The Chain
How a song forged from disparate scraps came to represent the decade-spanning resilience and staying power of Fleetwood Mac.
"I think anyone who creates will tell you that it’s very difficult to work completely linearly to get what you’re after,” Lindsey Buckingham has said of “The Chain. The only song credited to all five members of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 line-up, The Chain was assembled with disparate links and spare parts and a lot of arranging ingenuity. Recorded during a period of romantic break-ups and high tension within the band, it has come to represent the remarkable endurance of one of rock’s most volatile bands.
It began in 1976, during the sessions for the Rumours album. Christine McVie brought in a song-in-progress called Butter Cookie (Keep Me There). On the Super Deluxe Edition of that now classic album, you can hear the song evolve through early demos and instrumentals. A feathery, Van Morrison-like groove gives way to a swampier chug, as the band search for the right feel and Christine McVie experiments with words. But it never quite rises above what might have become a solid album track. Then in the last minute it suddenly roars to life, powered by the entrance of John McVie’s memorable low-end bass riff.
Drummer Mick Fleetwood called that thematic riff “a major contribution” He said: “The Chain basically came out of a jam. It was put together, as distinct from someone literally sitting down and writing a song. It was very much collectively a band composition.”
As producer, Buckingham cited two inspirations for the process of assembling the song. Brian Wilson and his classic Beach Boys track Good Vibrations was an obvious comparison. The other one was more surprising.
“[Film director] Alfred Hitchcock, I gather, worked in a similar way,” Buckingham told BAM in 1981. “He would totally preconceive every scene and then try to get it as close as he could to that. I do that too, in some ways. You hear something in your head and you try to get as close as you can. At the same time, the more you work with music – or art, for that matter – the more you learn that you have to let the work lead you to a certain extent. It has to be give and take, and there are always going to be a certain number of unknowns that you’ll have to deal w
