REVIEW: Lindsey Buckingham Live in Chicago - Gift of Screws Tour

Lindsey Buckingham Live in Chicago October 2, 2008
by Vern Hester

Windy City Times

When Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac in 1974, nobody could expect much. Doe-eyed, fresh-faced and hippiefied Buckingham/Nicks had already released an album that went nowhere while the Mac—a British blues band— was seemingly on its last legs. The success of Nicks' witchy Rhiannon caught everyone by surprise but the sleeper 1975 smash Fleetwood Mac prepared no one for the monster 1977 album Rumours. The rest is history ( including breakups, diva attitudes, drugs, divorce, infidelities, booze, jealousy, and an unbroken string of sellout tours and multi-platinum albums ) , but a distinct history nonetheless. In retrospect, no one has had the legs that the Mac has had, and now that Nicks' charm has curdled into schtick it's as plain as day how much Buckingham brought to the table of L.A. rock. After one listen to ‘79's Tusk or his out-there rave-ups on ‘80's Live, it was obvious that the man was a demented wizard or possessed by aliens from another galaxy ... or both.

Part ferocious bluesman, part nutty professor and part post-summer Beach Boy, Buckingham was the wild card that gave the Mac its idyosyncratic flavor and bite. While Nicks kept a higher profile, Buckingham—the other dominant personality in the band and, by far, the most creative—released solo albums of such wayward personality and oddball charisma that he seemed at times, well, nutty. Granted, Go Insane had the clicking heart of Oz's tin man, but Buckingham's studio tinkering took years and could only be called obsessive. ( If the idea of a grown man, albeit a very rich one, tapping out the percussion for a song with two pencils on a box of Kleenex on his bathroom floor with a $20,000 mircrophone dosen't strike you as “obsessive,” I don't know what will. ) As a result, there's a certain closed-in quality on his projects that feels airtight and joyless. A decade of happy matrimony and a brood of his own kids seem to have put some rosiness back in his cheeks and opened up his music by degrees.

His new Gift of Screws, like his four previous solo efforts, is bullish on personality, shot through with a punchy eccentricity, but surprisingly quirk free and emotionally direct. The tone of Screws is a regret-free wistfulness that sounds almost nostalgic. The opener, Great Day, is equal parts syncopated percussion and clenched vocals spiked with jagged guitar blasts. Love Runs Deeper and Gift of Screws have an even bigger assault—there's no way that the Mac could contain this fury. The obvious gem here is Did You Miss Me?—a lilting valentine of such fragmented aching that it sounds like the oncoming of autumn.

Buckingham's packed Oct. 2 show at House of Blues put Screws and all of his music in a different context. Without the safe confines of a cushy studio, Trouble, Did You Miss Me? and Big Love were more plaintive and earthbound. Mac staples Never Going Back Again and World Turning got reworked and turned on their heads—the latter even flipped backwards and almost unrecognizable. A positively fierce Tusk shook the rafters in a way that the Mac never could muster but I'm So Afraid tipped the show in another direction. Buckingham sank into it with a steady conviction, but where the Live version was a weighed-down snarling affair of shrieking pain and fury, his guitar solo here was nimble, fleet and even transcendent. Shorn of its danger and pain, he turned it into something almost hallucinatory and light.

If Buckingham can live through the uber-fame of the Mac's ongoing existence, live a new life and do it without the bitterness and artistic slop that tends to cling to rock megastars, then I guess there's hope for all of us.

REVIEW: Lindsey Buckingham goes beyond the big Mac

Buckingham goes beyond the big Mac
BRAD WHEELER

Globe and Mail
October 8, 2008

"It's often better to be in chains than to be free." - Franz Kafka

"Chain, keep us together" - Stevie Nicks

'Probably I would never make Fleetwood Mac albums at all," says Lindsey Buckingham, before adopting an Al Pacino Godfather III rasp, "but it's like 'You're dragging me back into it.' " The Go Your Own Way singer, in town for a concert last night in Hamilton and a sold-out one this evening at The Music Hall, is speaking of the push and pull between his dual careers as a solo artist and the Fleetwood Mac front man. Or maybe that's not what he's referring to. Because as Buckingham points out, not in any prickly way mind you, he's being asked a good number of Fleetwood Mac questions. "It's okay, though" he says, "you fall back on what you know."

Speaking to the man with regard to his latest solo album, Gift of Screws, it's hard not to think about the band that still occupies a fair bit of his time. Fleetwood Mac, a complicated group of Brit bluesers and So-Cal pop-rockers (including Buckingham's scarf-wearing former lover Stevie Nicks) are regrouping for the first time since 2004, with rehearsals likely to begin early next year for a spring go-round. "We'll see how that goes," Buckingham shrugs, "and we'll probably make another album at some point."

And yes, a few songs from Gift of Screws, unlike 2006's acoustic Under the Skin, have that familiar bouncy Mac style. In fact, three of them (the bluesy Wait for You, The Right Place to Fade and the title track) originate from recording sessions with group namesakes Mick Fleetwood and John McVie in the 1990s. Other material from those sessions ended up on Fleetwood Mac's last album, 2003's Say You Will.

But in addition to the familiar sound of the songs, the lyrics often address the confusing rock-star life that Buckingham led while in a band he first left in 1987. The trickling acoustic Bel Air Rain has the candid reflection, "In my younger days, I was mistaken for a whore/ I guess you can say I lived in shame."

Buckingham, greying but fighting-weight thin at the age of 59, protests (a little bit) that the songs are just generally about success and the pressure to repeat it, but he does admits that Bel Air Rain refers to the stressed post-Rumours period of the late 1970s and 1980s. "They want to put a name brand on you and a set of labels," he explains, referring to record companies. "They want you to adhere to that, and not to go outside of that. That was very clear to me."

Buckingham's artistic reaction to the pressure - we won't go into the pharmaceutical response - was to make Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, an extravagant epic from 1979 that was in many ways a Buckingham solo album. "There were so many things that were exciting me," he says, perking up. "Let's take some risks, let's challenge people." (And, let's rent Dodger Stadium and hire the University of Southern California marching band to play on the title track.) After Tusk, Buckingham eventually began living two musical lives: one, that of the rock icon, for Fleetwood Mac projects; the other, the idiosyncratic cult hero, for his more "esoteric" solo albums. The "big machine" allows for the "little machine" to plug along. "You go through all these things in order to try and walk the line that you want to walk," he says. "With my solo albums, I'm not doing it for somebody else's expectations. You have no expectations of what's going to happen with it, beyond turning it in."

Buckingham is fine with the intermittent tugs from his loose Fleetwood Mac shackles. "It's good," he says, enthusiastically enough. "It's nice to know that that's there." And while he allows that the band members are miles apart in so many conflicting ways, there's something to be said for occasional incompatibility. "There's synergy in diversity."

That kind of mature realization is reflected in Gift of Screws, an album sounding a little like Fleetwood Mac, but from a man wiser for the time without the band. "It's about anybody who ever has to go through that level of success," he says, referring again to Bel Air Rain, "and still try to come out knowing who you are."

REVIEW: Lindsey Buckingham Live in Toronto "Music Hall turns into Buckingham Palace"

Music Hall turns into Buckingham Palace
By JANE STEVENSON
Toronto Sun

Lindsey Buckingham's career is two halves of the same whole.

There's the singer-songwriter-guitarist with the more "commercial venture," as he called legendary rock band Fleetwood Mac last night during a solo show at The Music Hall.

And then there's his more "esoteric, left side of the palette" solo career -- again his words -- whose discography was most recently expanded by the mid-September release of the rock-oriented Gift of Screws, which actually boasts a catchy first single in the form of Did You Miss Me which was included in his set list.

The 59-year-old guitar virtuoso managed to show off both sides of his impressive 35-year-plus career in equal and crowd pleasing measure during a lively two-hour show which saw him backed by a crack three piece of bass-keyboards-guitar (Brett Tuttle), guitar (Neale Heywood) and drums (Alfredo Reyes). Opening with the new songs, Great Day and Love Runs Deeper, Buckingham hit his stride vocally with the older solo tracks, Trouble, and Go Insane, but it was the Fleetwood Mac songs, Tusk (complete with blue strobe lights) and I Know I'm Not Wrong, that really kicked the show up another notch and standing ovation after standing ovation started to come his way.

The singer-guitarist was also an engaging solo performer during a standout acoustic set made up of the beautiful Never Going Back Again, the dramatic Big Love and the intense Shut Us Down.

Often Buckingham stood with his head back, his eyes closed and his mouth wide open while he played, seemingly lost in his own world while he freely exposed his emotions.

As Tuttle described him: "He's a champion of music and a champion of songs."

And when he talked about the tumultuous time in his life that he wrote Big Love, just before he left Fleetwood Mac for a time in the '80s "to get my sanity back," he admitted the lyrics of "looking out for love," have now been put firmly in the past after meeting his wife eleven years ago with whom he now has three kids.

The biggest applause often came for Fleetwood Mac songs like World Turning -- which featured one of the strangest drum solos I've ever seen by the nonetheless talented Reyes -- Come (not a great song but completely elevated by Buckingham's awesome playing), I'm So Afraid, Go Your Own Way and Second Hand News, the last two which saw people finally streaming to the front of the stage to clap and sing along and even touch Buckingham's guitar strings.

And when Buckingham did his long band introductions, it was clear he had a genuine affection for the trio, particularly Heywood who he's known since his "crazy Malibu days."

"I'm having flashbacks of Gary Busey and Nick Nolte -- it's a strange crowd there," joked the slim and youthful looking Buckingham, dressed in a black leather jacket, black shirt, jeans, and black cowboy boots.

LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM
The Music Hall
October 8, 2008
Sun Rating: 4 out of 5

Bob and Tom Interview

LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM
ON THE BOB AND TOM SHOW
OCTOBER 6, 2008

- 45 MINUTE INTERVIEW

- TWO LIVE TUNES PLAYED

"DID YOU MISS ME" AND "BIG LOVE"

Buckingham Nicks "The Re-Issue Issue. Speaking with Lindsey Buckingham

Old album reissued?
By JANE STEVENSON
Toronto Sun

Anyone who has followed the long musical and personal saga of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks knows that they made an excellent 1973 album, Buckingham Nicks, which was a commercial failure but has since regained cult status.

It was also re-issued in 1976 when the two hit it big after they joined Fleetwood Mac. However, it's never been released on CD, something Buckingham thinks could happen in the next couple of years with a possible tour behind it for the one-time lovers.

"If it is going to happen it would probably happen in the next two, three years," Buckingham said.

"It's sort of a symptom of the fact that the band spends long periods of time apart, that Stevie and I don't talk a lot, that people who are 'the handlers' tend to think that there will be an optimum time to do that that will coincide with a marketing plan."

Does Buckingham, now married with three kids, mean a tour with Nicks to support its CD release?

"That could certainly happen, that would be fun," said Buckingham, currently on his own solo tour and beginning rehearsals in January for a Fleetwood Mac tour.

"Do we have enough material? Yes, we do. It would be its own hook, the two of us up there, it would be this complete circular thing, bringing us back to where we were in 1974, which has a poetry all its own.

"But again, the people who think in terms of marketing are thinking, 'Okay, but we have to do it at a time when we can remaster it and bonus tracks and all of this kind of stuff.' I would just re-release it myself because it is what it is!"

Lindsey Buckingham says the Rumours hitmakers will regroup and tour in 2009

Mac is back
By JANE STEVENSON, SUN MEDIA
Toronto Sun
The Rumours -- pun intended -- are true: The Mac Attack is coming back next year.

Guitarist-singer-songwriter Lindsey Buckingham said that legendary rock group Fleetwood Mac -- with remaining members singer Stevie Nicks, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie -- will launch a tour in 2009.

"Fleetwood Mac is going to start doing something, rehearsals for some touring, in January, (and) we will probably be out in spring," said Buckingham, 59, in Toronto this week to promote his latest solo record, Gift of Screws (whose title track was inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem), and play a solo show at the Music Hall tonight after last night's gig at Hamilton Place.

'BETTER EXPERIENCE'

"It'll be the four of us and a couple of other additional backup musicians. No one of note."

That means you Sheryl Crow (see sidebar).

Buckingham says a new Fleetwood Mac album would come later -- hopefully. "We're talking about an album but we didn't want to go in cold," he said. "It's been awhile. And in my mind, the mantra really needs to be, 'Let's put any particular musical agenda second to the agenda of trying to enjoy each other as people.'

"And I've known Stevie since I was 16 and we still have some things to work out, and I think that that's the important thing at this point, otherwise, nothing's going to happen. We won't make it to the album otherwise. Let's acknowledge each other's feelings, let's be adults for a change, if that's possible. It may not be, we'll see.

"So if we go in with that attitude and we use the touring as a kind of proving ground and hang time, then I think it'll make an album after that a much better experience."

Strangely enough, Buckingham originally turned in an album named Gift of Screws back in 2001-02 but the record label asked him if they could use most of it for a new Fleetwood Mac album, which turned out to be 2003's Say You Will (it followed the group's last tour -- both sans keyboardist Christine McVie).

"It has been a bit of a pattern of sort of re-grouping and getting ready to do solo work in one form or another and have Fleetwood Mac sort of intervene. That's happened a few times," Buckingham said. "But you know if you're in the band, you gotta be part of the band."

Buckingham sounds positively easy-going within the dynamic of the famously fractious group -- whose various relationship breakups were documented on their landmark 1977 album, Rumours.

'HEALTHY TROUBLEMAKER'

"I'm working on it. I haven't always been," he said. "I've had very definite ideas which to some degree have been, I wouldn't say a thorn in the side, but I've been the healthy troublemaker who keeps things from being too complacent. That would be the way I would see it. Others might categorize it differently."

This time, however, Buckingham saw the rock-oriented Gift of Screws -- the followup to the more acoustic-based 2006 effort, Under the Skin -- through to its fruition with some lyric-writing help from his wife Kristen (Do You Miss Me, Love Runs Deeper) and 10-year-old son, Will (Great Day). The couple also has two daughters, eight-year-old Leelee, and four-year-old Stella.

Still, Fleetwood drums on three tracks and McVie plays bass on two from those much earlier recording sessions.

"This is a completion of a goal which was very specific that I had. And I said to the band, 'Please don't come knocking on my door for at least three years, because what I want to do is put out two albums and tour around both of them.'"