“You Make Loving Fun” showed that the late Fleetwood Mac member was a titan in her own right.
The popular image of Fleetwood Mac is of the band as an unstable molecule, its parts best understood by their place in an ever-changing swirl of connections. The group’s long saga includes marriages and divorces and affairs, departures and firings and returns. Bustling with rumbling blues, painterly folk, and hippie pop, its songs are pleasant blurs from afar, and cathedral-ceiling complex up close.
To most people, the singer and keyboardist Christine McVie, who died yesterday at age 79, was the member most recognizable for her role in the whole. She was first a fan (back when she performed under her birth name, Christine Perfect, at the same gigs as Mick Fleetwood’s blues group), and then a pillar (described in multiple obituaries as something like the “eye of the storm” in Fleetwood Mac). She could be thought of as both the band’s first woman (joining in 1970 shortly after marrying its bassist John McVie) and the band’s second woman (having willingly ceded the spotlight to Stevie Nicks, who joined in 1975 and quickly became a superstar). She was a glory-agnostic musician’s musician, content to entertain the public from behind the buffer of an electric piano.
But the grief millions feel at the news of McVie’s death may help reframe her legend: She was a titan in her own right.
