In Son of the Morning Star we read that the elderly Sitting Bull enjoyed visits with old U.S. cavalry soldiers who came by to see him. With whom else could you have such a deep conversation about the Little Bighorn? This is the reason why, someday, you will be happy to hear Nickleback at the old folks’ home.

Fleetwood Mac’s mega-monster hit Rumours (1977) was everywhere in its day. Those songs were in the air of the times, like the smell of musky polyester. It’s a surprise—those LPs that one once would have gladly shot as skeet, end up as repositories of the angst of the age. “Rhiannon” isn’t quite Joni Mitchell, but it does sum up a certain kind of Me Decade woman, aeire-faerie, and a flame to all us dumb male moths. The blood hasn’t quite dried on “The Chain” charting the devastating circumstances of the Sausalito recording sessions of Rumours. Here was an incestuous ronde of affairs, set into spinning overdrive by the kind of A-1 nose-candy few sub-rock stars have ever snorted. (The band honored the album’s suggestive title, posing four in bed on the cover of the Rolling Stone.)

The 2017 perspective suggests singer and keyboardist Christine McVie contributed to all the really good songs on Rumours. The appealing sweet sorrow of her singing the lines “Have mercy, baby, on a poor girl like me” harks back to Fleetwood Mac’s origins as a blues band.  Plus Christine plays the accordion sometimes. And plus, also, on video, she’s charming with her snappy answer to the stupid question: “How does it feel being a sex symbol?” “I dunno, ask Stevie Nicks.

Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie drops June 9, with two tracks released in advance. The duo has about a dozen summer tour dates, the nearest to us being two hours away at the Ironstone Winery in Murphys on Jul 21; they’re part of a musical calendar that includes Matchbox 20 and good ol’ Willie Nelson. But it’s clear the unkillable—and arguably local—band is back, just re-labeled Christine’s ex, John McVie turned up in the studio for the new recording, and Mick Fleetwood is on drums. Only Stevie Nicks is MIA. There are no spring chickens here, obviously. The ungallant might say “Now, here we have a band with a couple of centuries of experience between them.”

The new album marks something like five decades of south of San Francisco music. Buckingham and his off-again, on-again partner Stephanie “Stevie” Nicks met at Menlo Atherton High. In the late 1960s they played the county fairgrounds and the valley’s high school gyms as the Fritz Rabyne Memorial Band, popularly known as Fritz. The album Buckingham Nicks continued the work of these collaborators and lovers. Years later, when Buckingham was about to go full Brian Wilson in the studio for Tusk, he prepared by composing the songs on a then-state of the art home recording studio system.

I would have liked to have thrown the duo a few questions, but I was weighed and found wanting by the publicists. I found solace for this within the book Tusk by Rob Trucks (33 1/3)—“Lindsey Buckingham screwed me,” complains Trucks, as he was given a broken promise of interviews concerning that landmark double album. Trucks had to make up the shortage with descriptions of his childhood and his toenail fungus (ain’t joking). Still, there’s useful info here; the interview by trumpeter Gretchen Heffler of the USC Spirit of Troy Marching Band, heard in the recording of my lifetime favorite Mac-track “Tusk.” Also, Jonathan Segel of Camper Van Beethoven recalls the process by which his band traced over and recorded every track on F-Mac’s allegedly unpopular album Tusk.

Tusk, the double-album follow-up to Rumours, was hardly a financial stinkbomb. As Trucks points out, it earned well, just not by the standards of the book made by its hit predecessor. Show me the double album that doesn’t have a little fat on it, but Tusk is a serious musical stance: a band surveying the littered landscape after a crackup.   

 Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie
Jun 9
Atlantic Records