This is a story I’ve waited nearly three years to tell, ever since I launched this deep dive into Christine McVie’s discography shortly after her death in November 2022.
But I’d like to start it by addressing widespread memes remarking on Stevie Nicks staring daggers into Lindsey Buckingham during ‘Silver Springs’ a little past an hour into this Fleetwood Mac reunion special. Yes, I see it too. As with key lyrics from any of a half-dozen songs about their failed romance, it’s extra fun to read interpretations into that look. It’s easy to understand why this moment has become both an avatar for the spurned and another example of what a badass Stevie always was.
It’s also rubbish to think she’s intentionally throwing a flash of visual venom Lindsey’s way.
Watch the whole clip, see how they interact. Rewind to ‘Landslide’ and cherish the tender glances, the warm embrace when it’s over. Rewind even further to ‘Gold Dust Woman,’ her fiercest vocal of the night, or opening declaration ‘The Chain’ and its admonition that ‘I can still hear you saying you would never break’ it. Stevie shoots all kinds of looks Lindsey’s direction, in song after song. Double-check how she angrily hollers at him on ‘Go Your Own Way’ — and that’s his kiss-off tune.
That was their dramatic dynamic all along, and now it was finally back in action and flexing group fortitude, not wielding old wounds like weapons. Throughout the 80-minute show, start and finish and in between, love and kindness is plenty evident with every head turn, every gypsy twirl.
I can attest to that personally. Because I was there.
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I started writing reviews for the Orange County Register, then the second-largest SoCal newspaper behind the LA Times, in February ’95 under my birth-name byline. Two years later, in April, I became the paper’s lead music critic. My first big assignment: covering the opening of U2’s PopMart Tour in Las Vegas that month.
Weeks later, on May 22, 1997, I drove alone to a soundstage on the Warner Bros. Studios lot in Burbank for the early-evening, guest-list-only taping of The Dance. Twenty years and three months after Rumours first circulated, the 22-song set marked both the first proper performance from the quintessential Fleetwood Mac lineup in 15 years and the recording of their first album together in a decade.
No +1 for me this time. Press waited until the A-, B- and C-list celebrities and industry bigwigs had been escorted in. When I was shown to my seat, I discovered, much to my delight, I’d been placed next to Winona Ryder. She greeted friends and acquaintances pre-show with the same shy smile she semi-flashed me when I said hello. Otherwise she sat quietly, raptly, transfixed by what we were privileged to be witnessing.
Coverage was embargoed until closer to Aug. 12, when the show premiered on MTV, with the album due a week later, the DVD a month after that, and a tour to follow, capped by their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in ’98. I was invited to attend because I’d already been promised interviews with Buckingham and Nicks for a cover story that summer.
Both were kind and thoughtful when we eventually spoke, each telling much the same story about how these old flames caught fire once again. Lindsey, with whom I ultimately chatted more than once over the years, can often sound pompous when he doesn’t mean to, yet he’s somehow still sincere, despite his affectations. Stevie, on the other hand, is exactly what you hope she is: pure sweetness, like Dolly Parton, and with an equally gentle tone.
She also provided one of my all-time favorite quotes, even though I had no place for it in the piece I wrote. I pointed out how I couldn’t recall seeing her in anything but signature gypsy-lace attire. ‘Do you ever just wear jeans and a t-shirt?’ I asked.
‘Stevie Nicks never wears jeans,’ she replied. A provably untrue statement, but I don’t care. Sounded amazing coming out of her husky voice all haughty and how-dare-you like she was Bette Davis.
I never did speak with Christine McVie.
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Of course, my purpose in revisiting The Dance is to view it through the McVie lens. When I do, lo and behold, the same truism is proven yet again: Christine was the unassuming glue.
That May evening inside the immense, fully tricked-out Warner Bros. soundstage, scribbling notes beside Ms. Ryder, I felt the unexpected beneficiary of an especially advantageous vantage point, in that I was positioned behind a triangulation of camera angles. When I saw the finished product, it seemed so many of my wider perspectives were also the director’s. Multiple long shots captured the experience exactly as I witnessed it from a narrow area of four-seat rows stage-right of the soundboard, two rows up from the floor, perfectly elevated over the heads of the 10-or-so floor rows, where Tom Cruise and Courtney Love sat. (Everyone was asked to remain seated, except for ovations and encores.)
I think it’s because of such ideal positioning that my section isn’t so frequently spotted on the DVD. There are occasional peeks across Christine’s keyboards and out toward the audience that reveal it. About an hour and 29 minutes in it’s clearly visible — but Winona and I are still blurs. Maybe I’ll be able to make out our faces when (just guessing here) they finally remaster this for its 30th anniversary in 2027.
Bet they also issue the entire set on vinyl that year, too, probably as a Record Store Day exclusive, or yet another expansive box set that for the first time ever and all that jazz gathers everything recorded at both performances, May 22 and 23.
In either case, you’d get the same amount of Christine, an unfortunate imbalance with what her fellow singing bandmates presented — 6.5 of 22 cuts in all, though only 4.5 made it onto the CD/LP (the half-point is for ‘Don’t Stop’).
’Temporary One,’ a speedster powered by renewable optimism, was new and sage like Buddha: ‘The river goes on and on / And the sea that divides us is a temporary one / And the bridge will bring us back together.’ The other three were ‘Everywhere,’ for which they let her out from behind her bank of plastic ivories to sing and shake maracas center-stage; the terrific banjo-driven arrangement of ‘Say You Love Me,’ featuring a rare vocal assist from her bassist ex John; and a straightforward but strong version of ‘You Make Loving Fun,’ her verses more soulful than they sounded in the ‘80s.
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The mix, by the way, is just remarkable, as it should be for what went on to become one of the biggest-selling, Grammy-snagging live albums and music DVDs of all-time. It is peak Mac smooth, those three unique voices once again blending into a seamless whole, yet each distinctly heard across their harmonized spectrum — especially Christine’s on top, corralling the squawking/squabbling tones below her.
Everything about her that night seemed regal, much like the Duchess of Cool pose she strikes on the evocative cover with Mick Fleetwood in Rumours pose. They wanted to use Matisse’s famous 1910 painting La Danse but couldn’t secure the license. What they wound up shooting instead, done up as they were for the show, probably helped sell more copies.
Watching McVie directly in front of me, in slightly tilted profile, her crucial role was more evident than ever. Fleetwood and Mac lock in the rhythmic foundation; Lindsey leads but with limits; Stevie is starlet icing; and Christine is the mother hawk overseeing it all from the perimeter of their chain. No wonder they always sounded lost and soulless to me when she wasn’t around — and she wouldn’t be for much longer after the ensuing reunion tour wound down.
True, once she rejoined in 2014, she remained in Fleetwood Mac until shortly before her death Nov. 30, 2022. Yet, apart from a brief appearance on 2003’s Say You Will (more on that in a future post), the rest of her studio work would come as a solo artist or, for one exceptional disc, in cahoots with Lindsey. For all intents and purposes, The Dance is really the last tango for this mightiest of Mac lineups.
Why Buckingham-Nicks get more airtime than C. McVie is still a mystery to me. Letting Lindsey include an admittedly compelling version of ‘Go Insane’ — a solo hit — in a set that also boasted not one but two new ones from him was surely a sop to his ego, a means of further nudging this reformation into existence. But those three cuts plus his seven-minute six-string workout ‘I’m So Afraid’ and solo rearrangement of ‘Big Love’ and ‘Go Your Own Way’ and ‘Tusk’ meant there wasn’t room on the original CD for the occasion’s most poignant moment by far.
That’s the sight and sound of Christine alone at the piano, closing out a Fleetwood Mac like so many times before, with another pristine performance of ‘Songbird.’ Should have been the final moment on the last Mac album she’d ever appear on. ’Twas symbolically meaningful then; hits so much differently now.