Christine Perfect

 

John McVie; Christine McVie; Mick Fleetwood

Christine McVie (nee Perfect) died today, at the age of 79.

some of the Reader Comments under the New York Times story --

Scott 

NYC

Ugh!!!!!!!!  :(

EJD

New York

Oh my heart.

Paul Smith

Austin, Texas

RIP Christine!  I loved not only her hits with the Buckingham-Nicks era Mac, but also her album with Chicken Shack, and her songs on the underappreciated FM albums from Future Games through Heroes Are Hard to Find.  

Her wonderful songs and recordings will live on!

Steve Mason

Ramsey, New Jersey

Great singer, great talent, great band.

Robert

Virginia

Christine McVie perfectly balances Fleetwood Mac.  Understated elegance in her songs and voice.

Jennene Colky

Denver

She was born Christine Perfect.  Seldom was a name more apropos.  RIP.

Newton Guy

Newton, Massachusetts

How sad.  What a legendary combination of talent that band was.

Paul

Sora, Panama

...Christine's soulful voice... Losing her seems so damn... personal.  I'll never stop loving her.

Michael 

Fresno

I loved Christine.  She always felt like the most balanced member of the group, and if you've never listened to her song "Why" -- on the Mystery to Me album -- go put it on, right now.

Pegah

San Francisco, California

Indeed a genuine loss.  She made this world a happier place

Elex Tenney

Beaverton, Oregon

Great band; she had a great voice.  Another sad passing for my generation.

Cinnamon Girl

New Orleans

...the songs are not just nostalgic.  They are timeless

Ed

New York

I have literally a lifetime of memories soundtracked by her exceptional songs.

Sandra

Olympia, Washington

Her songs made my heart sing.  Thanks for the memories.

Juraj Kovac

Slovakia

Warm Ways was her most inspired song for me.

magzeen

new england

Fleetwood Mac was the soundtrack of my life when I was in high school.

Quohog

Jersey Shore

Wonderful voice.

Elizabeth

New England

"The songbirds are singing like they know the score"...

Vera Camden

Cleveland

The lilting voice of a generation.  She was brilliant.

Karla Decker

Victoria, B.C.

I loved her voice....My contemporaries are splitting the scene at an alarming rate.

Stef

New Hampshire

She was the heart and soul of Fleetwood Mac.  Her passing is like that of a close friend, but then I am now listening to Rumours and she's here.  She always will be.

Sedat Nemli

Istanbul. Turkey

Née Perfect.  And she was.  R.I.P.

Eric

Virginia

You can take me to paradise and then again you can be cold as ice.... her voice and music just made me float among the clouds

Andrew

Philadelphia

...Fleetwood Mac was always a favorite of mine, too, and Rumors was the first album I ever bought.

John 

Akron, Ohio

Christine McVie was a "perfect" fit for each of the several phases of Fleetwood Mac, despite the very different styles of Peter Green, Bob Welch, and Buckingham / Nicks.

ThurmanMunson

Canton, Ohio

45 years, I've marveled at Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks, two of the best Rock 'N Rollers of all time, who held together one of the best Rock 'N Roll bands ever.  Gonna not shed a tear but raise a full glass.

Bascom Hill

Bay Area

She sang a soaring background vocal on Bob Welch's Sentimental Lady.  An epic voice.

Art

Phippsburg, Maine

"Hypnotized" was on Mystery to Me, not Penguin.  Still my favorite Fleetwood Mac record.

Redd Pharmer

Coming Out Of Turn Four

Will have to pour a whisky neat and toast the memory of that warm voice.  RIP.

Sane citizen

NY

Fleetwood Mac was just magical.  Thanks for all, Christie.

Marcy

Paris, Texas

....I love the songs "Everywhere" and "Little Lies." ...

Gary

New Mexico

I fell in love with her with Chicken Shack.  For me she was always the center of Fleetwood Mac.

Chindhee

Wyoming

...I'm glad that music lives forever.

Rob F

California

For those of us alive in the seventies and seeing Fleetwood Mac playing Days on the Green in Oakland, it is hard to imagine a more optimistic time.

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such a good book

 

Jerry Hall by Richard Avedon

------------------ [excerpt from Jerry Hall:  My life in pictures, Quadrille Publishing, 2010] --------------------- Richard Avedon was a fantastic photographer who took very intimate and focused shots.  He had assistants with hand-held lights so the lighting was constantly moving around you and you were free to pose in any direction.  

Other photographers had fixed lights on stands and you had to stay looking in one direction, but Avedon created a moving feast of light and you were free to do whatever you wanted, which was very liberating. --------------------------- [end / excerpt]

_______________________________

I like how she calls it "a moving feast of light" -- a phrase borrowed from novelist Ernest Hemingway, who said,

        "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

        A Moveable Feast is also the title of a memoir by Hemingway.

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ripping off the consequence-immune

 

Hustlers   (2019)

The last night to watch American Beauty (1999) on Netflix is November 30th -- however, it just showed up on Amazon Prime Video...sometimes that happens, a film "overlaps"...

I finally said, "I want to see Hustlers," so paid to see it on Amazon.

Tighter pacing would have helped this film, but it's not bad.

It got more interesting for me when I read somewhere that it was to be a sort of parallel, or homage, to Goodfellas.  

        So I said, 'OK - watch them back-to-back...'

The Jennifer Lopez character has the nerves-of-steel for that shit they're doing, but not everyone in her crew does:  when the Constance Wu character says softly, "I don't want to hurt anybody," you realize -- OK, this young lady does not belong anywhere near the credit-card operation, and maybe not even in the primary, original job which was being a "stripper."  

        And when Ramona starts recruiting random marginal ladies of doubtful repute -- it starts a downward slide which is similar to Goodfellas -- where it all falls apart...

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grit and gratitude

 

Flat Boat

Andrew Wyeth

A You Tuber I listen to sometimes said that "grit and gratitude" is her motto for the holiday season.

        She added, "Your problems would be some people's miracles."

I looked for poems about November -- one that I found was written by Maggie Dietz:

November

Show's over, folks.  And didn't October do

A bang-up job?  Crisp breezes, full-throated cries

Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.

Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees.

Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage,

While it lasted?  Was I dazzled?  The bees

Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage

And gone to shiver in their winter clusters.

Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge

On busted chestnuts.  A sky like hardened plaster

Hovers.  The pasty river, its next of kin,

Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters.

Even the swarms of kids have given in

To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure:

TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains.

The days throw up a closed sign around four.

The hapless customer who'd wanted something 

Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.

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tobacco-land

 

"Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should!"

was a slogan in a television advertisement for this brand of "smokes."  

'90s-kids etc. might be disbelieving of the idea that cigarettes used to be advertised on TV, but they were:

"I'd rather fight than switch!"  

        Tareyton

"I'd walk a mile for a Camel."

        (Camel)

"You've come a long way, baby!"

        (Virginia Slims, working a little "women's lib" into the theme)

______________________________

There was a commercial for Salem cigarettes that I used to notice when I was in the early years of grade school -- seated around a long table, a bunch of adults sang boisterously,

♫ ♪ ♪♪

You can take Salem out of the country, but --

You can't take the country out of Salem!

They swayed back and forth as they sang -- it looked like they were having a fun party.

----------------------- The "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" slogan had hit a snag earlier, in 1954, when news anchor Walter Cronkite was supposed to do a live-read of a Winston ad, and he protested that the grammar was incorrect -- he said it should read, "Winston tastes good as a cigarette should."

        Winston ads later on, that I heard over the TV, built on that one-time controversy by saying the line correctly -- "as a cigarette should" but also throwing in a little back-and-forth where one character would say, "What-a-yah want, good grammar or good taste?"

The Tareyton ads showed an adult with a black eye, and he (or she) would say, "I'd rather fight than switch" -- that slogan was memorable, for some reason; my mother had an irritated antipathy to those ads.

--------------------------------------------

President Nixon signed legislation banning cigarette ads on TV and radio on April 1, 1970.

        ("Hello, R.J. Reynolds?  APRIL FOOL!!")

The last televised cigarette ad ran at 11:50 p.m. January 1, 1971, during Johnny Carson.

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"Up To the Minute"

 

CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite   1962

The Mary Tyler Moore Show is currently on Amazon Prime Video -- Walter Cronkite appeared in Episode 21 of Season 4 (starts at 19:40).

It's a good scene.

I was thinking maybe it is "meta" because Walter Cronkite -- the real television journalist -- appears on the MTM Show, which is fiction -- and Cronkite plays himself.  Or -- he is himself.

        In the storyline, Cronkite is an acquaintance of Lou Grant (who is a fictional character on the show, portrayed by Ed Asner).

(The word meta came to my mind, but I'm still not sure what it is -- when I Google "what does meta mean" words and paragraphs come onto my android tablet screen, and I read some of them and end up more confused than when I started.)

________________________________

[Wikipedia excerpt] --------------- Walter Cronkite became one of the top American reporters in World War II, covering battles in North Africa and Europe....He was one of eight journalists selected by the United States Army Air Forces to fly bombing raids over Germany in a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress as part of a group called The Writing 69th....He covered the Battle of the Bulge, and after the war, he covered the Nuremberg trials....

In 1950, Cronkite joined CBS News in its young and growing television division, again recruited by [Edward R.] Murrow.  Cronkite began working at WTOP-TV (now WUSA), the CBS affiliate in Washington, D.C.  He originally served as anchor of the network's 15-minute late-Sunday-evening newscast Up To the Minute, which followed What's My Line? at 11:00 pm ET from 1951 through 1962.

...On April 16, 1962, Cronkite succeeded Douglas Edwards as anchorman of CBS's nightly feature newscast, tentatively renamed Walter Cronkite with the News, but later the CBS Evening News on September 2, 1963, when the show was expanded from 15 to 30 minutes....

        ...During the 1960s and 1970s, Walter Cronkite was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll.  [end - Wikipedia excerpts]

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-30-

hey - hey - hey! that's what I say!

 

Pier 60, Clearwater Beach

------------------- [excerpt from Keith Richards book] -------------- Then came "Satisfaction," the track that launched us into global fame. ...I wrote "Satisfaction" in my sleep.... The miracle being that I looked at the cassette player that morning and I knew I'd put a brand-new tape in the previous night, and I saw it was at the end.  

Then I pushed rewind and there was "Satisfaction."  It was just a rough idea.  There was just the bare bones of the song, and it didn't have that noise, of course, because I was on acoustic.

        Mick wrote the lyrics by the pool in Clearwater, Florida, four days before we went into the studio and recorded it -- first at Chess in Chicago, an acoustic version, and later with the fuzz tone at RCA in Hollywood.

It was down to one little foot pedal, the Gibson fuzz tone, a little box they put out at that time.  I've only ever used foot pedals twice -- the other time was for Some Girls in the late '70s, when I used an XR box with a nice hillbilly Sun Records slap-echo on it.  But effects are not my thing.  I just go for quality of sound....

        One hit requires another, very quickly, or you fast start to lose altitude.  At that time you were expected to churn them out.  "Satisfaction" is suddenly number one all over the world, and Mick and I are looking at each other, saying, "This is nice."  Then bang bang bang at the door, "Where's the follow-up?  We need it in four weeks."  

And we were on the road doing two shows a day.  

You needed a new single every two months; you had to have another one all ready to shoot.  And you needed a new sound.  If we'd come along with another fuzz riff after "Satisfaction," we'd have been dead in the water, repeating with the law of diminishing returns.  

        Many a band has faltered and foundered on that rock.  "Get Off of My Cloud" was a reaction to the record companies' demands for more -- leave me alone -- and it was an attack from another direction.  And it flew as well.

        So we're the song factory.  We start to think like songwriters, and once you get that habit, it stays with you all your life.  It motors along in your subconscious, in the way you listen.

___________________________________

{excerpts from Life, by Keith Richards with James Fox.  Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company.  New York - Boston - London.  2010.}

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On You Tube go to the video named

The Rolling Stones - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (Official Lyric Video)

uploader / channel:  ABKCOVEVO

and -- PLAY!   ♫ ♪ ♪

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