New York Times

September 24, 1997

By BEN RATLIFF

UNIONDALE, N.Y. -- For about five minutes before Fleetwood Mac came on stage at the Nassau Coliseum on Tuesday night, the audience listened to a recording of crickets played over the speakers.

The association with the outdoors must have provoked a massive sense memory, because one remembers nearly every track from the band's 1977 album "Rumours" heard at barbecues and swimming pools and beaches, coming out of carry-along AM radios with bulging plastic designs, back before everyone had a sleek home stereo. More Fleetwood Mac albums have been sold than the combined populations of New York, California, Florida and Texas; the band's music, for a time, was an atmospheric component everywhere, like cricket noises.

It could have been cicadas, though, not crickets. It's been nearly 17 years (15, actually) since this best-known lineup of the group has toured. But the quintet nevertheless played a tight and satisfying, if not particularly meaningful, set of its chestnuts.

As every Fleetwood Mac fan knows, each member of the band has been in a stormy relationship with at least one of the others, and the styles of the three principal songwriters can be read as reactions to romantic trouble. Lindsey Buckingham ("Go Your Own Way,") spat out tantrums; Christine McVie ballasted her songs with hopeful, stiff-upper-lip versions of what love should be ("Songbird"); and Stevie Nicks wrote sketches of mysterious, powerful women, ("Gold Dust Woman.") All these songs were on "Rumours," and were part of Tuesday night's show; every song from the album but two made it into the set list.

The trio wrote songs about one another and themselves, and with their pretty three-part harmonies throwing sunlight on recriminations and idealizations of love, the songs retain a lingering power. So did some of the band members' between-song gestures to one another -- the "it's all water under the bridge" looks and fond embraces exchanged by Buckingham and Ms. Nicks.

For most of the set, Ms. McVie stood still behind keyboards, sitting down at a grand piano for "Songbird" and the Beach Boys' "Farmer's Daughter," her voice the embodiment of a self-reliant strength with its confident low range. Buckingham, with a deeper and thicker voice than he once had, played a tortured artist and a multitalented one: He played a long, emotional guitar solo in "I'm So Afraid," Spanish figures in a solo performance of "Big Love," and banjo in "Say You Love Me;" he cathartically shrieked the crescendos of most of his songs, a little scream-therapy to enliven the soft-rock.

But it was Stevie Nicks' show. Her voice, thin, high and drawled with smoky wrinkles, was in good, strong form, and without moving much, she communicated like crazy. Dressed in constantly changed costumes of shawls and brocades and velvet, she stretched out her arms after each number, her shawl dripping from her shoulders, looking like a bedraggled cormorant. That martyred Old Mother Hubbard pose was an iconic one, and it pushed the audience's buttons.

Four new songs were played, all of them part of the band's new CD, "The Dance," the live soundtrack of its August MTV special, which is near the top of the Billboard chart. The best of them was Ms. Nicks' "Sweet Girl," in which she intimates -- strangely enough, considering her present circumstance -- that she wouldn't go through the experience of fame and touring again. ("Who do you love when you're not working?" the lyrics ask of someone who could be Ms. Nicks. "Where would you go if you had the time?")

But the crowd couldn't muster nearly as much excitement for the unfamiliar. Since it's hard to keep identifying with a band that had its definitive moment 20 years ago, most of the members of the audience were there for a more practical purpose: to celebrate the smooth functioning of their own memories.