Keep Me There / The Chain

[seteca]

How many famous "bass solos" are there anyway! It had a song written around it, and deservedly so. LB's solo is also kick-ass.

From the various sources of info. (e.g. Rumours DVD-A, Making of Rumours etc etc) I always assumed that the way it worked was:

John was messing about in the studio and came up with that famous bass riff. Christine liked it and they decided to build a song around it. The first thing that got done was the ending with LB's screaming guitar solo.

Then they did the beginning which is heard as "Keep Me There", but they didn't get anywhere lyrically with it, so the pre-bass part got thrown into the bin (literally, according to Richard Dashut!).

They then took Stevie's lyrics to a song she had written from the Buckingham Nicks era and the three writers tried to come up with a replacement for the part that had got chucked out. Lindsey came up with the supporting chords and fills (while they were putting the verses and choruses together, according to Christine) using a dobro, which he decided would be the instrument of choice for the final recording.

To come up with a tempo for the song Lindsey said something like "we used a metronome and did a reverse countback (or something like that) from John's riff. " I'm not sure exactly how that's done, but the translation I guess is "we built the song around John's bassline"..!