Lindsey Buckingham reinterprets his intricate solo masterpiece “Never Going Back Again”

Watch Lindsey Buckingham Perform New Version of “Never Going Back Again” In Fender’s New Re-Creation Series

Lindsey Buckingham reinterprets his intricate solo masterpiece “Never Going Back Again” using the newly released Fender Acoustasonic Jazzmaster in Fender’s Re-Creation video series.

The gorgeously filmed performance spends a lot of quality time focused on Lindsey’s left and right hand, giving guitarists a clear view of his alternate Travis picking technique. He adds a nice, improvised melodic interlude in the song’s middle section, using his classic ‘solo while holding down the rhythm’ style.

And the sounds! Let’s say this video, the first in Fender’s new series, may well win over anyone who wasn’t sure of the Acoustasonic’s acoustic tonal capabilities.

“Even though I’ve only been with this new Jazzmaster for a short time, I can see that it would have a lot of uses in the studio. I’m excited to give it more time to get to know it a little better.”

“Acoustic guitar has always been my soulmate and alter ego; it got me to a place where I guess I had my own style,” Buckingham said. “Anytime I can take that orchestral approach, I have. The American Acoustasonic Jazzmaster allows you to do just that.”

American Songwriter

INTERVIEW - MICK FLEETWOOD LA TIMES

Before Stevie and Lindsey, Peter Green was the soul of Fleetwood Mac. Just ask Mick Fleetwood

By ROB TANNENBAUM
MARCH 24, 2021 5 AM PT
LA TIMES

Before he founded Fleetwood Mac, guitarist Peter Green replaced Eric Clapton in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, a band that was a way station for many of the best white British blues musicians of the 1960s. In the Bluesbreakers, where he earned the nickname “The Green God,” Green wrote “The Supernatural,” an instrumental showcase in which, midway, he halts his stately pace and resolutely holds a single note for 4½ bars. Other guitarists wanted to prove how fast they could play; Green was proud to show how slowly he could.

“It’s a perfect description of Peter,” says drummer Mick Fleetwood, 73, a former Bluesbreaker who has been, for 53 years, the only constant original member of Fleetwood Mac. “That’s Peter’s adage that I inherited from him as a musician and as a friend: Less is more. Say something with one note, or with a perfect vibrato.”

There are musicians who rate Green ahead of Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck as the greatest British blues guitarist of the ’60s, due to his singular combination of tone, touch and taste. But Green isn’t as well known as his contemporaries, an injustice Fleetwood has often tried to correct, most recently with an all-star tribute concert.

Green’s career and life are mysteries no one has solved. Fleetwood Mac debuted in August 1967 and within two years became the biggest band in Europe, outselling the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. A second guitarist, Jeremy Spencer, also wrote and sang, and Danny Kirwan soon joined and did the same, but the group’s success was chiefly due to Green’s songs, which varied between melancholy and menacing: “Black Magic Woman,” the U.K. No. 1 hit “Albatross,” “Man of the World,” “Need Your Love So Bad” and “Oh Well.”

In 1970, Green, who like many musicians had been taking LSD, came to believe that playing for money was immoral. He started wearing a white robe onstage (it made him look like Rasputin), gave away much of his money and tried to persuade the band to do the same. He quit and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent time in mental institutions. His treatments included electroconvulsive therapy, during which doctors use electric currents to spark a brain seizure, and also narcotizing drugs. He moved to Israel and lived on a kibbutz, then returned to England, where he worked as a hospital orderly and a cemetery gardener. He was sent to prison after a 1976 incident in which he threatened to shoot his accountant. (In some accounts of this incident, Green is said to have demanded the accountant stop sending him money.)

Green toured and recorded now and then, but never again at a high level. “I just zombie around,” he told an interviewer in 1994, adding that his prescription meds made him fall asleep. His remarkable peak lasted less than three years, and some of his songs are known better for cover versions, notably Santana’s “Black Magic Woman,” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Oh Well” and Judas Priest’s version of “The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown),” the haunted hard-rock song that was Green’s finale with Fleetwood Mac.

In the decades since Green left, the Fleetwood Mac lineup has changed regularly, which Fleetwood — sitting for a video conference from the kitchen of his home in Hawaii, wearing a black shirt and Kangol, and aviator glasses — calls “one of the most magical things about the band — the insanity of it.” And even after Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined and Fleetwood Mac became massive stars with the 1977 release of “Rumours,” Fleetwood kept reminding people that the band began with Peter Green.

His latest tribute is Mick Fleetwood and Friends Celebrate the Music of Peter Green and the Early Years of Fleetwood Mac, a concert that took place at the London Palladium on Feb. 25, 2020; the concert will stream at nugs.net starting April 24, followed the next week by Blu-ray, CD and LP releases. The guest performers include Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, Pete Townshend of the Who, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, Noel Gallagher of Oasis, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, Kirk Hammett of Metallica and David Gilmour of Pink Floyd.

When I ask Fleetwood how long it took him to organize the concert, he replies, only half-jokingly, “most of my adult life, since Peter left the band.” For decades, he’s carried the responsibility of keeping Green’s name alive.

Tribute concert for Fleetwood Mac's Peter Green premiering April 24

A film documenting the star-studded London tribute concert that Mick Fleetwood organized last year celebrating Fleetwood Mac's early work and the group's original leader, singer/guitarist Peter Green, will premiere April 24 as an on-demand event that will be streamed on nugs.net.

Tickets for the flick, titled Mick Fleetwood & Friends Celebrate the Music of Peter Green and the Early Years of Fleetwood Mac, go on sale to the general public starting at 3 p.m. ET on the 24th, while Citi card members can access tickets now. The event will be streamed in HD and the 4K video format and will be available for viewing for five days.

Mick Fleetwood & Friends will then be released in multiple audio and video formats and configurations on April 30, including a box set featuring the concert on Blu-ray, two CDs and four vinyl LPs, and a 44-page hardbound book offering sleeve notes, photos and more.

As previously reported, the concert, which was held February 25, 2020, at the London Palladium, featured Fleetwood playing drums alongside a house band of respected musicians, with special appearances by a jaw-dropping lineup of guest artists. Among them were Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, The Who's Pete Townshend, Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, ex-Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman, Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett, Oasis' Noel Gallagher, and U.K. blues great John Mayall.

A number of other current and former Fleetwood Mac members also performed, including Christine McVie, Crowded House's Neil Finn, and founding guitarist Jeremy Spencer.

The show's house band included Who touring drummer Zak Starkey, and Jonny Lang and ex-Fleetwood Mac member Rick Vito on guitar.

Green didn't attend the event and, sadly, passed away in July 2020 at age 73.

Visit MickFleetwoodandFriends.com for more details.

Tribute: Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie

Women’s History Month Tribute: Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie

by Rozzi

When I was in seventh grade, Christine McVie was like a friend, probably because I had so few. It was one of those cruel middle school mysteries: I left sixth grade popular, the first girl in class to wear eyeliner, but when I returned from summer vacation, everything had changed. As I learned of loneliness, music took on a new role. My mother must have given me the CD—Rumours with a “u”—the spelling of it alone excited me. I used to play it every morning before school, while my cat Mr. Moon walked between my legs. A late bloomer, my hands were still childlike; I can see them in front of me now, red nail polish chipped at the edges, pulling the CD out of the sleeve and placing it in my parent’s old boombox. At first, I listened to Fleetwood Mac because no one else in my class did and, while I also secretly knew the words to the entire Christina Aguilera album, I preferred the feeling of rejecting whatever it was that everyone else accepted. But even then, I knew the band was magic. 

“Songbird” was the first song I learned. I used to sing it to myself in my bedroom mirror with a hairbrush in my hand. On a family trip to Colorado, I hung back on hikes and played it on repeat in my head while imagining myself in a romantic montage with a boy from middle school. That was my first taste of Christine’s romanticism, and perhaps my first taste of romanticism at all. “I wish you all the love in the world, but most of all I wish it from myself” is a lyric so deeply loving that I recently begged my brother to let me sing that song at his wedding. But the friendliness of Christine’s vocal allowed 12-year-old me to connect to it just as powerfully.

Christine is melodically brilliant (can anyone not readily recall the tune to “Everywhere”?) and her voice is rich and soulful, with an expert stability, and pervasive sexiness. But what I love most about her is her accessibility, her willingness to make songs for everyone. If Stevie Nicks is a spiritual deep thinker like John Lennon, then Christine McVie is a Paul McCartney-like optimist. She has a pulsing excitement for the moment she’s in, a belief in miracles, and she appears to fall in lust constantly. 

As a kid, this mirrored my passionate hope for the future, but as a young woman, it is her bravery that inspires me most. Sometimes I imagine her sitting down at the piano to play with her band (that included her bass player husband) “You Make Loving Fun,” a tune about her illicit affair with the group’s lighting director. When I write lyrics, my motto is if I’m embarrassed to put it in the song, I’m on the right track. In this pursuit, Christine is a guiding light—her loyalty to her art, and her paramount love for music, showing me the way.

My best friend and I went to see Fleetwood Mac at the Forum [in L.A.] a few years ago. Our seats were wedged into the stage right corner, and we spent the better half of the night pacing back and forth to the sections with better views until the security guards got wise to our plan. The band played hit after hit, but I went home thinking about Christine’s joy. And maybe that’s what first drew me to her as a lonely seventh grader: We shared a soulmate. For all her love songs, music appears to be the love of her life, at least she sings like it is. I didn’t know it then, but at 12 years old I was in the process of making the same lifelong commitment.

As I write this, “Say You Love Me” comes on and I hear it as if it’s brand new: the restrained confidence of her vocal, the enthusiastic piano at her fingertips, and the joyful honesty of her lyrics. Once again, I feel as if I’m with an old friend, pulled to the moment I’m in, and head over heels in love.

Rozzi is an L.A.-based singer/songwriter with new music to come in 2021.

Spin Magazine

Photo: Davidson/Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Fleetwood Mac "LIVE" Red Vinyl Set For Release

 

Barnes and Noble have an exclusive release available for pre-order. Release date is July 16, 2021. Doesn't indicate whether 1LP or 2.

PRE-ORDER

MICK FLEETWOOD “I would love the elements that are not healed to be healed”

Mick Fleetwood Open to Reunion With Lindsey Buckingham, Imagines Fleetwood Mac Farewell Tour

“Fleetwood Mac is such a strange story,” says the drummer. “I would love the elements that are not healed to be healed”

By ANDY GREENE
Rollingstone

With the concert industry shut down for the foreseeable future and his bandmates spread to various spots around the planet, Mick Fleetwood truly doesn’t know what the future holds for Fleetwood Mac. But that hasn’t stopped the drummer from looking ahead and sketching out a possible farewell tour in his mind.

“I’m very aware that we’ve never played that card,” he tells Rolling Stone on the phone from his Hawaii home. “I think the vision for me, and I think it would be hugely appropriate, is that we actually say ‘this is goodbye’ and go out and actually do that. That has always been my vision and I’m a flatly confident that we can do that. We owe it to the fans.”

The comments appear to contradict Christine McVie’s recent statements to the BBC where she said that bassist John McVie was “a little bit frail” and no longer had “the heart for it.” She also said, “If we do it, it’ll be without John and without Stevie [Nicks], I think…I’m getting a bit old for it now. I don’t know if I can get myself back into it.”

McVie later walked back the comments, and Fleetwood says they shouldn’t be taken literally. “I think she got out of bed on the wrong side that day,” he says with a laugh. “She meant to say, ‘We’ve done so much. I don’t know whether or not we can keep going.’ Anything other than that, she can speak for herself. But I can assure you we are alive and well. And she has no regrets. She just got caught up in whatever she was saying and she also felt she had been misunderstood.”

Christine McVie also said that John McVie was focused largely on sailing the world on his boat, but Fleetwood says that’s never once stopped him from participating in band activities. “He’s always more interested in going sailing until you put it in front of his face,” he says. “He’s so not caught up in the drama of the workings of the band. That has always been my world. I’ve never not known John to answer the call and say, ‘Show me the gig and I’ll plug my bass in.'”

There hasn’t been any reason for McVie to plug his bass in since Fleetwood Mac ended their last world tour in November 2019. It was their first tour since parting ways with Lindsey Buckingham and bringing in Neil Finn of Crowded House and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers to fill the void. “It was a massive, really lovely world tour that was beyond successful in every way,” says Fleetwood. “And a happy tour.”

They initially planned on booking about eight stadium shows with other big artists the following year, but the pandemic made that impossible. Last July, Fleetwood Mac founding guitarist Peter Green died just months after Fleetwood staged a massive tribute concert in his honor at London’s Palladium.

It was a devastating blow to Fleetwood, but it also caused him to get back in touch with Buckingham after two years of bitter estrangement. “I’ve really enjoyed being re-connected with Lindsey, which has been gracious and open,” says Fleetwood. “And both of us have been beautifully honest about who we are and how we got to where we were.”

The reconciliation leads to an obvious question: Might Buckingham come back into Fleetwood Mac for the farewell tour that Fleetwood is plotting out in his mind? “Strange things can happen,” says Fleetwood. “I look at Fleetwood Mac as a huge family. Everyone plays an important role in our history, even someone like [early Seventies] guitarist Bob Welch, who was huge and sometimes gets forgotten. Lindsey’s position in Fleetwood Mac will, for obvious reasons, never been forgotten, as it should never be forgotten.”

“My vision of things happening in the future is really far-reaching,” he continues. “Would I love to think that [reunion] could happen? Yeah. I’d love to think that all of us could be healed, and also respect the people who are in the band, Neil Finn and Michael Campbell.”

The major impediment to a reunion with Buckingham is his relationship with Stevie Nicks, which had been strained for decades and finally reached a breaking point in early 2018. No reunion tour can proceed without the two of them arriving at some sort of detente. “I can’t speak for the dynamic with Stevie and him,” says Fleetwood. “I don’t even need to protect it. It’s so known that they’re chalk and cheese in so many ways, and yet not.”

For now, Fleetwood is just happy he’s back on speaking terms with Buckingham. “I know for a fact that I intend to make music and play again with Lindsey,” he says. “I would love that. It doesn’t have to be in Fleetwood Mac. And Fleetwood Mac is such a strange story. All the players in the play are able to talk and speak for themselves. Somehow, I would love the elements that are not healed to be healed. I love the fantasy that we could cross that bridge and everyone could leave with creative, holistic energy, and everyone could be healed with grace and dignity.”