Razor Blades and Spare Parts

“The Chain” is the song Fleetwood Mac open concerts with, the one fans treat as the band's constitution, the only track in their catalog credited to all five members of the classic lineup. It is also, strictly speaking, a song nobody wrote. It was assembled — from a Christine McVie tune that fell apart on the studio floor, a bass figure John McVie played during a jam, a guitar passage Lindsey Buckingham recycled from a flopped 1973 album, and a set of verses Stevie Nicks had been saving for herself — and some of the joins were made the old-fashioned way, by cutting two-inch tape with a razor blade and splicing the pieces together. The five people whose names share the credit were, at the time, barely speaking. The song about never breaking the chain was built from broken parts by a band in the middle of breaking up.

The First Thing They Taped

When Fleetwood Mac arrived at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, in early February 1976, the first song they put on tape was a Christine McVie number called “Keep Me There.” The initial tracking session, on February 2, had Mick Fleetwood on drums, John McVie on bass, Christine on organ, and Buckingham on a Stratocaster — a working band running down a new tune, the way hundreds of songs get started. Nothing about it suggested the track would take a year, three donor songs, and a razor blade to finish.

“Keep Me There” itself never made it. The band kept working the song — an early studio take, logged under the title “Butter Cookie (Keep Me There),” eventually surfaced on the album's expanded reissue decades later — but it refused to cohere. A bluesy piano motif was thrown out entirely. What survived was the ending: during one run-through, John McVie let fly a rolling ten-note bass figure that built and built under the outro, and everyone in the room understood that whatever happened to the rest of the song, that part was staying.

"“The Chain” basically came out of a jam. It was put together, as distinct from someone literally sitting down and writing a song."

A Room Full of Exes

The reason the song kept stalling had less to do with music than with the people making it. The McVies were divorcing after eight years of marriage and communicating almost exclusively about chord changes. Buckingham and Nicks were coming apart in slow motion, in full view of everyone. Fleetwood's own marriage was collapsing back home. The Record Plant's main room was windowless and cave-like, day and night blurred together, and the drink and cocaine that fueled the sessions did nothing to lower the temperature. “Everybody was pretty weirded out,” Christine McVie told Rolling Stone, in what may stand as the great understatement of the era.

Out of that misery the band members were writing at each other — songs of accusation, escape, and defiance that answered one another across the studio like arguments continued by other means. That story, the soap opera that made Rumours the best-documented breakup in pop history, is told in full in our review of the album. “The Chain” occupies a strange place in it: the one song none of them wrote alone, about the one thing all five of them still agreed on — that the band itself had to survive whatever they were doing to each other.

Cutting the Song Together

With “Keep Me There” dead but its ending too good to abandon, the salvage operation began. Buckingham reached back to Buckingham Nicks, the 1973 duo album whose commercial failure had gotten him and Nicks dropped by their label, and recycled the fingerpicked instrumental passage that opens that record's “Lola (My Love)” as raw material for the new song's intro. A Dobro — the metal-bodied resonator guitar — supplied the ominous verse riff that gives the finished track its swampy, funereal opening. None of these parts were conceived together, and they didn't all live on the same piece of tape.

So the band and their engineers, Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut, did what you did in 1976: they physically cut the song into existence, splicing sections of two-inch multitrack tape together with razor blades until the Frankenstein parts played as one piece of music. The seams are audible if you know to listen for them — the way the track moves in blocks, from the hushed Dobro verses to the stomping choruses to the bass-driven coda that arrives like a different song entirely, because it once was one.

"Something magical was happening while the band was playing down the song — I could see that they had started to feel the excitement, too."

Buckingham, the band's de facto producer and the chief architect of the assembly, never pretended the process was anything other than what it was. “I think anyone who creates will tell you that it's very difficult to work completely linearly to get what you're after,” he reflected to BAM in 1981, describing an approach he traced to Brian Wilson's modular “Good Vibrations” sessions. The song wasn't composed and then recorded; the recording was the composition.

Stevie Takes One for the Team

There was still a hole in the middle of the construction: the track had no words. “Originally we had no words to it,” Fleetwood admitted. “And it really only became a song when Stevie wrote some.” Nicks, as it happened, had a set — verses she had written and demoed on her own, for an entirely different song she intended to keep for herself, built around a bitter ultimatum aimed at Buckingham as their relationship disintegrated: refuse this love now and it would never be offered again. When she heard what the band had assembled, she recognized that her orphaned lyric and their orphaned track were describing the same wreckage.

Decades later, Nicks described the handover as a conscious sacrifice. Buckingham had a track with a guitar solo he loved and nothing to sing; she had the words. She gave them up — not entirely happily.

"Well, okay. I will take one for the team here. And I will give you the song with all the words and the verses and everything, so you can use your solo."

“I had full-on plans for the original ‘Chain’ song before I gave it to Fleetwood Mac,” she said in the same interview, while allowing that the trade worked out: “I'm really glad that I gave it to Fleetwood Mac because it turned into one of the best songs.” Nicks has always maintained that the melody and the bulk of the lyric were hers — that whatever the credit says, “The Chain” began life as a Stevie Nicks song. The credit, though, says something the band decided was more important.

Five Names on One Song

Songwriting credits are where bands go to war; whole careers have ended over them. Fleetwood Mac, a group whose two couples were actively divorcing, did the opposite. Because the finished track genuinely contained something from everyone — Christine's chord progression driving into the chorus, John's bass run, Fleetwood's drums anchoring the jam it grew from, Buckingham's guitar architecture and assembly, Nicks's melody and words — all five names went on it: Buckingham, Nicks, Fleetwood, and both McVies. No other song on any Fleetwood Mac album carries that credit.

That's the irony the band has been living with ever since. The only song they all own is the one none of them could have written, produced at the exact moment the five of them could barely share a room. Its refrain — a vow to keep an unbreakable bond intact — was assembled by people whose actual bonds were failing, which is precisely why it stuck. The song didn't describe the band as it was; it described the pact that kept the band alive anyway. When Fleetwood Mac walk on stage, “The Chain” is routinely the first thing they play: five people renewing the only contract that survived 1976.

The Bass Line That Outran the Band

And then there is the strange afterlife of John McVie's bass run — the one salvaged piece of “Keep Me There” that started the whole assembly. In 1978, BBC television adopted the song's galloping outro as the theme music for its Formula One coverage, and kept it until 1996; when the BBC won the rights back in 2009, the first thing it announced was the return of “The Chain.” The confirmation alone sent the thirty-two-year-old song back into the UK singles chart on downloads. For two generations of British viewers, ten notes played during a collapsing marriage in a windowless California studio simply mean: the race is about to start.

Fleetwood himself sounds half-amused, half-proud when he talks about it — “that bassline is still being played on British TV in the car-racing series to this day,” he noted of his rhythm-section partner's contribution. It is a fitting last twist for a song made of repurposed parts: the piece that was rescued from a failed tune went on to be rescued again, by an entirely different medium, for an entirely different purpose. Songs that are written can be finished. “The Chain,” which was built, apparently never will be — people keep finding new uses for the parts.