Music: The Monster Season

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New albums by Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles strike fire

Some weeks ago, during the very particular and graceful lull of an English Sunday afternoon, two American travelers stopped by a pub in the village of Blandford, Dorset. The air was thick with Player's smoke and jollity, the sound of gentle joking, the slide and click of coins across the worn wood of the bar, and the easygoing strains of the new Eagles album.

Released just days before, The Long Run, an adept and insinuating work by the regents of California pop, had already crossed the ocean, penetrated cultural barriers where some resistance might have been anticipated, and found a snug home for itself. Besides being a reminder of the international power of American pop music, hearing The Long Run in Blandford helped to take the Eagles out of cultural context. It lifted them from the category of stainless-steel Los Angeles pop, in which they are usually confined on their home turf, and let their music stand free of preconceptions. It sounded good.

The ballads, always a group specialty, floated free and easy. Songs like The Long Run and The Sad Cafe seemed to sink right into your memory. The current hit single Heartache Tonight, or In the City, a hard dose of metropolitan late nights, or the ironic frat-house rocker The Greeks Don't Want No Freaks sounded rambunctious in a way that is new for the group.

The Eagles, one of America's top-selling acts (their last album, 1976's Hotel California, sold 12 million copies worldwide), have been popular favorites even as they have endured some tough drubbing from the critics. The group, particularly Co-Writers Don Henley and Glenn Frey, have been taking it on the chin for such presumed transgressions as coldness, stylistic calculation and lyrical arrogance. Some of this criticism is justified. The Eagles are a motivating commercial force in rock more than a creative one. The Sad Cafe tries to shape a coda for the '60s by shoring up all the cliches of a generation ("love," "freedom," "amazing grace," "lonely crowd") and firing them off like salvos. The song becomes unwieldy, but its graceful melody rescues it. Henley and Frey have better luck closer to home, in the jokey, hokey bacchanal of The Greeks Don't Want No Freaks or the sly ironies of The Disco Strangler (a collaboration with String Player Don Felder) and King of Hollywood, in which a hard-hustling mogul is nailed neatly in two fleet lines: "He's just another power junky/ Just another silk-scarf monkey."

Fleetwood Mac, a band whose average lyric has the approximate weight and consistency of a summer breeze, have become the smash success story of the late '70s. They even outpoint the Eagles; their last album, 1977's Rumours, has rung up sales of something like 15 million copies. Their new album, Tusk, is two records' worth of prime Mac material; they may even be cueing it up in Dorset right now.