[David]

Originally Posted by SteveMacD

As a fan of Christine’s blues playing, the 2018 tour brought back something that had been missing since the BTM tour. The way she and Mike traded solos on “Black Magic Woman” and “Tell Me All the Things You Do” was like going back to when Danny and Bob were in the band.

It wasn’t that great. She fiddled a bit with some two-finger tremolo and just kept repeating it. That went on for thirty seconds? I think you got gushy because it was the first time in a long time she had done any blues playing. But it was just a shadow of what she used to do in the old days. (It truly was very minimal — nice to hear it at all, I guess, but let’s not pretend it was a barn burner.)

It’s telling that her grand return to the stage was “Get Like You Used To Be” with Mick’s blues band and that her final appearance ever was singing “Stop Messin’ Round” at the Peter Green tribute.

I thought for sure she would add “Get Like” to the Mac set list somewhere along the line. Shame it wasn’t. Her “Stop Messin’ ” at the Green concert, despite being a little feeble, was more fun for me than anything she had done in that vein since her piano work on the same song and “Tear It Up” in 1990. She obviously felt really hip to be singing that one with those supporting players. Put a big grin on my face.

For whatever reason, that dimension of Christine’s playing always got shelved when Lindsey was in the band, but it was something that was meaningful to Christine.

Silly of you to lay that on Lindsey. Chris was still incorporating blues piano in 1975 and 1976 concerts (“Get Like,” the pianet outro on “Spare Me a Little,” “Jumping at Shadows,” B3 on “Oh Well” and “Manalishi,” “Don’t Stop” turn-around blues piano, and even blues-scale fills on “Hypnotized.” And she always played blues B3 on “Oh Well” until Lindsey quit. It was the entire band of that configuration that veered away from doing any blues numbers with prominent keyboard, and it took another configuration in 1987 to bring some of that back, probably thanks to Mick and Rick. The best, fastest blues fills improv she used to do — “World Turning” on both B3 and CP30 — wasn’t equaled again until 1990 with “Stop Messin’.”

That evolution away from doing a little ham on blues piano in the sets wasn’t solely a Lindsey Buckingham thing. Lindsey gets blamed for a lot of weirdness. Why blame him any more than Stevie or Mick in 1977/1978/1979/1980. In fact, the only semi-blues they were still doing in those years (as an entire song) was “Oh Well” and that was Lindsey’s decision, as he told Jim Ladd in 1981. Mick, Chris, and John only wanted to play any blues, apparently, when they were waiting for Ray Lindsey to restring and played a little “Jumping at Shadows” in the down time.