I'm okay now, really, but I got kind of shook up the other morning. I stumbled out of bed, turned on the radio and heard a song by Boston, then Springsteen's "Backstreets," an organ tune from Stevie Winwood, some Eric Clapton and something by Fleetwood Mac. I'd never heard of the Mac album, something called Tango in the Night, but I knew what was what –
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I was trapped back in the 1970s, and punk was never gonna come and save us. Reeling from the implications, I fell onto the CD player. It was the 1980s after all.
Fleetwood Mac is back, and as the baby boomers troop to record stores, the band is right on time. With Tango in the Night, the members of Fleetwood Mac doubtless hope to rule the airwaves as they did with the 1977 Rumours, the best-selling one-artist album (nearly 20 million copies sold) until Michael Jackson's Thriller. Tango may not be a world-beating 1980s LP; that seems to demand Message and Image and Novelty as well as craft. Then again, radio is moving away from crunch and toward insinuation once again – ask Bruce Hornsby. Coproducers Lindsey Buckingham and Richard Dashut have layered listenable sounds like true disciples of Brian Wilson. Given the chance to sink in, Tango in the Night will.
Rumours, the bench-mark Fleetwood Mac album, set lovers' quarrels in shimmering, paradoxical harmonies from the ex-lovers themselves. Listening to songs by Buckingham, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie was like spinning the TV dial to see three different soap operas with the same cast. To follow up Rumours, Fleetwood Mac spent a million dollars to record the homemade-sounding double album Tusk, followed that with a live set and then sort of fizzled out, garnering its later hit singles ("Hold Me," "Gypsy") from a considerably lower profile. My guess is that the band had tapped the anger that also spawned punk in 1977 but it then got sidetracked into trying to recapture the shimmer instead of the spark.
When the band drifted apart after making Mirage in 1982, it looked like the postpunk, big-beat 1980s were too impatient for Fleetwood Mac's fine-tuned midtempo introspection. Tango in the Night sounds five years newer than Mirage, but only if you listen carefully. Buckingham, as arranger and main songwriter, uses computerized zithers and toy pianos, as well as synthetic-sounding voices, most effectively in the Beach Boys-style chorale that caps McVie's "Everywhere." He also uses rhythm machines to augment Mick Fleetwood's steady-state drumming. But like Mirage, this album is a cornucopia of hooks, with arranging touches that are thoroughly cinematic. "Tango in the Night" moves from the lonely present tense, with rippling zither and quietly ticking drums, to the lusty past, where drums stomp and guitars roar; in "Family Man" a classical guitar is the voice of Buckingham's conscience.
As usual, Fleetwood Mac sings about love, a
