Wish You Were Here
 

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...ng-of-day.html

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

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.

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.

As you know, the band considered it & practiced it during rehearsals. I wonder why they decided not to do it.

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....

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."

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.

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.

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

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/d...sharon/UFO.gif

Yep, "Wish You Were Here" was first.

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

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)

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 ...