Get ready for the (Fleetwood) Mac attack

After a four-year hiatus, Fleetwood Mac is out on the road, for the first time with no new record to promote. Instead, they're out playing the hits that have made them one of the most successful, mercurial, contradictory and compelling pop groups of all time.

The tour, which began March 1 and continues through June 19, hits Oakland's Oracle Arena on Wednesday and San Jose's HP Pavilion next Thursday.

Back in February, as the band rehearsed for the tour, the four members — Brits Mick Fleetwood and John McVie and Menlo-Atherton High alums Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks — gathered for a 90-minute teleconference.

There was no sign of tension among the four members, whose pairings and betrayals, riffs and reunions are the stuff of VH1 "Behind the Music" legend. But three of the members (bassist McVie, 63, barely opened his mouth) alluded to dissatisfaction about the band's last venture, a tour that passed through the Bay Area in 2004.

"I think when we left the 'Say You Will' tour, there was some discontent about how everything got left," said Buckingham, 59, the group's guitarist and, alongside Nicks, singer-songwriter. "You wouldn't think it would be possible all these years later, but it is still to some degree a work in progress in terms of how we all interact as people."

One thing that added to the difficulty of the "Say You Will" experience was that it was the band's first tour without singer-pianist Christine McVie, who opted to go her own way in 1998.

McVie's departure was especially hard on the band's remaining woman, Nicks, 60. "The loss of Christine, as one of my best girlfriends, was horrific for me," she said. "You know, there's not a day that goes by that I don't wish she'd call up and say, 'I'm back,' but she's not going to. So we've all kind of accepted that now."

In 2008 pop star Sheryl Crow began saying she would be working with Fleetwood Mac, an announcement that Buckingham later strongly denied, blasting the announcement as "self-serving" and "inappropriate."

When the question was raised (twice), Nicks brusquely gave a well-rehearsed answer, insisting the decision not to join was Crow's. "I think the others were fine with her being a part of it," she said of her bandmates, who neither confirmed nor denied that assertion.

Nicks said the Crow notion was part of an ill-advised effort to build a buffer between her and Buckingham.

"After we went through that, we really realized that there wasn't going to be another woman to come in this band that was going to fix our problems," Nicks said of a complicated friendship that dates back to their Atherton days and includes a very public romantic relationship and breakup that inspired many of the band's signature songs. "The fact is that if Lindsey and I can't work out our problems by ourselves, we might as well throw in the towel. So that's what we are currently trying to do."

So far, so good, Nicks said.

"Well, Lindsey has been in incredibly good humor since we started rehearsal," Nicks said. "And when Lindsey is in a good humor, everybody is in a good humor. "... Everybody seems very kind to each other this time around. And when it's going like that, it's a pleasure."

The 23-song set list for the tour covers nearly all of Buckingham's and Nicks' hits and high points from the five studio albums the group made from 1975 to 1987, plus the essential Christine McVie numbers and a few solo hits from the two leads. The band has also been playing "Oh Well," a song that dates back to the band's emergence on the '60s British blues-rock scene, long before the two Californians joined the fold. Tellingly, no songs from "Say You Will" made the cut.

For a restlessly creative artist like Buckingham, who has steadfastly refused to go gently into the good night of bland superstardom, an evening of nothing but old chestnuts seems like enough to make him, well, go insane.

But Buckingham said his two recent solo albums have helped recharge his creative batteries and left him eager to reunite with the band. And he said there's something to be gained by playing familiar songs.

"By virtue of the fact that we don't have an album to push, we are not working on new material, we can sort of relax into just hanging as people a little bit more," he said.

"We've been down a long, long road together. And in some ways we know each other better than we know anybody else. We share things with each other that we've never shared with other people. And I think that we all want to dignify the road we've been down."

Of the 16 musicians to perform in Fleetwood Mac over the past four decades, the only constant has been drummer Fleetwood, now 61, and he said the days of sacrificing personal goals and relationships for the band are over.

"We are past that," he suggested. "We are past that because the nature of time has taken people into solo careers and doing wonderful things that they need to do, raising families that were not even thought of 25 years ago.

"We don't do this that often. But when we do it, we try to do it right. And this feels really right to be doing this now."