Remember Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 “Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies”? Eight academic departments invited Jasbir Puar to Vassar College and she told students lots of lies. They were neither sweet, nor little.

Ms. Puar’s talk this past Wednesday evening was titled “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters.” The Rutgers’ Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies has been busy telling lies, presenting a version of this lecture from Poughkeepsie to Santa Barbara. Her incendiary, unbalanced hate speech masquerades as scholarship. In typical postcolonialist fashion, she ignores the facts and twists reality in favor of delusional fantasies to promote her spurious agenda. Disguised behind a plethora of pseudo-intellectual jargon, she presents bigotry all too reminiscent of 1930s Europe to demonize Jews.

I was there, listening to her reading from her computer in a monotone voice. Her lack of emotion contrasted sharply with the hatred she expressed. Let me give you a taste of her slanderous distortions and demonizing lies about Israel.

With no documentation or specific evidence, Ms. Puar asserted that Israel’s ultimate goals are ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, stealing of Palestinian land and entrenchment and expansion of suffocating Israeli power. Israel’s “settler occupation” (her term) which she calls the “second Nakba” (catastrophe) is all about using “asphyxiating” biopolitical control over body and environment to suppress the Palestinian people. To this end, she claims Israel uses scientifically executed “maiming” and “stunting.”

She described the end goal as not just ethnic cleansing, but also the ‘cannibalism of a culture.’

“Maiming” means shooting to intentionally cripple, shattering knees and hitting vital organs (an obvious contradiction) to minimize death statistics and ensure that Palestinian workers can be profitable without threatening the occupier.

“Stunting” is used to permanently debilitate and disable the Palestinians. This is achieved through population poisoning with uranium, lead and phosphorus and “calorie starvation” in children. Through Israel’s actions, it is creating physical, psychological and cognitive injuries by controlling infrastructure, water, electricity and land, restricting mobility and limiting telecommunications. Her personal observation is that 95 percent of Palestinians are permanently disabled.

Even congenital disabilities are blamed on the Israelis and, incredibly, Ms. Puar held Israel totally responsible for the collapse (via “remote home control”) of essential services in Hamas-controlled Gaza, which she called an “open air prison.”

Ms. Puar’s libelous accusations included Israelis killing Palestinians to harvest their organs, a version of the age-old anti-Semitic “blood libel,” experimentation on Palestinian children, “field assassinations” of 120 Palestinians, ages 12-16, in the last four months, and the intentional bombing of Palestinian hospitals and nursing homes.   She labeled Israel an apartheid state that uses its world-renowned reproductive technology to control population demographics by collecting genetic data to identify who is Jewish and specifically targeting Palestinian procreative organs. Paradoxically, she bragged that the Palestinian birthrate is triple that of the Jewish Israelis.

Ms. Puar concluded that Israel is imposing a collective punishment on helpless Palestinians through psychic, bodily and mobility impairments, all elements of biopolitics. She described the end goal as not just ethnic cleansing, but also the “cannibalism of a culture.”

‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.’

When asked whether Israelis were creating a slow-motion genocide, she agreed Palestinians are dying a slow death, but insisted the term “genocide” remains “tethered to the Holocaust” and its use is not allowed since Jews have hijacked discourse regarding trauma and victimhood.

She supported Vassar’s current BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) resolution, but, after students stopped applauding, advocated organized armed resistance against Israel.

This lecture was hate speech, pure and simple, demonizing the Jewish nation like Goebbels and Hitler, perpetuating the anti-Semitic “blood libel” and blaming Israel for all the evil in the world. Shades of Der Sturmer or Mein Kampf.

A hundred students sat in rapt attention, many nodding approvingly and, by their questions, indicated agreement with her message. Far worse was the utter silence of the half dozen Vassar faculty members present. Not one stood up to challenge the baseless lies and unadulterated exaggerations within Ms. Puar’s hour-long diatribe. Not one. Behind me sat Peter Antelyes, director of Jewish Studies, and Joshua Schreier, its former head. When I asked Mr. Schreier whether he believed Ms. Puar’s outlandish accusations, he responded, “You prove to me that anything she said wasn’t true.” I was stunned.

How could Vassar American Studies, Africana Studies, International Studies and Women’s Studies programs and the English, Political Science and Religion departments sponsor such a lecture, especially since Ms. Puar spoke at Vassar in 2012? And how could they do so without also offering an opposing view?  These academics’ sponsorship was an endorsement of hate speech against Jews, setting an example for students to follow.

But the most unkindest cut of all is the sponsorship by Vassar’s Jewish Studies program. Surely one would think that Jewish Studies faculty, familiar with the 2000-year history of Jewish persecution, would recognize blatant anti-Semitism. Is it too much to expect them to have the moral integrity and principles to refuse to sponsor this rank anti-Semitism and to debunk the demonizing lies? Have their brains been hopelessly addled by their ideological obsession with the postcolonialist view of Israel as a foreign Western colonial power victimizing “indigenous” Palestinians?  Would the Africana Studies program endorse the views of a Klansman or the Women’s Studies program host Ray Rice?

This is not the first time that Jewish Studies has supported anti-Semitic speech, and the Observer has covered anti-Israel activism at Vassar before. The school sponsored Judith Butler (2013) advocating the elimination of Israel via BDS, Max Blumenthal (banished from the German parliament for anti-Semitic rants), Ali Abunimah (2014) promoting ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Middle East, and Sa’ed Atshan (2015) demonizing Israel as “apartheid.” But this latest event marks a new level of disgusting.

George Orwell in his 1945 “Notes on Nationalism” observed, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

Ziva Dahl is a fellow with the Haym Salomon Center. She has a Master of Arts degree in public law and government from Columbia University and an A.B. in political science from Vassar College.

In early 1968, Pink Floyd made a peculiar decision.

Due to mental instability exacerbated by drug use, their distinctive primary vocalist and songwriter, a tousle-headed, coal-eyed satyr of shattering talent named Syd Barrett, had fallen into a state of high dysfunction. Despite the fact that Pink Floyd featured four other extraordinary musicians, three of whom were markedly capable of composing, singing and helping conceptualize a worthy career direction, Pink Floyd refused to step out of their leader’s long and dysfunctional shadow.

Due to pressure from their label, their management, the media, their fans and their families, they held on to the hope that their front man would return (and promoted the myth that he was operational), and that he would again achieve the remarkable heights he had reached on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

But their leader was no longer capable of coherent functioning, much less creating another masterpiece, and each of Pink Floyd’s talented members were forced to live with the specter of a faded and absent genius hovering over them.

OH, WAIT. THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN. Floyd let go of Syd Barrett and his substantial ghost, they reassembled around their extraordinary core and they went on to make some of history’s most lasting music.

In 1967, the Beach Boys made a peculiar decision.

Due to mental instability exacerbated by drug use, their distinctive primary songwriter and visionary, a floppy-haired bright-eyed man-panda of shattering talent, had fallen into a state of high dysfunction. Despite the fact that the Beach Boys featured five other extraordinary musicians (Carl Wilson, Bruce Johnston, Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Dennis Wilson), each of whom had shown they were markedly capable of composing, singing and helping conceptualize a worthy career direction, the Beach Boys refused to step out of their leader’s dysfunctional shadow.

Due to pressure from their label, their management, the media, their fans and their families, they held on to the hope that their front person would return (and promoted the myth that he was operational), and that he would again achieve the remarkable heights he had reached on Pet Sounds. But their leader was no longer capable of coherent functioning, much less creating another masterpiece, and the Beach Boys and each of their talented members were forced to live with the specter of a faded and absent genius hovering over them.

The tumbling, tragic and joyous story of rock is absolutely chock full of groups who lost their primary songwriters, vocalists and band leaders for one reason or another, yet carried on to achieve great creative and commercial heights: Fleetwood Mac without Peter Green would have once been considered unimaginable, not to mention Genesis without Peter Gabriel, Joy Division without Ian Curtis, or the Small Faces without Steve Marriot; for that matter, many would have considered Pink Floyd without Roger Waters inconceivable.

Yet the Beach Boys, a band of stunning skill who proved time and time again that they were capable of making extraordinary music without Brian Wilson, were never allowed to be fully free of him.

And fuck you all for that.

READ THIS: How New York City Became the Epicenter of Jazz

I have zero hesitation in pronouncing Brian Douglas Wilson a musical genius nonpareil; Pet Sounds is the greatest pop rock album ever made, and SMiLE, if it had been completed at the time of its initial realization, could have changed the course of pop music (its integration of American musical tics into an avant-garde and psychedelic context might have encouraged an entire vein of adventurous American pop divorced from the Beatleisms that define the rock and pop landscape to this very day).

But the startling vocal skills of the entire Beach Boys ensemble and their shared experiences as a growing band framed and made ecstatic the brilliance of Pet Sounds (and the extant SMiLE tracks), and Carl, Mike, Bruce, Al and Dennis (not to mention later additions like Blondie Chaplin) were each golden talents more than capable of leading and redefining a Brian-less Beach Boys. But they never really had the chance.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ekVXou4B7Q&w=420&h=315]

Despite the fact that some of the most wondrous and distinctive material in the band’s canon was recorded without Brian, he remained the Elijah we all left the door open for; but imagine if every time we sat down for Seder, someone said, “Well, it’s not a real Seder, since Elijah didn’t show up.”

There’s every bit of evidence that a Brian-less Beach Boys could have been a joyous and logical continuation of the band’s ideals and aural achievements.

Personally, I would argue that post-SMiLE, Brian Wilson wasn’t just a shadow of himself, but less than a shadow; the most Brian-driven of the post-SMiLE albums, The Beach Boys Love You, is bizarre and psychologically fascinating, but the people who insist that it’s a great album are like those who scan those tepid and twisted Alex Chilton solo albums for Big Star-esque greatness. It ain’t there, bubbelah; go back and listen without trying really, really hard to like it.

Which is all to say that Brian Wilson could have left the Beach Boys after late 1967, with his legacy and place in history 100 percent intact (after all, Syd Barrett is no less a legend for having been a primary force on only one Pink Floyd album). And if Brian had been allowed to retire, the Beach Boys would have gone on, driven by the considerable and unique skills of their remaining members, and likely would have been appraised as an original and important American band, producing work of invention, quality and diversity.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmAqpRFGzRQ&w=420&h=315]

I barely give a fuck who Mike Love has his picture taken with, or what political candidates he supports, or how he may stumble in public speeches; he is a gentle and kind man whose heart is in the right damn place, and he supports many worthwhile causes related to the environment, conservation, and spiritual enlightenment. Have any of you ever met Ric Ocasek or Todd Rundgren, or even, for that matter, the great Lou Reed? Have you ever talked to a waitress or stewardess who had to deal with Paul Simon?

I have met a pile of so-called pop stars, and in terms of being a decent man with a decent heart, Mike Love is pretty goddamn high on the “good guy” list. Most of you just hate him because he’s in a band called the Beach Boys without Brian Wilson. You think that the fact that he keeps the Beach Boys going is somehow denigrating of or defiant of the great achievements of that band, but it’s just the opposite; Mike Love has kept the Beach Boys, a vital American institution, alive and working in the face of great odds and even greater derision.

Go see the current touring version of the Beach Boys.

The band is made up of able, passionate and credible musicians: Jeff Foskett, Scott Totten, John Cowsill, Brian Eichenberger, and Tim Bonhomme are all committed and credible cats with an honest and real devotion to the songs, sound and legacy of the Beach Boys (and Foskett has been with the Beach Boys for 34 years, longer than Carl or Dennis Wilson were in the band, if you’re counting). Shit, if those guys were backing Jason Faulkner or Matthew Sweet, you’d be saying they were the best band in the world. But instead, they are part of a band with Mike Love and Bruce Johnston called The Beach Boys.

The current Beach Boys do great honor to the work of Brian Wilson (and to the work the Beach Boys did without Brian), and they keep the legacy of a valued American treasure full of vigor, harmony, and the power to move and emote. Listen, I’ll come out and say this: I vastly prefer the current Beach Boys to the Brian Wilson touring experience. Brian’s band is amazing, and they play his compositions and his arrangements with loving detail, but there is no escaping the fact that at the center of the stage is a man who often looks like he doesn’t want to be there, like he’s just a sad ghost inserted into the middle of the world’s greatest Beach Boys cover band. Every time I see Brian Wilson, I leave depressed; but every time I see the current Beach Boys, I leave elated.

Angel Olsen’s MY WOMAN has two souls, smeared across gradients, shape-shifting as the 29-year-old songwriter sees fit. It is, initially, willfully naive about romance: Olsen summons uncomplicated tropes about falling in love and falling apart in love. This character gives herself fully to the chase, to the fever. She knows better but martyrs herself anyway. The silver-tinseled wig, the pouting, the snark: Bowie would be proud.

The second half of “Not Gonna Kill You,” five songs into MY WOMAN, positions Olsen closer to the author of Strange Cacti, Half Way Home and Burn Your Fire for No Witness—not the caricature of the lonely heart Olsen is currently dispelling in interviews, but the woman with a seer’s touch. “However painful, let it break down all of me,” she sings, “‘till I am nothing else but the feeling, coming true.” She is, to my ears, deliberately less wise a few beats earlier. Or, if we’re not comfortable with that thinking—who’s “wiser,” the stoic or the libertine?—her initial delivery is surely less subtle. Which is the point.

By using both reckless and world-worn voices, Olsen validates all experiences of human entanglement. “Can’t help feeling the way that I do,” she continues in “Not Gonna Kill You.” “Become a prophet, become a fool.” We’ve seen her toe this line between serenity and oblivion before: “Halfway insane,” goes “Always Half Strange,” from 2012. “And halfway home, in your arms.” She suggests that raw instinct, however feral and unsafe it seems, is where life really happens. She’s always deconstructing experience in the service of locating truth.

What begins in “Not Gonna Kill You” blossoms in the murderers’ row of “Sister,” “Those Were the Days” and “Woman,” except fever clouds part and Olsen stares directly into her pain and longing. The image works two-fold: Olsen’s character is no longer caught in sensation’s riptide, and the music itself evolves from a terse, fuzzy psych-folk to a sound more glass-eyed and spacious. Side B affects a dream state that’s all too real.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r248o_rUfKE&w=560&h=315]

Critics have noted this section’s Rumours-like quality, and it’s not as if she’s tried to hide from that era’s influence. But Olsen’s only channeling it in a cursory way. Perhaps this is blasphemy, but, gun to head, I’d take “Woman” over anything Fleetwood Mac wrote in its prime. I’ve never shed tears listening to Stevie Nicks.

There’s a sacredness in Olsen’s voice. It conveys uncharted streams of feeling, both healing and violent, and it aches whether she’s playful or aggrieved. She shares little in the way of biography, names or places, or whether she’s moved by lovers or friends or family. Instead she draws us close to a visceral, nonverbal center. Her work implies that biography is irrelevant when the only true thing we know from birth to death is the flailing of our hearts. So Olsen deals in little sleights of hand, and with each release she’s more elegantly hiding the seams.

This can be frustrating for the listener who needs to know all. Because we’re conditioned to process certain sounds as “sad” or “intimate,” the stripped, Skeeter Davis-on-Blue-Dream sound of 2011’s Strange Cacti and, to a lesser extent, 2012’s Halfway Home, made it easy to believe Olsen was staring us between the eyes, baring all her wounds. Her role as an “independent” songwriter enhances this slippery notion—we’re more likely to assume her songs are based in felt reality because they aren’t written by committee in Nashville or Los Angeles. Who can say? Maybe Olsen songs are like journal entries, maybe they aren’t. It doesn’t matter either way.

We should take the critic Greil Marcus’ lead here. “What are we doing when we listen?” he asked rhetorically in an interview with Nerve’s Phil Dellio in 1986. “What happens? What doesn’t happen? What could happen? I really am a critic in the sense that I don’t really give a shit what the artist intended, or what he meant. I couldn’t care less. What I’m interested in is what happens when you listen.”

Amen. We should free ourselves to more acutely feel ourselves brooding or twirling or collapsing in response to Olsen’s voice and song, regardless of origin. Anyway, what is art but a wordless signal pinging from one spirit to another?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mIA1r2ZELU&w=560&h=315]

Olsen’s vigorous self-searching and curiosity remind me of a passage by Annie Dillard, in 1974’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

“The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps.”

Or maybe T.S. Elliot is better: one senses in her incantations a desire to inhabit the poet’s “still point of the turning world.”

“Neither movement from nor towards,” he wrote. “Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” Dance “slow decades toward the sun.”

I imagine it’s difficult for Olsen to stalk any gap—of the spirit, of the natural world, of relationships—while being one of independent music’s most visible faces. She’s suggested this in recent interviews, and surely the pressure is worse than we know. “Again and again we return to Olsen’s fear of being trapped,” relayed the author of one of the better articles on her reemergence. And: “Above all, Olsen fears being ‘trapped by my own art.’ Trapped by a ‘tagging culture’ that can’t compute creative complexity. Trapped by the emotional intensity of her fans’ responses.”

Perhaps Olsen was too polite to say it, but she also seems trapped by the necessity to speak about being trapped—interviews can be suffocating for artists with any regard for their time or energy or self-respect. I can’t speak for Olsen, and sometimes she seems thrilled to speak with journalists, but our consistent obsession with pinning down a narrative or being liked by our subjects is ultimately toxic for conversation between artists and the public.

What does anyone gain from five or 10 or 20 articles conveying the same or similar narratives, especially when we learned many of them during the prior album cycle? When Olsen boldly shifted course with Burn Your Fire for No Witness, imbuing her songs in garage and Orbisonian and even bossa novan tones, the narrative obsession began: We don’t know the real Angel. Angel isn’t our sad folkie pin-up girl. Angel actually likes to have fun.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nleRCBhLr3k&w=560&h=315]

Does anyone really doubt that Angel Olsen has more than one personality trait? This press cycle is concerned almost entirely with goading her into sharing again and again how she feels about how others feel about her work.

“Are you misunderstood?” we repeat. Of course she is. What compelling artist isn’t?

Anyway, she turned to Twitter this summer to comment herself: “Things I wish I could tweet but I can’t because of some fake status,” reads a missive from July 8. Or, on August 18: “Here’s what I really think about ‘phoners.’ ” Attached is Urban Dictionary’s definition of the term, which normally implies “phone interview” but here means “the act of achieving an erection while sexting.”

Vicki: Did you get that picture I sent last night?

Michael: Yeah, definitely got a phoner from it.

#sexting #phone #boner #erection #texting

That’s how the accompanying screenshot read.

An outsider might conclude that Olsen is ungrateful for the attention, but consider how painful this is to listen to, let alone what it must have been like to be a participant. Or imagine how it feels to spend an afternoon with a journalist only to have the resulting headline read “Angel Olsen Ditches Sadness and Dives into ’60s Rock.” The logical fallacy here—how are “sadness” and “’60s rock” mutually exclusive?—is only bested in degrees of inscrutability by the fact that MY WOMAN explores myriad sounds, not just “’60s rock,” a term, by the way, that tells us nothing specific.

And: Olsen ditched sadness? No close listener of MY WOMAN would come away with this opinion. Moreover the first two sentences here, written by someone with bylines at serious publications (Pitchfork and The Quietus), suggest that both writer and editor created this on cruise control.

“It takes a great amount of effort to find someone who doesn’t respect Angel Olsen,” she writes. (It took me this much effort: I asked the lady in the cube next to me, and she replied, “who?”)

Then: “The folk rock singer-songwriter performs with a style of authenticity that, especially in today’s hyper-informative environment, is unparalleled.” Styles of authenticity didn’t raise any eyebrows? “Unparalleled.” Really? In 2016 alone Olsen is paralleled by Marissa Nadler, Julianna Barwick, Jessy Lanza, Chris Staples, Radiohead, Simone Manuel, Bernie Sanders, my friend Billy, and anyone who stayed true to themselves for any reasonable amount of time.

I’m being extreme, yes. I know what the writer meant, and I’m too aware how haunting cliches and lazy writing can be—no doubt there are blind spots in this piece and plenty others I’ve written. But surely we can agree our work should at least aspire to the clarity and depth of the artists we cover. Otherwise what value are we providing to readers, never mind historical understanding of our moment.

“I don’t care what the papers say,” Olsen sings near the top of MY WOMAN, over Berlin-worthy chords. (She means it.) “It’s just another intern with a resume.” Then: “Everyone I know has got their own ideal. I just want to be alive, make something real.”

Why do we ask what she means by all this again?

***
Angel Olsen plays Webster Hall on September 17

Deep in the heart of every rock musician, from the most credible to the most commercial, there lies someone whining, “Je suis un artiste! If only the world knew what a deep, tortured soul I am, and how complicated my record collection is!”

The more practical of these musicians merely peppers their catalog with maudlin and heartfelt ballads. Let’s call this the Bon Jovi method: “Perhaps you will forgive that Slippery When Wet stuff if I sing another song that is the musical equivalent of the page in the yearbook dedicated to that 11th grader who died.” Other artists make severe left or right turns, and produce albums dripping with uncharacteristic drama and musical complication; here I direct you to Music From ‘The Elder’ by Kiss, a histrionic, incomprehensible, and orchestra-laden concept album from 1981 that very nearly ended Kiss’ career (it’s actually a pretty good record, by the way, and features two songs co-written by Gene Simmons and Lou Reed).

Pop/rock history is absolutely strewn with such artifacts, from Pet Sounds to Bad Religion’s Into the Unknown (a fascinating pop/prog exercise from 1983 that was so offensive to the group’s fans that the band excised it from their catalog). In between these extremes, there’s Springsteen’s bold and courageous Nebraska, McCartney’s remarkable Firemen albums, Neil Young’s fascinating genre exercises (like Trans, Everybody’s Rockin’ and Arc), the Beastie Boys’ game changing Paul’s Boutique, and, of course, the great daddy of all of these sorts of records, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. There are also entire careers that are built on thwarting expectations, e.g. Scott Walker, Beck, Bowie and Prince.[i]

In the autumn of 1979 Fleetwood Mac, a wildly popular and influential band at the peak of their visibility and commercial prowess, released a much-anticipated double album that was interpreted by fans and media as radical, even experimental. Almost exactly a year later the Clash, a wildly popular and influential band at the peak of their visibility and credibility, released a much-anticipated triple album that was interpreted by fans and media as radical, even experimental.

Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk is lean, effective and almost completely without waste or filler. It showcases a great band at their prime. Alternately precise and luxurious, Tusk is one of the most underrated albums of the era.

It is the anti-Sandinista!.

Sandinista! is a sprawling mess, resembling some kind of well-meaning dish that combines far too many under-cooked and over-thought ingredients (“I’m not sure yet if I’m making a soup, a stew, or a salad, but maybe we should we throw some cardamom and fenugreek in there!”). Sandinista! is like a perfect storm of mistakes, and it’s one of the most confounding and overrated albums of all time.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnSQFaHvxTI?list=PLw8I74P–tlVmX53NXBA_YtzoovpSfdlU&w=560&h=315]

Respectfully, I “get” what the Clash were going for on Sandinista!—they wanted to present a travelogue of the sound of the disenfranchised classes of Jamaica, London and New York City. But it appears that no one was running the show or making sure takes were satisfactory; seemingly, nobody cared if overdubs made any sense, or if the mixes were coherent; and it certainly sounds like no one was insisting that a song be fully composed before the tape was rolling.

For 36 years, Sandinista! has been defined not by its content, but by the way it has been interpreted by an audience desperately eager to see genius where there was only confusion.

Sandinista! is a prime—perhaps the prime—example of what happens when a well known artist does something so contrarian and obscure that it gets mistaken for greatness; let’s call this “The Radiohead Effect.”

“This is so effed up, it must be good!” says the listener, who may also be the type of person who has spent far too much of his or her life listening to live recordings of “Dark Star”, owns a copy of Elvis Costello’s The Juliet Letters, and thinks liking Primus makes them really, really weird, maaan. Listen, pally, you want weird and good? Sit down with all four CDs of Tony Conrad’s Early Minimalism Volume One, and then talk to me about your uncle who taught you all about Captain Beefheart and the Talking Heads.[ii]

The standard line about Sandinista! is that there’s an album worth of good stuff here. Well, that’s not quite true. There may, indeed, be an album’s worth of good material, but barely an EP’s worth of good recordings.

Only a year earlier, the Clash had released one of the greatest albums ever made. On London Calling, the Clash also deviated from expectations; they crafted a near-perfect double album that accessed influences from all over the world, from all over their heart, from all over the 20th century. London Calling is an album about the conflicting public and private faces of the West, referencing the music that had touched the Clash and made them the band they had become, from Woody Guthrie to Mott the Hoople to Jacob Miller to Lonnie Donnegan.

The big difference, as far as I can tell, is that on London Calling, someone was in charge (specifically, producer Guy Stevens), and the Clash circa 1979 were a band who were seeking a form of perfection; but the band who made Sandinista! were, I believe, deliberately seeking a scattershot account of the 88 different types of music in their heads. However, I don’t think they anticipated the desultory effect an undisciplined writing, recording and mixing process would have on the finished product.

In order to underline my rather strong assessment of Sandinista!, I’ll point out some specifics.

In no particular order…“Junco Partner” is one of the more coherent recordings on the collection, but why didn’t someone ask violinist Tymon Dogg to tune up before recording? It’s precisely this sort of problem—stop the tape and tune the freaking violin—that consistently plagues Sandinista!

“Rebel Waltz” is painfully close to being a great song, but it’s about four mix passes away from a decent mix. Again, a track like this—which, if it had been more thoughtfully arranged and mixed, would have fit in well on London Calling—underlines why Sandinista! is such a troublesome album.

“The Sound of Sinners” also could have been a helluva song, if it had been produced or mixed by someone who wasn’t really, really high; and there’s almost something to “Ivan Meets G.I. Joe”, except, well, it’s dumb, and they made the standard stoner mistake of not being able to distinguish between the sound effects and the music (the video game sounds are mixed as high as anything else in the track).

Let’s keep on going! “Look Here”, like many of the album’s worst tracks, is an idea, not a song—“We’ll try to do a jazzy, swingy, kind of thing, um, I mean, let’s not spend too much time on it, and, uh, I have one melody line I can repeat a lot, and if it doesn’t sound quite right, we can just overdub some more stuff on it, and I think it will be, like, jazzy!”

“Up in Heaven” is a very solid riff and a fairly decent verse and…nothing else. Nada. No one bothered to write anything more. “Something About England” is a goddamn good song, but it sounds like it was mixed by someone who just drank a lot of Benadryl and Baileys and chases shiny objects without any sense whatsoever of an “overall” coherent mix—“Oh, that’s a cool guitar part! Let’s turn that up! Wow, I like the sound of that piano, let’s put that fader up for a while!”

And on and on.

Sandinista! is mortally faulty on every level, except for one: it’s not pretentious, and its fascination with various urban music styles is sincere. In this sense—the way in which it is genuine, and simultaneously under- and over-thought—Sandinista! is reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait. But Dylan did something pretty brilliant on Self Portrait: he kept things small, and the performances and arrangements are on the minimalist side, as opposed to Sandinista!’s universal tendency to throw more and more crap into the gumbo.

Now, let’s extract a pretty solid EP from the album’s entire 144 (!) minutes.

“Magnificent 7” is a pioneering song with some style, effectively recorded. “The Call Up” is dynamic and strange, with a compelling lyric. And “Hitsville UK”, although drenched in the weed-friendly reverb haze that surrounds virtually all of Sandinista!’s non-mixes, is a very solid song, even if it smells a bit like a second-rate Jam or Elvis Costello composition. Sandinista!’s three unapologetically great tracks are “Somebody Got Murdered”, “Police on My Back” and “Lose This Skin” (though “The Call Up” comes preciously close); but I suspect it is no accident that two of these three were not written by the Clash.[iii]

There’s more: The thing that makes Sandinista! not just a curious, well-meaning face-plant but also a true catastrophe are the dub tracks. The half-dozen-plus dub tracks on the album are pretty sorry and confused examples of the genre. Generally, dub is the act of taking away elements, and effecting those that remain, to create a psychotronic, mesmerizing, hypnowoofer effect; however, the dub tracks on Sandinista! have more to do with “Revolution No. 9” or a bad sophomore year music concrete project. Whereas I can concede that most of Sandinista! is well intended, the dub tracks are just a disaster, a sign of what a misdirected and ill-conceived mess this whole thing is.

Now…Tusk.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KlumjcOg9k&w=560&h=315]

I’ll be honest, you can’t even compare these two albums, these extraordinary adventures. From hushed, flickering ballads to constricted, tightly wound pop built out of the closely arranged Legos of genius, Tusk is a masterpiece, or very goddamn close to it. It has to be one of the best—and most absolutely rewarding and consistent—double studio albums ever made, and it has dated exceedingly well.

To rediscover Tusk (or to investigate it for the first time!) is like stumbling upon a lost masterpiece by the Go Betweens, XTC, Nick Lowe, Kimberly Rew, the dBs, or any of the artists from the early 1980s who were trying to create a highly conceptualized yet non-indulgent uber-pop resonant with emotion and depth.

On Tusk, Fleetwood Mac distill the very best of their past (the uncluttered intensity of the Peter Green era, the gorgeous, sad restraint of the Danny Kirwan years, and the harmony-laden FM glow of Rumours and Fleetwood Mac) into one package, and present it in a detailed, fastidious fashion; every sighing and soaring note and iridescent guitar is placed with nearly mathematical intent. What results is an album that easily equals the best credible pop of the era.

Contrary to the hype that usually accompanies Tusk, this isn’t just Lindsey Buckingham’s album; in fact, if you remove his tracks, you’re still left with a goddamn terrific record.

Christine McVie’s exquisite “Brown Eyes” is a cool, shimmering, dusk-purple spray of hooded-eyed sadness; the bass-chord-driven “Never Make Me Cry” is such a great example of late-night low-volume electric melancholy that it is reminiscent of Mazzy Star or Malcolm Burn-era Chris Whitley (and despite Buckingham’s more deliberate efforts, it might be the most successfully arty track on the album).

As for Buckingham’s much noted achievements on Tusk, they are artful and meticulous, and like the work of Mitch Easter-era R.E.M., endlessly fascinating, with new production quirks and onion-skin-like overdubs revealing themselves on every new listen.

When you combine Buckingham’s precisely tweaked pop gifts with McVie and Nicks’ luxurious, poignant sigh-pop, and then paint the whole megalith in the intimate tones that Tusk is bravely produced in, the result is rare magic. I think the album most comparable to Tusk is the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile, which also balanced Brunelleschi-like brilliance with Gropius-like simplicity, creating a pastoral yet ecstatic album.[iv]

Listen, I can’t say enough about Tusk, but it’s really stunning how this emotional yet disciplined album, so richly composed and edited and mixed to masterpiece-like effect, is virtually the opposite of Sandinista!.

Let’s put it this way: Sandinista! absolutely insists you call it brilliant, because if you refuse to, you’ll see what a true piece of crap it is. At some point in high school, some friend of yours—possibly someone you wanted to hook up with—showed you one of their poems. It was pretentious nonsense full of typos, and combined the worst aspects of Kahlil Gibran, Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut. But you had invested so much in your friendship with this person that not only did you say you liked it, you actually convinced yourself that it was brilliant.

Generationally, we had so much invested in believing the Clash were The Only Band That Matters (especially after the Everest-like triumph of London Calling) and so much invested in believing that they were our Beatles, our Stones, that we not only tolerated the babbling, incomplete and indecipherable nonsense that was Sandinista!, we actually convinced ourselves that it was as good as the band thought it was when they were really high and recording it.[v]

I shall end this anecdotally.

One day in 1981, in my role as teenage journalist and correspondent for the U.K. music weekly Sounds, I found myself talking to Christine McVie. I told her I had heard that the Clash wanted to make sure that their new triple album, Sandinista!, would sell in stores for a lower price than Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. McVie arched an eyebrow and said, “Ah…the Clash…I believe that’s one of those bands Lindsey likes.”

One day in 1981, in my role as NYU student who lived in Weinstein Dormitory and made virtually daily pilgrimages to a record store on St. Marks Place called Sounds, I ran into Joe Strummer. He was walking on the north side of 8th Street between University and Broadway. He was holding a small brown paper bag full of cherries. Being a strident but generally amiable 18-year-old asshole, I felt compelled to tell him all the things I didn’t like about his latest album, Sandinista! I also told him how very much I liked the just-released album from his pre-Clash band, the 101ers.

Strummer listened politely, never losing eye contact. When he saw that I was done, he smiled and said, “Want a cherry?”

[i] Into the Unknown is actually a pretty good record, and the two Firemen albums (Paul McCartney’s collaboration with producer/former Killing Joke bassist Youth) are probably McCartney’s most interesting work of the last 25 years. Neil Young’s Arc, like Metal Machine Music, is much better described than heard.

[ii] Seriously, though, listen to Early Minimalism Volume One; it is a deeply important and fascinating document, and a fundamental part of understanding the birth of the Velvet Underground, Krautrock and Sonic Youth.

[iii] “Police on My Back” is a first-rate cover of an even better recording by the vastly underrated Equals, a terrific and pioneering mod/blue beat band from the 1960s led by Eddy Grant; and “Lose This Skin” is written and sung by violinist Tymon Dogg.

[iv] Two architects mentioned in one sentence! I knew those NYU classes in urban design would pay off!

[v] Regardless, I’ll still take Sandinista! over the worst multi-LP album ever made, ELP’s triple-disc Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends. If I ever get Doctor Who-like powers to travel through space and time, the very first thing I will do is destroy the master tapes to this unforgivable atrocity; only then will I consider preventing Hitler’s birth or telling a young Robert De Niro that he should never, under any circumstances, make any movies with Ben Stiller.

Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, this intense, intimate, engaging miracle that we often take for granted, turns 40 this week.

It’s important that we separate this stellar achievement from the ludicrous time in which it was made.

Those of us old enough to remember the 1970s—or rather, when the mid-ish 1970s became the late-ish 1970s, that un-shining time when the freakish, frantic optimism of the Bicentennial cracked into the blackouts and Bowery-trash fires of 1977—may be too quick to file away Rumours with the other gargantuan leviathans of the Jimmy Carter/Ohmygod-Cheap Trick-is-on Midnight Special-era, i.e., do we just throw it all in a bin with the first Boston album, Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell, Frampton Comes Alive, or Hotel California, and be done with it?

But Rumours isn’t having any of that. It is far better than that.

Rumours may have a place in our 1970s experience, but the 1970s experience doesn’t tell us anything about Rumours.

Rumours is virtually nothing like any contemporary record, either mainstream or alternative.

How strange is that?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKj1EFeU-cM?list=PL8sYBBep5yX1oL56TUgme-O2ld5Ne7M3q&w=560&h=315]

Rumours was Fleetwood Mac’s 11th studio album, released nearly a decade after Fleetwood Mac’s debut. How many bands attain that rare spot in the sweet and rapturous air of multi-platinum, record-breaking commercial Arcadia—much less achieve artistic transcendence!—on their 11th album? My God, it was their 11th studio album. Their fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth albums hadn’t even charted in the U.K. Only two and a half years prior to its release, the group had been considered so commercially invisible that their manager attempted to send imposters on the road in their place.

Yet Rumours is not only the ninth-best-selling album of all time, it is an adamantine artistic accomplishment that deserves to be mentioned when we discuss The Greatest Albums Of All Time—and it merits being removed from all the silly cultural confetti usually thrown in its direction, and should be examined with great, loving detail.[i]

Rumours is an old, sweet and complicated friend who gets more interesting every time you talk to them. Even when they tell you a story you have heard 88 times, you find some new details, some new angle, some new twist or emphasis you never noticed before.

But first, a few words about the fascinating story of Fleetwood Mac, and the road that led them to Rumours.

Circa 1974 there was no reason to think Fleetwood Mac’s commercial future would be any brighter than that of Savoy Brown, Renaissance, or Fairport Convention (to name three other credible and well-liked acts of English origin who could play medium and small/medium-sized venues in the States and place themselves on the mid-lower rungs of the U.S. charts). More confusingly, by 1974, the Mac had shuffled through a startling array of lineup changes and musical styles.

Between their formation in 1967 and 1970, Fleetwood Mac were an ass-tearing, incendiary blues and boogie band who pioneered some proto-metal tricks (they also had a penchant for both the ridiculous and, occasionally, the elegiac). A listener who was hearing early Mac for the first time might, not entirely inaccurately, lump them in with Gary Clark Jr., Stevie Ray Vaughan, or Cream.[ii]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0U-eef6OyQ&w=560&h=315]

For the sake of understanding where Rumours came from, our story really begins in 1970, when Danny Kirwan—originally a second guitarist and third vocalist—emerged as a co-leader of the band. Kirwan introduced an element of near-pastoral folk-pop into the mix, transforming Mac’s boogie churn into a platform for gentle and intense excursions into a sad blue pop.

Shortly thereafter, Christine Perfect, a buttermilk alto vocalist of almost aching sensitivity (and a keyboardist of great skill) joined the band, further supporting the transition of the “blues” Mac into a band with folk-pop and art-folk overtones (I covered some of this in a piece I wrote for the Observer in November of 2015 on Danny Kirwan; please pour yourself a Clamato and vodka and read it).[iii]

The initial foreshadowing of Mac’s mid-‘70s mega success can be found on the two Kirwan/Christine McVie-dominated Mac albums, Future Games (1971) and 1972’s Bare Trees.[iv] The difficult and fascinating Kirwan left Mac in late 1972.

American guitarist and vocalist Bob Welch joined the Mac in time for Future Games, and it’s easy—too easy—to identify this as an integral factor in the road to Rumours; I think this is a false flag. Some might say that gummy, tobacco-stained pop songs like “Sentimental Lady” (from 1972’s Bare Trees) preview Mac’s mega-gold future, but I think Welch’s sly, winking, pallid attempts at California snarl and FM bong-blues are an outlier in the Mac story. It is, in fact, Christine McVie’s simplicity and melodicism and the elegant sorrow of Danny Kirwan that anticipates Mac’s future as a gentle yet persuasive bittersweet macramé-and-satin pop machine.[v]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIARC-2ji6I?list=PL89EB68BCF49203DA&w=560&h=315]

The first Fleetwood Mac album unquestionably recognizable as a “modern” Mac album is 1974’s Heroes Are Hard to Find. This is largely thanks to Christine McVie, whose material combines British post-folk wistfulness with an easily graspable rhythmic and chordal structure that recalls All Things Must Pass-era George Harrison.

McVie’s alluring and affecting contributions to Heroes show that the Rumours-era Mac was already fairly well articulated before Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks even joined the band, and I don’t think she gets enough credit for this. The idea that Mac would be a band that mixed the simple, the soaring, the aching and the accomplished is very largely the gift of Christine McVie, and we see hints of this as early as 1970s Christine Perfect album.

Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac at the very end of 1974, and their first album with the band, 1975’s Fleetwood Mac, reached No. 1 (to date, the best performing Mac album in America had been Heroes, which reached No. 34).

I think it’s fair to say that Fleetwood Mac is clearly a beta version of Rumours. Rather dramatically, within the first second of Fleetwood Mac, we meet the clipped, hiccuping hyper pop of Lindsey Buckingham. Buckingham sounds like he’s Andy Partridge writing songs for the Cowsills, or maybe like some holy cross between David Byrne and Harry Nilsson; his opening salvo on Fleetwood Mac sounds almost alien, connected to a new wave future or to the sunny bubblegum of the Rubinoos or Paul Collins (though with that constant, peculiar overlay of an almost Orbison-esque Americana). Even over 41 years later, it still startles.

Although I find Buckingham’s songwriting contributions to Fleetwood Mac thin, his style, his presence, his aggressive and precisely syncopated guitar playing, and his simple but scientific leads are always nearby and pointing clearly to the (near) future.[vi]

And then there’s “Rhiannon.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b9BpunsVmo&w=560&h=315]

On track four of Fleetwood Mac, honey and opium have been poured over the future of the band in the form of this utterly compelling black light and Eve cigarette cat’s heartbeat of a song. In fact, the song itself had been dosed in opium and over-sweetened chamomile tea, since in its original form (performed live, but never recorded, by Buckingham and Nicks), “Rhiannon” was nearly twice the speed, had an almost Southern rock-ish twist, and Nicks’ seductive purr is replaced by an almost Joplin-esque howl.

This transition is very important to note, since it provides a clue about the core genius of the Fleetwood Mac/Rumours-era band: there is something about Fleetwood Mac (whether it’s the grace and glow of McVie, or the Bullet Train-clean pulse of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie) that ropes and wrangles “Rhiannon,” and makes it dreamlike and nearly perfect.

Finally, we arrive at Rumours, released a year and a half after Fleetwood Mac.

One of the defining aspects of Rumours is claustrophobia. Sonic claustrophobia, that is. This, I believe, provides the context for all of its achievements.

The sounds on Rumours are tight, closeted, and largely lacking in ambience. This is virtually unique for a California-based mega-pop band of the 1970s (though more common to the punk records being made at this time in the U.K.).

Ambience—meaning, literal ambience, as in reverb, presence, and the listener’s awareness of the size of the room a band is performing in—is a vastly underrated and important quality. Ambience telegraphs a great deal to the listener about how they are involved in the experience. By creating this masterpiece of virtual non-ambience, on Rumours Fleetwood Mac makes the epic (those amazing arrangements, those amazing songs, those amazing performances) intimate and personal. It’s a very tough trick.

Each and every listener, even if they are listening to the album in a social setting or in a crowd, hears it as if it was a story being told just to them. Because of this, Rumours feels almost like a condensed epic, arranged within an inch of its life but never losing the small-electric ensemble feel.

This intimate ambience also provides a fascinating environment for Buckingham’s intensely orchestrated guitar parts, which are tucked so neatly into the mix that they do not display their feathers, except upon intense examination; discovering the depth and detail of Buckingham’s guitar work on Rumours is like an Easter Egg, or like taking out a magnifying glass and finding the Lord’s Prayer written on the side of a popsicle stick.

If this tight, intimate ambience provides the context for Rumours, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie provide the framework. I cannot stress this enough: For all the praise we can heap on Lindsey Buckingham and the shiny apples he puts in front of the listener, for all the admiration I can express for the warm, expressive genius of Christine McVie, for all the appreciation I have for Stevie Nicks’ sexy, horny voice and the lacy, blowsy cult that sprung up around her, I think that Fleetwood and John McVie are the reason Rumours is Rumours.

Taut, powerful, and utterly devoid of one single bar where they insist on the spotlight, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie’s performance on Rumours is, well, nearly perfect. Because Fleetwood largely eschews crash cymbals, often keeps the four beat on a tom, and plays a tightly screwed hi-hat, his drumming is often nearly invisible; but that just means he’s doing something very, very right. I can think of no English drummer, with the possible exception of session king Bobby Graham, who played with such a mixture of economy and power.[vii]

Bassist McVie, although certainly conscious of the chord changes, plays Fleetwood more than he plays Fleetwood Mac; which is to say he echoes, almost seamlessly, the steady, fat, flat kick drum, crisp snare, and heartbeat toms of Fleetwood’s playing. He underplays the chord changes, and plays exactly with and on top of Fleetwood. The rhythm section’s approach leaves a phenomenal amount of room for the guitars and the vocals to expand, emote, hum, harmonize, twinkle, and chug. Honestly, I think Fleetwood and John McVie’s performance on Rumours is one of the great album-length rhythm section performances in rock history, yet it never draws attention to itself.

Listen to the whole last quarter of “Don’t Stop.” At precisely the time when 99 percent of the drummers, dead or alive, would be trying to throw some variety, rolls, or time-tricky energy-boosting into the piece, Mick Fleetwood remains unwaveringly loyal and constant to the nearly motorik-like metronomic high hat/snare beat he has played through the entire song. Aside from Tommy Ramone, Klaus Dinger, or the aforementioned Graham, I don’t know of any other drummer who would have made this choice.

There is something about Lindsey Buckingham’s accomplishments on Rumours that defies easy description. Where does this gift come from, this ability to spin Harry Nilsson/Brian Wilson-level melody over “Farmer John” chords with Becker/Fagen precision (yet without ever dipping into Steely Dan’s jazzy pastel Capezios)? It’s virtually unique, almost as if Jeff Lynne was producing the Monkees, or Mutt Lange was producing the Association, or Phil Ramone was producing Captain Sensible (hey, that’s a good idea).

Who else, other than gorgeous oddities like Jason Faulkner, R. Stevie Moore or Sean O’Hagan, devote this much attention to getting the most sugary pop so very, very right, and then do it again and again?

As for Christine McVie, the captivating post-folk/pre-Kate Bush melodic melancholy of her presence (often, her blue, sugary woe reminds me of Nick Drake channeled by Hope Sandoval) provides the gorgeous lilting night-light to Buckingham’s proud, rumbling sun.

As for Stevie, well, she’s Stevie, ‘nuff said, and I am very fond of Stevie Nicks, but oddly, I would contend that she’s the most dispensable element to Rumours’ genius. She exists as a public face for this extremely well-tuned machine, but the gears function fine without her. Actually, I’m not sure Rumours contains a Stevie song half as good as “Rhiannon” or her extraordinary “Beautiful Child” on Tusk.

Rumours was a single, shining moment. With Tusk, the extraordinary ensemble playing that had kept Rumours centered and consistent flies off the rails, and that’s probably the reason that the best moments on Tusk belong to Nicks and Christine McVie, because unlike Buckingham, they are still thinking and acting like band members.[viii]

Buckingham’s work on Tusk is damn good (“I Know I’m Not Wrong” is pretty much as good as anything he wrote for Rumours), but it doesn’t sound like Fleetwood Mac. It sounds like Lindsey Buckingham. There is nothing on Rumours, not one bar, that doesn’t sound like Fleetwood effing Mac.[ix]

Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is a gift that keeps on giving. What was a generational touchstone has become, with time, a masterpiece worthy of detailed analysis; it is as joyful when heard in 21st-century headphones as it was when it was played on an over-heated stereo at some hazy high school party. It has grown with us, and will no doubt continue to do so.

[i] Confession: I adore Rumours, but it isn’t even my favorite Fleetwood Mac album. I prefer both Tusk and Bare Trees, and if I am going to take off my weighty thinking cap and just throw my head back and shimmy and scream a little bit—not a pretty sight—I would rather listen to the live albums Mac recorded at the Boston Tea Party in 1970.

[ii] The founder and original leader of Fleetwood Mac, guitarist and vocalist Peter Green, somewhat perversely named the band not after himself, but after his rhythm section, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie.

[iii] Perfect, who issued one exquisite must-have solo album in 1970, would be known as Christine McVie when she joined Fleetwood Mac.

[iv] This isn’t entirely true—there’s some hints in the Kirwan-penned material on 1970’s Kiln House—but how bloody complicated do you want me to make this?

[v] Having said all that, here are four fairly important things to note about Bob Welch: First, he introduces the idea that Mac could survive as a one-guitar band, a concept that would have been unthinkable just two years earlier, when the band had three guitarists; second, he compels the group to move to California, and that’s huge; thirdly, his departure in late 1974 paves the way for history; and finally, considering all the extraordinary and damaged characters who have been in Fleetwood Mac (the band has had 16 full and active members) it is an interesting statistical improbability that only three of them—Bob Welch, Bob Brunning, and Bob Weston—have died.

[vi] 1975’s Fleetwood Mac is actually the second Mac studio album to be eponymously titled; the band’s spitting, gray, Chicago-via-Soho debut, released in 1967, is also titled Fleetwood Mac.

[vii] If for some bizarre reason Mick Fleetwood is reading this, I would love to ask him if the vastly important and under-heralded Bobby Graham influenced him.

[viii] In my opinion, the second-best song in Fleetwood Mac’s entire catalog is Christine McVie’s shimmering, ghostly “Never Makes Me Cry” from Tusk. The first, if you were wondering, is “Albatross,” the heavenly instrumental from 1968, which is one of the greatest recordings ever made.

[ix] Buckingham’s solo work in the 1980s is so swallowed up with the desire to be seen as the precocious child in the classroom (a quality evident throughout Tusk, though nowhere on Rumours) as to be almost universally unlistenable. His ’80s solo catalog is replete with quirks and studio giggles that must have seemed smart at the time, but probably sounded dated, distracting, and useless by the time Buckingham got into the parking lot. This stuff is a prime example of what I have always referred to a SMPTE Code Syndrome—when someone becomes so utterly fascinated by all the little noises that the mixing board can make that they completely lose track of what those noises are contributing to the songs. But there is none of that on Rumours, not one iota.