"Wish You Were Here"

Summer 1986.

Ravi Shastri lists Fleetwood Mac as one of his favourite music acts. And I wondered what Fleetwood Mac was. At 15. The name rolls off the tongue well, doesn't it. Anyway that's where I heard about Fleetwood Mac for the first time. (Actually, didn't find out what the name meant until very recently. Actually didn't quite care:))

Then, in the summer of 1986, this song at the end of a friend's compilation audio cassette. Cassettes (and LPs) were all we had then - no CDs, no computers, nothing. CERTAINLY no mp3s. So, if you got what you wanted down at the cassette shop, good....otherwise you just forget about it and wait till the cassette shop gets a hold of it. And if that didn't happen while your teeth stayed in....well.

A malnutritioned, sickly, music-starved, gawky, mawkish teenager in India...in the 80s. Add morose. Everything was a big deal (and still is :):)) Up until that point I was so straight-laced musically - only choral stuff. The only half-way decent pop music I'd heard was ABBA. But I was impressionable, willing to try stuff......and desperately wanted into what the hoopla about ROCK music was. The mawkish, folkish teenager wanted.....some more than he'd already heard.

"Wish you were here" was the perfect thing for me. It was boring, straight, unremarkable, sad-sounding and morose. It was also the only material I had, "rock"-wise. Christine McVie's voice sounded dubious to me - couldn't make out whether this was a guy or a girl!!!! I liked that :) The song also had just enough chord stuff to tickle my fancy - that second chord ("all this distance between us") was sensational because I'd never heard ANYONE do that before !!! It sounded dark, lonely, mysterious, and WONDERFUL. I absolutely LOVED the chords, I LOVED what John McVie was doing on the bass..... Then I discovered Lindsey Buckingham's guitar at the end of the song. And the piano workout. And I was hooked for life.

Lindsey Buckingham's guitar solo still rings true - a soaring rock'n'roll workout. It was the ONLY rock'n'roll I'd heard till then......and along with Christine's piano in the end, the song was etched in my memory for life.

Now, after 20-odd years......I know a lot more. I know that the song is from the Mirage album, which is surely nowhere near Fleetwood Mac's greatest. I heard Rumours in 1991, and "Wish You Were Here" became a distant memory, a lost link with my long-gone adolescence.

I'd have to say, those impressions, those memories, those indelible links - I never really lose them. And now, I wouldn't recommend "Wish You Were Here" to a teenager. But I love the song anyways. I know what life was then.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkAarMnkeYs

There's still no reliable video.....this is one of the Mac's forgotten songs. No matter :)