lindsey buckingham

I have a certain amount of ambivalence when it come to Lindsey Buckingham. He’s an amazing guitarist and a very talented songwriter, but you have to take the bad with the good.  Let’s talk about the bad first, and then do the good, so as to end the post on a positive note...

The Bad:  There’s something annoyingly prim and prissy about Lindsey Buckingham, and it comes across in a number of his songs and in his playing.  One gets the sense of a guy who wants nothing so much as to be a refined artiste. Taking oneself seriously is not necessarily a sin. It’s often preferable to being overly frivolous. But there’s a threshold beyond which self-seriousness becomes grating pretentiousness. Buckingham can be both pretentious and precious. The elfin register of his singing voice probably doesn’t do him any favors in this regard.  Listen to the opening bars of Long Distance Winner and tell me you don’t picture a guy in ballet shoes, perhaps even standing en pointe. Even with songs I love, like Second Hand News, Landslide, Gypsy, and Trouble, there’s so much attention paid to songcraft that you become hyper-aware of the music actually being a crafted product, and this diminishes its emotional impact. There’s something vaguely clinical about Buckingham’s aesthetic. It's too fine in certain respects...

In the wake of the Platinum Record mega-success of Rumours, some critics wondered aloud whether Buckingham might be the heir to Brian Wilson. It’s not an unreasonable thing to consider. There are some interesting similarities between the two guys, though there are also some stark differences. I don’t wanna get into it other than to say that I think Buckingham really internalized the idea of himself as a genius.  Watch this video and ask yourself this question:  Does he really need 15 guitars, each one tuned in a different, hopelessly obscure tuning?  Would it be so bad to maybe just play a few songs in standard?

The Good:  With the arrival of Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac became Fleetwood Mac in name only. From that point forward, the band simply continued what Stevie and Lindsey started on the (commercially failed) Buckingham Nicks record. Fleetwood Mac, for all intents and purposes, became the Lindsey Buckingham Band. I may not be enamored of the Buckingham persona, but there’s no denying the excellence of the man’s melodic touch.  I think he could probably write hit records in his sleep if he wanted to (which is a big if).  And he’s an outstanding guitarist, one of the best I’ve ever heard. He finger picks everything, which is staggering to me as a struggling student of guitar. He can pour on the loudness and aggression as he does on Go Your Own Way and Gold Dust Woman, but he’s also capable of guitar playing that’s vulnerable sounding and tenderly expressive on songs like Sarah and Landslide...  

Rumours came out when I was 8.  I remember hearing it everywhere: Supermarkets, candy stores, taxi cabs, people’s homes.  It was on the radio constantly. The two albums I remember most from that period of my life are Steely Dan’s Aja and Rumours.  Fleetwood Mac became bigger than jesus.  By the time I was 12, they released the much less accessible (which is to say much more pretentious) Tusk.  The backlash was inevitable. At 15, I embraced punk and “New Music.”  By that time, I didn’t want to get anywhere near Fleetwood Mac or any music of that ilk.   Yet here I am now, 30 years later, and Fleetwood Mac are much more interesting to me than those guys who would get on stage and stare at the floor, maybe bored, maybe sad, and definitely unenthusiastic about what they were doing, perhaps unenthusiastic about life itself.  The sweet tones Lindsey Buckingham has always gotten from his (complexly tuned) guitar have left a lasting mark on my ear drums, and the music he’s been involved in continues to be compelling...