Album Assignments: Bare Trees

For its most recent tours, Fleetwood Mac replaced Lindsey Buckingham with a new singer (Neil Finn) and a new guitarist (Mike Campbell.) Now, I’ve seen Fleetwood Mac lots of times, in lots of configurations, and I’ve also seen Lindsey on his own, and with Christine McVie. If you lean in close, I’ll whisper something to you, something heretical among a lot of Fleetwood Mac fans: I’ve kind of had it with Lindsey.

Sure, I appreciate him as a guitarist, as a songwriter, and as a producer, especially on Rumours, Tusk, and Mirage. But I’ve also listened to his endless pontifications and solos from many a stage, and I’ve read numerous sources that detail his abusive, controlling behavior. In fact, the band’s excuses for dismissing him were so threadbare that I really wonder if his firing was actually connected to the #metoo movement, which happened to peak right around the time they made the announcement. In any case, for me it was really listening to and writing about Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie that crystallized my perception that he’s been standing on Fleetwood Mac’s neck for the last 20-odd years.

Well, seeing Fleetwood Mac without Lindsey Buckingham on these last tours was quite a revelation. Here’s what I wrote about it the night after the first Lindsey-less show I saw:

Have you ever gotten out of a toxic relationship and found pieces of yourself coming back to life, pieces you’d shut down, maybe without even fully realizing it? Like opening the windows of long-sealed rooms and letting the outside air in at last? That’s what it felt like to see Fleetwood Mac in concert without Lindsey Buckingham.

Apparently, without Lindsey in the mix, Fleetwood Mac can acknowledge that it existed before he arrived! Can Stevie sing “Black Magic Woman”? Sure, why not? Can Mike Campbell play and sing “Oh Well”? You bet! Can Fleetwood Mac play a Danny Kirwan song in 2018? HELL YES.

And that brings us at last to Bare Trees. Fleetwood Mac released this album in 1972, back when they were just a working band rather than an international sensation and cultural juggernaut. The lineup, besides Mick and John, was Christine McVie, Danny Kirwan, and Bob Welch.

In a previous post, I called Welch “criminally underappreciated”, and I stand by that statement. Welch was a great musician and songwriter, and was responsible for some of the best Fleetwood Mac songs between the Green and Buck/Nicks eras. But for whatever reason, he gets consistently ignored in retrospectives of the band’s history, and was unconscionably snubbed when Fleetwood Mac was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. Sadly, he died by suicide in 2012.

The thing is, it’s hard to appreciate Welch within the confines of a single Fleetwood Mac album. His best stuff was spread across the albums from his tenure — “Lay It All Down” and “Future Games” from Future Games, “Did You Ever Love Me” (with Christine) from Penguin, “Emerald Eyes” and the wonderful “Hypnotized” from Mystery To Me, “Silver Heels” and “Bermuda Triangle” off Heroes Are Hard To Find. But Bare Trees has one of his all-time classics, “Sentimental Lady”, a song he re-recorded and had a Top Ten hit with on his 1977 solo album French Kiss.

I confess to preferring the solo version, partly from childhood familiarity and partly because I love Christine singing “all I need is you” at the end of the chorus. But the Bare Trees version is charming too, with Christine singing an intriguing countermelody across the chorus. Lyrically, too, the Bare Trees version is superior, as it retains a full verse that got cut from the solo version — “we live in a time when paintings have no color, words don’t rhyme.”

Welch was pretty sentimental himself, given to emotional mysticism and spooky imagery, as in his other tune on Bare Trees, “The Ghost.” Where the wind in “Sentimental Lady” is gentle, it’s a “strange wind” that haunts this song. Where “Sentimental Lady” is about holding on to love in the face of threatening odds, “The Ghost” is about the threat of, well, nuclear holocaust. “And then the winds start to blow / And the fire comes scorching down / And then the sky disappears / In the cloud with an awful sound / And when you can’t hold out / Then you run to the underground.”

Compared to this, Christine McVie’s troubles seem pretty small, but they’d loom large in the future of the band. Even in 1972, she told us in “Homeward Bound” that she’d rather be at home in her rocking chair than traveling the world. It wasn’t until 1998 that she made good on that conviction, quitting Fleetwood Mac for about 15 years. “Spare Me A Little Of Your Love” is her highlight on this album, a sweet love song leavened with just enough of McVie’s trademark ambivalence.

In the end, though, this is Danny Kirwan’s album. He has more songs on it than Welch and McVie put together, including the title track. Kirwan’s another one whose best stuff is pretty well distributed across albums (really, they all are), including the tune performed by the band on its recent tours (“Tell Me All The Things You Do”, from Kiln House) and the excellent “Trinity”, which somehow never made its way into the light until the band’s 1992 box set. Bare Trees was his swan song with the band, though — he was destined for one of Fleetwood Mac’s many strange and sad endings, fired from the band for his excessive alcoholism and a violent backstage incident, and homeless for much of the 1980s and 90s.

His intensity and lyricism are in full flower on this album, as is his deft way with a melody. In fact, two of his five tunes are instrumentals, with “Sunny Side Of Heaven” being a particular knockout. Woven between them is the story of a full life. The album opens with “Child Of Mine”, a poignant declaration of love for his infant son. Eight songs later, Kirwan closes with “Dust”, an ode to death with lyrics from the first two stanzas of Rupert Brooke’s 1910 poem.

Kirwan’s stuff here is serious, but I’d never call it bleak. His melodies are too joyous, his playing too passionate, for such a label. Really, that applies to the whole album. Where John McVie’s cover photo depicts a world stripped of life, looking almost like a misty Dante-esque purgatory, Fleetwood Mac’s cascading synchrony of songwriting, vocals, guitars, and rhythm section feels more like the sunny side of heaven.