Tony's Guitarist Picks - Lindsey Buckingham

When one hears the phrase “guitar hero” many names instantly come to mind – Hendrix, Beck, Clapton, Page, Gilmour, Duane Allman, Peter Green, etc.  One guy who is especially underrated is Lindsey Buckingham.  Yup, the guy who plays pop songs in Fleetwood Mac.  Maybe he’s a guitar “anti-hero” because he’s not a household name.  Fleetwood Mac was originally a blues band and had a great blues guitarist, Peter Green.  If you’re a purist, perhaps you don’t like the pop band that Fleetwood Mac has become, and that’s ok.  I like the blues incarnation, and I like the arena rock/pop edition as well.  As the guitar player in a pop band, he’s like George Harrison in that he has a keen sense of melody that enables him to provide the right thing for the songs of Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks.  That doesn’t give him a lot of room to solo, but every now and then he can let rip a good solo – see Go Your Own Way or Sisters of the Moon.  But being the producer in addition to being the guitar player, he can pick and choose where he can make songs by the other songwriters sound the way he wants them to.

Guitars.  Before he joined Fleetwood Mac, LB’s guitar of choice was a Fender Stratocaster.  After he joined the band he needed a fatter guitar sound, so he switched to a Les Paul.  He met a luthier who worked for Alembic named Rick Turner.  He asked Turner to make a guitar that’s a cross-between a Stratocaster and a Les Paul.  The result was the Turner #1 model [see below].  That is his main electric guitar, but sometimes he’ll go back to the Stratocaster or even a Telecaster.  For some acoustic work he’ll use a Gibson Chet Atkins.  For the rest he plays various Taylor acoustics.

Style.  He never took guitar lessons and he doesn’t read music.  Most of the guitar players I like are grounded in the blues.  When he was a kid, his first guitar idol was Scotty Moore.  After the first wave of rock and roll faded [Elvis got drafted, Chuck Berry went to jail, Buddy Holly died] The Kingston Trio became his big influence.  And like The Kingston Trio, LB plays without a pick.  He combines the power of a rock guitarist with the precision of a classical nylon-string player.  To hear the former, look no further then Peter Green’s Oh Well, Part I [Fleetwood Mac Live – 1980].  Here LB wails with the best of them.  The one time LB usually gets to stretch out during a Fleetwood Mac show is on his own I’m So Afraid, where he gets to solo to his heart’s content.  On the acoustic side, there’s stuff like Landslide and Never Going Back Again.  The man has incredible technique.

Colors.   What does the song need?  LB’s dobro gives Gold Dust Woman an exotic sound.  The volume swells on Dreams are ethereal.  The National Steel Guitar on The Chain is a sound not often heard on a pop song.  Within the confines of Fleetwood Mac [what he calls “the big machine”] he can’t get too carried away with his guitar sounds.  But in his more-esoteric solo work [“the little machine”] he can indulge himself.  The center of the songs of McVie and Nicks are the vocal melody around which guitar parts are arranged.  His own songs are centered around the guitar.  Sometimes one gets the feeling that his songs are really lots of guitar parts with vocal melodies thrown in as an afterthought, but I like them anyway.  His technique is best described as “dazzling.” 

Two Guitarists Replaced Him.  After the band finished Tango in the Night LB bolted from Fleetwood Mac in 1987, the band replaced him with two guitarists to do the work of one – Rick Vito and Billy Burnette.  Both were hired to play the parts LB played by himself.  Since LB also produced the records, they had to find someone to fill that role as well.  You can do the blind taste test between Tango in the Night and Behind the Mask and judge the results yourself.  

Come [Fleetwood Mac – Say You Will] / Down On Rodeo [LB – Under The Skin].  I like to listen to these two songs as a “twofer”.  Although the songs are from two different albums, they’re from the same song cycle.  For me, these two songs best represent the two sides of LB’s musical personality.  Come is a manic electric freakout, while Down On Rodeo is a calm acoustic “after the storm” piece.

Big Love.  This song opened Tango in the Night, but since he didn’t tour with Fleetwood Mac after that album’s release, the first time he played it live with that band was for 1997's The Dance.  While the studio version of the song is a full band arrangement, from this point forward he played it solo.  Had I not seen the performance for myself, I wouldn’t have thought what I heard was played on one guitar.

Go Your Own Way [Fleetwood Mac - Rumours] - Early one morning in late 1982, I was on my way to take a physics exam.  I had a cheap cassette deck in a 1975 Toyota Corolla, and whilst driving to class I had on Rumours.  This song came on and when it ended, I heard it again, and again.  As the song has a fair amount of lyrical bile in it [in a good way, which reflected my own emotional state at the time], but the hook was the last solo.  The first solo in mid-song is good - the second solo is great.  The song and the solo hooked me on all things Lindsey Buckingham.  I suffer happily.  The physics exam?  I aced it.  I credit this song for getting me in the proper frame of mind.

I'm So Afraid [Fleetwood Mac Live] - This was the finale from the eponymous Fleetwood Mac album.  The studio has quite a few harmony guitar overdubs, but the song morphed into a beast live.  Being the sole guitarist, he's got a bigger sound with the Rick Turner electric.  There are several other live versions of this song [Live in Boston, The Dance, the Mirage deluxe set, the Tusk deluxe set].  This one is my favorite.  This live album sold me on the "Lindsey Buckingham - guitar hero" tag.

My current iPod playlist:

Come [Say You Will]

Down on Rodeo [Under the Skin]

Gift of Screws [Gift of Screws]

Wait for You [Gift of Screws]

Murrow Turning Over in His Grave [Say You Will]

Someone's Gotta Change Your Mind [Under the Skin]

Steal Your Heart Away [Say You Will]

Bleed to Love Her [Say You Will]

Rock Away Blind [Seeds We Sow]

Big Love [Tango in the Night version]

Go Insane [Go Insane version]

Tango in the Night -> Loving Cup [Tango in the Night/Go Insane]

Second Hand News [acoustic outtake version from Rumours]

Tusk [2/1/79 Outtake] [Tusk]

Wrong [Out of the Cradle]

Soul Drifter [Out of the Cradle]

Holiday Road [iTunes single]

Book of Love [Mirage]

Go Your Own Way [Rumours]

I’m So Afraid [FM Live]

The Ledge [3/13/79 Version] [Tusk]

Save Me a Place [10/18/78 Version] [Tusk]

What Makes You Think You're the One [Tusk]

That's All For Everyone [Remix] [Tusk]

That's Enough for Me [9/29/78 Version] [Tusk]

I Know I'm Not Wrong [11/2/78 Version] [Tusk] [“Shit, that’s fast” – Christine McVie]

Tusk "Stage Riff" [1/30/79 Demo] [Tusk]

Trouble [Law and Order]

I Want You [Go Insane]

Slow Dancing [Go Insane]

This Is the Time [Out of the Cradle]

Countdown [Out of the Cradle]

Caroline [Tango in the Night]

Family Man [Tango in the Night]

You and I, Pt. II [Tango in the Night]

D.W. Suite [Go Insane]

Red Rover [Say You Will]

Say Goodbye [Say You Will]

Treason [Gift of Screws]

Turn It On [Out of the Cradle]

Surrender The Rain [Out of the Cradle]

On With the Show [Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie]