Unlikely Summer Jams 2007: Fleetwood Mac/The Field

fairyland, originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

One summer I took over the record store I worked at for a few months while my boss went off to India. Piccolo Records was housed in the tiniest old building. It had seen Napoleon take the city of Maastricht but would not keep standing for much longer. My tasks included covering the records in the store with plastic before I left each day. A single rainstorm would soak the store and render the beautiful records worthless. That summer, I lived every music geek's High Fidelity dream. Though many people would say that the most power lies in merely lounging imperiously behind the counter and occasionally deigning to answer questions by the humble clientele, my experience taught me that the greatest pleasure a record store employee can have is to put on a record and have it bought right off the store's shiny Technics 1200.

Those days I just grabbed random records from the racks, discovering Meat Loaf and the Bee Gees surprisingly palatable early work, but never quite getting into Beefheart or Zappa. To my surprise though, the record that was sold straight off my turntable the most was the multi-million selling album Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. Though it has in the past been written off as a commercial easy listening album, it is luminously produced, never over-stuffed, but also not cliched in its casual instrumentation. The ideal record to put on as I opened the store, propped the door open, and started to remove the plastic sheeting off the racks (just because it is July, sunny even, does not mean that it never rains during fickle Dutch summers).

The more than 30 million-selling Rumours (1977) is stuffed with anthemic pop singles, Clinton-campaigner Don't Stop, devastating Karaoke beast Go Your Own Way, and the sultry groove of Dreams. The appeal of the album version of fan-favorite Gold Dust Woman lies in the way Stevie Nicks' other times too-unbridled symbolism and floatiness has been contained, paced-out, harnessing its vicious power without exactly revealing the song's subject (jealousy? drugs? break-ups?). The sparse demo I'm posting is much tighter but less menacing. My main interest is in its surprisingly sweet coda, which sounds almost exactly like the poignant, wordless warbling than underscores the dramatic scenes on the Gilmore Girls.

More summer stompers can be found of the Mac's weirdest album, the wonderful Tusk (1979). Apart from the insane title track (background noise, African drumming, spooky vocals, and of course a brass band finale), and Stevie's sprawling swamp of a song, Sara, it also features the very Don't Stop-ish Think About Me , which I've posted in the single version off the expanded re-issue. As with Fleetwood Mac's most powerful stuff (and, now that I think about it, Abba's work as well), this song works best in its juxtaposition of upbeat sound and loose rhythm, with more pointed, dark lyrics, probably bred from the band's fucked-up inner romantic dis-entanglements. As Arion Berger suggests in his Rolling Stone review of the Rumours reissue:

"It's not a classic breakup record; it wasn't built as a soundtrack to whatever heartbreak you're trying to sing along to. But it's their breakup record, and in its idiosyncratic way it mirrors all the lost loves of the world. The two couples confess, blame, sigh and ride a deep, chugging groove toward some kind of resolution."

For fans of later Mac, as well as those of minimalist Teutonic techno, I'll end this with a post of The Field's epic stretching of the 1987 song Everywhere, here renamed Everday. As I've attempted to describe before, the tracks produced by Stockholm's Axel Willner are a different kind of trance. The music sounds like a warmer version of a skipping song on a CD. You know, those times where you're too busy doing something to realize you've been listening to the same few seconds of your favorite song for the last hour, just because someone used that disc as a coaster. The tracks on The Field's From Here We Go Sublime album just keep on building and building, revealing tantalizing snippets of their source material, but somehow ultimately imploding that material, mining radio staples by The Four Tops, The Flamingoes, hell, even Lionel Richie's Hello, for previously unsuspected tensions and dancefloor energy.