Fleetwood Mac boggles the eardrums
by Kyle Hughes, Bennington Banner, July 28, 1978
The crowd of some 29,458 music fans that came to see Fleetwood Mac rolled back hundreds of yards over the jammed lawn of the Performing Arts Center here Wednesday as a restless throng circled the theater itself, forming a threatening human wall.
The milling crowd was nervously held back by a phalanx of security guards at each aisle.
Over the theater, two helicopters maneuvered before the show, carrying the members of Fleetwood Mac one by one to the concert site from their motel 30 miles away in Albany.
The band members were dropped off on an isolated part of a nearby golf course and grandly driven away in rented black limousines. The whole spectacle was a demonstration of the kind of twisted treatment that the public has grown to expect “rock royalty” to get.
By any measure Fleetwood Mac would qualify as rock royalty, but they are perhaps noted most for the tremendous volume of their record sales. Millions of their last two LPs have been sold worldwide, and they have enjoyed a steady stream of hit singles.
The turnout Wednesday was large, but relatively quiet for the performance by Fleetwood Mac, a British blues band turned California rockers. Quiet, that is, by SPAC standards.
Beer and wine were banned from the grounds of the center several years ago after a series of violent incidents threatened the future of rock concerts at the outdoor theater. Several small riots had broken out, with a number of injuries.
Since then, SPAC officials, fearful of a liquor-sodden rampage by provoked music fans, have been cautious about booking certain acts and allowing any form of alcoholic beverages on the grounds.
But Fleetwood Mac, despite its mongrel origins in the English blues explosion of the middle 1960s, is in many ways the quintessential American pop-rock group of the ’70s, and its audience Wednesday reflected that standing.
The crowd was expansive and generally well-behaved—the human wall of fans never did roll over the security guards like a great tidal wave to occupy the aisles. At one time, such an action was routine at a large rock concert at SPAC.
The whole atmosphere at Saratoga Wednesday was ’70s mellow.
Fleetwood Mac and their opening act Bob Welch (an ex-Mac member who struck out on his own prior to the band’s big success) did play their instruments supersonically loud, and electrified their more folk-oriented material, but the whole effect of the music was low-key.
This might seem paradoxical, especially if one had been there to hear their heavy-duty rendition of “You Make Lovin’ Fun.” What is a pleasantly melodic shuffle on record was something akin to a Sherman tank attack the way they performed it Wednesday.
Likewise, another of their huge singles, “Dreams,” was distinguished by a painfully loud bass mix that felt like a stomach punch.
An oddity of the show was an abbreviated version of the pre-California Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh Well,” written by long-departed guitarist Peter Green. Only two members of the group survive from that band era, and it sounded funny to hear the new Mac, whose music is so radically different from the old group’s blues instrumentals, do such a vintage tune.
The center of Fleetwood Mac now is singer-guitarist Lindsay Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks, who at this stage of her career could plausibly be described as an actress as well. Her vocalizing was tentative all night, although she didn’t really display any of the dry-throated struggles that led many people to believe that she was losing her voice during the last tour.
While a short-haired Lindsay Buckingham provided most of the lead (over a generally inaudible Christine McVie on keyboards), Ms. Nicks was the portentous visual center of the stage. She changed costumes several times during the performance, and projected a spacey aura that didn’t always quite work.
Often she was affecting, particularly during “Rhiannon,” when she hovered and waltzed across the stage in a red gown miming the overamplified, Indecipherable words of the song.
Christine McVie turned in a strong, if slightly overwhelmed performance, abetted by original band members Mick Fleetwood and John McVie. Ms. Nicks’ histrionics kept the spotlight.
The cautious started exiting the theater before the two encores started, winding their way through the crowd to get to their cars before the inevitable traffic jam started.
Pleased SPAC officials announced that they had taken in somewhere between $150-
200,000 in admissions, but declined to reveal what they had paid Fleetwood Mac.
For their part, Fleetwood Mac plugged their new album (coming out soon, they promised), and fled the stage. The helicopters waited in the wings.
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