100 Greatest Songs of the 70’s #8 Fleetwood Mac – The Chain

Released: 1977

Any Fleetwod Mac fan should be able to give you the back story to Rumours, the band’s most sucessful album and one that remains one of the 20th century’s most definitive, if only in terms of the showcasing the abilities of high functioning musicians and songwriters. Originally from London, Mac was a moderately successful blues orientated vehicle with Mick Fleetwood at the helm, however by 1974 it had become more or less a shell; talent hunting in Los Angeles, Fleetwood identified Lindsey Buckingham as the band’s potential new guitarist, only for Buckingham to insist that there would be no deal unless his partner Stevie Nicks came along for the ride.

The changes in line up elicited firstly promising results with it’s eponymous 1975 debut and then spectacular ones, Rumours‘ potion of breezy Laurel Canyon soft rock and the players intriguing male-female dynamics transforming them into the West Coast’s equivalent of ABBA (without the cheese). What made soon to be classic songs like Don’t Stop, Go Your Own Way, Gold Dust Woman so mesmeric however was an palpable strength of feeling, engendered behind the scenes via disintegrating personal relationships, and heightened by limitless supplies of cocaine.

The Chain left behind the breezy West Coast signature of it’s counterparts. The only song on the record which was credited to every group member, it emerged from jamming sessions, a track Buckingham arranged from individual’s composite threads but on which each segment pulled it’s weight in gold, from Fleetwood’s Cajun stomp of a kick drum to John McVie’s strutting bass. A wailing chimera, initially it felt so out of place such as to belong on a different record, and yet ultimately it’s framing is the one moment on which the darkness of the album’s subtext is dragged angrily into the California sunlight. But ask any Fleetwood Mac fan, they can tell you that.