Outside Counsel

Douglas Wolk asks, "Has there ever been a less-influential great band than Fleetwood Mac? ". It's an interesting question, and I'm not so sure he gets the answer right. What are we talking about when we say that an artist or a band is "influential"? Do we mean that a lot of imitators were inspired by the band? By this measure the existence of the Knickerbockers and Badfinger establishes The Beatles as influential, but that doesn't seem to really address why The Beatles were great. We are about million or so New Dylans down the road, and that hardly defines him either.

Seeing Springsteen on the last tour it occurred to me that the Boss was less the vision of rock'n'roll future Jon Landau thought he saw, and more the culmination of a complex set of influences-- Phil Spector, Roy Oberson-- lest we forget, Springsteen was a New Dylan for a while. Rethinking it a bit, it occurred to me that this was not altogether true-- we owe Bruce for Thin Lizzie, and Melissa Etheridge, and Meatloaf.... I don't know that this is a good thing, but there is no denying the influence.

Do we value Rod Stewart because Bonnie Tyler sounds like him? I would submit that The Who were influentially primarily to the extent that they inspired a lot of bands to produce overwrought concept albums. We have a lot of bad Kinks albums that should be on Pete Townsend's conscience, let me tell you, but we still know that The Who were great.

So perhaps that's not what we are getting at. I would submit that the value of "influence" is something more like what Brian Eno was talking about when he said of the Velvet Underground, "Only five thousand people ever bought a Velvet Underground album, but every single one of them started a band." The DIY aesthetic inspired by the Ramones (and others) had a similar effect-- and I think the same could be said for Chuck Berry, and James Brown, and a handful of others-- but if that is the standard of greatness, it is a pretty high bar. In the jazz realm we think about the founding fathers of bebop-- Charley Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk-- in those terms; and, of course, Miles Davis made a career of inventing jazz forms that others would devote careers to exploring. Is it fair to Fleetwood Mac to be held to the standard of artists like Miles, or Dylan, or the Vevets? I hardly think so, but I agree with Wolk that they were a pretty terrific band for a while there.

This sort of hierarchy is impossible to quantify. It is why being a fan is fun, of course-- making lists and arguing about this sort of thing is entertaining. It is also why the idea of a Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame is absurd. I would submit, however, that the significance of Fleetwood Mac may be twofold: although it is probably true that nobody aped their sound, everybody became the sort of studio obsessives that they were, and for a good long while that sort of high gloss production was the gold standard in pop music. I would also argue that our notion of what constitutes a blockbuster album may have been largely shaped by "Rumours"-- it was a gigantic seller before "Thriller" and its progeny, and in an interesting way shaped the music distribution industry's idea of what constituted success for years. It is notable that "Rumours" was the album that Reprise used to introduce the new album list price of $7.98 (bonus trivia question: What was the first album released with that list price?). I keep thinking that the intersection of Art and Commerce is where the next great study of American popular music is going to take place, and maybe Fleetwood Mac would be a good case study. If that's not influence, I don't know what is.

Rough week for guitar players, I'm afraid. First Pete Cosey (I've been listening to "Get Up With It" and "Electric Mud" since I heard), now Bob Welch. Like the Yardbirds or the Bluesbreakers Fleetwood Mac produced a number of notable guitarists. I guess that's how it went in the British blues scene back then. Welch's stretch with the band represented a stylistic departure, a move away from the blues and towards a more -- I hesitate to say pop, but that's what it was-- a pop sound. Some of this was probably attributable to Christine (née Perfect) McVie's presence. "Bare Trees" was successful, and it's follow-up, "Penguin" was the band's highest charting album to that point. Welch also brought "Hypnotized" to the band on his last album with the Mac, "Mystery to Me". His solo career is probably best summed up by noting that his biggest hit after leaving the band was a remake of "Sentimental Lady", but there is no denying that he was a talented cat. He kept plugging at it, and it's sad that it ended this way for him. A possible clue-- I just went onto iTunes, and none of the sides he cut with Fleetwood Mac are there. Amazon has them as CDs, or on vinyl, but not as mp3s. This strongly suggests that the guy who saved Fleetwood Mac from commercial oblivion hasn't been seeing a lot of mailbox money lately, and if that's true it's a crime.

I suppose one of the points of having a Hall of Fame is so that people can have discussions about who should or shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame. (Discussions about whether there should even be a Hall of Fame seem to be largely confined to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.) Something about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that has bugged me for a while is why Bob Welch was not inducted with Fleetwood Mac. All of the other members of the band were inducted-- but Welch, who was the guitarist, songwriter and vocalist for the band in the period when it transitioned from Brit Blues to LA Pop was locked out. Are the four sides the band recorded with Welch their best work? I'd say Future Games, Bare Trees, Penguin,  Mystery to Me, and Heros Are hard to Find are an important piece of the band's output. Christgau gives Games, Trees, Penguin and Mystery each a B+, which seems fair. Heros gets a B-, and I'd say that's about right as well. (It was, however, their first US Top 40 album.) Back then every hip dorm room had a copy of at least one of these: usually Bare Trees or Mystery to Me. It is certainly worth noting that the band kept rolling during this period-- the personnel changes that it went through would have scuttled most other acts. (It was a good time for bands like this, which were allowed to keep making records even without scoring a major hit. As with movies the age of the blockbuster would soon arrive. Ironically, the Mac would be one of the acts that brought about the demise of the mid-list band.) When Welch left the band they were on strong enough terms that Fleetwood, Chrisine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham played on the re-make of "Sentimental Lady" in 1974. Per Wikipedia, in 1978, Welch, Fleetwood and the McVies had signed a contract with Warner Bros. agreeing to an equal share of all royalties from their Fleetwood Mac albums. Welch alleged that the other three  had subsequently struck various deals with Warner Bros. that gave them higher royalty rates, and had failed to inform him of the new, higher royalty rate, thus depriving him of his fair share of royalties. He sued, and the matter was ultimately settled, but during the pendency of the law suit he wasn't in direct communication with Fleetwood. In other words, an important member of one of the most disfunctional bands in the world got screwed over for an honor because he was getting screwed over on his royalties.

It would be fun to locate the court file on Welch v. Fleetwood, and it would be even more fun to put together a casebook for a class on Rock and Roll Litigation. The nitty-gritty of how bands are organized and managed is something I'd love to devote some time to.

Interesting article on the changed business model for popular music. Older acts are the big concert attractions, and touring is where the money is. This has probably been true for jazz musicians for a couple of generations, of course, and is probably more true than ever for jazz, but it's a reality for rock too, and it's the "heritage acts" that are cashing in. Recorded music made an artifact-- the recording itself-- into a new art form, but the wheel has turned. I thought it was interesting that younger acts aren't necessarily putting on the sorts of shows that they need to in order to fill the big venues. Spectacle is a big part of what people are plunking their bucks for, and that's certainly a different skill from songwriting of guitar slinging. When you look at video of "Greetings From Asbury Park" era Springsteen it is pretty clear that he'd figured it out-- he knew how to perform for an audience and how to make records, and that combination and some patience on the part of his label made it happen for him. There are acts out there that can do this-- The Supersuckers come to mind-- but it is a complex blend. A certain kind of fan is always going to be there for the musicianship, but playing for them isn't going to buy a house in Malibu.

As we were driving in this morning Fleetwood Mac's "Hypnotized" came on, and I mused about that band. We'll never see anything quite like that again is my feeling. Basically a rhythm section which was defined by whoever rotated into the songwriter/guitarist chair, who'd have the patience with an act like that? Back when I was in college, just before they became the biggest thing in the whole world ever, a copy of "Bare Trees" in someone's collection was an indication of taste and discernment, particularly if there were one or two additional Fleetwood Mac sides on the shelf next to it. "Kiln House", maybe, or maybe "Mystery to Me". There were a lot of bands like that-- FM radio staples. Nobody ran out to buy "Future Games", trust me, and it's hard to believe that Reprise kept them under contract. Because they did a lot of records ended up being sold, and it may even be true that because a lot of records got sold some artists who wouldn't have gotten a shot were subsidized.

If commercial banks were bands, what bank would be The Beatles? Actually, nobody gets to be The Beatles, and who knows one commercial bank from the other? The piece is funny all the same. " 3) Deutsche Bank = Fleetwood Mac. A lazy comparison would equate Deutsche Bank AG, Germany's only global bank, with Kraftwerk, Germany's only global band. Reliant on technology for success, secretive, Teutonic and somewhat emotionless, they have a lot in common.
"A different list of attributes, though, suggests an alternative. Immensely profitable? Check. Years of infighting and not communicating with one another? Check. Badly in need of a style makeover? Check. It's Fleetwood Mac."

I am not sure why, but for the past few months I have been surveying Fleetwood Mac. I've been paying particular attention to Then Play On, which deserves, I think, a better sobriquet than "Brit Blues"-- Peter Green got it in a way that John Mayall wished he could have. Middle period Mac-- Danny Kirwan/Bob Welch Mac, I suppose, was what I liked back when I was an undergrad. Of course, they broke through with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, along with Christine (Perfect) McVie as principle songwriters, and at this late date I guess I have to concede that Nicks, as loopy as she has always seemed to me, is the real deal as a rock singer/writer. McVie's work pretty obviously required context that she couldn't produce outside of a band setting-- I bought a copy of her solo album (called "The Legendary Christine Perfect Album"in the US) and immediately realized that I'd been had. Buckingham's solo stuff cracks me up, and I am glad I own some of it, but again, what is clearly going on there is that he's a flake who does his best work when someone calls him on his flakiness. Nicks understood it all. I never need to hear "Leather and Lace" again, but I respect it. Nicks wrote a hit single, and good for her. She has written, actually, a ton of them, and just because I don't like them doesn't mean that they aren't  exactly what they are supposed to be. So, yeah. Great rhythm section that kept lucking onto great writers. Is there anyone else quite like that?
spending some time with

The Stones are just about the only act I would even consider seeing at a football stadium, and I did consider it, but then I thought better of it. A substantial factor was cost: a half yard is a lot of kale. In the end though it wasn't so much that as it was the idea that I would be able to see them better on dvd, hear them better on CD or vinyl, and do either in greater comfort in my house, with my choice of beer and my choice of things to eat. In a way this makes me sad, like catching a look at myself in a mirror and wondering who that old guy is before realizing it's me. I don't want to see Fleetwood Mac at a hockey arena. I don't want to be any further away from Bob Dylan than I was the last time-- roughly 25 feet away is my outer limit. I love live music, but I will be confining my future excursions to the smaller venues from now on. Mick and Keef and Charlie and Ronnie can't rock me at a show when I'm three blocks away.

The music choices politicians make don't have to be flat out terrible. I'm good with Clinton and "Don't Stop", and one of the things that made Jimmy Carter seem sorta hip was that he quoted Dylan. That says it all when it comes to being hip in politics, though-- Jimmy Carter and Fleetwood Mac are as cool as it gets. I don't understand why this is so, but it appears that the Kerry campaign has the same Classic Rock disease as just about everybody else. From Salon: ' "All Right Now" is followed by the theme to "Rocky." "Revolution" starts but soon skips to the truly execrable "Eye of the Tiger" by '80s nightmare Survivor. The reporter beside me has been covering both campaigns for months. "Can Republican music be any worse than this?" he asks.'