INTERVIEW: It has been a ‘Landslide’ of joy for Rumours ATL: A Live Fleetwood Mac Experience
Photo: Rumours ATL: A Live Fleetwood Mac Experience are coming to a town near you. Photo courtesy of the band / Provided with permission.
The past 18 months have been “super weird” for Mekenzie Zimmerman, who plays the Stevie Nicks part in the successful tribute band Rumours ATL: A Live Fleetwood Mac Experience. Before the pandemic, everything was going swimmingly for the Atlanta-based group. They were routinely selling out concerts and playing larger and larger venues up and down the East Coast, but then March 2020 happened. They saw their business and their art come to a screeching halt, but the intrepid musicians decided to pivot rather than wallow.
Plus, for Zimmerman, there was some personal news as well.
“I actually had a baby like two weeks after the national lockdown, which was really, really strange,” Zimmerman said in a recent phone interview. “My thought process was, OK, I’ll be out for six weeks postpartum, and then I’ll come back. My first weekend back was supposed to be going over to the Netherlands, so we were really excited about that. And then it didn’t happen, and so it was like, OK, well, I guess we’ll see what happens in September. A lot of it was just a huge waiting game and just like, OK, I guess that’s not going to happen now. We’ll see what happens in the next three months.”
The band — consisting of Zimmerman, Adrienne Cottrell (Christine McVie / keys), Denny Hanson (Lindsey Buckingham / acoustic guitar), Alex Thrift (lead guitar), Jim Ramsdell (bass) and Daniel Morrison (drums) — decided to substitute the live concert experience for some special content online, including live streams and Instagram Q&As. They wanted their fans to know they were still here, and they had no plans of quitting the music business.
“We made it a point to make sure that our agent knew that we were very serious about what we do, and he went to Live Nation and said, ‘Look, you guys have rooms big enough. This Fleetwood Mac tribute is great, and they bring an incredible audience every single time. And I really think that you guys should put them in a big room and do a socially distancing thing,'” Zimmerman remembers. “And so this went back and forth for months and months and months, and finally Live Nation came back to us and said, ‘Yeah, we want to put Rumours in the Roxy in Atlanta, which holds like 4,000 people.’ But they made the capacity smaller, so it was only 600 people. And we were the very first band to play a Live Nation room during COVID, so that was pretty crazy.”
Zimmerman said the early months of the pandemic were tough. There were no gigs — at all. But then the Live Nation concert opened the business up again, and they started to cautiously play some shows, with safety always at the front of their minds.
“It’s tough because I can’t really compare what we went through to a band that used to be playing more of a bar on a Thursday night,” she said. “Those people suffered the most, and we’re really fortunate that these venues were chomping at the bit to get us back.”
One of Rumours ATL’s beloved venues is the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey. They have played inside at the historic concert hall, and they also opened for Almost Queen two summers ago on the summer stage. This summer they headlined a socially distanced concert at an outdoor biergarten at the venue, so when it comes to the Stone Pony, they’ve played every possible configuration. And each time, the audience has enjoyed themselves and rocked out with the smooth tunes of Fleetwood Mac.
“Fans would approach us and say, ‘Oh my gosh, you don’t understand how much this means to me, that I’m able to actually be here in the flesh. I survived COVID. I was in a hospital, and now I’m here at a concert, the thing that I missed the most during the pandemic. I’m here, and I’m able to enjoy live music again,'” Zimmerman said. “And that’s such a special thing. We had a guy come up at the Stone Pony actually and tell us the other night that the live streams that we did really, really helped him get through the pandemic because he was just so upset about being locked in his house and not being able to enjoy the things that we take for granted really truly every single day.”
This musical journey began when Zimmerman was 12 or 13 years old. She has always been a huge Fleetwood Mac fan, and in her early teens she started to get the bug to perform live. Her first performance was a seventh grade talent show, and her uncle, an incredible guitar player in his own right, accompanied her on stage for a rendition of “Landslide.”
“I sang ‘Landslide’ in front of all these kids,” she remembers. “In 1999, kids that were 12 and 13 years old didn’t really know who Fleetwood Mac was. … When it came time for this band to start in 2014, I was in another project that was a punk rock / bluegrass band, and we were getting really burned out just playing these dingy bars with these rowdy audiences. I was thinking, if I’m going to play a bar, I want to at least enjoy the music that I’m playing, and so I messaged Alex, our lead guitarist, on Facebook. We had just met a few months prior to that, and I knew that he was a really good guitar player. I was like, ‘Look, this may sound cheesy, but if we learn a couple Fleetwood Mac songs, would you want to maybe be a gigging guitar player with me? And will you go play a bunch of covers in a bar?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds cool. What other covers would you want to do?’ I was like, ‘Well, I really love Hall & Oates, and I can sing Hall & Oates stuff, too.'”
An idea started to form, but it took some time to develop. At first, Zimmerman and Thrift thought an acoustic yacht rock band would work, but then they settled on Hall & Oates. The plan, in these early days, was for Zimmerman to be a “Lady Daryl Hall” and for Thrift to don the mustache and curly hair of John Oates.
“I was going to be Daryl Hall with the slicked back blond big mullet or whatever, but the more we thought about it, the cheesier it sounded to us,” Zimmerman said. “And we were like, this won’t last. So he’s like, ‘Well, what if we just did a Fleetwood Mac tribute band? You want to play Fleetwood Mac songs. You sound like Stevie Nicks. Why don’t we just make a tribute out of it?’ So that’s what we did.”
She added: “It ended up being this thing that just blew up. We really did not realize how many people were that into Fleetwood Mac and really truly wanted to hear their music.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Rumours ATL: A Live Fleetwood Mac Experience, featuring Mekenzie Zimmerman, are currently on tour. Click here for more information and tickets.
