{"id":86078,"date":"2018-07-28T00:38:38","date_gmt":"2018-07-27T21:38:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ngradio.gr\/?p=86078\/"},"modified":"2018-07-28T00:39:10","modified_gmt":"2018-07-27T21:39:10","slug":"remembering-fleetwood-macs-last-live-run-without-lindsey-buckingham-shake-cage-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ngradio.gr\/en\/news-el\/music-en\/remembering-fleetwood-macs-last-live-run-without-lindsey-buckingham-shake-cage-tour\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Fleetwood Mac\u2019s Last Live Run Without Lindsey Buckingham On The \u2018Shake The Cage\u2019 Tour"},"content":{"rendered":"

Listen To This Eddie<\/a>\u00a0is a weekly column that examines the important people and events in the classic rock canon and how they continue to impact the world of popular music.<\/em><\/p>\n

You know that old saying, \u201cThose who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it?\u201d Yeah, maybe someone should let the members of\u00a0Fleetwood Mac<\/a>\u00a0in on that bit of sage wisdom. This year, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, and John McVie will\u00a0hit the road once again<\/a>\u00a0to delight basketball arenas full of fans around the country with a bevy of the biggest hits that FM radio has ever spawned. Not included among the lineup is the band\u2019s longtime musical director, singer-guitarist extraordinaire Lindsey Buckingham, who was\u00a0given his walking paper<\/a>\u00a0by the rest of Fleetwood Mac a few months back for reportedly wanting to delay the run by half a year. If that seems petty, you certainly aren\u2019t attuned to the drama-filled history of this legendary band.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were supposed to go into rehearsal in June and he wanted to put it off until November [2019],\u201d Nicks\u00a0told\u00a0Rolling Stone<\/em><\/a>. \u201cWe arrived at the impasse of hitting a brick wall,\u201d Fleetwood added. \u201cThis was not a happy situation for us in terms of the logistics of a functioning band. To that purpose, we made a decision that we could not go on with him. Majority rules in term of what we need to do as a band and go forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

he interesting thing is that Fleetwood Mac\u2019s Buckingham-less run in 2018 draws an extraordinary amount of parallels between the last time the group chose to soldier on and hit the road without him 30 years ago for their Shake The Cage tour. By the spring of 1987, the guitarist was bone-tired having spent the last 18 months of his life re-working what was supposed to have been his next solo record into a full-on, Fleetwood Mac album titled\u00a0Tango In The Night<\/em>. It was a massive struggle just to get the thing put to bed, thanks in large part to the non-interest of his one-time paramour Stevie Nicks, who only showed up on rare occasions, seemingly far more concerned with promoting her own solo album at the time\u00a0Rock A Little<\/em>. Even when she as available, the results were not encouraging.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were recording at Lindsey\u2019s house up on Mulholland somewhere,\u201d\u00a0Nicks remembered.<\/a>\u00a0\u201cHe lived there with his girlfriend Cheri and this record was being recorded at his house and I didn\u2019t find that to be a great situation for me. Especially coming out of rehab. I guess I didn\u2019t go very often and when I did go I would get like, \u2018Give me a shot of brandy and let me sing on four or five songs off the top of my head.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt was a very difficult record to make,\u201d\u00a0Buckingham told\u00a0Uncut<\/em><\/a>. \u201cHalf the time Mick was falling asleep. We spent a year on the record but we only saw Stevie for a few weeks. I had to pull performances out of words and lines and make parts that sounded like her that weren\u2019t her.\u201d It\u2019s true, for the song \u201cWhen I See You Again,\u201d for example, Buckingham had to finish out the vocal himself after the bridge when Nicks wasn\u2019t able.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Despite the fractured recording process, the fatigue, addictions and demons that dogged the band throughout this period,\u00a0Tango In The Night<\/em>\u00a0was a huge, commercial success. With fifteen million copies sold, it ranks second only to\u00a0Rumours<\/em>\u00a0as Fleetwood Mac\u2019s best-selling album while also spawning two, top ten singles, \u201cBig Love,\u201d and \u201cLittle Lies.\u201d Given how succesful the record turned out to be, the next logical step, of course, would be to book a tour, but Lindsey had had enough and told the group as much.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was the worst recording experience of my life,\u201d he recalled.<\/p>\n

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\u201cAnd compared to making an album, in my experience, going on the road will multiply the craziness by times five. I just wasn\u2019t up for that. I needed to pull out of the machine and try to maintain a level of integrity for the work that wasn\u2019t about the scale or the sales.\u201d<\/p>\n

Needless to say, the rest of Fleetwood Mac did not take Buckingham\u2019s decision well and tried for months to change his mind with various accommodations, including acquiescing to his request to beef up the live lineup with a variety of studio players to really bring the\u00a0Tango<\/em>\u00a0songs to life. In the end, all the effort was for naught. The band held a meeting at Christine McVie\u2019s house in August to plot their upcoming tour, which is where the guitarist hit them with the news. \u201cI \ufb02ew off of the couch and across the room to seriously attack him,\u201d\u00a0Nicks told\u00a0Classic Rock<\/em><\/a>. \u201cAnd I did. I\u2019m not real scary but I grabbed him which almost got me killed.\u201d A chase through McVie\u2019s house ensued that eventually made its way out into the streets, before Buckingham finally left for good; for now.<\/p>\n

It was Fleetwood, who\u2019d navigated his namesake band through a multitude of different lineup changes far before Buckingham and Nicks entered the scene, that decided that they should proceed without him. \u201cI went: \u2018We\u2019re not stopping,\u2019\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd literally within a week, I convinced everyone that we should not stop and have this be a catastrophic non-event and have no promotion for the album.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Shake The Cage tour was already on the books with the first date scheduled to go down in Kansas City on September 30, 1987. Fleetwood and company acted fast to search for a replacement who could handle all of Buckingham\u2019s complicated parts. When they couldn\u2019t find one man for the job, they instead decided to pull in two, rockabilly singer Billy Burnette to handle the vocals and Rick Vito, a session musicians who\u2019d worked with Fleetwood on the drummer\u2019s album\u00a0I\u2019m Not Me<\/em>\u00a0to take care of the lead guitar parts. As it happens, they pulled the same move in 2018, enlisting Tom Petty\u2019s right-hand man Mike Campbell to play guitar and Crowded House\u2019s Neil Finn to sing. Whether Buckingham feels any ill-will toward his former band members for kicking him out (and honestly, he probably does), there\u2019s got to be at least a small bit of satisfaction knowing that it took two guys to do the job he\u2019d done all by himself for the past 40 years.<\/p>\n