The Chain Breaks

Reassuring reminders from a velvet voice.

Atlanta, GA

December 5, 2022

And I wish you all the love in the world

But most of all, I wish it from myself.

– Christine McVie

Like weeds in a garden, reminders of the 1970s are popping up everywhere. Volatile inflation, atrocious attire, and proxy wars with Russia are discomfiting echoes of that turbulent time. 

But as thorns proliferate, a flower was plucked. While dispiriting sights from the seventies flare up, one of its soulful sounds has been extinguished, darkening a lamppost on Memory Lane.

Last week, the woman born Christine Perfect died after a short illness and a long life. In the late sixties, she married John McVie. A couple years later, she joined him and Mick Fleetwood in a band named for them both.

Like silver to a circuit board, Christine McVie was the indispensable ingredient not enough people knew was there. Like that precious metal, her voice was durable, shined, and was a conductive agent for most any melody or mood.

But it was more ethereal than electric. Listening to her is akin to sipping warm brandy in front of a crackling fire. Tho’ she could turn up the heat, her best songs were a velvet counterpoise to the huskier contralto of the sultry Stevie Nicks.

But the wonder of Fleetwood Mac was how well they worked despite (or perhaps because of) the drugs, divorce, and dysfunction that permeated their most productive period. 

After Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham joined the band, the group hit it big with their eponymous album in 1975. Two years later, as their relationships dissolved, anger ran rampant, and band members barely spoke outside writing, rehearsal, or recording, they released a masterpiece. 

Because of the industry gossip about their interpersonal foibles, John McVie suggested titling the new album Rumours. And when I was young, there were few nights when the needle didn’t pierce the wax on that remarkable record.

It remains one of the greatest rock albums ever recorded. It was a diary in music, as if written by a neurotic genius suffering split-personalities that couldn’t stand what they’d done to one another. But all of them had their say, and all the others had to listen to it.

Part of what makes the album amazing was so many of its songs reflect the irritation, distrust, jealousy, and resentment each member of the band felt for at least one of the others. 

On several songs, Buckingham and Nicks openly feuded with each other as their relationship dissolved. Fleetwood was going thru a divorce, and the McVies had just completed theirs. Yet almost every cut is a gem, and Christine McVie mined many of those that shine brightest. 

Not that she was above getting in her own digs. Tho’ she and John McVie divorced just a few months earlier, her hit You Make Loving Fun referred to an affair she was having with the band’s lighting director. But keeping in tune with her more subtle persona, she initially told her ex-husband she was singing about her dog.

Don’t Stop, one of her more well-known hits, was later co-opted by the 1992 Clinton campaign for its ostensible optimism. But McVie actually wrote the song about her philandering ex-husband, who performed it with her for several decades without recognizing the irony. Apparently, it was lost on the Clinton campaign too.

Christine McVie once said she liked to write songs from other people’s points-of-view. Among the exquisite examples of her empathy was the lovely Songbird that rounded out the first side of Rumours. 

She wrote, sang, and played piano on this solo effort that accentuated her talent and revitalized the band. The song relates to no one in particular, and everyone in general, like a lot of us do. She wrote the song in half an hour in the middle of the night.

Upon hearing it, the group’s commitment to each other triumphed over the travails they’d endured. They persevered, and completed Rumours.

The second half of the album picked up where the first left off. The Chain was a collaborative composition, the only Fleetwood Mac song with all five band members receiving writing credits. 

And it’s terrific. The harmony, rhythm, and iconic John McVie bass are quintessential Fleetwood Mac. The lyrics concede the fraying threads that linked Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. But the larger theme in that tumultuous time was the bond that bound the entire band. It was a song of group salvation in a period of personal despair.

But the piece that immediately came to mind when I heard Christine McVie died was more obscure, and wasn’t on Rumours. It was written several years before Fleetwood Mac had first gone platinum. 

In the early seventies, Christine McVie wrote and sang a song called Why, which was particularly pertinent the last few years. It begins plaintively, as if the guitar is lamenting a long day or lifetime of regret, no doubt with another drink in its hand and empty bottles by the bed. 

Then, about a minute in, as all hope seems lost, a glimmer appears. Noticing the light in the window, a reassuring keyboard stops by, trying to shake the somber strings to their precarious senses. But after another fifty seconds or so, it’s McVie’s voice that steps in to save the day, with reassuring words that at one time or another we’ve all needed to hear:

There’s no use in crying, it’s all over

And I know there’ll always be another day

Well my heart will rise up with the morning sun

And the hurt I feel will simply melt away

Unfortunately, as Christine McVie reminded us last Wednesday, we won’t always have another day. But there’s no use in crying. The morning sun will rise, and under the warm light of its refreshing rays, whatever hurt we feel will melt away.

If only we’re willing and wise enough to let it go.

JD