There is a marvelous moment in The Big Lebowski when The Dude just can’t take it anymore. When the cabdriver puts on The Eagles, Jeff Bridges is in obvious pain. “Not THE EAGLES, man!” The irate cabbie throws him out. In the early 1980s, when I was working at Laguna Liquors in San Luis Obispo, now a sports-bar/burger place, I met an old and dear Arroyo Grande High School friend, a bassist in a not-very-successful rock band, who assured me that they didn’t play Fleetwood Mac crap.

I didn’t tell him that I loved Mac. And I wouldn’t have been ejected from the cab, because I love the Eagles, too.

When I was an impoverished student at the University of Missouri, what sustained me were eggs, Velveeta and Wonder Bread, because they were cheap, and me chasing the radio dial until I could find “Rhiannon” once again. The song’s first national splash on the television show Midnight Special—“This is a song about a Welsh witch,” Nicks deadpanned—was so epic that my reading material of choice back then, Rolling Stone (along with, of course, National Lampoon) many years later published a very funny but spot-on essay on the band’s appearance, called, modestly:

17 Reasons This ‘Rhiannon’ Clip Is the Coolest Thing in the Universe

By Bob Sheffield

Sheffield even commented on Stevie Nicks’s hair. I found this line stunning:

Stevie’s hair. Oh, the hair. Beyond feathered. The feathers have feathers.

That’s good writing.

Here’s the clip, from 1976, introduced by, of al people, Helen Reddy:

Of course, I fell immediately in love with Nicks, whom my mother-in-law, a devoted Reagan Republican, somehow met backstage because both women had connections to La Cañada Flintridge, a town that overlooks Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. My mother-in-law, whom I adored, was horrified. She seemed to think that Stevie was something that JPL had brought home from Deep Space.

I would find out only many years later that both my mother-in-law and my wife, Elizabeth, have Welsh roots. No wonder I loved “Rhiannon.”

And even thought it was “Rhiannon,” and Velveeta, that allowed me to survive an impoverished summer until my work-study job came through, that’s not my favorite Fleetwood Mac song.

Nope.

I have settled, after thoughtful consideration, on “The Chain” as my favorite, and for several reasons: it’s fraught with anger and recrimination, because the band members were uncoupling and so angry and recriminating during the production of Rumors. It’s raw stuff. I don’t know but there was blood on the recording studio floor. The Lindsey and Stevie who’ d been eyeing each other suggestively during the Midnight Special segment were not in love anymore. They were instead, metaphorically, at least, lacing each others’ Constant Comment Tea with rat poison.

That’s what makes the song so real. They were in a place where, tragically, nearly all of has been, the kind of place that, forty years later, might make you pull your car over on the 405, reach into the trunk for the tire iron, and begin hitting yourself repeatedly upside the head.

Why did I do that?

Why did I say that?

Why was I such an asshole?

Once the bleeding from the tire iron slows, though, you realize that the other element that makes this a great song is in the way it’s performed.

There’s the languid introduction, the rapidity and intensity of as its tempo once it passes the introduction—it’s the kind of musical acceleration that marks The 1812 Overture— the plaintive high notes, Fleetwood’s maniacal drumming and, for me, the best part: John McVie’s bass solo, maybe the best since Jack Bruce’s work with Cream, and the way it yields to Buckingham’s final solo. Yes, Buckingham is a ham, and his solos sometimes last longer than The 1812 Overture, but this one is sharp and wounding, which is exactly the way an angry song should end.

But you don’t have to accept my opinion on “The Chain.” It suddenly occurred to me that I’m not alone in my opinion about this song, because so many excellent musicians have covered it.

So I put together this video as my little tribute to Mac and the song. The original band appears at beginning and end, but in between are Florence and the Machine, then two country-inflected performances by The Highwomen, from Howard Stern’s show, and then by Keith Urban and Little Big Town with, of course, Nicole Kidman looking on fondly. Then, to avoid getting lost in Kidman’s charms, I ended the video with the McVie-to-Buckingham handoff.

I haven’t put “The Chain” up there yet with “Gimme Some Lovin’,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” “Gimme Shelter,” or Rubber Soul, but it’s kind of sliding unobtrusively, without being obnoxious about it, into my mind’s list of favorite songs.

I just have one more and extremely important point to make: Christine McVie, I miss you.