Gladwell On Fleetwood Mac
Fleetwood Mac was an English-based blues band whose manager put a faux version of the act on the road. That’s what I remember from "Rolling Stone". It was kind of like a fake Savoy Brown, or another band that gigged incessantly but had never broken through… Who cared?
I’d seen their albums in the bins. How many labels had they been on? Sure, I knew "Oh Well", even "Albatross", but many bands had one or two great tracks. Like Blodwyn Pig. Hell, Blodwyn Pig’s tracks were even better! A great English blues band was not solely about the blues, they broke through!
But Fleetwood Mac never did.
Then suddenly, Fleetwood Mac was the biggest band in the world.
Watch this video. It’s going to make you feel incredibly good. It’s going to give you hope. Gladwell gets a few of the facts fucked up, but they’ve got nothing to do with his point. Which is that Fleetwood Mac experimented for a decade before they got their sound right. And the companies involved with the act, most especially Mo Ostin’s Warner Brothers, were cool with this. They believed, they supported the band and then they finally broke through.
Gladwell posits that the previous 16 records before "Rumours" were not very good. That didn’t feel right, but it used to be after every hit record you went out and bought the catalog, and although I love the title track, thinking back on it, "Heroes Are Hard To Find" is not exceptional. And I can listen to "Station Man" off "Kiln House" incessantly, but the rest of the album leaves me cold, it’s unnecessary. But put me in a dark room and play "Gold Dust Woman" and I get goosebumps.
Gladwell says there are two kinds of creators. The conceptual and the experimental. A conceptual artist is like Picasso. He gets a vision and executes it, sometimes just that fast. But an experimental artist has to weave his way, to find his greatness. Listening to Gladwell I thought of the Talking Heads. Nothing on the first album made me believe they could come up with anything remotely like their cover of "Take Me To The River". Hearing the track in my mind now, I must say I’ve never heard that exact sound on any other record. You know, where they’re pulling on the guitar strings and each note sounds like the plop of a gumdrop in a giant underground pool. Or maybe it was a synth. Who knows. But it was this sound and the groove and David Byrne’s vocal that made the track so infectious, so perfect, such a reworking of a classic that it still sounds fresh every time you listen to it.
Gladwell states that in the modern era, most creators are experimental. They’ve got to go down blind alleys to get to the crunchy goodness. But today a label will can you after the first single, never mind a whole album. Labels believe that only kids buy records and go to gigs and that youngsters don’t want to see old fucks perform, so they latch on to young ‘uns with desire, but very little else. And you wonder why the public no longer cares. Because the public can’t relate! The music just isn’t good enough! Or it satiates someone truly into the scene, but a casual listener is left cold. A great track crosses boundaries, it doesn’t matter if you’re a fan of the genre. I can’t say I love hip-hop, but "Can I Get A…" is one of my absolute favorite downloads. The groove, when the chicks come in and answer, putting Jay down, asking him how he’s gonna get around on his bus pass… Kind of like the Beatles. They sounded like nothing that came before, but we were instantly converted.
Watching this video gives me hope. Because like Leonard Cohen sings, everybody knows. That the music business is decrepit, run by fat cats who just want to hold on to their money, purveying evanescent shit that slides right off your back.
You want to make it today?
Be able to sing. Put in a melody. Have a catchy chorus. A bridge would be nice. It’s not about revolution so much as evolution. What I’ve just described is the music of the greatest group of all time, the Beatles. There’s nothing wrong with being able to sing on key and being able to play your instrument. And once you’ve got the basics down, you can truly experiment.
The Beatles didn’t create those classics overnight. I’ve got tons of demos and false starts from the band. They honed their chops and experimented. They had to get it right. And when they did, we responded.
Just like you’ll respond to Gladwell’s speech here.
You see we’re sick of celebutards who’ve got nothing to say. Somehow, over the course of many speeches, Gladwell has refined his presentation to the point we’re hooked. We like wrestling with new ideas. We like being stimulated. It makes us feel alive. The same way listening to those Fleetwood Mac tracks did thirty years ago.
