The Chain

Stevie and Lindsey. John and Christine. Mick in the middle, just trying to keep the lights on.

Cocaine. So much cocaine.

This is the only song on Rumours credited to all five of them, and that’s because it’s Frankenstein—stitched together from three different songs that weren’t working, sewn up in the studio while everyone was sleeping with everyone else’s ex and pretending they could still make music together.

They couldn’t. They did anyway.

Listen to the first minute. Gentle. Almost tender. Stevie’s voice braiding with Lindsey’s like nothing’s wrong, like they didn’t just destroy each other, like love is still possible.

It’s an act. It’s the most convincing act in rock history.

“Listen to the wind blow—”

Christine wrote that part. Or maybe Stevie. The credits are a legal fiction at this point. Everything belonged to everyone and no one. That’s what happens when you can’t stand to be in the same room but you’re contractually obligated to make a masterpiece.

Then the drums.

Mick Fleetwood playing like a man marching to war. Like a heartbeat getting faster. Like something terrible approaching that you can’t stop.

“Damn your love, damn your lies.”

There it is. The mask slipping. The studio walls thin enough to hear the screaming from the night before. Lindsey wrote that line about Stevie. Or Stevie wrote it about Lindsey. Or both of them wrote it about each other and neither one blinked when they had to sing it together.

And then—

AND THEN—

That bass line. John McVie. Four notes. The most famous four notes in rock. He played them while his marriage was ending. He played them standing ten feet from the woman who was leaving him. He played them like his life depended on it because his career did.

“Chain keep us together.”

The chain isn’t love. The chain is the contract. The chain is the accountant saying you’ll all be broke if you don’t finish this album. The chain is five people who hate each other choosing hate over poverty.

Running in the shadows— Damn your love— Chain— CHAIN—

It falls apart. It builds back up. It falls apart again. That’s not production. That’s documentary.

Forty-seven years later, they’re still playing it. Still standing on stages together, or what’s left of them. Still bound by the only thing that survived.

The chain never broke.

Everything else did.