Faces, Loggins & Messina, Fleetwood Mac at Anaheim Stadium, Aug. 30, 1975.
by Greg Burk
In Guitar Center Magazine, Seattle
The guy who first thought of having rock concerts in sports stadiums had a real blockbuster bonanza of an idea, but he didn't take it far enough. It's all very well and advantageous, of course, that you can squash 3-4 times the usual number of people into this kind of venue without having to worry about considerations like a roof over your head, decent acoustics or reasonable seating arrangements. And if the truth be known, you scarcely even need bother with hiring entertainment, since the audience is almost certain to find ways of amusing itself by rioting with cops, passing out from heat prostration, "grooving to the outdoor vibes," etc.
But in the interest of true American entrepreneursmanship, couldn't more be done? Suppose, for instance, snipers with high-powered hunting rifles were to be stationed around the periphery of the stadium and ordered at intervals to fire random volleys into the crowd? Or suppose particularly ferocious and ravenous wild beasts were to be released occasionally and allowed to run rampant until their hunger was satiated? In this way, at relatively little cost to the management, a concertgoer could, for the 10 bucks or so he pays to attend, obtain the risky thrill of knowing that death, injury or serious discomfort to himself or one of his friends is not only a probability, but very nearly a certainty.
One of the first sights I saw upon entering Anaheim (home of the Angels) Stadium for the Faces/Loggins & Messina/Fleetwood Mac concert was the Emergency Unit toting out some scrape-skulled young military recruit strapped on a rubber stretcher, his eyeballs rolled back, his complexion a pale Montana-sky blue, shaking and vibrating like a laboratory rat caught on the electric runway. "There's one poor doughboy they'll never let fight in the Third Big One," I said to myself as I settled my butt and my high-powered binoculars into what I judged to be a reasonably safe third-tier seat.
The first band to come into my lenses, and the only one to earn their cut of the gate, was Fleetwood Mac, or, as I prefer to call them, the Whiteness and Goodtimes Band. I call them that because, since Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer left the group for different forms of fulfillment in 1970-71, there has not been a WHITER group of musicians than this. Yes, even whiter than the Carpenters, and far better. These folks have gone through about a dozen guitarists in the past five years, but their claim to fame is that in that period they have never substantially changed their sound, and never put out a bad album.
Mac's sound is gutsy, has a good dynamic sense, but is still fluid and markedly feminine. The last is particularly true now that the ancient rock-of-ages rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie is fronted by songwriters Christine Perfect (John's wife and former member of Stan Webb's Chicken Shack) and Stephanie Nicks -- on keyboards/vocal and vocal respectively. Lindsey Buckingham rounds things out with guitar and voice. The new material sounds very strong and would have stood up quite well on its own, even without support from the early Peter Green standards which Fleetwood still feels obliged to perform. "The Green Manalishi" still comes across magnificently with the present alignment, but doing "Oh Well" without the stunning triple-guitar assault that made it such a crusher in '69 is just a trifle absurd. But in toto: great timing and a certain nice kind of middle-class passion. Fine effort.
It's been well noted before that the Recession has made strange bedfellows in rock concerts, and in the present instance the only billing I can think of that would present a greater contrast than Loggins & Messina/Faces is Osmonds/Black Sabbath. These two groups should never be allowed on the same continent in the same month, much less on the same stage an hour apart, and a clear division of loyalties was evident in the crowd. Personally, I would have welcomed the opportunity for a big brawl in which the fans of each band slugged it out for supremacy, because I come down strongly on the Faces' side. It's obvious which side would win, and Loggins & Messina bore the bleeding piss out of me.
And I mean that sincerely, because the whole time they were on stage, I was wishing that, rather than being in the same stadium with them, I was flat on my back in a dead-white hospital intensive-care ward with venereal disease and a catheter up my wee-wee instead. These guys really annoy me. First of all, they're the Kalifornia Kliché Klones of Seals & Crofts, whose peace-and-mellow-vibes whining, grinning and B'hai proselytizing make me thirst unquenchably to give them both a second lobotomy at neck level. (To complete the joke, L&M are now using S&C's former piano player.) Secondly, L&M produce the kind of studied blandness that identifies itself almost perfectly with the get-stoned-and-lie-in-the-sun lifestyle, which some have dignified with the title of Culture, but which seems to me to be the next best thing to not existing. They demand absolutely no intellectual, emotional or even visceral beat response. It's music that doesn't exist.
And they proved it again and again on stage. Most of it was just the same old harmless dreck that they always dish out. But what's really disgusting is that L&M played portions of their new album, on which they take a bunch of perfectly likable old pop tunes and, with a love-groove smile, cut the balls right off them. I swear, these jerks could take "Satisfaction" and make it sound like a simpering schoolboy's complaint to Mommy. The coup de grace was administered with perfect elegance when Loggins & Messina ruined the only decent song they've ever done, "Angry Eyes," by turning it into a cosmic-tedium zillion-minute percussion jam. Whheew.
After that, I was all set for the Big Triumph, but as it turned out, the gods had ordained that, on that day, the great, or near-great anyway, should be laid low. For Rod Stewart and Faces were dealt the big banana-cream pie from the sky. Perhaps they merited their fall by the hubris they displayed in building themselves up: Just before the Faces' performance was due to start, a little one-engine airplane wrote the word FACES in huge letters directly above the stadium high in the Orange County heavens. VERY impressive. The stage was duly decorated with stairsteps, platforms and a white motif.
The first signal of doom came when the elaborately garbed ringmaster who introduced the band blew more lines than he was contracted to blow, then . . . "the blah-de-blah vocalist extraordinaire -- Rod Stewart!" And the band . . . just . . . stood there. They just stood there because nothing worked. After a few minutes of goofing with knobs and cords, Faces stumbled into "Memphis," which in this particular version was carried almost entirely by Ian MacLagan's piano and Tetsu Yamauchi's bass, because the hardworking Ron Wood's guitar and Kenney Jones' drum amps didn't make a peep.
A chagrined Rod the Mod explained at this point that the Faces had been ripped off for every stick and wire of their own equipment "somewhere in the middle of Arizona," and consequently the whole mess they were using was rented or borrowed. Uh-oh. To make a painfully long story short, it was that way all the way through. Everybody's sound stopped at one time or another in a kind of random rotation. Jesse Ed Davis, who is Faces' current guest on rhythm guitar, moved his arm up and down all evening, and I never heard a buzz out of him. Wood was worst hit, but major problems also extended to Rod and the guest horns of Tower of Power. There were ludicrous moments like when Kenney had to drum-solo until his arms dropped off on "I'm Losin' You" while they tried to find Woody some wattage. All part o' the show, folks.
It could have been good. Faces got enough power together for "You Wear It Well" and "Twistin' the Night Away," and those were just fine. But after "Maggie May" petered out, Rod flung down his mike, took a running jump into a big stack of burned amps, smashed 'em over, and waved goodbye and sorry.
So the main entertainment ended up being provided by third-billed Fleetwood Mac and by some dodos who decided it would be neat to antagonize the cops and pick a fight in which the dodos would be sure to be the crowd favorite. I guess they figured that the only way they could get some notoriety in their little lives was to get clubbed and maced to a stinging pulp by a clutch of 250-pound beefers in front of 60,000 patrons shrieking for blood. And I guess if I felt that way, I'd do the same thing.
And so would Rod Stewart, I bet. But he's already got some notoriety, so he doesn't have to. But of the 12 numbers he tried to do in concert, only 4 were Stewart/Faces originals. And most all of 'em were old, 'cause the new album's pretty dismal. And the time comes for most rock stars when you wake up in the morning and realize that your albums are in the bargain bins, you're over the hill and into the deep blue sea treading water, and you're too old to be much good at soccer anymore. But you try.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE: I should have been writing tighter and better at age 24, and some of my earlier stuff for my college and high-school newspapers shows that I could be (somewhat) less self-indulgent. But I post this as an artifact of a particular time, when I was excitable and had lived in L.A. just over a year. The Faces broke up after this tour.