Rumours, Nate

The best song off Ignition, which has the noble legacy of being "the Offspring album that came out before Smash," is probably "Dirty Magic." Southern California punk freaks would probably make a case for something like "Kick Him When He’s Down" or "Session," but "Dirty Magic" is the only song on the record with any gravity, with any sense of a universal lived experience. It's a melancholic song about incomplete love, about how one person needs more than they can get from another, and how that ache leaves both people touched. It's driven by an echoing, stabbing, persistent guitar lead that does as much of the sour longing as the lyrics do. It's heavy, but could be so much heavier, as if there is weight still to be discovered, as if this song, which is about feeling lonely, is the tip of the much lonelier, indescribable iceberg beneath the waters of the soul.

How did the Offspring, of all bands, do this? How did the guys who made their hay on songs like "Self Esteem," "The Kids Aren't Alright," and, god help us and have mercy on our works, "Pretty Fly for a White Guy," find this vein of maturity, longing, pain, and universal melancholy?

They did it by rewriting "The Chain."

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Look, I'm no copyright attorney. I'm not coming here to bury the Offspring, to suggest the Dexter Holland and Noodles and the other nameless offspring of the Offspring owe their "Keep 'Em Separated" bucks to Micky Fleet and the gang. There are only so many chords, so many tempos, so many configurations of traditional rock instrumentation. The things that work do so for a reason, and the good ones have been stealing from the greats since before the notion of "good ones" or "great ones" occurred to anyone. Hell, I'm basically stealing this writing style from Rob Harvilla, doing my shitty copy-of-a-copy impression of his better works, my "Dani California" to his "Last Dance with Mary Jane," just as the Offspring offered their version of one-way-but-entangled heartache via the stolen valor of "The Chain." It's fine, we're all friends here.

But humor me, all the same: In that link up there, back up in the first paragraph? Queue it up to the 2:24 mark and let it run. Have you done so? I'll take you at your word. Okay, now fire up this link—god, take a minute to look at those prancy, ren faire cocaine users, what an album cover—and roll it to the 2:50 mark or so. Let some of this cascade over you, a few urgent guitar plucks, a few "I need to tell you something right now" cymbal splashes. Wait for the isolated bass line—that's really the best part of the song for my money, the part where you know some shit is about to hit the fan, the part where those two prancy ren faire cocaine users are about to unleash a run of songwriting and performance that is as metal, if not more metal, than most of the also-rans inspired by the early works of Metallica—then just let that fucker cook until the song ends.

You can hear almost whatever you want in that 90 seconds: the past of rock and roll; the aspirational future of rock and roll; the high-water mark of a juggernaut eleven albums in; the violent disintegration of at least four different relationships; the resignation that there are no endings, not really, except for that last ending; the reason people keep doing drugs despite how much drugs take back from people; the possibilities; the reasons that people who lived in this moment can't give it up; the reason Rumours is listed among the best, most important music works of a genre, of a century. So, given all that, is it any surprise you're going to hear "Dirty Magic," too? Can you blame the Offspring for taking something back from the source?

I'll have more to say about "The Chain" further on down the page there if you care to read it, but I do want to take a moment to say that more metal band should be covering this song. Fleetwood Mac, for all their skills, are not a heavy band. They aren't Led Zeppelin. Hell, they aren't even Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young in terms of teeth, but this song here is about as heavy as anything Jimmy Page fever-dreamed after a night of salvia, bi-curiosity, and speed-reading The Lord of the Rings. The only heavy cover I could find is this one by Evanescence, which is fine as far as these things go (they kind of fuck-up the chorus and the breakdown, in my opinion, but I find it on the whole to be a more worthwhile effort than, say, this note-for-note recreation by the Highwomen), and also this one, but these guys are a bunch of cheesedicks.

But still: where are all the Mastodon covers of this song? And while we're here, where is my database of every cover of every song, shouldn't the chodes from Genius be on that? Maybe they could rank them? Where do you think this fictional site would rank the Chicks' cover of "Landslide"? Did I just give away the next great media company?

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I digress, but only kind of. Rumours is that kind of record, the kind that anyone who has been listening to music, even passively, within the last, say, 45 years has some relationship to, even if they don't know. I'm not even talking about reimagining or recreations as much as I am sheer saturation. Do you have any idea how many times I heard "Go Your Own Way" on classic rock radio before I knew it was a breakout single from this album? Do you have any idea how popular those Guardian of the Galaxy movies are? Do you think that Doggface dude becomes a meme if not for the pitch-perfect alignment of his skateboarding elation and hauntingly chill "Dreams"?  This isn’t a soft-rock record anymore, it's woven into the very texture of American rock music, into the notion of "feelings, but also guitars."

I'm by no means a scholar on this band, but I know the accolades. One of the most successful records of the '70s, Rolling Stone's list of best-ever rock music, Pitchfork's lists for best-ever rock music. Of course, if any record was going to carry the weight of expectation, it's this one, which... look.

There's probably a way to talk about this album's text without considering its subtext, to talk about its output without factoring in its inspiration, but I think that would be a boring way to talk about it, and frankly I think Fleetwood Mac would agree with me. Let us, here and now, accept the premise that sex and drama has been a successful selling tactic since the dawn of both "sex" and "drama," that this idea was not invented in beer commercials in the '90s or boxing matches in the '80s, and that Fleetwood Mac, certainly wrecked and affected by their various interpersonal disintegrations, certainly understood what was to be gained by emphasizing those disintegrations in the run up to, release of, and continuing conversation around the songs on Rumours.

Let’s use a visual example, eh? Here, watch this video of the band performing "The Chain" (duh), specifically queue in on how Ms. Nicks is looking at Mr. Buckingham. Now, cards on the table, all caveats aside—I have no idea WHEN this video is from, but the eye test suggests it wasn't released in the '70s, so whatever feelings may have existed at the time might have changed or eroded. However, let's further assume that this is some time after the initial writing and release of Rumours. Do you buy this performance by Nicks? When she channels what appears to be a seething anger and disappointment in how she looks at Lindsey, do you see that as stagecraft or distillation of emotion? Candidly, I think it can be both, and I think that's the whole point. There is no disentangling the story from the songs, the heartbreak from the lyrics, the love lost from the guitars gained. This is melodrama of the highest order, pitched performances that land below camp and above repute.

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Probably should talk about some other songs besides "The Chain" huh? Let’s go here: for all the hay and praise made on behalf of this record, it is really, to my ears, a story of two kinds of song "titanically massive singles that echo through time" and "some nice songs that I forget are there unless I am listening to them." From that former realm, you've got something like "Go Your Own Way," which lives on the other side of the coin of "The Chain," in that it is about melancholy first, then pain second, and is the kind of song I could hear every week for the rest of my life and not get sick of (I don't know how much this gets discussed, but this band excels at combining three-part harmonies with very simple, yet effective guitar soloing. Buckingham lives in that Neil Young class of guitar hero, as a guy who gets a lot of emotion out of what is otherwise comparatively rudimentary guitarwork).

There's "Dreams" which is less a song that it is a gas, in its ability to fill whatever vessel you pour it into. A song like this sounds equally welcome and appropriate for almost any context; you can fuck to it, cry to it, sleep to it, have a long chat with a friend to it, sip wine on a porch to it (can't really RAGE to it, but that's not really a gear this particular titan of soft rock can get to). People think it's pandering and cloying to be all things to all people in all situations, but to come by it honestly is to catch lightning in a bottle.

You also get "You Make Loving Fun," which in the context of the heartbreak parade feels more cynical than it does legitimate. And yet, here it be, the most obvious evidence of the rampant cocaine use that was, erm, all but confirmed by the band in the recording and writing of the record. While it eventually lands where all songs on Rumours land, it takes a farty, yacht-rock disco detour to get there. We're talking somewhere between Tom Petty and Donna Summer. The fact that there's as much soul present in this otherwise lily-white presentation of rock music for squares is a real testament to this band's prowess and its ability, at least here, to both stay within their lane and stretch their chops. Up to a point, at least. Everything is competent, if not incendiary. No one is pointing to these cats as the most accomplished musicians, but they get miles out of their limits, they find magic in their working man's rock

And then you have "Don’t Stop," which... they're not all winners, alright? This is an enjoyable enough song that I'm certain most people would welcome to hear in their office cube or on the radio, but come on, this is too cute by half, even if you consider the heartbreak and darkness that vibrates on the tune's warm edges (such is the potency and ambiguity in a lyric like "yesterday's gone / yesterday's gone"). Of all the tunes on this thing, this is the only one of the titanic singles that seems to diminish in power over time, that shrinks as the rest of the album grows and grows (shout out to the One Bad Man).

I’ve probably discussed "The Chain" enough at this point, but goddamn. What a tune.

Singles alone do not make an album a classic, but the rest of the songs on this record, while they do not rise to the level of these other songs here, act as well-intentioned bridges to get us where we need to on the album, to move us through eleven tracks without needing to take the album off the playlist. Ultimately these also-rans; your "Never Going Back" (pastoral), your "Second Hand News" (Wes Anderson shit), your "Songbird" (the piano one), your "I Don’t Wanna Know" (a song that somehow sounds like a combination of every other song on the album, played all at once); these are what make the album a classic, the fact that they carry the water, that they maintain the vibe, that they keep you plugged into the world of Rumours, in which everyone loves everyone else, everyone is heartbroken, everyone is feeling everything all at once, and everyone is doing cocaine about it.

Chuck Klosterman has called this album—and I am paraphrasing here—one of the most cohesive collections of deeply pleasant songs ever constructed. That'll make you one of the ten most memorable albums in a genre's history, even if it won't make you the best. And so it goes with Rumours, the greatest collection of background music ever produced by the boomer generation. Hail hail, you flouncy weirdos.