This weekend’s #superfriendssunday is a top-track round, the album in question is Rumours as a salute to the late great Christine McVie — and as I’ve been sinking deeper into her music since she passed away two weeks ago, and I’d been planning on posting about important milestones from throughout her career, I’ve decided to step up the pace in the hopes of reaching that ‘77 monolith by Sunday.
I work well with deadlines, so thanks much, @karenvinylgirl, your theme has given me one. Can’t say I’ll get in everything I want by Sunday, but this is at least solid motivation.
Not unlike original Fleetwood Mac guitar god Peter Green’s parting shot, ‘The Green Manalishi with the Two Prong Crown,’ I’m taking an equally forked approach to this subjective revisit, principally tilting toward Ms. McVie’s moments but also re-re-reconsidering the Mac evolution overall.
Her formative years as a pro were much the same as any man’s of the era, honing her chops in relative anonymity until a break occurred, a door opened, a crucial gig got booked, a certain record hit radio at just the right time.
Despite upstanding membership in the semi-popular British band Chicken Shack for a couple years, McVie floated for a good while, not exactly a surprising realization considering how male-dominated the scene was. Women from back then who became legends and icons generally did so from within the spotlight, not the sidelines.
Yet for a while Christine Perfect had it both ways: She played superb blues-and-otherwise piano, which made her an asset to any outfit, while her huskily angelic, instantly memorable voice could lift a single up the charts, most notably the Shack’s remake of the Etta James staple ‘I’d Rather Go Blind.’
That balance of fronting vs. playing would become a template for her future, a means of developing into a standout star while retaining stature as a musician to take seriously.
At the end of the ‘60s that process was already producing results, scoring her NME awards for best female vocalist in both ‘69 and ‘70, years in which she was essentially only a periphery player in Fleetwood Mac.
As on loads of Chicken Shack shit, the best of which is found on the exhaustive compilation The Complete Blue Horizon Sessions, McVie’s boogie-woogie and ivories-slashing swoops often wind up buried in the mix. Unless you were Steve Winwood, guitar interplay almost always trumped piano playing on much of late-‘60s rock — and that’s certainly the case on the rush-released Mr. Wonderful, the founding quartet’s humdrum second LP, from ‘68.
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Their next work remains a must, but for much of its running time the just-wed Christine McVie only allegedly appears amid the sterling solos and spaced-out moods of Then Play On, a multilayered near-masterpiece that continues to age exceedingly well. Still, to my ears, which entered the world six days after this LP from September ‘69, that classic is entirely about Peter Green’s gloriously acid-damaged exit (‘Oh Well’ indeed) alongside new guitarist Danny Kirwan’s prodigious teenage entrance — intertwined snakes, one coiling upward, the other decaying downward.
By the summer of ‘70, when she turned 27, Mrs. McVie and her bassist husband were communing at Kiln House with the rest of FM. I picture it rather idyllically, the marriage of Mick Fleetwood and Jenny Boyd that June forming the heart of a happy, hopeful, transitional time for the band, teeming with good beer and better jams. Naturally Christine’s presence would be more palpably felt on the album that resulted from that sojourn, so-named for the hops-roasting house where it took place. She also contributed the slightly psychedelic cover artwork that gives off the impression that I get.
‘Station Man’ is the first unmistakable vocal assertion of Christine McVie in the Mac canon; you can’t miss her on the high end in that Kirwan-led, proto-Little Feat groover. The richness her keys bring to the completed sound, however, is evident whether you’re listening for it or not — albeit more so on Kirwan’s compositions (his is the progressive direction they’re heading in) than on founding member Jeremy Spencer’s ‘50s pastiches, some of which are endearing (Side 2), plenty of which are meh, dated, annoying (Side 1).
Spencer’s role in Fleetwood Mac was a fundamental one, but it ends here. Christine McVie’s had just begun.
Chicken Shack cuts sung by Christine Perfect (later McVie) that are worth checking out: ‘When the Train Comes Back,’ ‘You Ain’t No Good,’ Mean Old World,’ ‘‘Get Like You Used to Be,’ ‘Woman Is the Blues,’ ‘Hey Baby,’ ‘It’s OK with Me Baby,’ ‘I Wanna See My Baby’ … there were lots of ‘baby’ songs in those days.