For years a bass line introduced the Sunday motor racing on the BBC, and a whole nation hummed along without knowing it was Fleetwood Mac. The song was "The Chain", the one track every member of the classic line-up wrote together, and the truest picture the band ever drew of itself: five people who could barely stand each other, bound into something none of them could break.Fleetwood Mac should not exist. The band that made the best-selling break-up record of all time began as a London blues group in 1967, then weathered a founder's breakdown, a religious cult, a fake band sent out under its own name, three divorces set to music, and decades of feuds and firings, and somehow kept playing. This is the whole strange story, told the way it has not been told before: song by song, all 217 of them, in order, from Peter Green's first blues single to the last studio goodbye of 2003.Every track gets its due, in the tradition of Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head. Between the chapters, six essays trace the larger story around the music: the debt owed to Black America, the turn from the political to the personal, confession as the last honest subject, the artist against the audience, the human price of fame, and why Rumours still sells half a century on. A full song index and a timeline of the band's ever-changing line-up round out the book.From the smoky blues of the Green years to the California sunshine of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, and the wreckage underneath it, The Chain is the complete, clear-eyed companion to one of the strangest and greatest stories in rock. Published for the fiftieth anniversary of Rumours.
