Wish You Were Here

[vivfox]

Friday, December 21, 2007
"Wish You Were Here"
Summer 1986.

Ravi Shastri lists Fleetwood Mac as one of his favourite music acts. And I wondered what Fleetwood Mac was. At 15. The name rolls off the tongue well, doesn't it. Anyway that's where I heard about Fleetwood Mac for the first time. (Actually, didn't find out what the name meant until very recently. Actually didn't quite care:))

Then, in the summer of 1986, this song at the end of a friend's compilation audio cassette. Cassettes (and LPs) were all we had then - no CDs, no computers, nothing. CERTAINLY no mp3s. So, if you got what you wanted down at the cassette shop, good....otherwise you just forget about it and wait till the cassette shop gets a hold of it. And if that didn't happen while your teeth stayed in....well.

A malnutritioned, sickly, music-starved, gawky, mawkish teenager in India...in the 80s. Add morose. Everything was a big deal (and still is :):)) Up until that point I was so straight-laced musically - only choral stuff. The only half-way decent pop music I'd heard was ABBA. But I was impressionable, willing to try stuff......and desperately wanted into what the hoopla about ROCK music was. The mawkish, folkish teenager wanted.....some more than he'd already heard.

"Wish you were here" was the perfect thing for me. It was boring, straight, unremarkable, sad-sounding and morose. It was also the only material I had, "rock"-wise. Christine McVie's voice sounded dubious to me - couldn't make out whether this was a guy or a girl!!!! I liked that :) The song also had just enough chord stuff to tickle my fancy - that second chord ("all this distance between us") was sensational because I'd never heard ANYONE do that before !!! It sounded dark, lonely, mysterious, and WONDERFUL. I absolutely LOVED the chords, I LOVED what John McVie was doing on the bass..... Then I discovered Lindsey Buckingham's guitar at the end of the song. And the piano workout. And I was hooked for life.

Lindsey Buckingham's guitar solo still rings true - a soaring rock'n'roll workout. It was the ONLY rock'n'roll I'd heard till then......and along with Christine's piano in the end, the song was etched in my memory for life.

Now, after 20-odd years......I know a lot more. I know that the song is from the Mirage album, which is surely nowhere near Fleetwood Mac's greatest. I heard Rumours in 1991, and "Wish You Were Here" became a distant memory, a lost link with my long-gone adolescence.

I'd have to say, those impressions, those memories, those indelible links - I never really lose them. And now, I wouldn't recommend "Wish You Were Here" to a teenager. But I love the song anyways. I know what life was then.

http://coolbluewaters07.blogspot.com/2007/12/song-of-day.html

[LiamMcConville]

I can't get into the song just because the intro sounds too much like Silver Springs.

[macfan 57]

I LOVE "Wish You Were Here". It's my second favorite song of hers on the album. I love her piano on the track & the lyrics too, although she didn't write them. I would have liked to have heard it live on the Mirage tour.

[nicepace]

I think that is a wonderful, moving description of the effect that a song can have on us. This absolute, thrilling connection to a particular piece of music is one of life's richest experiences.

[David]

I would have liked to have heard it live on the Mirage tour.As you know, the band considered it & practiced it during rehearsals. I wonder why they decided not to do it.

[jbrownsjr]

I can't get into the song just because the intro sounds too much like Silver Springs.

Actually the triad inversion intro you hear appeared on Wish You Were Here first...

Then when FM decided to do SS live on the Dance... christine then used that little intro stealing it for SS.

If you listen to the Studio version of SS, it has a guitar and bass riff intro with piano, but not the same intro as Wish you were Here...

Christine does the same with Why, using the intro of Come a LIttle Bit Closer.

She's one sharp tack that Christine....

[aleuzzi]

I love this song. Her voice is really strong here. In fact, ALL of her Mirage songs are excellent, my favorite being "Love in Store."

[bucklind17]

I love her piano on the track & the lyrics too, although she didn't write them.

I never knew she didn't write the lyrics for this song. I noticed a co-writing credit at some point, just never considered it was for the lyrics. They sound so Christine!

Love this song, too. It's a great closer for the album.

[shackin'up]

I think that is a wonderful, moving description of the effect that a song can have on us. This absolute, thrilling connection to a particular piece of music is one of life's richest experiences.


I love this story. Mirage came out when I was seventeen during the time my dad died. Anyone who says it's a bad album can count on my murderqualities.

Wish you were here is not Chris' best song, but anyone can imagine it has a special feel and meaning for me. So does Can't Go Back.

[darklinensuit]

I love this song, though there is no denying it sounds like Silver Springs. One of the few Mac songs that goes on for a while at the end without annoying me.

- Jake

[vivfox]

I'm always curious to know what song it was that hooked you in to Fleetwood Mac as a new fan? For me it was hearing Rhiannon on the radio, yet that didn't make me go out and buy the White Album. I didn't buy Rumours until after I heard You Make Loving Fun as a radio single. Then I heard the White Album.
I try to imagine someone like the guy who wrote this thread's article, hearing all the great FM and Stevie solo singles, yet still not say to himself, "I gotta buy this album." So he was exposed to Rhiannon, Say You Love Me, Over My Head, Go Your Own Way, Don't Stop, Dreams, Tusk, Sara, Think About Me, Stop Draggin.., Edge of 17, After The Glitter Fades, Nightbird, Trouble, Hold Me and Gypsy all being played on the radio for the last 7 years of his life and nothing in his brain goes sparky until one day he's listening to a friends cassette and then BAM: it hits him!!! He hears Wish You Were Here and it's a life changing experience, and then, to him, a whole new world of Fleetwood Mac music...

http://i220.photobucket.com/albums/dd169/cielosharon/UFO.gif

[chiliD]

I can't get into the song just because the intro sounds too much like Silver Springs.

Actually the triad inversion intro you hear appeared on Wish You Were Here first...

Then when FM decided to do SS live on the Dance... christine then used that little intro stealing it for SS.

If you listen to the Studio version of SS, it has a guitar and bass riff intro with piano, but not the same intro as Wish you were Here...

Christine does the same with Why, using the intro of Come a LIttle Bit Closer.

She's one sharp tack that Christine....

Yep, "Wish You Were Here" was first.

Ummm..."same with Why" (Come A Little Bit Closer)??? What? Further explantation please!

[chiliD]

I'm always curious to know what song it was that hooked you in to Fleetwood Mac as a new fan? For me it was hearing Rhiannon on the radio, yet that didn't make me go out and buy the White Album. I didn't buy Rumours until after I heard You Make Loving Fun as a radio single. Then I heard the White Album.



Well, for me, it was "Oh Well". I'd been aware of Fleetwood Mac since their inception (since I was a Peter Green fan from his days in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers), but it was "Oh Well" that "hooked me". And now, 37 years and many personnel changes later, I'm still a fan (albeit VERY reluctantly the last decade)

[David]

Yep, "Wish You Were Here" was first.

Ummm..."same with Why" (Come A Little Bit Closer)??? What? Further explantation please!Steve, on one of those live tapes of "Why" from the Bob Welch years, Chris starts playing the Come a Little Bit Closer intro & then starts the Why lick. She's just having a little fun.

I once posted (here I think?) a detailed description of the musical differences between the 1997 Silver Springs piano intro & the Wish You Were Here studio intro. If someone can find that, it might help clarify things for some.

[jbrownsjr]

Steve, on one of those live tapes of "Why" from the Bob Welch years, Chris starts playing the Come a Little Bit Closer intro & then starts the Why lick. She's just having a little fun.

I once posted (here I think?) a detailed description of the musical differences between the 1997 Silver Springs piano intro & the Wish You Were Here studio intro. If someone can find that, it might help clarify things for some.

Is it a different key? Off the top off my head I don't remember... all i remember was they sounded quite the same... and seemed to be triads or inversions of them going down... followed by I IV I ...

[nicepace]

I'm always curious to know what song it was that hooked you in to Fleetwood Mac as a new fan?

Sitting in my dorm room in the mid-70s listening to my roommate's Fleetwood Mac albums (the five Bob Welch era albums) there were two songs that leaped out at me as extraordinary bits of music, that "hooked" me.

Those two songs were "Homeward Bound" and "Why."

"Homeward Bound" because I was a strong feminist (still am) and loved piano music (still do), and I was just blown away by this incredible piano music being played by a woman in an accessible, toe-tapping pop song with a beat you could dance to and lyrics you could relate to. (Not some esoteric jazz or blues recording.)

"Why" for obvious reasons ... because it's such a moving and beautiful piece of music, with that incredible lead vocal and extraordinary harmonies, and an extraordinarily simple yet universal lyric. And I was also a big fan of psychedelic music (particularly Jefferson Airplane) and I really dug the psych elements of the song (the somewhat meandering intro).

[aleuzzi]

I'm always curious to know what song it was that hooked you in to Fleetwood Mac as a new fan

"Gypsy." I was twelve years old. I listened to that and "Hold Me" about 100 times a day.

But soon, very soon, it was "Say You Love Me."

[Dr.Brown]

I'm always curious to know what song it was that hooked you in to Fleetwood Mac as a new fan?

"Sara"

In the winter of 1982 I was a 16 year-old loner/geek junior at an all-male Catholic high school who had not listened to much contemporary music at all. I had heard the name "Fleetwood Mac" but was unfamiliar with them. I had heard the song "Don't Stop" before but did not know who performed it.

That winter I discovered a new soft-rock radio station which had the original vinyl (non-CD edit) version of "Sara" on heavy rotation.

The first time I heard it I was immediately smitten by its lush harmonies and musical soundscape - it was the most beautiful and sensual song I had ever heard. Whenever it came on I would stop in my tracks and be swept up into it.

Later that year MTV began playing "Gypsy" - a very pretty Sara-esque song enhanced by a gorgeous video and I finally learned what the members of Fleetwood Mac looked like.

In the intervening years I have come to esteem the musical contributions of the other members of Fleetwood Mac more (especially Christine McVie - "Why" is a classic I never tire of) but "Sara" was and remains my first love. I try not to revisit her too often to preserve her mystery.

P.S. "Wish You Were Here" is a great song. :nod:

[bucklind17]

I remember being six years old and hearing "Everywhere" on the radio all the time. Back then, I used to think the lyrics "I want to be with you and you and you and..." because, you know, I was six.

Really, though, I'm one of those kids that got into Fleetwood Mac when The Dance came out. I was 15 years old and just really starting to actually get into music. Specifically, it was "Bleed to Love Her" and "Silver Springs" that got me hooked, but once I bought the CD, I realized I knew almost all the songs on there. I remember thinking I'd never have to buy anything else but The Dance, because all the songs I liked and knew were on it. That lasted about three weeks. Ten years later...

[David]

In my case, Go Your Own Way & You Make Loving Fun, but I loved virtually all of Rumours