Six points about The Alternate Mirage as we continue deep diving into Christine McVie’s recorded past:
1. I know all they did was flip the back cover to the front and vice versa, but I can’t help but smile at the sight of the band’s rhythm section whenever they’re posed with their namesake moniker. It’s why I prefer the ’75 white album display over the iconic shot for the LP that followed it.
2. ‘Hold Me’ here is remarkable in two ways. First: no Lindsey vocal; double-tracked Christine handles verses alone, then Stevie provides low harmony and occasional counterpoint. Second: the chorus is different; instead of ‘hold me, hold me, hold me-heeeee,’ it’s ‘c’mon and hold me, hold me, hold me like a good man should’ plus lines later excised. Wonder who played editor. My guess is co-producer Lindsey, seeing as it was his idea for this to become a duet. The finished piece is better, a sonic advance; this one sounds like a Rumours outtake. Still proves the song would’ve been a hit in any form.
3. I wish the Christine-dominant bah-bom-bah-bom opening from the half-step-lower version of ‘Eyes of the World’ had been properly retained and not compressed into a distant background in the completed track — although it feels like a Christmas carol, so I get why Lindsey tweaked it. Its rawness also reveals a striking resemblance to ‘I Don’t Want to Know.’
4. If a snippet illustrating how an instrumental called ‘Suma’s Walk’ eventually morphed into ‘Can’t Go Back,’ then surely there must have been some alternate of Stevie’s ‘Straight Back’ to share, rather than repeat the album edition. Nor would anyone have complained were it swapped out for one of Stevie’s two unused selections from these sessions, ‘If You Were My Love’ (my pick) and ‘Smile at You’ (which, yes Lindsey, was indeed too bitter for this set).
5. Speaking of Stevie: Can’t decide if ‘That’s Alright’ is better as a sparsely ‘Landslide’-ish brushes-on-snare thing or the country nugget it became.
6. Regardless that her vocal is double-tracked on ‘Love in Store,’ Christine still sounds as nakedly intimate as she ever did on ‘Songbird.’
Seventh point I initially forgot: I now remember what the two-chord refrain from ‘Only Over You’ reminds me of … the opening and verse feel of ‘Message to My Girl,’ one of Neil Finn’s best from his time in Split Enz. That song came out a year later. Wonder if Christine’s tune had any impact on Neil’s.
One other thing regarding ‘Hold Me’: It’s worth reiterating that Fleetwood Mac’s biggest smash in a while was co-written by English singer-songwriter Robbie Patton, whose album Distant Shores Christine had produced a year earlier. Scroll back for a post about that, and stay tuned: Robbie’s back with another Christine-abetted effort in our next installment.