The one musician Christine McVie never wanted to talk to: “I couldn’t keep peace”
For a band that was as volatile as Fleetwood Mac could be, it’s always nice to have a peacekeeper like Christine McVie at all times.
There were moments where it could get way too intense between her and John McVie during the recording of Rumours, but even if some of the drama spilt into her personal life, she was practically the mother of the group who could keep everyone together whenever it came time to play a show. But when things turned horrific, there were some problems that even she couldn’t fix.
Which is strange considering how many fantastic songs Christine wrote during her time on this planet. Every single one of her hits deserves to be remembered just as much as Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s greatest tunes, and while Peter Green will forever be known as the resident genius of the group, there’s something about Christine’s habit of being able to never writing an outright terrible song.
Even though there are some tracks where she seems to be taking a back seat to the rest of the band, you can definitely hear her magic sprinkled into something like ‘The Chain’ or ‘Tusk’. She was the glue that held the band together just as much as Mick Fleetwood did, but by the time that the band reached the late 1980s, there was no sense in trying to keep Buckingham at bay any longer. He had been pissed off for years about waiting around, and while he did want to keep recording, the thought of him going out on tour would have been impossible.
The relationship between him and Nicks had completely fallen apart, but things were at least looking up a little bit when working on Behind the Mask. Rick Vito and Billy Burnette weren’t outright terrible by any means, and the handful of original songs the band included on their greatest hits album did seem hopeful about things to come. Once Nicks left, though, there was no sense in them keeping things together for much longer.
The Dance did help remind everyone of what a powerful force the band were together, but even if they didn’t want to carry on with the classic lineup just yet, the idea of working on Time was doomed from the start. Bekka Bramlett was a decent fill-in for Nicks, but when working on different pieces of the new material, Christine felt that there was no way for her to ever get on the same page as Dave Mason.
He had a decent track record of being in Traffic, but Christine wasn’t going to be told what to play once Mason walked into the room, saying, “Dave Mason and I did not get along, and I thought the music was suffering. I think Mick thought it was the end of the road as well, for the first time. Also, I was more gone than them during the making of Time. Emotionally not there, physically not here. I just didn’t show up. I left Mick and John holding the baby. I couldn’t bear watching it all fall apart. And I couldn’t keep peace with Dave Mason, I’m afraid. It was very acrimonious with him and I just bailed.”
And compared to every other record they made, this is the biggest patchwork job that the band ever created. Christine’s songs may as well have been put on an entirely separate album compared to everyone else, and even if they had a serviceable facsimile of what the old band sounded like, the result is the kind of album that you listen to in the moment and then immediately forget once you stop listening.
It wasn’t the worst thing in the world by any stretch, but when you think of this as Fleetwood Mac, it becomes almost laughable. Mason wasn’t going to be the band’s saviour, and even if Christine did her best to save the record, you know that something has gone terribly wrong when some of the lower-tier names out of Nashville were making better records than one of the biggest groups of all time.
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