New Wave of Big Love for FM: WSJ

[michelej1]

[click article to read comments after]

Wall Street Journal By HANNAH KARP June 23, 2016 4:54 p.m. ET

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-...mac-1466715297

The New Wave of Big Love for Fleetwood Mac

Two British DJs spotlight their favorite band with ‘Fleetmac Wood’ parties at Glastonbury, Burning Man



This weekend in at England’s Glastonbury music festival, a pair of British DJs will spin a two-hour set devoted to a single act: the nearly 50-year-old soft-rock band Fleetwood Mac.

Husband-and-wife DJs Alex Oxley and Lisa Jelliffe both were born well after the band formed. But they have spent the past four years promoting what they call Fleetmac Wood parties around the world, at festivals including Nevada’s Burning Man and more traditional venues in San Francisco, Chicago and New York.

They play Fleetwood Mac songs and remixes for crowds that include both graying baby boomers and youngsters surprised to discover that songs such as the haunting “Gold Dust Woman” are, in fact, Fleetwood Mac originals.

Group hugs are common during the band’s hit “Landslide.” Many attendees dress up like the band’s lead singer Stevie Nicks in flowing skirts and shawls, though one female fan arrived as guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, sporting a stick-on hairy chest. Ms. Jelliffe said she once developed a blister on her hand from banging a tambourine too long.

The music may not be cutting edge, but it’s special because “it unlocks emotional memories,” and it’s “not ironic—there’s nothing funny about it,” Ms. Jelliffe said. As she spoke, she sat on her deck in Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon, the neighborhood where some of the band members used to live.


The tunes—which made the band one of the world’s highest-earning touring acts in 2015, with $125 million in gross ticket sales, according to industry magazine Pollstar—also seem to help partygoers “get in touch with their feminine side,” she added.

The band is having a moment, despite its easy-listening sound that some music fans love to hate. (A Fleetwood Mac representative didn’t reply to requests for comment.)

The 40-year-old Ms. Jelliffe said her own superfandom started after she saw Fleetwood Mac perform at London’s Wembley Arena in 2009. She realized she knew so many of the songs “subconsciously—they’d been omnipresent my whole life.”

She began digging deeper into the band’s catalog and making and sharing remixes on audio-sharing site SoundCloud. She and Mr. Oxley, 35, hosted their first Fleetmac Wood party in a sweaty East London basement for several hundred people in 2012—around the same time indie-rock acts including MGMT, Best Coast and Yeasayer participated in two separate Fleetwood Mac tribute albums, “Just Tell Me That You Want Me” and “Rumours Revisted.”

The couple has since held dozens of the events from Colombia to Australia. They’ve played Glastonbury for the past three years. Remixes have poured in from musicians and fans, thanks in part to the growing availability online of Fleetwood Mac song stems—the isolated parts of each recording, such as the bass line, percussion and keyboards. Performing-rights groups collect performance royalties for Fleetwood Mac’s songwriters and publishers from festivals and clubs that have hosted the Fleetmac Wood events.

Plenty of old acts like the Grateful Dead and Kiss have active cult followings. There’s an annual convention for fans of English singer-songwriter Morrissey and his band the Smiths.

But Fleetmac Wood events are unusual in that they feature remixes and originals only. Cover versions are verboten.

“A nonfan accidentally came to our party once and got really angry when we wouldn’t play anything except Fleetwood Mac,” recalled Ms. Jelliffe. When a guest DJ tried to slip in a remix of a Paul Simon tune, it “was immediately faded out and fixed.”

[snroxman]

Thanks for sharing that article, Michele! I'd love to go to one of these myself.

[michelej1]

Originally Posted by snroxman

Thanks for sharing that article, Michele! I'd love to go to one of these myself.

There are so many tribute bands out there that I don't usually post about them, but this was the Wall Street Journal and it seems to be a growing phenomenon. Michele