Weddings, Parties, Anything, Anyone

VH1 has recently been running a behind-the-scenes special on the making of Fleetwood Mac’s eagerly anticipated 2003 studio album, Say You Will. The album itself was generally well received, though that’s not much of a surprise given the veteran rock group’s enormous fan base. Many of those fans were overjoyed to see the reunion of the group with Lindsey Buckingham, the creative powerhouse whose departure after the 1987 album Tango In The Night left them wondering if there could be a Fleetwood Mac without him. What seems to have been forgotten in the interim is that there was, in fact, a Fleetwood Mac without Lindsey Buckingham. And there had been before.

Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac several years into the band’s life. Stinging from the departure of moody guitar genius Peter Green, the core members – Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Christine McVie – took on the California duo who had created something of an underground hit with their self-titled Buckingham Nicks album (and maybe that catchy combination of their surnames to create their identity found some resonance with Fleetwood and the McVies as well). Buckingham and Nicks were a couple at the time, and their addition to Fleetwood Mac propelled the band’s self-titled 1976 album to acclaim and, more importantly, airplay. But in the wake of that album, Buckingham and Nicks’ relationship deteriorated (as did the marriage between John and Christine McVie), and the resulting hard feelings informed 1977’s Rumours, still considered by many to be Fleetwood Mac’s magnum opus. And it’s the success of that album that has created, in the minds of many, the picture of the Buckingham/Nicks/McVie/Fleetwood/McVie lineup as the definitive Fleetwood Mac.

Buckingham was eager to avoid doing, as he frequently put it, “Rumours II,”and spent the group’s next two studio albums carving out an increasingly experimental niche in rock music. When Buckingham departed in 1987, the rest of the group auditioned for the best of the best, finally hiring two well-regarded sessions players who were both guitarists, vocalists and songwriters in their own right. The product of the new recruits was 1991’s Behind The Mask. Somehow, Mask – despite ample airplay and curiosity from even casual fans about how Fleetwood Mac sounded minus Buckingham – didn’t soar to the best-selling heights of its predecessors. Then Bill Clinton adopted “Don’t Stop” (from Rumours) as the theme for his 1992 Presidential campaign, and when he won the vote, asked Fleetwood Mac – with Buckingham – to perform at his Inaugural Ball. (Money, it seems, couldn’t keep the band together, but a Presidential decree could.) With Buckingham, and without Behind The Mask recruits Billy Burnette and Rick Vito, the Mac was back, and a major tour (and, consequently, a best-selling live album) ensued.

But, pressing rewind a bit, Behind The Mask didn’t sound appreciably different from Buckingham-era Fleetwood Mac. (In fact, a careful reading of the fine-print “guest musicians” listing shows that he did, in fact, lay down acoustic guitar tracks on one song.) The album’s producer carefully kept the new material in the same sonic vein as the old, and on tracks such as the lead single “Save Me” which featured lead vocals by Christine McVie or Stevie Nicks, the honest truth was that it was hard to tell that Buckingham wasn’t there.

And this really demands some rethinking on the fickle subject of bands’ identity. Even with a key member of the group gone (its male voice, guitarist and one-third of its songwriting muscle), Fleetwood Mac still sounded like Fleetwood Mac – at the whim of the group’s producer. Now, in a business sense, it wasn’t just an obvious choice to make the new lineup sound as much like the old as possible – it was, given the amount of scrutiny cast on the Mac by fans expecting the group to fail without Lindsey Buckingham, a wise choice.

Another 70s supergroup, Electric Light Orchestra, seems to have accumulated a revised history which paints it as the brainchild of Jeff Lynne, its lead vocalist, guitarist, sole songwriter and producer. But ELO was actually an offshoot of the Move, a successful (at least in the UK) late 60s pop group which took Beatlesque melodies and bent them in a heavier, rockier direction. Roy Wood, who emerged as the Move’s leader through a couple of personnel changes, brought Lynne in as the result of one of those changes. Both enamoured of such experimental Fab Four tunes as “I Am The Walrus” and “Strawberry Fields,” Wood and Lynne conceived of ELO as a side project, running parallel with and being funded by – at least initially – the Move. Bringing drummer Bev Bevan with them, the two recorded a 1971 debut album for the new project, thick with cellos and other classical touches, as well as songs so diverse and non-traditional that they wouldn’t have met the expectations of the Move’s audience. Eventually, the Move was folded as both Wood and Lynne grew more interested in ELO, but then Wood left six months after making that decision – with another band member’s creative juices flowing, there was an increasing amount of conflict over whose material would be recorded, how it would sound, and what direction the band as whole was taking. Wood left to form his own rock-with-classical-instruments outfit, Wizzard, and Lynne recruited new players for ELO and went on to find tremendous success in the mid 1970s.

This revitalized ELO lineup, give or take a few members, kept recording and touring until 1986, when Lynne decided to fold the unit and concentrate on his increasing demand as a producer in his own right. He would immediately go on to produce ex-Beatle George Harrison’s next album, Cloud Nine, to tremendous acclaim, setting in motion a chain of events that would see him producing the first “new” Beatles songs in two decades in 1995. In 1990, a retrospective ELO box set arrived, though now the liner notes seemed to paint Roy Wood as more of a guest performer/songwriter early in the band’s history. This revision of the band’s history may have been prompted by Lynne as a pre-emptive strike against some former bandmates: drummer Bev Bevan was recruiting new performers and songwriters to record and tour under the name “ELO Part 2.” That group’s self-titled debut album, forever doomed to be confused with the original ELO’s self-titled debut album in computerized inventory databases, featured the lush strings and harmony vocals that characterized ELO’s hugely successful sound in the mid/late 70s, only with different people writing and singing the songs. With several hands now stirring the songwriting pot, the songs were, musically and lyrically, miles away from Lynne’s solitary vision – the sound now tended toward hard rock with orchestral accompaniment. On at least two of the debut album’s tracks, instrumentally and vocally (with the exception of Eric Troyer’s voice, noticeably different from Lynne’s), there were moments where ELO Part 2 sounded remarkably like 1970s ELO – and yet the difference is enough to tell that these were someone else’s songs.

And of course there are more than just these two examples. Lawsuits and injunctions have been filed over whether or not certain members of the Wilson clan have any right to tour as the Beach Boys, or whether or not David Gilmour and the rest of post-Roger-Waters Pink Floyd can tour under that name. And the latter-day history of Motown is littered with cases where ousted members of classic “girl groups” from the labels heyday sued for being released due to age or other issues.

So the question is…does the identity of a band have any meaning anymore? Some bands hold that identity as an immutable sign of the creative collective they were at the time: after the death of Jerry Garcia, the Greatful Dead simply became The Dead. Upon the departure of David Byrne for a solo career, the Talking Heads, by a similar (and rhyming) token, became the Heads (and they still had to endure a lawsuit from Byrne). Other bands shift identities both internally and externally – Jefferson Airplane has undergone several changes of name and style, into Jefferson Starship and subsequently just Starship. Other bands keep their name despite a change of membership – R.E.M. is still just as much R.E.M. after losing Bill Berry. Some acts change their names just to stir up public interest – Prince and Madonna (oops, sorry, Esther), I’m looking at you.

The bands may see their identities as the perfect verbal thumbnail sketch of who they are at the moment of creation, and that’s fine – Crowded House, to me, is Finn (the younger), Hester and Seymour. And they decided that’s what it was too, after a short and awkward stint with Finn (the elder) added to the group (though they later rightly expanded that definition to include longtime live backup player Mark Hart as a full member of the band). But never forget that to the managers, the labels, and those watching the bottom line, the band’s identity is nothing more and nothing less than a brand. To the marketing departments, it might as well be a band named “Nabisco.” Because while the band’s members may have adopted a name as the symbol for something not unlike the Platonic ideal of the perfect form of who they are and what they play, the labels just want something that will sell, often forgetting to focus on the sound that got that band on the radio in the first place.