Christine played guitar live??

[David]

Originally Posted by trackaghost

Yeah, but surely she could have handled three chords on some of the songs.

Well, ok, but handling three chords is about 10 percent of the job. It's a lot easier to sit in your living room & strum your guitar than it is to play onstage surrounded by a band & amplifiers & monitors & an audience & all the accompanying confusion. Knowing some guitar chords is the tip of the iceberg of being a performing musician. You're responsible for being able to "keep up" with your entire band & having to make spontaneous & immediate judgments about subtly changing tempi & dynamics, being in the rhythm "pocket," & making all those adjustments you have to make based on not just what you hear but what you see. It's pretty tough if you're not used to it. At the Mac concert in Inglewood way back in the early '80s when the video was shot, the band started "Oh Well" on two or three different railroad tracks, & Mick jumped from one track to the other on his congas. Lindsey & John & even Christine on maracas all got back on within seconds. They all knew what they were doing & how to fix problems that happen onstage. They all know how to deal with feedback as instrumentalists or with other aspects of rotten sound. Stevie just doesn't have that experience or those gifts. The others can keep damage to just track turbulence, but she'd have completely wrecked or hit the snowdrift.

Obviously she can strum a guitar and if she had played every night, even doing something simple, she's probably be pretty decent by now.

I guess I could agree with that. If she'd been playing guitar onstage all these decades regularly, we could talk about her as an instrumentalist in addition to a vocalist.

That's one thing I've always found disappointing about Stevie that she never really tried at all to become a better musician.

I've always been puzzled by the fact that her piano playing shows no evolution or improvement from one eon to another. I teach piano lessons & have never seen this phenomenon in anyone else, or heard about it in anyone else. It just might be an anthropological first!

[trackaghost]

Originally Posted by David

Well, ok, but handling three chords is about 10 percent of the job. It's a lot easier to sit in your living room & strum your guitar than it is to play onstage surrounded by a band & amplifiers & monitors & an audience & all the accompanying confusion. Knowing some guitar chords is the tip of the iceberg of being a performing musician. You're responsible for being able to "keep up" with your entire band & having to make spontaneous & immediate judgments about subtly changing tempi & dynamics, being in the rhythm "pocket," & making all those adjustments you have to make based on not just what you hear but what you see. It's pretty tough if you're not used to it. At the Mac concert in Inglewood way back in the early '80s when the video was shot, the band started "Oh Well" on two or three different railroad tracks, & Mick jumped from one track to the other on his congas. Lindsey & John & even Christine on maracas all got back on within seconds. They all knew what they were doing & how to fix problems that happen onstage. They all know how to deal with feedback as instrumentalists or with other aspects of rotten sound. Stevie just doesn't have that experience or those gifts. The others can keep damage to just track turbulence, but she'd have completely wrecked or hit the snowdrift.

David, that's all well and good but Stevie has (allegedly) been playing guitar since she was 16 and has been in bands since her teens. Everything you've said comes with experience. People learn to play their instruments, they practice, they play with other people, they learn to keep up. She COULD, if she had wanted to, have been playing with other musicians and becoming more proficient at her craft years before joining the Mac. She obviously decided that she wanted to be the centre of attention and play tambourine instead of contributing a musical part, which is fine but not very inspiring to me. And there are definitely people who play instruments on stage who aren't world class musicians who manage it fine. Plus those examples you give don't mean much anymore since the band hasn't done anything spontaneous in years, they've turned into The Eagles, playing the same thing note for note.

Originally Posted by David

I've always been puzzled by the fact that her piano playing shows no evolution or improvement from one eon to another. I teach piano lessons & have never seen this phenomenon in anyone else, or heard about it in anyone else. It just might be an anthropological first!

Yeah, she only plays piano as a tool for songwriting. It would help her in what she does if she could play better but it's obvious she has never put any effort into it. Even Madonna, yes even Madge, has been learning to play instruments in recent years. If she can do it I have no idea why Stevie can't.

[michelej1]

Originally Posted by David

I've always been puzzled by the fact that her piano playing shows no evolution or improvement from one eon to another. I teach piano lessons & have never seen this phenomenon in anyone else, or heard about it in anyone else. It just might be an anthropological first!

I took piano lessons for 7 years as a kid and while I might have improved the first 2 years, I can assure you that over the course of the last 5there was no progress or evolution. Of course, that's because I didn't practice from one lesson to the next. My mother lost interest in goading me and I just let it go.

I would guess Stevie has the same problem. She works on the piano long enough to eek (and eke) out a demo and then she doesn't touch it again until the next time around.

Michele

[DeeGeMe]

Seriously people--do you honestly think Stevie was going to mess up her fingernails playing a stupid guitar when she had people to do that for her? Do you realize the kind of time (and money) this woman has spent on her manicures????

[Gailh]

Originally Posted by louielouie2000

So how have I never heard that Christine played guitar live, or at all? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5Pe9...eature=related
I just LOVE this song live! It's gorgeous! The harmonies just give me chills. I wish I had a better quality version of it!

She used to play the cello when she was younger.

Keyboards, guitar, cello, chair - is there no end to her talent?

Gail

[chriskisn]

Originally Posted by carrie721

no joke. neil young, for instance, is not a "great" guitarist, but at least he knows more than 5 chords and has written some pretty amazing songs, in part because of his playing abilities.

Well to quote Bob Dylan "You can play a song with one chord"

[nicepace]

Originally Posted by chiliD

She was the bass player in one of her first bands back before Chicken Shack, so (as she says on In The Meantime) "anything is possible".

That's an interesting bit of musical history.

What was the name of the band? Do any pictures exist? Do any audio clips exist?

Christine is simply an amazing musician. I think she'd be able to play anything she put her mind to.

[michelej1]

Originally Posted by nicepace

What was the name of the band?

Shades of Blue.

This is from the Rolling Stone Chicken Shack biography:http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/...hack/biography

Chicken Shack was a leading band of the late-'60s British blues revival, but it is best remembered for pianist/singer Christine Perfect, who later became better known as Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac. Stan Webb, Andy Sylvester, and Perfect played together in a Birmingham band, the Shades of Blue, in 1965. That band broke up when Perfect completed art college and moved to London. She later met up with Webb and Sylvester, and they regrouped as Chicken Shack, adding Bidwell. They made their U.K. debut at the Windsor Blues Festival in August 1967. There Perfect met her future husband, John McVie of Fleetwood Mac.

Andy and Stan had some gigs, but they didn't have anyone on bass, so she joined them and she went to school. She finished getting her teaching degree after they broke up.

Michele

[DeeGeMe]

Originally Posted by chriskisn

Well to quote Bob Dylan "You can play a song with one chord"

I once heard country music described as "three chords and the truth". So you don't really need a ton of chord progressions to make a hit song--a lot of the Beatles songs weren't that musically complex (although some obviously were).

[carrie721]

Originally Posted by chriskisn

Well to quote Bob Dylan "You can play a song with one chord"

of course you can. what's your point?

here's a great example of it:



if you're going to be that spare with the chord structure, you better have an impeccable lyric to lean on. but stevie's lyrics are pretty hit-and-miss, and she isn't all that sonically adventurous, which leads to stagnancy.

[nicepace]

I think the folks who are discussing why Stevie hardly ever played an instrument live are missing an important point.

Most women in rock bands DON'T play an instrument. The majority are just vocalists. Christine is in the minority of women in bands, since she is a vocalist, a songwriter, AND a musician. As Fleetwood Mac fans, we've gotten used to the idea that women are musicians too, but we have to remember, that's the exception, not the rule in rock music.

It's true that there are more women musicians in bands in recent years than there were back in the '60s and '70s when Chris got her start, but the bands like Heart and Fleetwood Mac are still in the minority.

My point is, the fact that Stevie hardly ever played an instrument live is not unusual in the world of rock, and there really is no reason to expect her to, although it would have been very cool if she had.