"The Feminine Touch"
 

Saw this recent article in the Stevie forum:

[Nicks] attributes the group’s endurance to two things. One is the primacy of the work . . . The other thing, for want of a better term, was the feminine touch. She and Christine McVie brought a gender balance uncommon in major rock bands at the time. They were also major players because they wrote songs as well as performed them. If they clubbed together, they could exercise a veto over the rest of the band, and they did, frequently. “We became the mums,” they said. “There were times when we literally said, ‘OK, we’re going to have to fix this situation’. We did it many times. What can I say? Women are the caretakers. We can see a mess coming before they (the men) can.”

The Independent

http://www.thestatesman.net/page.new...ss=1&id=182190

Yet again, Stevie goes on record to say how valuable Chris's presence was to her in the band.

Having women in the band, one of whom was also a musician made Fleetwood Mac unique & different from any other band at the time. And the fact that Chris & Stevie were complete opposites in personality made it work even better.

Once again, it's nice to see Stevie give Christine her due.:thumbsup:

Except why does Stevie never frame her views on the band in musical terms? She doesn't say "Chris brought such & such to the band's sound." Even about her own music, Stevie frames all discussion in terms of the social (including the romantic) back & forth. I'm dying to hear Stevie talk more about music qua music, whether her own or Fleetwood Mac's. But I have a feeling that she never will.

Is she just totally intuitive when it comes to the mechanics of music? Does she have no conscious opinions she can share about those mechanics?

That wasn't Christine's primary importance to Fleetwood Mac -- that she was a caregiver & a problem-solver. That's of secondary importance. Christine's primary importance was as a singer, songwriter & musician.

Stevie rarely talks in musical terms. Although it's funny, you can tell she really writes from her insides.... rather than... hmmm I think I'll make this 3/4 with a 16 measure A section, a 4 measure bridge, an 8 measure B section, then a coda....

I think she just sits in a closet and sings a melody, records the melody on a tape recorder and then puts words to it.... and says... Waddy, Lindsey Christine... make this work... she probably directs the instrumentalists very little as they arrange...

and quite honestly, Mick is going to push out a pop beat.... John is going to find a groove with Christine and Lindsey will do his spastic meaderings and walla!!! a number one hit!!! Dreams!!!! :D

Maybe that's because Stevie isn't a musician, unlike the other four.

I know what you mean, MacFan: Stevie is barely proficient at piano and, I think, guitar.

However, I remember one of my composer friends who doesn't play any instrument well getting really pissed when people challenged his being a musician. Apparently, "musician" includes singers and songwriters, or anyone else who "makes" music in some way.

Who knew?

I agree. Christine's musical importance to the band has been underplayed over the years. It's funny how sometimes you only know how important something is when it's gone.

Fleetwood Mac were unique, though, in having 2 women in the band who wrote songs and in Christine's case played an instrument.

Gail

That's true. And neither of the women were traditional sex symbols. Stevie was a sex and fashion icon in the 70s, but not in the way most women were: she rarely wrote directly about men, and unlike Linda Rondstant and countless other women, she added layers of clothing to her ensemble instead of showing a lot of skin.

As far as Christine is concerned, she's like no one else in rock that I know of. Her lyrics and melodies are standard "I love you" fare, but her voice is truly unique. And her playing is so rooted through the rhythm section that it vibrates from the bottom up instead of flashing all over the surface. And she is, while striking and beautiful, not "pretty" at all. I have a picture of her in profile in one of my rooms at home: a friend saw it once and said "a woman with a nose like that could never be called pretty; she's more likely to break the backs of cows over her knee."

and sang melodies, harmonies, played a chair, ac guitar, maracas, snare drum... accompanied Stevie on Rhiannon, did Songbird solo... etc etc

major major player

I think it's safe to say that Christine was more proficient at playing a larger variety of instruments than Lindsey ever was, which is something a lot of people tend to ignore. Then again, it's kind of hard to bunny hop across the stage with a Hammond organ while pretending to hump it. :rolleyes:

I don't agree. Lindsey has performed on keyboards, guitars, banjos, drums, bass guitars, & complex sampling synthesizers -- & Lord knows what else -- on his albums. I'd have to give the edge to Lindsey as the master of the most instruments. Chris is essentially a keyboardist & only dabbles with a few other instruments (& typically not in the studio). Lindsey is in the Todd Rundgren mold: plays everything on his solo albums (or used to).

By the way, his piano playing is quite good, for what it is. Check out the work on "September Song" on Law & Order. Obviously, it's meant to sound tacky & toy-pianoish, but the arpeggios are solidly played & even contain some double-time work & show-offy cadenzas. Christine could do it half-asleep, but still it's light years ahead of any piano work Stevie has ever recorded.

The only thing I can thibnk of is when she said that she wanted to create a solo sound that would be like a female version of the Commodores, calling back and forth with her back-up singers. (Always reminds me of All the Beautiful Worlds.) But you're right, I can't think of anything she says about the mechanics.

- Jake

Fleetwood Mac had two female songwriter/musicians. One of these two was also an instrumentalist (someone who plays an instrument, as opposed to a musician, which also includes singers). However, it's not true that this was unique. There were numerous all-women bands, including for example the Go-Gos, the Bangles and the Runaways, who had several female songwriters and instrumentalists.

But those bands were entirely comprised of women. What made Fleetwood Mac different is that they had these two women songwriters/musicians in a mixed-gender group. This configuration is extraordinarily rare in the history of rock music. Heart is probably the only other instance of more than one woman musician in a famous mixed-gender group. But Christine was playing an instrument, singing, and writing her own songs years before Heart ever recorded an album. She is the true pioneer of women having an equal role as a singer/songwriter/instrumentalist in a mixed-gender band.

what's funny is that christine plays the hand percussion instruments so much better than stevie... i dont think stevie counts... just feels

Chris is pretty darn good on maracas, definitely. On Monday Morning on the Tusk Tour, she played the maracas with one hand & the organ with the other. It might not sound like much ... until you actually try doing it yourself! They're two different actions involved & they're both hard to synchronize. I've done it in performance. You wind up applying the maraca action to the keyboard & the keyboard action to the maracas. :lol::eek::shocked:

Stevie's tambourine work is purely for show. (In fact, I've always believed that it was Mick playing the tambourine part on studio work like Go Your Own Way & Storms.) But I will say she's solid on the güiro on that filmed soundstage performance of You Make Loving Fun. That's not a particularly easy action to keep on beat.

Eyes of the World... Mirage Tour... I loved Christine's, perfect tamborine play... While Stevie was stumbling around with her tamborine, mouthing the words.... Christine was keeping beat... then doing a keyboard riff on her yamaha

Christine also plays her percussion instruments into the microphone and so we can all hear them.

Still it must be difficult for Stevie when she's not singing because she hasn't got anything else to do. Hence the prancing about.

Gail

oh and i love how christine wails on that maracas during world turning midnight special.... she was so into it!!!

sometimes she does a great organ call/response thing with mick and lb right before mick's weird drum solo and sometimes she doesn't....

i love when her lb and mick are trading off riffs before his stupid solo that makes no sense....

I am enjoying this thread. When I think about Christine as a musician, I think of her piano and organ playing, but she sure is a good percussionist, isn't she? On what recordings (if any) does she play any percussion instruments?

And on what song did she play guitar live in concert? I remember seeing her play guitar on one song, and I'm sure I even have it in my concert notes, but right now I don't remember which tour it was and which song. One of you Macsters will know for sure.

And of course when discussing Ms. McVie's incredible instrumental talents, let's not forget the fabulous accordion on "Tusk."

You know, you'd have thought someone over at USC would have noticed that their entire 110 man marching band just got upstaged by an English tea lady! :lol::thumbsup:;)

I've been looking at pictures of early Fleetwood Mac for years, but for some reason, it didn't hit me until recently just how unique it was that Christine had so much influence and her talents were used so efficiently as the sole female in a group of guys. It wasn't completely unheard of, but it wasn't common. She wrote songs, she sang them, she played instruments, she performed, she went on the road, she ran the gamut all before another woman joined the band. I'm curious, since I don't know a whole lot about other bands that featured women, but how does Christine's role in Fleetwood Mac before the arrival of Stevie and Lindsey compare to say, Grace Slick in Jefferson Airplane? It seems to me like Stevie sort of took on the more common role of women in multi-gender rock bands, while Christine happened to be a woman doing everything the guys did and better, but my lack of knowledge of other bands at or around the time of early-Chris FM may have me on the wrong track.

Has Lindsey ever made any outright statements about Christine as a musician? Obviously, he's commented on Stevie's musical talents and/or lack thereof, and I know he's mentioned being on the same sort of musical level with Christine and that they got along well musically, but I'd be curious to see more detailed comments about her musicianship from him, if there are any. I recently found an interview where someone asked about a collaboration he did with her, I believe it was "Mystified", and he essentially said that she started it and he finished it, alluding to the idea that they never actually worked on it together, but I feel like that wasn't really a common thing and arose more because of Lindsey's place with the band at the time Tango was being recorded.

I've always really admired Christine's place in the band. While Lindsey's work is my favorite overall, it's Christine's that gives Fleetwood Mac their defining sound. The level of her successes in a band where she was one of five very different and oftentimes intense personalities is pretty awesome, and I continue to think that she is one of the most under-rated female musicians of our time.

The great thing about Christine was that she automatically liked writing pop songs... hence, you need a great guitar solo vs any kind of piano solo in pop at that time.. She liked to set the tempo and beat of the song... "Don't Stop" "Say You Love Me" "YMLF" "Hold Me" Sometimes LB and CM drive me crazy with too much pop... repeating the chorus until you kill yourself (Little Lies) but thank God those Chorus are just so damn good!! I play the chords out on the piano and the progressions are so simply great...

Most people don't think so, but I think LB and CM really got closer and closer as they neared Tango, and really created a lot of magic. Because of that,I think they had an understanding of what their roles were, and both were very powerful voices.. I think LB sometimes resented his role much like Roger Waters resented his role in that, he did all the work, loved all the power that it gave him, then got pissed cos he "felt" he was doing all the work...

Most don't like LB's Mirage work, but I feel that if it were a better recording, people could hear what I heard on the record album vs the cd.

To me, LB's problem has always been that he doesn't take his songs to the next level in terms of composition and tries to make up for it in production.

Christine has the opposite problem...

During the beginning of the Tusk tour, she played accoustic guitar on "Save Me A Place". There's also rehearsal footage of her playing guitar on "The Ledge".

That's it -- no surprise it's MacFan who knew this bit of Christine trivia.

As for the accordion, I remember thinking that when FM played "Tusk" in concerts, Chris' accordion was taking the place of the entire marching band. Did she ever play the accordion on any other song, either in the studio or live?

It's a metaphor. Christine just played the riff on the accordion, repeatedly. Her keyboard tech, Jeff Sova, was backstage playing (or triggering) something closer to the brass arrangement of the original on an Oberheim. On the 1982 band tour, Jeff played a phat string patch undergirding Christine's piano on "Hold Me."

On the band tour with Vito in 1990, Chris played the accordion on "When the Sun Goes Down."

She played accordion on "So Excited" off the Christine McVie album....

I think both were her primary importance.
Solving problems in as mad band as Fleetwood mac is of big importance.
That factor shouldn´t be undervalued.
Though i don´t think she was the only one doing her part on solving problems.
She also had her problems to include with others,
drinking and liason with Dennis Wilson couldn´t have helped.

I use the phrase primary importance in a stricter sense: the single most important.

I don't think I undervalue it. I merely assign it ... secondary importance. From the point of view of aesthetics, Christine's personality & character -- both sociological and/or psychological factors -- play secondary roles. Steve MacDougall will tell you that I am, in any discussion of aesthetics, firmly anti-sociological. Beethoven's nobility of spirit & his kindness are of secondary importance to his compositions: of primary importance are the formalistic properties of the compositions themselves. It isn't Christine's inclination to placate co-workers in a dither that jumps out at me when I listen to "Hold Me." It's her singing, songwriting & playing that do so.

You may have a different opinion, & that's fine. I just want to be sure I'm understood properly.

As Ethel Merman once sang, "Everything is beautiful... in it's own way...."

Nowadays people say, "It's all good." I prefer Ethel.

Or as Jean Brodie (Maggie Smith) says to her flibbertigibbet young charge, who seems intent on sharing her knot-tying activities with her classmates:

"Indeed. For those that like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like."

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/image...879_brodie.jpg

All hail Maggie!

Ev´rything´s coming up dusty