joshua shank: check one off the list: Fleetwood Mac

I moved to Minnesota when I was 16 years old. Prior to that I had played violin for nine years (from ages 3-12) as well as a few obligatory years in the middle school band as a second chair trumpet player. However, by the time the Shank clan pulled up its Iowa roots and headed north, I had quit pretty much any sort of involvement with music at all. (I think the first CD I ever bought was Blackstreet's Another Level. Remember "No Diggity"? You bet your ass that I do.)

All this changed when I moved to Minnesota. Fleetwoood Mac's classic Rumours-era lineup had just reunited and everybody was freaking out (my parents included). My life as a musician changed fundamentally when I saw their reunion concert, The Dance, on television. For some reason--and this is going to sound incredibly naive--I had never realized that you could play a guitar with anything other than a pick and, when I saw Lindsey Buckingham's trademark fingerpicking on the song, "Big Love", I totally lost my mind. To my untrained ear he was playing two guitar parts at the same time and I couldn't figure out how anyone would be able to do that. It became like a puzzle I had to solve and my mother's old, nylon-string guitar became the perfect vessel to find the solution.

Here's a shaky concert video of the song in question. Go to about 1'30" if you want to skip his speech. The first few bars of this piece absolutely blew my mind.

Here's the repeating figure I'm talking about. It's built out of almost nothing; just a top voice outlining a perfect fourth (with an added hammer-on to create a little syncopation) and a lower voice descending the A natural minor scale.

And that's when I became a musician. (It should be noted that I totally realize how melodramatic that all sounded. Well, too effing bad. The story tells itself better when it's romanticized.)

So what this diatribe is getting at is the fact that I went to a Fleetwood Mac concert last night at the Xcel Center with my dad and about 12,000 other people. It was sooo awesome and they let you take pictures.

A sea of people.

No wonder aged rock stars keep "reuniting" to do concert tours. This can't possibly get old.

My camera actually behaves pretty well in low light situations if you keep it still and give it enough time. This picture is a digital zoom and it still comes out halfway decent.

I think I took this when Lindsey was screaming out their 8-minute, bluesy, guitar jam "I'm So Afraid". Check out the one guy in the crowd who wore green that day. For some reason, he sticks out like a sore thumb to me.

Here's another shot with Stevie Nicks. Her rendition of "Gold Dust Woman" was off the chain.

The Star Tribune ran a great review of the concert which they titled "Fleetwood Mac outdoes itself". I couldn't agree more.

My favorite part of the review reads thus:

"...he seemed as amped as a punk-rocker half his age. The Lindsey Buckingham Show indeed."

Here's the picture they included.

I cannot believe she is 60 years old. What moisturizer do you think she uses?

After the concert it was back into the Minnesota cold. I took this from the top floor of the arena looking down on Kellogg and 7th. I like the huddled mass of blurry people near the bottom of the picture.