If you go to a little liberal arts college in Northeast Ohio, you may find yourself driving to a bar thirty minutes away to see a cover band. Rumors, “Northeast Ohio’s Premier Fleetwood Mac Tribute Band,” has entered its twenty-seventh year playing the classics. On Friday, February 20th, they performed a four-hour show at Westlake’s Time Warp Bar.
Lance Horwedel, channeling Lindsay Buckingham, was the first to take the stage, wearing an outrageous cloud of a wig. He fiddled with his guitar for a moment, paying no attention to the sizable audience. Shannon Martin-Paul, portraying Stevie Nicks, glided on soon after, pulling a black shawl off a microphone stand acting as a costume rack. Though the band also included Christine McVie and Mick Fleetwood impersonators, the focus — no surprise — was on Lindsay and Stevie.
With thundering speakers, the band commanded the roiling Gen-X audience’s attention. They opened with a performance of “The Chain” so faithful to the original that it was difficult to distinguish it from the studio recording. Before launching into a near-perfect imitation of “Edge of Seventeen,” Martin-Paul traded her black shawl for a white one, only to change her mind and toss it aside. Claudia Doman, Christine McVie, took out her phone and began to record the audience.
Though the music was stunningly accurate, the experience was strange. There may have been no one on the band’s side of the bar younger than twenty-eight. During an invigorating “Don’t Stop,” a woman leaned over my shoulder and asked how I knew Fleetwood Mac, presumably because my companions and I were noticeably younger than the average Time Warp regular. A friend of mine said something about the radio, but the woman wanted to hear something more specific, because she asked again, “No, like how exactly?”
The overall experience was a musical potluck. Though Rumors delivered loyal, headsplittingly loud covers of some of Fleetwood Mac’s best-known songs, Time Warp Bar added its own overpowering flavor that turned the band into a collaborator rather than the focal point.
If you’re curious to check out the band for yourself, you can catch them at Time Warp Bar on Saturday, April 11th from 9pm to 1am. Even with the voyeuristic audience and the deafening sound system, Rumors’ cover of “Dreams” would be worth the trip.
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