Fleetwood Mac – "The Chain" (1977)

I can still hear you saying

You would never break the chain

Imagine if David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash left Crosby, Stills and Nash and were replaced by three other musicians and started playing heavy metal.  The band wouldn’t really be Crosby, Stills and Nash, now would it?

That’s sort of what happened to Fleetwood Mac in the early seventies – the band’s singers, songwriters, and guitarists were all replaced and the band started playing and recording a completely different style of music, but the band didn’t change its name.  (Luckily for Fleetwood Mac, it was named after its drummer and bassist, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, who stuck it out through all the changes.)  

It was sort of like if Coca-Cola had started putting Sprite in Coke cans.

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The new Fleetwood Mac – which was built around the singing, songwriting, and instrumental skills of Lindsay Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, and Christine McVie – became one of the most successful pop groups of all time.  Its 1977 album, Rumours, has sold 20 million copies in the U.S., making it one of the dozen top-selling albums of all time:

(Do you know what the weird photo on the Rumours cover signifies?  Neither do I.)

The four other Fleetwood Mac albums released in the seventies and eighties also went platinum, and nine of the group’s singles were top-ten hits. 

Was the new Fleetwood Mac really that good?  I was a hater for a long time, but the group’s music started to grow on me a couple of decades after it was released.  

That doesn’t mean that I don’t think the new Fleetwood Mac isn’t overrated – just that it’s not as overrated as the Eagles and the Police.

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I was surprised to learn that today’s featured song was never released as a single.  (For me, no song says “new Fleetwood Mac” more than “The Chain” – the group often opened its live shows with the song.)  

Click here to listen to “The Chain.”

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: