"You Make Loving Fun" by Christine McVie / Fleetwood Mac

Making everyone else sound better

“Sweet wonderful you / You make me happy with the things you do / Oh, can it be so? / This feeling follows me wherever I go”

There’s a book that was really hard to find for a while. It’s still hard to find, but it can be done. I’m talking about the original “Fleetwood” memoir that Mick Fleetwood put out in 1991. It’s been retracted so thoroughly from publication and visibility. He put out a second book, titled “Play On” which is more grounded than the first. Mature, properly adult and contemporary. “Play On” is the one that’ll come up if you search for it. But for a long time, “Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac” was nowhere online. It was as if, every time a copy came up used, someone from the Mac team was charged with buying it up and making it disappear.

They seem to have relaxed this practice. You can find old copies now. Go forth.

I’d pulled it off the shelf at a good friend’s NYC apartment when I lived there. She had an amazing library, but got rid of all the books when she renovated the place. One day I was like “where’s that Fleetwood book?”, and she said she’d dropped it off at Housing Works with everything else.

Oh well. The drag about everything becoming digital is that, in a few crucial cases, you give up your ability to access the stuff that someone doesn’t want you to see. The first Mick Fleetwood book is most assuredly not “great on Kindle”.

But I’d devoured it, told my friends about it, lent it around and always gotten it back. It wasn’t just some gold mine of salaciousness, it was raw. Some hilarious and heartbreaking stories in there. I guess some of the stories were a little too much dirty laundry for some people in their circle. The PR team had to step in and make it disappear. That’s my fantasy, anyway.

“I never did believe in miracles / But I've a feeling it's time to try / I never did believe in the ways of magic / But I'm beginning to wonder why”

Surrounded by the drama of the rest of the band, Christine McVie does not get her due. She was briefly a standalone act before joining the Mac, and had released an album using her original name, Christine Perfect in 1970. It hadn’t gone well. She’d sung in a blues band called Chicken Shack before that, even achieving some success with a version of the Etta James tune, “I’d Rather Go Blind”. The track evokes a uniquely British melancholy, Christine sounds chronically polite and ladylike. It’s hard to listen past it.

And I say this as a fan. I get the feeling that, in a different universe, Christine Perfect might have emerged as some kind of British Bonnie Raitt. But the first album collapsed under its own weight, too many dudes were trying to shape her sound into something it wasn’t.

“Don't, don't break the spell / It would be different and you know it will”

All the eventual Nicks/Buckingham glitter and drama totally overshadowed Christine McVie from the front of the Mac stage. But she held the band together. She brought incredible consistency and poise. The warmth of her voice is like a cello in the Mac vocal lineup: making everyone else sound better while not sticking out too much.

And don’t forget “Songbird”. We can all go home now.

“You, you make loving fun / And I don't have to tell you but you're the only one / You make loving fun”

Christine McVie’s writing doesn’t ruffle many feathers. It’s a little too earnest for rocknroll but she can’t help herself and she doesn’t need to. She can send a melody. Her lyrics have a crystalline clarity. There’s an abundance there which took me a while to appreciate.

“It's all I wanna do”

I love this song a little too much:

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