BEFORE: Stevie Nicks carries over from "Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Live from Gatorville" and guess where she was born - Phoenix, Arizona! Hey, that's great, I haven't profiled that state yet, why it's almost like I planned this! Here's today's "Get to Know a State" feature for ARIZONA:
Date admitted to the U.S.: February 14, 1912 (48th state)
Claim to fame: A giant hole in the ground. I suppose that's not redundant.
Nickname: The Grand Canyon State. See? That's all they got. Or The Copper State. OK, they have two things.
State Motto: "Ditat Deus" or "God enriches". With copper?
State Flower: Saguaro cactus blossom
State Fish: Apache trout
State Bird: Cactus wren
State Tree: Palo verde
State mammal: Ring-tailed cat. OK, at least that's original.
State amphibian: Arizona tree frog. Come to America, we got turtles AND frogs.
State gemstone: Turquoise. Yeah, that tracks, it's on all their jewelry.
State beverage: Lemonade. OK, at least it's not milk. Who wants milk when you're out in the desert? Lemonade seems like a better choice.
Notable Sports Teams: Hey, they got some? I think it took a while, but they got there. The Cardinals in the NFL, the Suns in the NBA and the Diamondbacks in the MLB, plus the Phoenix Mercury in the WNBA. For a while, at least with baseball, I think it was just the state some teams had their spring training in.
Fun Facts: Without getting in to the enormously fun aspects of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase, it's enough to say that Arizona was formerly part of Mexico, also Nueva California and was a bit late to the USA party. But we got there, and just think about how funny the map would look if there was this big Arizona-shaped part of Mexico just sticking up into these United States. We just HAD to get Arizona into the country, the mapmakers were demanding it, it would be like if you had every Pokemon card EXCEPT one, you might really go to extremes to get it, right? Some of the other state names that were considered were "Pimeria", "Gadsonia" and "Montezuma". There were various gold rushes and silver rushes into the state, but mostly people found a lot of copper, so they just said, "OK, whatever, we're mining copper, I guess." I think now there are more retired people in Arizona than working people, because everyone's doctor keeps recommending that they move to a dry place, I suspect those doctors also have stake in land or timeshares in Arizona.
Nope, never been there, so I'm holding at 20 states visited out of 27.
THE PLOT: It's a Fleetwood Mac concert in Boston from 2004. What were you expecting?
AFTER: OK, I'll admit I am NOT an expert on Fleetwood Mac, they're just not one of my core bands. And I do have a LONG list of bands that I've seen live, like Air Supply to ZZ Top, and they're not on it. I'm a much bigger Tom Petty fan, obviously. But still, I recorded this one off the AXS channel, only upstairs, so I have no way to dub it to VHS and then to DVD. BUT, that's two hours of space I can free up on the DVR, and another two and a half hours if I erase the Tom Petty concert (which I also have on DVD) and now I'm really making some headway. By the time I'm done in mid-August I should have very few docs left taking up space on the list, and both DVRs, then I can start collecting some for next year's Doc Block, I suppose. I'm not adding anything now beyond the 23 docs I have waiting on deck.
Here's the Set List:
"The Chain"
"Never Going Back Again"
"Rhiannon"
"Gypsy"
"Big Love"
"Landslide"
"Beautiful Child"
"Gold Dust Woman"
"I'm So Afraid"
"Silver Springs"
"Tusk"
"Stand Back"
"Go Your Own Way"
"Don't Stop"
"Goodbye Baby"
You know, I know more Fleetwood Mac songs than I thought I did - well, I listened to the NYC classic rock radio station for a few decades, and if Fleetwood Mac's not classic rock, then I don't know what is. So of course I know "The Chain" and "Rhiannon" and "Go Your Own Way" and "Don't Stop", those are classic rock station standards. "Landslide" became super popular over the last decade because the (formerly Dixie) Chicks covered it, and then so did everyone else. I thought "Stand Back" and "Gypsy" were technically Stevie Nicks solo songs, but maybe I'm wrong or half wrong. And I remember "Big Love" from the days after MTV was invented, plus they showed that video in another doc, I think.
I also knew "Gold Dust Woman" from the radio, though I didn't know it was called "Gold Dust Woman". OK, I'm here to learn, and now I know that. And I sort of knew "Tusk", that's the song that they usually perform with a college marching band or something, I don't know if I ever heard the song straight and simplified, like just Fleetwood Mac without the USC Trojans band or whatever. It's a weird song, very experimental. For that matter, everything Lindsey Buckingham does seems a little experimental and out there, he seems a bit like a genius or a madman or a little bit of both. You know, like a musician.
The rest of the songs, I was kind of flying blind here - "Silver Springs"? "Beautiful Child"? "I'm So Afraid"? How about "I'm So Clueless"? Reading up about the band on Wikipedia a little, it seems like different people wrote different songs, obviously, and so there are Nicks songs and Buckingham songs and McVie songs and, presumably, Fleetwood songs, but I don't know which ones those would be. Tom Petty even covered a Fleetwood Mac song in his concert, "Oh Well" but it's from the early days of the band, before Buckingham and Nicks jumped on board in 1974. This moment was documented a bit in the, umm, documentary "Sound City", when Mick Fleetwood was touring Sound City Studios in L.A. in 1974 and the house engineer played him a track from the album "Buckingham Nicks" which was being mixed there. Fleetwood liked it and asked Buckingham to join the band, and he said yes, provided there was also a space for his girlfriend, Stevie Nicks. Their first album together as a band had "Rhiannon" and "Landslide" on it, plus the Christine McVie songs "Over My Head" and "Say You Love Me".
Speaking of that, where is Christine McVie in this concert? Ah, she left the band in 1998 but came back in 2014. The band's last studio album came out in 2004, the year before this Boston concert. So I guess even since then, they've been on that nostalgia circuit, like not producing any new material but still eager to perform and make sure that people remember them AND buy a t-shirt. Officially I think they called it quits in 2022 when Christine died and they realize Mick was really getting up there in age. Buckingham left (again) in 2018 and was replaced by Mike Campbell from the Heartbreakers. Again, we see that everything is like, connected, man, we just have to figure out where exactly those connections are if we want to understand them.
It's really a Spinal Tap-like situation, people tend to remember the four or five main members, but there really have been like 20 or 30 people in and out of the band over the years. Really only TWO were in from start to finish, that's Fleetwood and John McVie - which worked out great considering the band's name came from their two last names. But I think you can see in this 2004 concert that by this point in the band's career, really Buckingham and Nicks were figuratively driving the bus. Or they were the engine, whatever, and Mick Fleetwood was happy to just still have a seat on the bus. Who knows, maybe I'm reading things wrong.
Stylistically, this concert is heavy on the Nicks/Buckingham stuff, and so conspicuously absent are the songs "You Make Loving Fun" and "Hold Me" and "Think About Me". Probably there needs to be another whole documentary about the comings and goings of all the band's members, the marriages and the divorces, the hook-ups and the break-ups, and a proper chronicling of who was in rehab during various absences from touring. I can't even begin to parse it out here, it's too complicated, plus there was a FAKE Fleetwood Mac band touring in 1973, before the REAL band got back together in 1974 - there's probably a whole doc's worth of material in the telling of THAT story. I'll have to keep an eye out.
Directed by Joe Thomas (director of "Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Live from Gatorville")
Also starring Lindsey Buckingham (last seen in "The Greatest Night in Pop"), Mick Fleetwood (last seen in "Under the Volcano"), John McVie (ditto), Taku Hirano
RATING: 5 out of 10 songs played in THIS concert that didn't make it to the film.
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