Photo: Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Image
What makes a band immortal? What keeps a musical legacy burning brightly when the hit parade dies down? It’s more than just the knack for rearranging notes and chords into pleasing structures, though that’s how they hook you. There’s gotta be a style and story. The Beatles were not just selling harmonic density and emotional simplicity but also hifi audio, kaleidoscopic color, and as time beat carelessly on, grief. 30 years later, Nirvana drew attention for sour punk-metal riffs and still turns generation after generation of fans of the late Kurt Cobain onto his abrasive-for-a-chart-sensation politics and encyclopedic independent-music knowledge. An adult-contemporary and country-rock institution, Fleetwood Mac cemented its place in the pantheon of indelible rock catalogs and sagas as a ’60s British blues-rock powerhouse which exploded in 1975 following the addition of the American singer-songwriter duo Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. The disintegration of the new hires’ romantic relationship ran concurrent to the crumbling marriage of bassist John McVie and his wife Christine, a formidable songwriter and vocalist in what had become a devastating roster by the late-’70s. The band’s legacy is internecine drama igniting musical chemistry. It’s serenading tens of thousands with pained verses while rolling your eyes at the heartbreaker at stage left.
The Tony nominated Broadway play Stereophonic joins a growing field of works attempting to do justice to the sun-drenched melodies, drug-fueled exhaustion, and gilded excess of past rock royalty. Brooklyn playwright David Adjmi recounts the trials of an unnamed British-American band crafting an album while its profile grows and its romantic entanglements dissolve. It’s obviously some sort of alternate reality Rumours scenario, powered by cocaine and spite: In a volatile 1977, a resolute British drummer is expressing to his domineering American singer-guitarist that he may have commandeered control of the album, but he doesn’t own the band. Adjmi’s succession of in-studio bon mots and benders dramatizes the toxic interplay between ego and surrender that makes for great music, while composer and former Arcade Fire member Will Butler and the Stereophonic cast (all of whom play their own instruments) conduct daring time travel experiments. At its best, the play succeeds at dissolving the listener’s sense of time altogether, giving a decade-old idea a bygone folk-rock patina you will occasionally mistake for originating in the late 20th century.
Its accompanying original cast recording is a stranger curio: Unlike Amazon Prime Video’s adaptation of author Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six and its dreary tie-in full length Aurora, Stereophonic’s cast recording is not pretending to bring the album from the show’s universe into the real world. It delivers finished versions of the songs sparking intense power struggles on stage — which you learn throughout the course of the play are being relegated to album outtakes — offering breathing room to the tantalizing bits of the story that beg for more attention: The strutting “Masquerade,” an ominous rocker by the Buckingham analog, Peter (Tom Pecinka), a singer and guitarist striking the perfect balance between egomania and blues-rock excellence; the chugging “Bright,” a catchy folk-pop tune by Diana (Sara Pidgeon), our Stevie, a raspy singer-songwriter who joined the band with Peter, her insecure boyfriend; or the galloping “Drive,” by Holly (Succession’s Juliana Canfield), a British blues rock vet, like Christine McVie, now in retreat from her band and also her marriage to Reg (Will Brill), the bass player. Like “Silver Springs,” a classic Stevie Nicks breakup tune whose absence from Rumours is testament to white-hot internal conflict, Stereophonic’s “Bright” – which appears in three versions on the cast recording – documents the too-often symbiotic connection between art and pain. Exhausted ballads from the folk-rockers in this tinderbox pay respect to the real-world catalog they can’t touch. Impressively, the music does not struggle with that precarious unreality, with the difficulty of capturing the soul and feel of a beloved pop-rock act without rights to Fleetwod Mac’s lyrics or riffs. Onstage and on the recording, the cast is plausible as a band, even with Brill playing bass absent any prior experience. They track as a touring Americana outfit. The songs reveling in the bluesy riffs, splashing keys, and mid-tempo grooves of ‘70s rock radio, weaponizing heartbreak that feels warmly familiar.
This is all incredible kismet. Will Butler was the only person connected to the rock world that Adjmi could get in contact with when he got the idea for a play about rocky studio sessions. Butler just so happens to be a restless, pliable stylist. His curt, tenacious solo catalog shuffles through garage rock, synth-pop, funk, and reggae, hanging some of the same sharp turns he took in his brother’s band. He could pen multiverse-displaced Buckingham/Nicks tunes. Peckina brought the necessary high lonesome vocal register to imbue tracks like the opener “Seven Roads” with the same almost boyish disappointment Buckingham radiates in a sad song. Pidgeon wisely avoids sniffing around Nicks’s inimitable grit — that would just be too much — and instead rifles through ‘70s singer-songwriter canon. During “Bright”’s fierce but dejected bridge, she favors country-rock icons like Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. The pained, ragged high notes at the climax of the slow-burning “East of Eden” touch on the growling delivery Nicks brought to Tango’s “Seven Wonders” but come across sounding more like Patti Smith. Canfield plays the disembodied counterpoint to the heartiness of Pidgeon’s vocals without cosplaying as Christine McVie; this easy touch saves “Drive,” whose plodding rhythm threatens to serve a “Stand Back” or “Edge of Seventeen” knockoff which never manifests. You wait for these songs to try something tacky but they never manage to elicit a shiver.
Paying homage to a beloved musical act without access to songs or likenesses is a recipe for all sorts of terrors, for nostalgia ploys like the shameless Led Zeppelin drag of Greta Van Fleet or lawyer baiting AI effrontery like Drake using 2pac’s voice to diss Kendrick Lamar in “Taylor Made Freestyle.” Stereophonic drifts through the roots-rock sphere Fleetwood Mac occupied and also inspired, sometimes grasping at specific sounds from Rumours and sometimes visiting related points in rock history but always revealing itself as a study project. Peckina can’t help how much he sounds like the singer his character is patterned after, but Butler could give him songs that step away from Buckingham’s shadow. “Seven Roads” deals in timeless, smoldering roadhouse blues, but “Masquerade” can’t shake the weight of “The Chain.” Pidgeon and Canfield get to wander: The detached, downcast “Champagne” – “The stars / How they fall / Like a glass of champagne / Thrown against the wall” – and the smoky, soulful “In Your Arms” dabble in soulful alt-country sounds a generation removed from the play’s studio dates. Nothing is holding a candle to the source material, but we land in Eddie and the Cruisers and Stillwater from Almost Famous territory, where an imaginary band with daunting points of reference occasionally feels like it could exist as its own thing.
It’s a shame that Stereophonic doesn’t play up its clear-and-present influence; the Mac is the elephant in the room in interviews with Butler, who has said he was making music a young Kurt Cobain might love – a chuckle since the Nirvana front man was more into the KISS wing of ‘70s rock – and Adjmi, who was first thinking about Led Zeppelin when the studio concept came to him. These 20th century folk-rock simulacra display impressive attention to period-specific sonic details. They’re summoning the ghost of a band, and they probably don’t want to get sued. But the interest in this story is rooted in the aches of the Rumours birthing process, which is a function of damage the individual players inflicted on each other and also the reason we’ve only had a handful of opportunities to bask in this legendary band chemistry in the 21st century. A final reunion fizzled out after Buckingham got into a dispute with Nicks ahead of 2018’s An Evening with Fleetwood Mac tour. She delivered an ultimatum, and he got the boot. Last fall, a year after Christine McVie passed, Nicks told us she didn’t see the point in returning to the fold. We can’t reconvene Fleetwood Mac’s big three anymore, but we can still see glimpses in the joy of disparate vocalists locking into in a three-part harmony across a darkly bustling rhythm section and in any tale of multiple songwriters engaged in a bracingly honest professional and emotional standoff. The DNA of a Fleetwood Mac hit, typified by luxe vocal harmonies gliding across sparse blues-rock tunes with thick low end, remains ever-present in pop, rock, and country music. A timeless band opens musical avenues for future explorers: Beyoncé’s “Bodyguard,” Kacey Musgraves’s “Cherry Blossom,” Harry Styles’s “Golden,” and Miley Cyrus’s “Midnight Sky” all lean into the tart folk- and synth-pop of Fleetwood Mac’s heyday. Everyone is loathe to utter the name, but Stereophonic makes the noisy argument that Fleetwood Mac’s signature sound is its own subgenre.
