I didn’t deliberately set out to write a long post about Fleetwood Mac that didn’t mention Stevie Nicks it just turned out that way. This was probably a little remiss of me as she was obviously the most visible member of the group by virtue of being the prettiest one and having the most distinctive voice, but she also had this Mystic Meg persona that made me think she’d sniffed way too much incense so I was never quite sure what I thought about her. Like Kate Bush you wouldn’t mind her being your girlfriend for a while but you’d soon get tired of spending all your time sitting in dark rooms reading tarot cards.
I have always loved this song though and she really belts it out in this clip. Love her Farah Fawcett hairdo too.
The biggest-selling album in 1977 was Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours which shifted so many copies (40 million!) it went way beyond being merely a successful record into the stratosphere inhabited by cultural juggernauts like Saturday Night Fever and Thriller — before those two came along it was the best-selling album of all-time (it’s now the 8th). I bought a copy too even though I don’t remember particularly being a fan of the group or any of the singles from it (none of which even cracked the Top 20 in England) because I thought an album that had become such a monster was something I should buy as a 15-year-old with growing pretensions to being a “serious” music fan (though I still didn’t “get” punk.) I bought the mega-selling Dark Side of The Moon for the same reason — “you have to buy it!” a schoolfriend had said to me — but that turned out to be a dull snoozer of an album (God, what a bore Roger Waters is) that I only played a few times while Rumours was actually a decent record, though I’m still puzzled why it sold the cartloads it did — it’s good but not that good. I didn’t particularly care for their more folky, mandolin-y leanings but I did love the bright AM pop songs of Christine McVie who is still my favourite voice in the group.
Obviously there were other, more radical, things happening in 1977 and I imagine that a lot of people who didn’t buy Rumours bought the first Clash album instead and saw rich, long-haired soft-rockers like Fleetwood Mac as representatives of the rock ruling class who would be among the first up against the wall after the punk revolution. So by the time they followed it up over two years later (an eternity back then) the musical landscape had completely changed, supposedly making the group and their brand of sunny Californian AOR irrelevant, at least in England — I’d had my own musical epiphany too during that time and was now firmly on the side of the revolutionaries.
But surprisingly, the Tusk album didn’t sound like they had just spent the previous two years lounging by swimming pools and smugly counting their royalties but were actually very aware that there had been a musical earthquake while they’d been gone and were open to it. Instead of Rumours: Part Deux it was a sprawling, often “difficult” record full of banging primitive beats and nervy jerky rhythms that sounded like Lindsey Buckingham (in particular) been listening to a lot of Talking Heads and probably The Fall and Gang of Four too (I vaguely remember him name-checking them in interviews), it was startling to hear these laid-back hippies making a noise like this:
Too startling for some people I guess as the album “only” sold four million copies (boo hoo), though the bizarre Tusk single was a bigger hit than anything off Rumours had been in England. It must have been a nightmare trying to follow up the biggest selling album ever so they decided to not even bother and do the “interesting” thing instead. So I ended up buying that album too but not because I felt any obligation to either, turns out these oldsters weren’t that bad after all and maybe didn’t deserve to get shot.
I’ve written a lot here about my mother’s record collection and had been working on one about Cat Stevens’ 1971 album “Teaser and The Firecat” before I left for London to see her. It was one of those albums you’d always find sitting next to “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Tapestry” in the homes of over-30s like my mother, offering a little taste of folky counter-culture bohemia in a nice, gentle package for those who were too old for Woodstock but too young for Val Doonican and James Last.
The album contained Stevens’ beautiful version of the old English hymn “Morning Has Broken” which, coincidentally, was played by the church organist at the end of my mother’s funeral ceremony. Well, not all that coincidentally really, my sister asked them to play it because it’s a lovely tune and was on one of my mother’s favourite albums.
I lived in Florida for several years and though it could be a relatively cosmopolitan place because of the large number of Hispanics and northern Yankees living there, every now and you’d be reminded that you were, in fact, in the Deep South. It wasn’t just the gun shops, the Confederate flag bumper stickers on pick-up trucks, the signs on shop doors saying “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service” or even the fact that black people seemed to live in a completely different world from the white folks. There was also the drunken redneck straight out of Deliverance who staggered up to me in a bar one night and because I had no idea what he was incoherently mumbling on about, said to me “If you cain’t unnerstand what ah’m sayin’ then get the fuck out of mah country!” and punched me in the face. Or the guy in another bar who told me that the English weren’t worth a damn and the United States should never have gotten involved in WWII because it wasn’t their problem. When I said that the Holocaust was a pretty important problem for everyone he replied “Aw, them Jews were askin’ for trouble” which was my cue to move to another stool. As you can imagine, being a left-wing, urban sophisticate from London, there were times when I wondered what the hell I was doing there (easy answer actually: it was hot, it was cheap, and the girls loved my accent.)
The jukebox soundtrack to those days was usually some loud and leaden Rawk music of the hairy and chest-beating kind: Lynyrd Skynyrd, AC/DC, Metallica — you know, real man’s music — but the one record I really, really hated which always plays in my head when I think about the South is “Old Time Rock and Roll” by Bob Seger. The song probably doesn’t mean much to your average Brit (unless they’re familiar with this scene from Risky Business) but it was a popular blue-collar classic down there which always got the Good Ol’ Boys rocking and made me want catch the next plane home (or at least cleanse my ears with some Pet Shop Boys.) It wasn’t just that it made Status Quo sound cutting edge, what made this song worse than all the others was its proud declaration that modern music was rubbish which, mixed with the ambience of cheap watery beer, rusty pick-up trucks and chewing tobacco, sounded like the rallying cry for every reactionary redneck cracker who still thought the wrong side won the Civil War, and the line “Don’t try to take me to a disco, you’ll never even get me out on the floor” always made me think of Nile Rodgers’ assertion that the whole “Disco Sucks!” movement in America was driven by racism and homophobia — in that context it might as well been called “Old Time Rock and Roll (And Not That Fag Shit).”
But I don’t want to dump on poor old Bob Seger too much, for a start he’s from Detroit and I’m sure he’s a nice, well-meaning bloke even if he is a bit of a bargain-basement Bruce Springsteen. And while I might be a sensitive, liberal city boy who does like disco, the truth is I was once also quite a fan of his 1978 album “Stranger In Town” and I really liked the single “Hollywood Nights” and used to own it on silver vinyl. And I still think this a tremendous record which motors along with the same exhilarating rush you get from flooring an open-top Mustang and zooming down a highway, it almost makes me forgive him for the living hell he put me through with “Old Time Rock and Roll”. Well, not quite, I still have nightmares about that bloody record.
The first minute of this clip captures the atmosphere I was talking about far better than I can, and it’s funny too, which always helps. This movie may technically be a comedy but at times it felt like a documentary to me.
PS: I should add, before I get a deluge of “how dare you!” comments, that I knew many wonderful, intelligent people in Florida, including my lovely wife who I met in a bar in Tampa. And I have been punched in pubs in London and Wales so there are arseholes everywhere.
I have no idea what this song is actually about but somehow I don’t think it’s about a hat, either way it’s a beaut though. The lyrics have always reminded me of Elvis Costello, especially the shabby sadness of “Man Out of Time.”
(Posts may be a little light and sporadic this week, work has reared its ugly head again.)
The sentimental musings of an ageing expat in words, music, and pictures. Mp3 files are up for a limited time so drink them while they're hot.
Contact me: lee at londonlee dot com
