough hit "Rhiannon" into an Edgar Allen Poe passion play, swooping across a dark stage waving the folds of her multilayered dress like Ulalume as a rock star. And whether the band is floating Christine McVie's lovely, ominously tumultuous "Over and Over," or revisiting Fleetwood's history with a cover of Peter Green's "Oh Well," they insert some of the brooding anger of the blues into a series of pop-music hooks as irresistible as any ever recorded.
These days, in fact, Buckingham's favorite strategy is to place howling country-blues chords into the band's pop-rockers, and when he kept these new solos blunt and swift, they were exhilarating ways to perk up a hit like "Don't Stop."
His longer forays into this method were more dicey, but the squawking, bouncing chords he yanked out during "The Chain," early in Sunday's show, was a neck-snapping indication of the crazily passionate music that was to follow all evening.
Building a show that grew more complex and ambivalent as the evening wore on, Fleetwood Mac came to exemplify one of the foremost reasons why the superstar system need not be scrapped: Sometimes, it can still produce music as wonderful and far-reaching as what we heard this night.