Music: The Monster Season

New albums by Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles strike fire

Some weeks ago, during the very particular and graceful lull of an English Sunday afternoon, two American travelers stopped by a pub in the village of Blandford, Dorset. The air was thick with Player’s smoke and jollity, the sound of gentle joking, the slide and click of coins across the worn wood of the bar, and the easygoing strains of the new Eagles album.

Released just days before, The Long Run, an adept and insinuating work by the regents of California pop, had already crossed the ocean, penetrated cultural barriers where some resistance might have been anticipated, and found a snug home for itself. Besides being a reminder of the international power of American pop music, hearing The Long Run in Blandford helped to take the Eagles out of cultural context. It lifted them from the category of stainless-steel Los Angeles pop, in which they are usually confined on their home turf, and let their music stand free of preconceptions. It sounded good.

The ballads, always a group specialty, floated free and easy. Songs like The Long Run and The Sad Cafe seemed to sink right into your memory. The current hit single Heartache Tonight, or In the City, a hard dose of metropolitan late nights, or the ironic frat-house rocker The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks sounded rambunctious in a way that is new for the group.

The Eagles, one of America’s top-selling acts (their last album, 1976’s Hotel California, sold 12 million copies worldwide), have been popular favorites even as they have endured some tough drubbing from the critics. The group, particularly Co-Writers Don Henley and Glenn Frey, have been taking it on the chin for such presumed transgressions as coldness, stylistic calculation and lyrical arrogance. Some of this criticism is justified. The Eagles are a motivating commercial force in rock more than a creative one. The Sad Cafe tries to shape a coda for the ’60s by shoring up all the cliches of a generation (“love,” “freedom,” “amazing grace,” “lonely crowd”) and firing them off like salvos. The song becomes unwieldy, but its graceful melody rescues it. Henley and Frey have better luck closer to home, in the jokey, hokey bacchanal of The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks or the sly ironies of The Disco Strangler (a collaboration with String Player Don Felder) and King of Hollywood, in which a hard-hustling mogul is nailed neatly in two fleet lines: “He’s just another power junky/ Just another silk-scarf monkey.”

Fleetwood Mac, a band whose average lyric has the approximate weight and consistency of a summer breeze, have become the smash success story of the late ’70s. They even outpoint the Eagles; their last album, 1977’s Rumours, has rung up sales of something like 15 million copies. Their new album, Tusk, is two records’ worth of prime Mac material; they may even be cueing it up in Dorset right now.

As the music business dropped off earlier this year and economic panic spread, investments of both high hopes and hard cash were being made in Tusk. Like the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac was the kind of “monster” group that was expected to pull the business out of the doldrums. Both records, indeed, seem well up to such heavy hauling, especially since the runaway success of In Through the Out Door, Led Zeppelin’s album of surprisingly graceful power, has cleared the road and got rock fans to reach for their wallets again.

Tusk contains not only some of the most infectious pop music of the year, but also some of the most adventurous. If there was a model or precedent for Tusk, it would seem to be the Beatles’ “White Album,” an equally ambitious and wide-ranging effort that attempted to bend old forms into new directions. There is much familiar Fleetwood material on Tusk, including the gossamer ballads of Stevie Nicks and the afterglow love songs of Keyboard Player Christine Me Vie, who has one of the easiest and sexiest voices in anyone’s neighborhood.

What is startling on Tusk is the wild melodic invention of Singer-Guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, who takes the band off into the ozone on tunes like Not That Funny and I Know I’m Not Wrong.

Bass Player John McVie and Drummer Mick Fleetwood provide sonic propulsion as Buckingham’s melodies range widely and easily between old English folk and avant-garde pop. The sound sometimes flirts with the sort of revisions of Eng lish folk idiom that Fairport Convention used to bring off with such foursquare inspiration, and sometimes, as in the title cut, skirts the sonic experiments conducted by Lennon and McCartney on songs like Revolution 9.

Tusk, in fact, seems simultaneously like a lover’s catechism and a souped-up Tibetan prayer for the dead. It features some phenomenal drumming by Fleetwood and some tantalizing lyric fragments (“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? . . . / Why don’t you tell me who’s on the phone?”) set beside 120 members of the University of Southern California’s Trojan Marching Band, blasting away to create an unlikely mixture of mystery, humor and the slightest hint of menace. Tusk is the penultimate song on side four. The album ends with a lovely Christine McVie tune, Never Forget, whose congenial conventionality seems calculated to assure listeners that the band has come back down to earth.

After a flight like Tusk, however, there’s little reason for them to settle; everyone will be waiting for them to soar again.