(#355: 31 October
1987, 2 weeks; 7 May 1988, 2 weeks; 28 May 1988, 1 week)
Track listing: Big
Love/Seven Wonders/Everywhere/Caroline/Tango In The Night/Mystified/Family
Man/Little Lies/Welcome To The Room…Sara/Isn’t It Midnight/When I See You
Again/You & I, Part II
“Don’t know what’s wrong,” grunts Lindsey Buckingham halfway
through “Family Man,” “but I do know what’s right.” Walking down that cold,
cold road is this troubled man who is Springsteen’s junior by just ten days. But who is this “family”? “Mother…father…brother…”; well, if he means
Fleetwood Mac, then that takes care of Christine, Mick and John. But somebody
else is missed out. In any case, is there actually anybody on this song except
him? Does this family even still exist? Or did they already make their excuses
and leave?
Detour #1: a hallucinatory rainbow of Fairlight strings and
harp and booming Cocteau Twins guitar, the coda to SMiLE Brian never managed to imagine. Then, eventually, a voice,
slightly startling in its deepness, uttering words like:
“You, under strange falling skies
You, with a love that would not die”
and:
“You, where the strange wind blows
You, with the secrets no one knows”
and beyond that, nothing except “You, you and I.” You
probably won’t know it, because it’s “You & I, Part I,” which only appeared
on the B-side of the “Big Love” single. Its omission from this album is rather
like Pepper going straight into “With
A Little Help From My Friends.”
Another thing to note is that this album came out in April
and took just over half a year to make number one. In the States, it did very
well but never got past number seven on Billboard.
Its eventual appearances in this tale can be explained by “Little Lies”
becoming a major hit single (and “Everywhere” the following spring, hence its
return to the top). This indicates that a lot of people found the record
problematic, not quite what they had anticipated ten years before.
But then, what do
you make of an album whose lead song and lead single were “Big Love”?
Detour #2: 23 May 1997, in the Warner Brothers studio in
Burbank, before an invited audience; the “classic” Fleetwood Mac quintet have
briefly reconvened for an MTV special entitled The Dance. It is the first time they have been on stage together
since Clinton’s inauguration over four years previously. The performance will
climax with a spectacular “Tusk,” featuring the USC Marching Band themselves.
But for “Big Love,” Lindsey Buckingham is all alone with his guitar.
Nobody really knew what to make of “Big Love” when they
first heard it. Yes, this is Fleetwood Mac – or is it (like “Caroline” and “Family
Man,” it was originally intended for Buckingham’s third solo album but
sequestered by the band, with some resistance from its author)? Certainly, even
Buckingham has rarely sounded so intense or angry. On one hand, as is evident
elsewhere on the album, he is having an awful lot of fun with this sparkling
new Fairlight toy.
But, not expecting the audience to know about Buckingham’s
tortured love life, whom is he addressing? One moment he is promising to build
her a kingdom, but in the next verse she is begging him to stay in that very
same kingdom; that is, if it is the same “she,” which I doubt is the case
(there was Stevie, and then there was Carol Ann Harris, and latterly Cheri
Casperi). All the while he is “looking out for love – BIG, BIG LOVE” as though “love”
were the equivalent of Family Fortunes’
“BIG MONEY.”
It really is that story again – wanting love as a symbol of
perfection, settling for nothing less and not understanding what love is really
about. And despite the determined futurism on the music’s surface and the
alleged blackboard lectures about New Pop, Buckingham’s howl reaches back to
Roy Orbison and forward to Kurt Cobain. When the rhythm section really make
themselves known – under the “ooh, aah” climax – Buckingham’s high, pealing, extended
one-note guitar scream reminds us that this is the same band who once performed
“Man Of The World” and “Oh Well.” Names and faces change but emotions don’t.
More disquieting, however, is the fact that the male/”female”
cross-channel “ooh”s and “aah”s are not Lindsey and Stevie, but Lindsey
entirely. Where is Stevie again?
A decade later, they are all present, but Lindsey is alone
on the stage, and performs a lightning-speed reading of the song. If you know
the tricks of playing guitar then you’ll know the playing is not quite as complicated as it sounds – one hand
plucking the upper two strings, the other holding down or otherwise handling
the lower three, so it’s a question of technical coordination above everything
else – but nobody except Lindsey could perform the song with the intensity that
he invests in it. When he reaches the climax, thrashing out flamenco chords,
rocking back and forth as though in an uncontrollable fit, screaming and crying
rather than grunting, and right at the end, cutting off and reeling back from
the microphone as though having collided with a volcano, there is a terror that
is not present in the original recording; his Orbison musings have mutated into
Chris Isaak, and, particularly when taken in combination with the penultimate
song on #516, the conclusion is that this is some kind of threnody for Kurt.
Consider the trappings of the original song, which were
already oppressive enough; here is Lindsey Buckingham, here’s Charlie Kane,
alone in his big castle, with things,
but things are not PEOPLE, and he is alone and he knows that none of it means
anything without love, the right love, and in 1987 he is not yet ready to break
down like he does at the end of the MTV “Big Love,” to admit vulnerability and
fear.
What did that old song say?
“And how I don't want to be sad anymore
And how I wish I was in love.”
But where is Stevie?
“Seven Wonders” in Britain was the second single, and missed
the Top 40 entirely, and it is recognisably Stevie Nicks but on closer
listening sounds more like a demon possessing Stevie Nicks. It doesn’t help
that she didn’t write the song herself – the songwriter was her long-time
associate Sandy Stewart (who worked extensively with her on 1983’s solo The Wild Heart) and the sum total of
Nicks’ contribution was to make minute changes to some of the lyrics and get
one line wrong (it was meant to be “All the way down you held the line” but
Nicks heard it as “All the way down to Emmeline” and that’s how it stayed, as
if she’d just remembered Hot Chocolate).
But Nicks’ delivery is rough, tortured, furious. I’m not
saying she heard Kristin Hersh on “Delicate Cutters” and knew that the bar had
been raised a little – since she wouldn’t have been in a position to do so – but
her voice could scratch paint off the Taj Mahal, despite Buckingham’s sterling
background support.
As for Christine, she was responsible (or, in the case of “Little
Lies,” one-half responsible, with her then husband Eddy Quintela) for the album’s
two best-known songs. “Little Lies” works chiefly because of Buckingham’s keen awareness
of New Pop mores – the arrangement and whispered chorales are distilled Prefab
Sprout, whereas the chorus could be Bucks Fizz (“Tell-me-TELL-ME-LI-IES!” Who
said something about their camera never lies?) – and its own little lie that it’s
a charming late eighties love song when actually it is proposing a break-up (“We’re
better off apart, let’s give it a try”). Likewise, the happiness on “Everywhere”
sounds very transient indeed (“You better make it soon/Before you break my
heart”); the latter is effective because of the cut-up symphony Buckingham and
his Fairlight make of piercing, pointillistic stars of voices.
Elsewhere there is the unusual sight of three
Lindsey/Christine co-writes. Of those, “Isn’t It Midnight” was again written
with Quintela, and canters along like a standard mid-eighties MTV-friendly rocker until
Buckingham’s furious, fuzzy and increasingly atonal lead guitar suddenly and
terrifyingly appears on the scene and proceeds to erase the song altogether;
the only other time this happens on the record is with the Buckingham-penned
title track, poised as it is between morbid contemplation and unfettered fury,
perhaps echoing the record’s cover painting, Homage á Henri Rousseau, by the Australian artist Brett-Livingstone
Strong, which depicts a nocturnal glade by the seashore. At its centre something
gleams with a light that has been pointed at it from a direction and source
unknown; in the water there are two swans, one camouflaged, and between them lurks a crocodile, ready to come ashore
and wreak havoc if it gets annoyed – therefore, an idyll which on closer
inspection isn’t idyllic at all.
“You & Me, Part II” I’ll come to eventually, but the
third Buckingham/McVie collaboration, which closes side one, is the rather
lovely “Mystified” with its gorgeous, ruminating chord changes and a feeling of
crisp eternity that is highly reminiscent of OMD; it could theoretically fade
out altogether, but the song is about uncertainty when faced with what looks
like love. It plays like a tropical beach hut silently surrounded by sharks.
Like practically all of the songs here not written by Stevie
Nicks, “Mystified”’s lyric is minimalist, almost like a pop haiku, and it can
mean whatever your circumstances demand it should mean. Otherwise, Buckingham’s
“Caroline” is all scratchy Peter Gabriel manoeuvres, and something about
reaching the mountain top and cutting the cord (signifiers!).
But if there are only three songs on this record sung (less
than fully) by Stevie Nicks, only two of which she fully wrote, then there is a
melancholy explanation for this, as Buckingham told Uncut in a 2003 interview: “It was a very difficult record to make.
Half 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’t her.”
Actually, over the seventeen months it had taken to make the
album – recording began as early as November 1985 – Nicks had spent a
cumulative total of two weeks in the studio. Her cocaine habit had worsened to
the extent that she required a thirty-day stay in the Betty Ford Clinic (which
was the inspiration for “Welcome To The Room…Sara”). On her release, however,
she went to see a psychiatrist and was prescribed the tranquiliser Klonopin, to
which she soon became far more seriously addicted; she did not manage to shake
the addiction off fully until the early nineties. As an addict, she was hardly
capable of turning up in the recording studio and doing her bit and so
Buckingham was faced with the task of having to build her vocal tracks up from
isolated lines, sometimes even isolated words, as described above. If Nicks’
voice on things like “Little Lies” sounds cut and pasted, it is a speeded-up
Buckingham (the drop-ins on “When I See You Again” where it sounds as though he
is messing about varispeed-style with Nicks’ voice à la “If I Was Your Girlfriend” – within all the “What’s the
matter, baby” stuff - are almost certainly speeded-up Buckingham).
Then again, is that really Christine McVie singing on “Isn’t
It Midnight” or a 60 rpm Buckingham impersonating McVie impersonating Nicks?
Buckingham, in the abovementioned Uncut
interview, summed it up: “Everyone was at their worst, including myself. We’d
made the progression from what could be seen as an acceptable or excusable
amount of drug use to a situation where we had all hit the wall. I think of it
as our darkest period.”
In other words, everybody in this family was too fucked up
to make this album, and Buckingham (with co-producer Richard Dashut) had to
bear most of the burden of putting it together and making it work. Thus Tango In The Night looks like Fleetwood
Mac, sounds at a distance like Fleetwood Mac, but isn’t really Fleetwood Mac. Nowhere
is this more apparent than on the two Nicks-penned/sung songs. In contrast to
Buckingham’s essentially futurist musical outlook, Nicks sounds stranded in the
past; “Welcome To The Room” plays with notions of Tusk and Gone With The Wind
but in truth she is far too far gone; at one point (“This is a dream, right?”)
she sounds like the yet-to-be-born Taylor Swift. She is back in the past, with
the other “Sara” (but “Sara” is
Stevie – isn’t she?), with “Beautiful Child” and maybe even with “Quicksilver
Girl.” I wonder whether the nod to Propaganda’s “Duel” (“The first cut is the
deepest one of all…”) was at Buckingham’s prompting. Most chilling is when she
sings, towards the end of the song, “When you hang up that ‘phone/Well, you
cease to exist.” As far as the Fleetwood Mac of 1987 was concerned, she was
barely existing as it was.
In “When I See You Again” she is dreaming, she is lost in a
dream, in memories of things and relationships that once were, and when she can
go no further, she gives up:
“And the dream says I want you
And the dream is gone
So she stays up nights on end
Well at least there is a dream left”
With that, she makes her exit from the song, and the album;
and we are left with the ghostly voice of Buckingham to sing the final lines - “If
I see you again/Will it be over/Again and again/Over and over?” – and sing them
right into the next world. He wants to get on; she is incapable of doing so.
The record closes with its most disquieting and disturbing
song. Musically, “You & I, Part II” is a cheerful daytime television
electro-jingle; with a slightly different arrangement it could have fitted onto
the end of Sulk (and yes, I can
imagine Billy Mackenzie singing “Big Love”) – but lyrically (and this is
Lindsey AND Christine) what the hell is going on? Eyes shut tight, phantoms
crawling out of the night, hoping and praying that tomorrow never comes, a
Queen Dido-esque entreaty not to “forget about me”…but then again, the phrase “hoping
tomorrow will never come for you and I” can have two meanings, depending upon
whether you regard the verb “come” as transitive or intransitive. This,
however, is unquestionably the end, the sound of the singer closing the door on
the “family,” on the group which a decade earlier had already sounded on the point
of disintegrating.
And so it proved. Disgruntled by the prospect of touring the
album, given the stresses incurred in recording it, Buckingham demurred and
left the band. Tango In The Night
remains the last new word that these five people have left us; The Dance included no new songs, and by
the time of Say You Will, effectively
a Buckingham-Nicks record, Christine McVie had retired, contributing only
occasional, ghostly backing vocals. There is no indication that their
forthcoming reunion will produce any new material. And so the dialogue, the
pain, continued in other ways. By the time “You & I, Part II” has done its
business, Buckingham’s voice has been reduced to a ghost in the Fairlight.
Perhaps he saw the future only too plainly.
