Lindsey Buckingham

Law And Order Press Kit

 

LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM - DISCOGRAPHY

with Stevie Nicks.
Buckingham Nicks Polydor S 5058 March 1973
 

 

with Fleetwood Mac...
albums:
Fleetwood Mac Reprise BSK 2281/2225 July 1975 platinum
Rumours Warner Bros. BSK 3010 February 1977 platinum
Tusk Warner Bros. 2HS 3350 October 1979 platinum
Fleetwood Mac Live Warner Bros. 2WB 3500 December 1980 platinum
 

 

singles (written by. Buckingham):
"Go Your Own Way" Warner Bros. WBS 8304 December 1976
"Never Going Back Again" Warner Bros. WBS 8413 July 1977
"Tusk" Warner Bros. WBS 49077 September 1979
 

 

produced by Buckingham:
Bombs Away, Dream Babies John Stewart RSO RSI 3051 April 1979
 

 

co-produced by Buckingham:
Fundamental Roll Walter Egan Columbia PC 34579 March 1977
Not Shy Walter Egan Columbia JC 35077 February 1978
 

 

Produced 10-81
 

 

PRESS RELATIONS DEPT. ELEKTRA/ASYLUM RECORDS 962 N. LA CIENEGA BLVD.
LOS ANGELES, CA 90069, 213/852-7231 665 FIFTH AVE., NEW YORK, N.Y. 10022, 212/355-7610

 


LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM TALKS ABOUT "LAW AND ORDER"...


It's late October '81 and Lindsey Buckingham's first solo album, Law And Order, has just been released. He's eager to talk about it. 

"The album was basically a two-part project," he begins. "It was started in February '81 in a small storeroom in Burbank, using minimal equipment - just a multi-track recorder, a small console and a couple of mikes. During that first phase I worked alone, doing the engineering myself, and quite a few tracks were very nearly completed there." By spring, though, other duties had interrupted; Buckingham was called away to France to begin tracking a new Fleetwood Mac album. "Breaking away at midstream from my own project was difficult at first, but in the end it worked out well," he notes. "Not only did the break help me gain a new sense of objectivity, but it also helped me prepare for the second leg, and to begin sharing ideas with Richard Dashut (Fleetwood Mac co-producer)."

After completing basic tracking with Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham and Dashut returned to the States to begin phase two of Law And Order, working steadily from June through late August. That part of the project was recorded and mixed in much more conventional surroundings (Larrabee Sound in Hollywood), and although from that point on Buckingham and Dashut shared production duties, Law And Order is basically a one-man show. Buckingham wrote, arranged, played and sang virtually everything himself. "Playing the instruments one by one can present a problem in achieving a 'live' feel on a track, especially with drums, but it's fascinating to find ways of working around one's limitations. For example, I'm not an accomplished drummer. It was difficult for me to achieve the 'hesitated' drum feel so important to rock music, especially as an overdub. But there was a logical way around that limitation - I simply recorded a metronome on one track, then sent it through a delay device and bounced the delayed metronome to another track. In that way, I was able to play the drums on the delayed click while playing all the other instruments to the original click. That spirit of experimentation is something I strive for, and it manifests itself in many ways throughout the album. Limitations or not, if the means  you use to achieve something are unusual, the result may also be unusual."

That approach served Law And Order well. Listeners won't confuse its unique shape and sound with any other record in the current marketplace. "Every song has a bit of its own identity," Buckingham says. Keep that in mind as he comments on the individual Law And Order songs...

"BWANA" (Buckingham) - "There's something about the taste and attitude of '40s music that's very romantic. A few tunes on the album have a '40s flavor but they're handled in a rock 'n' roll context. This is one of them. 'Bwana' is quite a melodic song, but it also conjures up images of a sort of jungle cartoonland. Oddly, the (basic) track of this tune was completely finished, background vocals and all, before I sang the lead vocal, and I had intended to use a certain melody. But just when I was ready to go out and sing it, Richard said, 'Why don't you go out and sing it like Frankie Lymon?' So I did. Suddenly, in a matter of minutes, a whole new melody and set of words emerged."

"TROUBLE" (Buckingham) - "This is the first single from the album, and the only song on which I didn't play bass and drums. I had tried playing the drums on this but it wasn't happening, so we asked Mick to play. He came in one night and we stayed 'till four in the morning doing takes. But when we came in the next day, there wasn't one take we felt was solid enough from start to finish. So we decided to cut a short tape loop of the drum track, only four seconds, I think. The irony of that was that the original reason for having Mick play on the song was to approach the track completely live, as opposed to my usual technique. Ultimately, we achieved just the opposite, using the same four seconds of Mick's drums over and over again. I overdubbed the drum fills and cymbal crashes to create a live feel. George Hawkins, who played bass on Mick's The Visitor album, put the bass on, and I played some very pretty half-speed guitars in the choruses. I 'm also quite pleased with the Spanish guitar solo."

"MARY LEE JONES" (Buckingham) - "There's no person named Mary Lee Jones, at least not as far as I know. My girlfriend Carol heard this one and said it reminded her of herself about a year ago, but it wasn't written with her in mind. It could be about any of us during certain times in our lives. Musically it's pretty straight ahead, though the guitar solo at the end is fairly unusual."


"I'LL TELL YOU NOW" (Buckingham) - "This is the oldest song on the album. In fact, had it been written a few months earlier it probably would have gone on the Tusk album. It deals with experiencing depression, the sense of isolation, feeling weak after having felt strong...the feeling of needing to communicate but not having the emotional momentum to do so. The singer promises to 'tell you now,' but he never does."

"IT WAS I" (Gary Paxton) - "Besides reminding me a little bit of some early Beatles tunes, this 1959 hit (by Skip & Flip) seemed fairly obscure to me, something I've carried in my memory since I first heard it years ago. The original version is quite amateurish, and therein lies its charm. I wanted to retain that innocence, and I
think I did."

"SEPTEMBER SONG" (Maxwell Anderson/Kurt Weill)
- "A very old song, from the '30s, in the true Tin Pan Alley tradition. I'd wanted to do this song for a number of years and knew the chords but not the words. When my father died several years ago, he left an extensive collection of 78s dating back to the 1920s, and last Christmas I finally got around to picking them up from my mother's house in Northern California. The collection was quite influential on many songs on the album. There happened to be a Frank Sinatra 78 of 'September Song' in there and that's where I got the words. This is obviously another song with '40s flavor, but rocked up a tad."

"SHADOW OF THE WEST" (Buckingham) - "Here's an analogy of the way you feel sometimes,when you feel as if you're over the hill or you've seen things that meant a lot to you suddenly disappear. Gone. It's about having to deal with loss, basically - loss of time, loss of memories, love, youth. Musically, I had wanted to record a Sons Of The Pioneers song for a while, and then Richard said, 'Why don't you write one yourself?'
So I did."

"THAT'S HOW WE DO IT IN L.A." (Buckingham) - "The closest thing to Fats or Jerry Lee or Little Richard on the album. People seem to think the song is gonzo, but it's no more so than many rock 'n' roll songs from 25 years ago. The accepted definition of rock has certainly changed. In terms of atmosphere, the attempt of many of these songs was to achieve a throwback sound, a rejection of 1981 'state of the art' in favor of a sound maybe less correct technically but far richer aesthetically. This song is a prime example of that. Can you imagine how the atmosphere of '50s rock 'n' roll would suffer if it had to be recorded under today's so-called 'perfect' conditions?"

"JOHNNY STEW" (Buckingham) - "Here's one of the tracks that we'd completely finished except recording the vocals. One night we were looking for lyrics, and John Stewart happened to drop by the studio. Somehow we started singing about Johnny Stew, joking, really. It went from there. This is also a song on which I tried for an impression of trumpet and sax sections in the instrumental part, though played on guitars. The Boris Karloff stuff on the vocals in the break section has a bit of humor to it - I just started clowning around in the break section while I was doing the lead vocal, probably just to relieve the tension that sometimes builds in the studio. This time it added a different dimension to the tune. When good accidents such as this happen, you leave them in."

"LOVE FROM HERE, LOVE FROM THERE" (Buckingham) - "A definite influence from my father's 78s can be heard here. He loved all the small six- or seven-piece Dixieland combos, lots of Kid Ory and Bunk Johnson. Despite recording limitations of the time, those are great records because the performances are so hot. 'Love From Here...' is definitely a cop of one of that type of song, again in rock 'n' roll context. The most noteworthy thing about this song is not the melody, but the breaking down of the roles the cornet, clarinet and trombone play in Dixieland jazz, and the emulating of them on guitars."

"A SATISFIED MIND" (Red Hayes/Jack Rhodes)
- "One of my father's all-time favorite songs, and it's for him. The version I'm most familiar with was Red and Betty Foley's from 1955. I more or less did the same arrangement. It was in strict waltz time and my guitar solo is very similar to the fiddle solo on the original. It was meant to be a simple song, a country song. Funny thing is, I remembered all the words and the arrangement, but I haven't heard the record in years. I'd like to find a copy and see how close I got."

 

Produced 10-81
 

 

PRESS RELATIONS DEPT. ELEKTRA/ASYLUM RECORDS 962 N. LA CIENEGA BLVD.
LOS ANGELES, CA 90069, 213/852-7231 665 FIFTH AVE., NEW YORK, N.Y. 10022, 212/355-7610

 

 

Also contained in the press kit for Law and Order is a photocopy of interviews with

 

BAM Magazine (January 30, 1981, ISSUE No. 96) Musician Magazine (No. 33, June 1981)
   

 



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