LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM
His guitar playing and songwriting (“Lindsey’s work with Fleetwood Mac is faultless,” says Mick Fleetwood) helped take Mac from almost washed up to world domination.
If losing the talismanic Peter Green was, in the words of Mick Fleetwood, “the most devastating thing that could happen to us”, then filling his shoes in Fleetwood Mac was at the time the most daunting gig in rock’n’roll. By late ’74 Bob Weston and Bob Welch had tried them on and passed through the band, with some creative success. (Green-era guitarists Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan had also gone.)
But there was something about the guitar playing on Frozen Love, the drummer considered, as he overheard the standout track by the LA folk duo Buckingham Nicks: the way that forlorn but defiant acoustic finger-style tumble broke into a stormy electric lead in the sublime mid-section. Fleetwood had just heard Lindsey Buckingham for the first time.
Unlike the early years of the Green reign – when blues lead was the currency, and its architect a fixture in Best Guitarist polls – the Mac of the Rumours era was a more nuanced pop-rock animal; a traditional guitar hero – legs spread, spraying solos – would have been incongruous and obnoxious. But it was within this broader canvas that Buckingham thrived, drawing on a palette of influences that made his peers look positively myopic.
Born into money in San Francisco, Buckingham had come from a background of vintage rock (“Probably the first player I was emulating was Scotty Moore”), had played banjo because of the Kingston Trio (“I got some chops that carried over into things like World Turning”) and evolved the intricate fingerpicking patterns of masters like Merle Travis (try Landslide or his solo arrangement of Big Love, with dovetailing bass/melody filling the mix).
Eschewing a plectrum, even when Buckingham played electric guitar he wove parts on Rhiannon that were more like an acoustic tapestry than another big, dumb 70s riff. “My finger-picking on the electric is a direct outgrowth of my formative period of playing the acoustic as a young teenager,” he told Guitar World.
“When I first joined the band, they tried to get me to start using a pick. I said no, I don’t think so.”
Adding to Buckingham’s off-kilter style was the fact that he had never taken a lesson, and couldn’t (can’t) read music. His playing was all heart, ears and instinct. As such, when he took a solo, it seemed almost led by the lyric, the wide-open-road feel of the break on his masterpiece Go Your Own Way being the perfect example. He once shrugged: “The song is all that matters.”
Back in 2011, Buckingham scraped into Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time (propping up the poll in last place). He deserved better. As a musician, his contribution took Fleetwood Mac from near-penury to the zenith, driven by a raft of head-turning guitar parts that never once resorted to cliché. Even knowing how it would all end – with Buckingham fired in 2018, the guitarist no longer able to rub along with Stevie Nicks – Mick Fleetwood would do it all again in a heartbeat. “One thing for sure,” the drummer told Classic Rock, “is that Lindsey’s work with Fleetwood Mac is faultless.”
Listen to this: Go Your Own Way (Fleetwood Mac, Rumours, 1977)