The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper: Line Out: Show Review

The Eternal Pop Music of Fleetwood Mac at the Tacoma Dome

Andrew Hall — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:20:37 -0700

Derek Erdman
Fleetwood Mac forever.

Going into Monday night's Fleetwood Mac show at the Tacoma Dome, I had a very specific plan: I was going to set up a camera in the Dome's parking lot, talk to strangers for a few hours, skip the show, and magically edit my footage into a film as compelling as Jeff Krulik and John Heyn's fantastic Heavy Metal Parking Lot. I was 100% certain that I could do this, despite my dislike of ambush interviews, my last-minute decision to shoot on my phone (where glare made it impossible to see what was in my frame), and the fact that I haven't edited a film since the seventh grade, when I used iMovie to make a music video using three clay penguins, one of which is still sitting in my teenage bedroom in Idaho.

As it turns out, there isn't so much an individual Fleetwood Mac Parking Lot as there are multiple Fleetwood Mac Side Lots, Fleetwood Mac Parking Garages, and occasional stretches of Fleetwood Mac Street Parking (which, unlike the Fleetwood Mac Parking Lot, does not cost $25-30 to try out). And because it isn't the 1980s, not only is tailgating not allowed at the Tacoma Dome, but no one was trying to break that rule—just nice and not-so-nice people either trying to get or get rid of tickets to an undersold Fleetwood Mac show. This led to curiosity getting the better of me and a change of plans. I took the change in my pocket and bought a ticket for significantly less than face value from a couple whose party included a bunch of last-minute no-shows, and went inside.

Barring the 30th anniversary celebration posters hanging up around the entrance, it would be easy to convince someone with no sense of time that the Tacoma Dome exists in 1983. It is a vast beige room-thing designed to be malleable; the floor is full of folding chairs effectively bolted together, with what appears to be an airport bar growing off the side. The concessions stand reads "all natural Painted Hills beef" but the photograph that accompanies the words looks like it was shot decades before "Painted Hills" and "beef" were ever part of the same phrase. By refusing to even try to modernize, it has achieved timelessness—an honest, no-frills place to see arena rock.

Really, though, this night was about Fleetwood Mac, an English blues band that became a Californian pop band currently led by two astounding songwriters who probably still don't like each other that much. Much of the audience was made up of people around the same age as the band, who were probably between 18 and 35 when Fleetwood Mac, Rumours, and Tusk became international smashes. But Fleetwood Mac fans are also those people's children, their children's children, and outliers who have really connected with songs from almost 40 years ago. On my way in, I met a young person trying to get someone's extra ticket for free simply because she "really like[d] this band." The fortysomething couple sitting next to me drove from Bend to see the show and were mostly "pretty into reggae," but got tickets as a gift from one of their parents, who had played these records all throughout their childhood.

I remembered a professor Annie Truscott of Chastity Belt (who, along with the rest of her band, was in attendance) and I had in 2009. He was probably born in the early seventies and once spoke, inexplicably, about how Rumours was the gold standard of rock albums; he was not a music teacher, nor did he ever speak again about music in his classes. I also thought about standing in a kitchen with my friend who proposed the initial idea of tailgating this show late last winter, talking about how Mick Fleetwood's use of the kick and toms on Tango in the Night more or less makes him an alien; years before, someone else went on to me at length about his otherworldly, perfect snare sound. I recollected almost seeing Fleetwood Mac when I was nine during one of two family vacations to the East Coast; clearly these songs even meant something to my parents, who ditched both California and pop music in the early seventies. I remembered how much my friend Peter talked about his dislike of Fleetwood Mac in 2008, then falling for Buckingham-Nicks songs last year. Some of the most vocal opponents of pop music I know are awed by Tusk's coked-out excess.

And the quartet of Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie, bolstered by four session players, still sell these songs, night after night, decade after decade, with absolute conviction and power. Their current tour's generous two-and-a-half hour set consists of almost every truly vital Buckingham or Nicks-penned song (of the now-retired Christine McVie's contributions, only "Don't Stop" remains part of their set), and despite the tension that almost certainly still exists between them, they are gracious performers. The singers' bodies and voices have aged into the Californians they were fated to become, but Buckingham is still a more than capable belter and a ferocious guitarist while Nicks' stage presence compensates for her occasional off notes, with her hold over a crowd never breaking. They opened on the one-two punch of "Second Hand News" and "The Chain" and then proceeded to turn an arena into a pile of feelings through their astoundingly intimate, razor-sharp big songs.

From the roars that accompanied every one of Mick Fleetwood's drum intros and singalong choruses and the Actual Lighters That Were Actually Lit In Large Numbers, it's clear that these songs mean a lot of things to a lot of people. When Nicks, accompanied by Buckingham on guitar and sang "Landslide" mid-set, one could get the sense that it was as much for them as it was for every couple that got teary-eyed and embraced when she delivered "I've been afraid of changing 'cause I built my life around you," and there were a lot of them. "Silver Springs," saved for the second encore, is still devastating and gorgeous.

Even when the set did fall into the trappings of arena rock—two-plus minute instrumental solos, projections that more often than not looked like either Dance Dance Revolution background videos or an iTunes visualizer, Mick Fleetwood's borderline unintelligible stage banter—there was a sense that this would pass, and I'd be left not with the occasional tedium, but this band's relationship with time: how it (and a lot of money and probably a lot of things we aren't privy to) helped Buckingham and Nicks stand to play these songs together again, how it allows songs to change over time, as Buckingham spoke of before a ferocious solo rendition of "Big Love," how these songs can, right now, mean a lot to at least three generations of people, how bands can change and listeners can change but good pop music is an undeniable. I can only hope that the scalper sitting in one section consisting of about 20 empty seats he had tickets for felt the same way.

The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper: Line Out: Show Review

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