when I think of shifting into fourth, getting on the 5, driving my Volkswagen Bug through the lonely highways of an impoverished desert to my abundant coast, the roads from Las Vegas to San Diego. It was a cloudy, drizzly afternoon if I remember correctly. But that’s just the point, as the thought is more like a whisper, like something I might have wrong. Because the weather is almost never like that there now. Back then it rained more, though. And now the edges of my memory are frayed. There are no clear pictures, only images that have been exposed to the elements, degraded by days and years, piled up. So much so that the only truth I know of a happening is the undiluted effect of it, how it made me feel. What has remained of that day is the sense of me inside my car, the low light more atmospheric than gloom, the repetitive thud of the bass drum in the intro, baba ba-bum, baba ba-bum, a guitar cord sounding off like an astral shimmer, all of it adding propulsion to my four cylinders, to me, when Bob Welch starts to sing/talk about two friends having coffee together, and I really don’t know what he means. But then it’s Christine McVie’s coo, seems like a dream, they got me hypnotized, and the rest of the band, and they are my only companions. I am 18 and alone, simmering with a pressure pent up, and I love that song, “Hypnotized,” love the whole album, or tape as it was. This is what comes to me when I think of McVie and Fleetwood Mac, me in my infancy and they in theirs. McVie was not the lead singer on that track, although she was the lead on other songs from Mystery to Me, like “Just Crazy Love,” a giddy confessional much like her later and more well known, “You Make Loving Fun,” a song I giddily dedicated to my husband right after we met. Yet even after Welch left and Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined the band, it was McVie’s songs that were and are some of my favorites. “Hypnotized,” though, is the song that returns to me like a juke box melody, like in the days when those inventions were still around and someone else pays for and picks a song, and the vinyl drops and the needle hits, and it’s exactly the one you want or need to hear, and you’re transported to a feeling as much as a place. I think of “Hypnotized” when I think of McVie because that album, released before the fame and the stadium concerts, was where I learned the silky evanescence of her voice. It was always her intonations I was most…
