Machine sees how I just told an entire paragraph aloud instead of typing, about, save me from confessing because it will take so long to contextualize, the experience of seeing Fleetwood Mac come to the public eye again. And how I now do not recognize the Buckingham Nicks version of the band as greats the way I did as a child. (even though this is the cutest album in the sweet world of acoustic countryfolk LovePop. The world that, other than mysteriously serving as a genre incubator for the Byrds, spawned little flat, bright pink packets of James Taylor and the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt, and became 70’s business-driven pop rock radio that was musically speaking, was two gum-popping inches deep, with unfortunate eventualities including Leo Sayer and Al Stewart. But the listening agony is like a little bunny and click we came back for more.  Lindsey Buckingham put Fleetwood Mac on the dial.  It didn’t make any kind of listening sense, when other music not getting much radio play had so much to offer. John Prine, Emmy Lou, Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, to begin a list.

And, I have an irrational, unfounded personal sense of loss of Peter Green from the blues based magical rock stew. ‘Old,’ Machine calls me flat-out, and it must be true if images of Fleetwood Mac looked like adults then, and children now. I looked a lot at that glass orb they used on two album covers, and for all I know it’s in one of the many crowded candids on the multi-sleeved Tusk cover, which was the most exquisitely entertaining find-things-in-the-sand activity, it took the attention clean away from Buckingham’s aerobics-class idea of music. They gave too much creative control to the shallowest artist in the band, even if he could shred.  It ain’t all about the shred. And Stevie Nicks was great for persona, and a sweet songwriter, with a soul for music and an amazing capacity for celebrity. Let me take that as a lesson, grasshopper, and make sure that the voices of my work speak for my investigations.