Walk A Thin Line
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Everyone in your So Cal let's-talk-about-our-feelings band is breaking up. Not the band itself: the band will never break up. It perpetually exists near the pop charts & across continents, swallowing decades as it churns forward, leaving behind a sticky residue of former and non-hits, along with discarded band members gone paranoid, alcoholic, insane (one day before a show former guitarist Jeremy Spencer says he's going out to "get a magazine." He's found days later among the Children of God, a religious cult). No, the members themselves are divorcing, splitting up, yet they continue to serve. A new chemistry is formed within the shapeless amoeba of the band. Songs are written, recorded--these secure multiplatinum success. Add to the chemistry of the amoeba broken love and massive infusions of cash: as any American success story can tell you, cash can kill almost anything. Not in this case. The thing slithers on, larger than ever. Yet the shape of the amoeba changes. It turns a sort of brackish, lively color and starts to move slowly. As the body rolls eventually its weird underbelly gets exposed. That underbelly is called "Walk A Thin Line." There is no pop to the song, no intro, just Lindsey Buckingham next to a thin, chilly drum track, singing, "I've seen so many things that made me wonder/ but sometimes it's hard to tell/ I said "Take your time"/ but no one was listening..." There's a guitar there: it sounds like it's been recorded in another, colder state. The drums pop and crack like glass ground into pavement. The band has eaten together, slept together, ridden first in buses and then in private jets together: now they sing together in formless harmony, the boys and the girls side by side again in the same cold, ideal space in which the guitars reside. The song whirls around and around but never coalesces. Its brittleness extends into the air and piles on top of itself, like some rare supercoolant tipped over in lab, dissolving the aluminum table legs. The result is that the members of Fleetwood Mac are fixed to the amoeba as it finally crawls to a halt; there is no more alienation, no more fighting, just the supreme layering of production technique. Beautiful.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:01 AM,
