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Gone His Own Way
Who's that strange new folkie? It's Lindsey Buckingham,
the brain
of Fleetwood Mac
Sept 29th 2006
New York Times
By Jay Ruttenberg
"Reading the paper, saw a review," Lindsey Buckingham sings at the
outset of his new album, Under the Skin. "Said I was a visionary,
but nobody knew." The song ends on a punch line "You should never
believe what you read" but its reviewer actually makes a valid
argument. Despite his membership in Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham
himself has long been accorded the status of a cult artist: beloved
by music nerds, but a shadow next to the band's iconic singer,
Stevie Nicks.
Considering that Fleetwood Mac has sold more than 100 million
records, this is a strange oversight. After all, Buckingham wasn't
just some backroom knob-twister! He was the guitarist with the bushy
Afro and perennially exposed chest hair, one of the quintet's three
dynamite singer-songwriters, and the production wizard behind the
hazy soft rock that came to symbolize '70s Los Angeles. Most
critically, he was the man who broke Nicks's heart or was it the
other way around? giving birth to the notion of rock band as soap
opera, as well as 1977's megaselling Rumours.
That album will always define Fleetwood Mac. Yet Buckingham's own
legacy may rest with a different work: Tusk, the sprawling,
marching-band-adorned follow-up to Rumours, a sort of Paul's
Boutique or Kid A of its day. "Can you imagine us delivering that
album to the record company?" asks Buckingham, 58, speaking from
L.A. after putting his kids on the school bus. "Even within the band
it was difficult for me. [Drummer] Mick Fleetwood will now say that
Tusk is his favorite album but that took a long time. After it came
out and wasn't a 16-million-copy seller, there were politics within
the band that said we weren't going to make records like it anymore.
I probably never would have made solo albums had there not been that
limitation."
Flash-forward a few decades, and Buckingham remains on the path
paved by Tusk. Recorded mostly in hotel rooms while the singer was
on a Fleetwood Mac reunion tour, Under the Skin is intimate and
spare, with masterful acoustic picking and percussion consisting of
Buckingham beating on a chair. "Hopefully it's only a step above
sitting in the living room playing guitar for somebody," he says. "I
was trying to return to my center, which is the folk medium."
Ironically, in reaching back to old folkies, Buckingham has achieved
a sound that's very much in accordance with contemporary West Coast
artists like Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart; even without
trying, this guy has an ear tuned to his era.
Skin is Buckingham's first solo album since 1992, the year Bill
Clinton borrowed Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop" as his campaign
anthem. These two events are not unrelated. Buckingham, who had
angrily left the band in '87, rejoined when they were summoned to
perform at Clinton's inaugural gala. Ever since, the guitarist has
had a boomerang relationship with the group reminiscent of Michael
Corleone's bond to the mafia. "It's like a black hole that pulls me
in," he says. Before the quintet's '97 reunion, "we had dinner at
[singer] Christine McVie's house. Everyone literally stood around me
in a circle, as if it was an intervention, saying, 'We've got to do
this!' But these are people that I love I don't take it lightly."
The handsome, late-summer mistiness of Skin is a far cry from
Fleetwood Mac's rote reunion material, and Buckingham doesn't
hesitate to say which lies closer to his heart. But he also credits
his return to the group with allowing him to grasp his past and
arrive at his current work. "It took a long time for me to get over
many things," Buckingham says. "I think it took a long time for me
to get over Stevie. It took time for me to come to terms with this
huge success we had, which in my mind didn't seem connected to
anything that we were doing. But I'm a family member now and can be
friends with the band in a way that I never was before. I've come to
a point where I'm refining my craft it doesn't feel like I'm marking
time or sliding down. It feels like an ongoing process of growth."
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