Fleetwood Mac – Rhiannon (1975)
I easily could have put this against the Word-Tone series, but I chose to set it down here. It’s one of Lindsay Buckingham‘s most memorable hooks.
Ironically, he didn’t even write it, his ex-gf did. And she didn’t even use a guitar, rather the piano (all you classical guitarists out there probably know that Albeniz wrote Asturias, a lynchpin of the chitarra repertoire, for the piano).
Everyone who golfs about this tune hits the drink over and over again about its mythical namesake, the darkness of its theme, the witchiness it cast on Stevie Nicks‘ persona, blah blah blah. I’ll brook neither truck nor trade with such trivia. Pedantry is my business.
This wasn’t Fleetwood Mac‘s first North American hit, but it was certainly its biggest at the point of impact. So much so, that a whole generation of new fans thought that they were a new band when the album – eponymous, further adding to their debut fakeout – dropped. Point of fact, Fleetwood Mac’s ‘White Album’, as some called it, was the band’s tenth studio release. Well, I use the words ‘the band’ loosely: this Fleetwood Mac bore no resemblance whatsoever to its namesake’s first incarnation with Peter Green, Danny Kirwan, Jeremy Spencer and Bob Welch taking turns as pre-Buckinghams. Truly, if you’d never heard them before the gorgeous American couple arrived, you’d never recognize the earlier version of this group. Like, at all.
In Rhiannon, the first Nicks hit, their impact was explosive, both in the voice and its accompanying guitar.
What turned out to be such a great guitar hook
was never a guitar hook at all. It was really just an instrumental rendering of what Stevie intended as her own vocal line. And just to show what a good sport of an ex-beau Lindsay was, he bailed on the hook in the second couplet to let the witchy voice of Stephanie (I’m guessing he called her Stephanie when he was mad at her – Stephanie Lynn when he was really smoked) come through in her lower register:
The pudding-proof comes in the second half of the verse, where Lindsay abandons the hook altogether, but the voice carries its same melodic contour:
It’s almost as if Lindsay was saying “You want the hook? FINE. It’s yours. But I’m getting the dog and the vinyl. And the foot massager. Witch.” And the lawyers got half.
