Crys and I went to Fleetwood and I cannot tell you the delight when I saw the waves of mullets flapping and the bleached blond hair raging in roots . . . you know the ones. They are my people. I am absolutely contented with my life when with them because deep down I am one of them. They are the forty- and fifty-somethings who still wear high-waisted Lee jeans (tapered) but who have now reformed themselves enough to wear buttoned-down blouses (the women) and Hawaiian shirts of all things (the men) instead of cut-off-at-the-shoulders-and-at-the waist shirts (both women and men), or especially their decade earlier hippie attire which has now been long back in style. It seems the decades have taken their toll on most of this crowd, in the sense that they aren't rocking it as hard as I'm capable of appreciating.
When the band started up, we screamed with the rest of them and yes, we knew every word to every song throughout the night's play list and it was overall just quite wonderful to be there. But I'm not going to lie to you, just as their fans had succumbed to the twenty-first century, so had the band. Lindsay was making up for the lost momentum for everyone, jumping off of amps as if he'd ever done such a thing in youth, while Stevie wandered around the stage the whole time. And then off the stage, at random. I had hoped it had something to do with being a white witch that made her vanish, but there was no smoke at this concert for her to disappear into. We could catch her because of where we were sitting, was the thing.
Since Crys and I were at the edge of the visual field, we actually got to see, in a sense, more. Everything the band thought the audience couldn't see, we did, in fact. As wonderful as it was to be there, I found myself mostly looking for where Stevie had wandered off to each time, usually finding her sneaking into the back tent where the make-up artists were. And even in the middle of songs that were huge vocal parts for Stevie, we could find her wandering over to John McVie at the bass where they would talk about undoubtedly how bored she was. Ah well. She's past 60. I give her that. But what I seemed to be thrilled about, during the lolls (or lulls) when Lindsay would seem to sneak in songs from his solo career, were the times we could catch the keyboardist dancing. This, I tell you, was magical. Sure he was taking Christine's place, but what a wonderful and somehow improved doppelganger. He too, couldn't be seen by anyone else but us poor souls on the side, and that is what made it so tremendous. He was hitting up '80s moves (not the cool kind which therefor made it, of course, really cool) as if he were listening to cassette tapes alone in his un-renovated basement bedroom. Of anyone there, you could tell he was still rocking it because he was doing it for the music, man.
Otherwise, I tell you, the night was simply wonderful. I admittedly started, yes, getting tearful when Stevie talked about the story behind "Gypsy," and I loved that they decided to finally, for once, play "Storms," Crys' favorite song. I should have just anticipated the fact that everyone would indubitably age, and that that's not so bad of a thing.
As we left, along with our fellow reformed hippies, I appreciated all the more that they were at least keeping their mullets, their gold chains, their skin cancer. Some things had survived and were thriving still and Crys and I just felt fortunate and inspired to be in their midst, just getting to walk past a lady with her buttoned-down blouse knotted above her bellybutton (done at some point during the course of the night, due to remembering who she really was, deep down, because of this transformative concert). I wanted to put my arms out and say, "My people: you are my people" to whomever would believe me. As we got closer, we could see that she was yelling into a really high-tech cell phone, drunk by then, and I could only feel pride for her for how she had managed to merge the present with her wonderful, magical past. Don't we all have a past both magical and wonderful that we're constantly trying to integrate into our present, so as to not forget it? Or am I the only one who remembers Star Brite, the magical unicorn from 1984.
I think that is a lesson we can all learn from.
(Dedicated to C-Bass Sitton.)
