Lindsey Buckingham: jerk or misunderstood genius?
Fleetwood Mac guitarist reportedly fired from legendary rock band
It’s rare for Fleetwood Mac — a rock band formed in 1967 — to garner headlines in 2018. Last week’s news that Lindsey Buckingham reportedly has been fired shook the rock community, earning eulogies and angry quips on Twitter.
There’s little question that the iconic band is losing a visionary musician (again) in Buckingham. But during a time when pop culture is re-examining its heroes, it’s important to remember that the guitarist and songwriter’s personal reputation is littered with allegations of controlling, belittling and even abusive behaviour.
Rock ’n’ roll is often steeped in mythology, so, like any stories about the genre, it comes down to whom you choose to believe: the camp that thinks Buckingham is a misunderstood genius or the camp that believes he’s a jerk.
Many of the stories concerning Buckingham come from former romantic partners.
Buckingham and fellow bandmember Stevie Nicks might be the most famous star-crossed lovers since Romeo and Juliet, only their story ends with them playing in the same rock band and singing songs about each other. The dissolution of their years-long relationship added creative fuel to the writing and recording of 1977’s “Rumours,” Fleetwood Mac’s most successful album.
But tension existed between the two long before the breakup. The young lovers released a single, eponymous album as Buckingham Nicks two years before joining Fleetwood Mac. The couple appears nude on the album cover, something Nicks reportedly was highly uncomfortable with.
The photographer pushed, and Buckingham eventually snapped, according to the book.
“Don’t be paranoid,” Buckingham yelled. “Don’t be a (expletive) child. This is art!”
Eventually, feeling “trapped” and “under pressure,” Nicks removed her shirt and bra for the shoot.
Nicks felt “mortified” by the cover, particularly when it hit shelves in 1973 and earned the disapproval of her father.
“From the beginning, Lindsey was very controlling and very possessive,” Nicks said, according to the biography.
Things didn’t improve after their breakup. Buckingham wrote “Go Your Own Way” in 1976 about Nicks, even though Nicks had to help perform the song. The lyrics are full of vitriol, from the bluntly cruel (“Loving you isn’t the right thing to do”) to the character-questioning (“Packing up, shacking up’s all you wanna do”). Nicks was, of course, insulted.
“I very, very much resented him telling the world that ‘packing up, shacking up’ with different men was all I wanted to do,” Nicks told Rolling Stone. “He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing that he said.”
During a 1980 tour for “Tusk,” Buckingham allegedly mocked Nicks onstage, tried to trip her and, at one point, attempted to
kick her. Singer Christine McVie was furious. She found Buckingham after the show and hit him.
“I think he’s the only person I ever, ever slapped,” McVie told Rolling Stone. “I actually might have chucked a glass of wine, too. I just didn’t think it was the way to treat a paying audience. I mean, aside from making a mockery of Stevie like that. Really unprofessional, over the top. Yes, she cried. She cried a lot.”
Buckingham says he doesn’t remember the incidents. While that tension only continued growing, both Buckingham and Nicks admit it fuels their creative output.
“Relations with Lindsey are exactly as they have been since we broke up,” Nicks told Rolling Stone in 1981. “He and I will always be antagonizing to each other, and we will always do things that will irritate each other, and we really know how to push each other’s buttons.”
Much darker and more concerning are the stories Buckingham’s next serious girlfriend, Carol Ann Harris, shared in her tell-all memoir, “Storms: My Life with Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac.”
In one, Buckingham, needing to urinate while being driven to a hotel, unzipped his pants and evacuated himself into his boot, “as our driver looked on in horror,” according to the book.
In another, Harris hung out with the band’s crew members only to discover that a jealous Buckingham had ordered them not to talk to her. “And in their eyes I saw a sense of fear that I recognized — fear of Lindsey’s anger. Nobody wanted to be the target of Lindsey’s fury — and this I understood.”
Throughout the book, Buckingham is shown doing mountains of cocaine and verbally and physically abusing Harris, which she described in great detail.
In one instance, she wrote, he “raised his arm and hit me hard enough to knock me off the staircase into the wall.” In another, she wrote, he grabbed a fistful of her hair, got in a car and drove down the driveway, dragging her across the pavement.
Eventually, Harris claimed, a doctor told her that she had to leave Buckingham for her own safety — so she did.
As with any memoir, it’s difficult to assess the validity of these stories. They certainly contrast wildly with a 1984 Rolling Stone profile titled — and this is not a joke — “Lindsey Buckingham, Lonely Guy,” in which Buckingham talked about how much he wanted a “wonderful, sensitive, soulmate girl.” This was during the “fairly barren” period after his relationships with Nicks and Harris ended.
The profile painted Buckingham as a musical genius who spends most of his time in the studio, trying to “break down preconceptions about what pop music is” and “struggling to be original” — but also as someone who worried “visibly about being the good host.”
Some problematic details cracked through in the piece, though. Take Buckingham’s comments on Harris: “At first, she was just another conquest.”
And, even though in that very profile, Harris said Buckingham’s solo record about their failed relationship (“Go Insane”) made her “angry” and “sad” and was “upsetting,” the rocker said he doesn’t regret making it.
Fleetwood Mac has always been a pressure cooker.
To wit: Criticism has been levied not just against Buckingham but all the members of the band. Grammy-winning producer Ken Caillat, who worked on “Rumours,” once said in an interview that after the record was released, he and the crew felt like “survivors of the Titanic or something .... You feel like you’re family, and you’re not a family. Fleetwood Mac was not generous ‘parents.’ They’re pretty selfish; so many people that were part of the family have since been discarded,” he said, adding, “They’re all so self-centred and egotistical that they don’t think about anyone.”
Buckingham’s departure from the band could be for a number of reasons — but it wouldn’t surprise anyone if that pressure cooker finally exploded. Again.