Six points about The Alternate Mirage as we continue deep diving into Christine McVie’s recorded past:
1. I know all they did was flip the back cover to the front and vice versa, but I can’t help but smile at the sight of the band’s rhythm section whenever they’re posed with their namesake moniker. It’s why I prefer the ’75 white album display over the iconic shot for the LP that followed it.
At last: a new Fleetwood Mac album!
New, that is, for this ongoing deep dive into the discography of the late great Christine McVie, following 10 posts dedicated to things she did to keep busy after the Tusk tour of ’79-’80.
That’s when we last found the most famous Mac-ateers all in the same room, sounding like cocaine as much as looking it and rapidly getting on each other’s nerves (again). A healthy break was needed — and maybe should have lasted longer?
There was a time, so soon after their ascendency to superstar status, when the most enduring incarnation of Fleetwood Mac was on such good terms with former frontman Bob Welch that it remains baffling why he was left out of their Hall of Fame induction and acrimony ensured for decades.
Ok, yes, the fact that he sued them in ’94 for unpaid royalties probably had lots to do with that snub. Rewind to November 1981, however, when this star-studded set was captured at West Hollywood’s world-famous Roxy Theatre, and you’ll find they were rarely chummier.
The keen eyes and ears of @all.the.records summed up this phase of my already-leagues-deep dive into Christine McVie’s discography in a comment on the previous installment in this series: ‘The takeaway I’m getting from these most recent … posts is the members [of Fleetwood Mac] worked on a lot of songs or records during some downtime in FM in the early ‘80s.’
I’d go a step further, actually: non-Mac downtime work became the band’s new standard operating procedure post-Tusk.
Time again to play the vinyl community’s fastest-growing game: Who Among Us Remembers This Guy?
Reintroducing Robbie Patton, another likable wannabe rock star who caught his big break opening for Fleetwood Mac’s troublesome tour behind Tusk — although Christine McVie, whose discography I’ve been revisiting, clearly took a shine to him more brightly than she did the focus of our previous post in this deep dive, Danny Douma.
We’ve reached the point in my year-old deep dive into Christine McVie’s vast discography where we must ask, for the first of several times: Who among us remembers this guy?
If you were lucky enough to catch Fleetwood Mac during the first North American leg of their Tusk tour in late ‘79 — and you bothered arriving on time — then you probably saw a warmup set from this likable fellow, Danny Douma.
If anyone was entitled to craft New Age-y yacht-rock with a dash of disco by the dawn of 1979, it was the Beach Boys. Except that’s giving them way too much credit, as if they’d planned to do exactly that — when in fact L.A. (Light Album), perhaps the group’s most forgettable collection, is nothing but a hodgepodge of solo material patched together to keep CBS Records from suing them for breach of contract, lest they turn in zero music two years after signing to that label.
This once-buried treasure from August ‘77 is the very definition of a cult classic, like Skip Spence’s Oar or Chris Bell’s I Am the Cosmos. The sole solo album from the least significant (yet still considerably talented) Wilson brother, Pacific Ocean Blue has been expounded upon aplenty. Much of that revisionist praise hits the mark, but boasts of ‘you must hear this before you die’ strike me as overinflated.
First off: Could they have picked a more distant, boring, pointless photo for this thing?
The frenetically blurry pic adorning the original Live back in December ‘80 said everything. This poorly framed glimpse taken from Loge 57 Row Z says absolutely nothing beyond ‘these are the five people in this band.’ The shot of them embracing inside the gatefold would have made a much better cover.
I did warn you there would be more of this stuff. Nearly a quarter of the way through this century we have easy access to the cream of Fleetwood Mac’s concert crop from three-quarters of the way through the previous century — and at this point that almost seems by design.
Mick Fleetwood was keen to put out a live set not long after ‘Rumours’ arose but the rest of the band shot the idea down. Didn’t stop them from recording an estimated 400 shows between ’75 and ’80 during increasingly in-demand tours that built this particular Mac’s reputation almost as much as their multiplatinum monoliths.
