For this 38th (!) splash within my deep dive into Christine McVie’s complete catalog, only one song from the soundtrack to Blake Edwards’s largely forgotten comedy A Fine Mess matters: her straightforward yet lovely cover of the Elvis Presley classic ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love.’
Unless I’m overlooking an obscurity, and not counting her Chicken Shack days, this August ‘86 selection marks the first time McVie contributed a recording to something other than a Fleetwood Mac album. Ironically, the sessions for it, with all but Stevie Nicks involved, partly led to the quintet regrouping for Tango in the Night a year later.
Longtime Mac collaborator Richard Dashut apparently asked Christine to redo the tune, although I can’t help but wonder if she’d toyed with the idea anyway? She was, after all, freshly in love again, this time with keyboardist Eddy Quintela, whom she’d marry two moths later.
I barely recall anything about the pitiful flick beyond ceaseless chasing involving Ted Danson and Howie Mandel. Even director Blake Edwards disparaged his own movie upon theatrical arrival, telling audiences to stay home.
But the Motown-issued soundtrack isn’t quite so insufferable; the New York Times fairly considered it a welcome distraction from the incoherent plot and pointless pileups.
Along with McVie’s moment, there are other remakes to note: the Mary Jane Girls modernizing Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons’s ‘Walk Like a Man,’ Billy Vera redoing Larry Williams’s ‘Slow Down’ (definitively by the Beatles) and Los Lobos putting a Tex-Mex spin on ‘I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday.’
All of those are better than then-new bits from Smokey Robinson and the reconstituted Temptations.
Christine’s cut alone, though, makes it worth the $3 it cost me.