A friend of mine said once that Fleetwood Mac is a band of solo artists – or something like that. Currently, you have Stevie Nicks – the lead singer, In this case he is right on the money. His proof: the documentary Fleetwood Mac: Destiny Rules.
Destiny Rules is a candid documentary that follows the making of the band’s 2003 studio album Say You Will. It was the first album without longtime member and keyboardist Christine McVie and the first record with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham back in the band. Buckingham left the band shortly before the tour for their 1987 album Tango In the Night.
What Destiny Rules shows us is that, while a considerable amount of healing has taken place among the band – particularly between the notoriously stormy relationship between Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks, there are still some caveats. For starters, they are somewhat worlds apart in their approaches to their craft – in particular the overall style.
For starters, Buckingham wanted their latest album to be a double album. A sordid Tusk 2.0 if you will. Nicks and the rest of the band see a double album as career suicide. She is right in her assessment that younger people, their target audience, will not buy a double album in 2003. After all, she would know because her solo efforts have, for the most part, consistently sold well despite her own age. Buckingham’s albums haven’t sold as well as hers.
To further drive home this point, when I saw Nicks in August 2011, her audience was a pretty full house. It consisted of young
women, families with children, some men and older women. It was at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavillion in the Woodlands – just outside Houston, TX. When Lindsey Buckingham came to the Verizon Wireless Theater in downtown Houston, it was a smaller audience that consisted of older men and women. I and my friend Javier both joked that the audience was “the Woodstock generation” because we are in our mid-twenties.
But one of the best things is that it shows the actual production process that the album went through. Such as the scene where Stevie and Lindsey converse about Throw Down and the possibility of editing out a verse. Also the idea of choosing the right mixing person to mix the songs is shown.
However the biggest complaint with this DVD is that there are absolutely NO extras. It is bare bones. It says on the back that the documentary was culled from over 500 hours of footage. You mean to tell me that you couldn’t make some extras out of that?!
B+
