REVIEW Lindsey Buckingham's First Live Solo Show - The Wiltern

LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM

The Wiltern Theatre

Los Angeles

CHRIS MORRIS 

Billboard Magazine March 20, 1993

FLEETWOOD MAC'S onetime axe-slinger/singer /songsmith enchanted an adoring crowd of fans at his first-ever solo show in L.A. proper on Feb. 22. 

Forging a live style that dramatically re-created the opulent studio architecture of his records, Buckingham alternated between solo performances of breathtaking intimacy and full-blown band numbers that

showed off the well-drilled skills of his nine backup musicians.

Performing with always apparent delight, the highly animated Buckingham received a local hero's welcome. He kicked off the evening with richly detailed acoustic versions of "Big Love," the last major hit he penned for his former group, and "Go Insane," the title track from his 1984 solo album. Proclaiming his intention to "reclaim some sense of creativity for myself," he then introduced his truly startling group.

Featuring five guitarists, three percussionists, and six singing voices, the tentet was adept at re-creating the densely layered vocal and instrumental overdubs that have made works like last year's Reprise release, "Out Of The Cradle," such engrossing rococo pleasures.

Buckingham led the group through its stormy paces on memorable Mac oldies like "The Chain" and "Tusk" and solo album numbers such as "Trouble" and "You Do Or You Don't." The concert hit a raging midshow peak with "I'm So Afraid," in which Buckingham constructed one of his few extended solos with near-mathematical precision and heart-halting emotion. 

After this show-stopping display, Buckingham dropped the energy level again with a couple of solo turns, then shifted into high gear again (with the remark, "All these guitars -give me a break! "), rampaging through "Doing What I Can," "This Is The Time" (in which all five guitarists traded furious fours) and the inevitable set-closer "Go Your Own Way."

Buckingham obliged the crowd with a pair of encores that included a spirited "Holiday Road" and a wrenching solo "Soul Drifter." No doubt about it: One of America's best-known studio hermits has acquired the band and the on-stage attitude to deliver his eccentric, ornate pop music totally live. Buckingham's show is one of the best on the boards at the moment.

Lindsey Buckingham's first solo National Tour

Buckingham's Out Of The Cradle Again

Lines Up Dates With 10 -Piece Tour Band

BY CHRIS MORRIS

Billboard March 13, 1993

LOS ANGELES - Warner Bros. is optimistic that a tour by singer/guitarist Lindsey Buckingham's 10-piece band will ignite fresh sales of Buckingham's much-lauded 1992 Reprise album "Out Of The Cradle." The group, which performed two shows at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., in December and a concert at the Wiltern Theatre here last month, launches the monthlong first leg of a national tour of clubs and medium-sized halls Monday (8) in Solana Beach, Calif. 

On Tuesday (9), the Buckingham band will be showcased on the half-hour VH1 show "Center Stage "; an hourlong version of the broadcast, co-produced by BUCKINGHAM by the cable network and PBS and taped live at WTI'W -TV in Chicago will be aired on the public broadcasting network later this spring. 

Westwood One aired 90 minutes culled from the group's Dec. 10 and 11 Coach House performances (Buckingham's first-ever live solo shows) on its Feb. 27 "Superstar Concert Series" broadcast.  Although two singles from "Out Of The Cradle" failed to chart last year, the company will release a third, "Don't Look Down," within the month to coincide with the tour. Says Buckingham of the tour, "Best case scenario is that we might pump life into the record, and this is basically what [Warner president] Lenny [Waronker] and Warner Bros. would like to do. I think it's to their credit that they're even willing to do that at this point because it would be just as easy for them to say, 'Yeah, go out and do the [tour] leg, and then make another album.' " While "Out Of The Cradle" won wide favor in critical circles it came in 10th in BAM's poll of national critics and 33rd in the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop Poll the eccentric pop album stalled commercially following its release last June. 

It spent only nine weeks on The Billboard 200, peaking at No. 128 in August. The first two singles, "Countdown" and "Soul Drifter," failed to hit the Hot 100 Singles chart; the track "Wrong" logged seven weeks on the Album Rock Tracks chart, peaking at No. 23. 

Buckingham had enjoyed some solo success in the early '80s when he was still a member of Fleetwood Mac. His 1981 Asylum album "Law And Order" hit No. 32 and spawned a top 10 single, "Trouble "; that album's 1984 successor, "Go Insane," on Elektra, rose to No. 45.

But Buckingham admits that his past association with Fleetwood Mac may not have done any good for his own distinctly different brand of music: "On the one hand, the name is gonna get your foot in the door, but maybe it's the wrong foot."

Buckingham says that the promotion of "Out Of The Cradle" focused on "normal publicity stuff ... and then we ended up going out for like five or six weeks and doing what I call radio ass-kissing."

Buckingham didn't begin to audition band members until late last summer. He says, "I didn't really expect that the thing would take as long to put together as it did. There was sort of a lag time, which obviously didn't work to our advantage, but I guess better late than never."

The 11-piece touring unit, including Buckingham, which features five guitarists and six singing voices, was designed to parallel the detailed, heavily overdubbed sound of Buckingham's albums that the studio-obsessive musician has essentially recorded by himself. 

He says, "[Rather than] having to paraphrase that [sound] down to the point where that had very little relation to what the recorded idea was, I wanted to get into a position where you had the flexibility to get into at least some level of nuance [on stage] ... It's a level of orchestration that was never possible in Fleetwood Mac."

Waronker says, "He's actually got a guitar orchestra up there, which is something he's talked about for as long as I've known him -maybe not completely seriously because I'm not sure he felt he could do that."

He adds, "The idea of taking his guitar parts and orchestrating them, giving each guitar player a part, really makes it special, and it gives you a little bit more insight into the record, too."

Buckingham is sticking to clubs and theaters during the first leg of his tour because "we need to reintroduce ourselves out there. I'm a little disenchanted with the larger places. I'm kind of interested in getting close, making as much contact as possible."

He says that later dates on the tour will be booked into "slightly larger places."

Even if the tour fails to fire sales for "Out Of The Cradle," Buckingham says his experience with his big band may bring about a change in his record-making style.

Lindsey Buckingham's Out Of The Cradle is a wildly impressive coming-out party

Lindsey Buckingham: Post-Mac Attack

The wayward Fleetwood singer continues on – solo

BY DAVID WILD

Rollingstone - Published June 25, 1992

I'm not trying to compete with Kris Kross now, just like I didn’t try to compete with Christopher Cross in the old days.”

Lindsey Buckingham – the pop genius and sonic architect behind Fleetwood Mac‘s string of platinum successes in the Seventies and Eighties – is sitting under a velvet Elvis portrait in his home studio in the lovely hills of Bel Air, California. Buckingham has spent a substantial portion of the last four years in this room. Now, however, he’s finally on the verge of sharing with the public some of the music that he and Richard Dashut, his coproducer and writing partner, have been creating here, and he’s considering the question of how popular his eccentric brand of melodic pop will be these days.

“I guess it’s obvious that making this album hasn’t been an especially speedy process,” says the master of the understatement. “But I had to let a lot of emotional dust settle. People might think I’ve been off on some island getting my ya-yas out. The truth is, I’ve basically been here twelve hours a day. I’ve been goofing off only in the most productive sense.”

Asked if he’s grown sick of the windowless room, Buckingham pauses as if he hasn’t considered the issue before. “Well, I’m not really sick of it,” he says finally. “But I haven’t come inside here for a while, and I’m not sure why. A couple of weeks ago, I opened the door and just looked in. And I couldn’t relate to having spent the amount of time I did in here. This room became more my reality than the rest of the house. At times the whole thing seems like a weird dream to me.”

Buckingham pauses again and looks around the room. “You know,” he adds, “actually, I guess I am pretty damn sick of this place.”

Happily, all of Buckingham’s work has paid off. Out of the Cradle – his first release since he decided to go his own way and leave the Big Mac shortly after the release of 1987’s album Tango in the Night – is a wildly impressive coming-out party for the forty-two-year-old Buckingham. A veritable one-man show, the album is an artfully crafted song cycle whose romantic lushness is effectively balanced by a healthy dose of ripping guitar. More ambitious than the two solo albums he squeezed in between Mac projects – 1981’s Law and Order and 1984’s Go Insane – Out of the Cradle represents Buckingham’s finest work since 1979’s Tusk, the album that established a creative high-water mark for his former group. That album – the controversial follow-up to 1977’s Rumours, one of the best-selling records of all time – was also, according to Buckingham, the beginning of the end for him and Fleetwood Mac.

Buckingham and his then creative and romantic partner, Stevie Nicks, joined Fleetwood Mac in late 1974. At the time, Buckingham was already a “complete studio rat.” He first caught the bug when he set up a recording room at his father’s coffee plant, in Daly City, California, after dropping out of college in the early Seventies. Around the same time, he and Nicks started playing together with a Bay Area group called Fritz. They moved to Los Angeles in 1973, recording an album as Buckingham-Nicks the next year. “Our record company had no idea what to do with us,” says Buckingham. “They said something about wanting us to be the new Jim Stafford, and they wanted us to play steakhouses.” Opportunity knocked when Mick Fleetwood went to check out an L.A. studio and producer Keith Olsen played a track from the record he’d done with Buckingham-Nicks as a demonstration. Impressed, Fleetwood asked the pair to join his band a week later. It would prove to be a savvy decision. The reconstituted Mac – with Buckingham and Nicks joining bassist John McVie; his then wife, keyboardist and vocalist Christine McVie; and Fleetwood – debuted with 1975’s Fleetwood Mac, a multiplatinum smash that sold nearly 6 million copies worldwide, followed by the classic Rumours two years later.

Yet Buckingham says it was never an easy fit – though at first the tensions within the band fueled the music. “Fleetwood Mac was one big lesson in adaptation for me,” says Buckingham. “There were five very different personalities, and I suppose that made it great for a while. Obviously, having two couples – and soon enough, ex-couples – added a lot more tension and some great subject matter to the mix. But the problems really kicked in when you started adding five managers and five lawyers to the equation. Once Stevie was singled out and selected as the star of the band, the machinery of the rock business clicked in, and things really got stupid. By the time of Tango, you could hardly fit all these people in one room for a band meeting. It was a heartbreaking thing to watch, until it became almost comical.”

Musically, however, things just got better and better for Buckingham until the release of Tusk, an under-appreciated pop epic that met with a mixed response commercially, selling only 2 million copies. “It was a bizarre left turn,” Buckingham says. “But I knew if we made Rumours II that we’d have to make Rumours III and Rumours IV. We’d sold 14 million copies of Rumours [21 million worldwide], so we were in that mega-Michael Jackson area, and that’s a dangerous place to be. There was a big backlash. It wasn’t like the people around me at the time were saying, ‘Hey, Lindsey, let’s keep going in that interesting direction where we sell a lot less records than we used to.’ I really had the wind taken out of my sails, and I felt set adrift for a while.”

In 1982 the band returned to the top of the charts with the more user-friendly Mirage, but for Buckingham the thrill was gone. “It became more and more this big machine that had to have hits to keep working,” he says. “There was no room to grow. After Tusk, it was basically all disappointment for me. It became a soap opera.”

Partly in an attempt to give Fleetwood Mac a more fitting swan song, Buckingham and Dashut returned to help whip Tango in the Night into shape. In the end, that record became the group’s biggest album since Rumours, with sales of 8 million. Still, the experience was hardly an easy one. “It was a mess,” he says. “Whatever was going on in people’s personal lives, I can’t really say. I was never the one up all night creating shenanigans and high jinks anyway – I was the one who went up to my room to work on songs. But for whatever reasons, there was no camaraderie left. Just getting people in the same room to create more semblance of a group became a huge hassle. Especially with Stevie, who was probably around for something like ten days for that whole record.”

Buckingham’s split with the band came when he decided he couldn’t tour to support the album. “They’d smoothed things over and coerced me, and I’d kind of agreed to go,” he says. “Then I realized I just couldn’t do it. I called another meeting, and they were shocked and hurt. I knew they wouldn’t leave it at that, so basically you could say I was let go.”

The group added two new members, Billy Burnette and Rick Vito, in an attempt to fill the void left by Buckingham’s departure. Diplomatically, Buckingham says only that Behind the Mask – the 1990 record the group made without him – was “not an album I can say I took to heart.” Buckingham did, however, take to heart some of the slights meted out by Fleetwood in his 1990 tell-all tome, Fleetwood. “I didn’t read the whole book,” Buckingham says, “but I did skim it, and there were a lot of . . . untruths, shall we say. Mick was basically trying to underplay my contribution, but the thing that really upset me is the incident he describes of the night I left the band. He had this thing in there about me slapping Stevie. I mean, she probably deserved to be slapped. But it never happened that way. I don’t know what Mick was talking about.”

“Wrong,” one of the tracks on Out of the Cradle, was inspired in part by Buckingham’s reaction to Fleetwood. The rest of the album reflects Buckingham’s experiences with the group in a much more vague and positive manner. “There’s no sense in my hiding from the association,” he says. “I feel like fifteen years with Fleetwood Mac was like working on my thesis, doing research for some kind of paper. And I wanted to make an album that sort of put it all in a real healthy perspective with maybe a little more maturity in there somewhere. Because even though I feel younger than I did ten years ago, the fact is, I’m not eighteen and there’s no point in pretending I am.”

Buckingham decided to bury the hatchet with his former band mates and made a cameo appearance onstage at the end of Fleetwood Mac’s last concert in 1990. More recently, he agreed to work with the group on some new tracks for an upcoming box set, if time permits. “Going up onstage with them one more time wasn’t any sort of nail in the coffin for me emotionally,” he says, “because I already felt pretty detached. Still, the minute I saw Mick, the chemistry was still there, and that was pretty much the case with everyone. It was a gas.” As for the new songs, Buckingham says: “There’s no reason for me not to do it. I’d have to feel a lot of animosity toward those people not to work with them, and I don’t feel that way.

“I left Fleetwood Mac to make myself happy,” says Buckingham, “and fortunately it worked. That’s why I spent all this time in the garage – trying to make something that made me happy.” And though Buckingham says that “so much in my life is work right now,” he admits to having left the studio occasionally to spend time with longtime girlfriend Cheri Caspari, whom he met while making Go Insane.

Still, Buckingham says, he’s more than willing to leave his home long enough to support Out of the Cradle by hitting the road. “It’ll be great to get out of the studio, get some air and play with some other musicians,” he says. “In the Fleetwood Mac days we got used to the private jets and everything when we toured, but this time I’ll take the public bus if I have to.”

At the same time, Buckingham wouldn’t mind selling some records, too. “My other solo records were made quickly as sidebars to a more mainstream situation,” he says. “That’s not the case anymore, so there’s no point in my being esoteric just for the sake of it now. I’m certainly not interested in making a cheap-shot sellout. This is no longer the sideshow, this is the main event, and I hope there are hits on there somewhere.”

Lenny Waronker, president of Warner Bros. Records, Buckingham’s label, believes there’s no shortage of hits. “It’s the height of great songwriting and record-making,” he says, “and I think the power and quality of the music will bring people in.”

Buckingham named the album Out of the Cradle after the Walt Whitman poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” “The phrase just had a certain resonance,” Buckingham says. “Some people thought there was an unnecessary reference in the title to my leaving Fleetwood Mac, and I suppose you could make an argument for that. You could also argue that there’s something ironic and weird about a guy over forty thinking of himself as leaving any sort of cradle. But that’s the way it feels. And it feels very good.”

RECORDINGS VIEW; A Studio Wizard Takes a Psychic Journey

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: June 21, 1992
The New York Times

In "Street of Dreams," the most anguished song on Lindsey Buckingham's third solo album, "Out of the Cradle," the narrator visits the grave of his father, who has been dead for 10 years, and prays, "Will I ever stop dreaming dreams?" His father's ghost answers, "Never, never, never!" in a vengeful primal scream.

The tormented father-son dialogue, which revolves around the word "lonely," is cast in a dank, echoey setting that suggests Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" transformed into a surreal dirge. As much as any cut on "Out of the Cradle," it demonstrates Mr. Buckingham's brilliance at using the recording studio to create intricate interior dramas in which ambiance and an allusive pop sensibility matter more than the actual words and music.

The most elaborate and ambitious of Mr. Buckingham's solo recordings, "Out of the Cradle" is an album-length suite that describes a young musician's descent from innocence into a dark night of the soul and his eventual re-emergence into a slightly shaky autonomy. Mr. Buckingham plays most of the instruments on the record, which took two years to record in his home studio with his longtime collaborator and songwriting partner, Richard Dashut. His labors have produced one of the most exquisitely textured rock albums ever made.

The style that Mr. Buckingham has refined on "Out of the Cradle" is a personalized extension of the sound he devised for Fleetwood Mac in the late 1970's. The ultimate studio distillation of harmonized California folk-rock, his technique mixes carefully layered guitars and other stringed instruments with voices (both real and electronic) into a scintillating orchestral fabric. His master stroke has always been his ability to buoy these rich, three-dimensional textures with rhythms that have the feel of streamlined Celtic folk dancing. Their brisk, airy bounce keeps the productions from seeming overworked.

As the sonic architect of Fleetwood Mac, Mr. Buckingham used this studio wizardry to create the rock equivalent of a nighttime soap opera, starring the flighty, sexy Stevie Nicks and the stalwart, long-suffering Christine McVie.

The sound Mr. Buckingham has created for his solo albums employs the same ingredients but adapted to suit his passionate yet pinched vocal style. Where Fleetwood Mac's albums were glamorous comedies of manners, "Out of the Cradle" is one long, brooding interior monologue. The psychic journey begins on a note of frightened euphoria ("Don't Look Down"), takes a look at music-industry crassness ("Wrong"), then descends into despair ("All My Sorrows") and borderline insanity ("This Is the Time," "You Do or You Don't," "Street of Dreams"). With "Surrender the Rain" and "Doing What I Can," the narrator begins to recover, and the last songs, "Turn It On" and "Say We'll Meet Again," express an almost giddy affirmation.

Mr. Buckingham writes charming folkish melodies, and his best lyrics make serviceable use of archetypal symbolism, but his manipulation of instrumental atmosphere is what makes "Out of the Cradle" memorable. Mr. Buckingham's psychological changes parallel an exploration of his musical roots.

His influences range from Rodgers and Hammerstein (an acoustic instrumental rendition of "This Nearly Was Mine") to the Kingston Trio (a haunting adaptation of their version of the traditional "All My Sorrows") to rockabilly ballads ("Street of Dreams") to good-timey mid-60's folk ("Say We'll Meet Again"). "Countdown" momentarily echoes the Turtles, while "Soul Drifter," a gorgeous folk-cowboy song, ends with quotes from the Tokens' "Lion Sleeps Tonight."

The sum total of all these fragments, reflections and echoes is an impressionistic, if eccentric, memoir of his own painful loss of innocence and musical evolution.

Review Stevie Nicks Live in Philadelphia, PA June 27, 1983

Eccentric Nicks gives delicate concert

By Ken Tucker Inquirer Popular Music Critic 

Tuesday. June 28, 1983 

Philadelphia Inquirer

Stevie Nicks, who performed at the Spectrum last night (June, 27 1983), is a very unusual pop artist: an intensely mannered and eccentric performer whose mannerisms and eccentricity yield good music. 

Nicks usually performs as part of the band Fleetwood Mac, but she has 'just released her second solo album, "The Wild Heart" (Modern), and her show last night concentrated on material from that new disc. 

For this tour as a headliner, she has assembled a first-rate band consisting of players from other groups, including keyboardist Roy Bittan, from Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band: Benmont Tench, keyboardist from Tom Petty's Heartbreakers, and drummer Liberty DeVitto, the best thing that ever happened to Billy Joel. Together with lead guitarist Waddy Wachtel, this band played a lot of harsh, loud rock 'n' roll that was a nice contrast to Nicks' reedy, delicate voice. 

Nicks' entire style of performance can, in fact, be described as delicate. In her wispy gowns and in the fluttery, flyaway dance steps she executes onstage, Nicks plays up the dreamy aspects of her music. The songs she writes are full of wise, young witches, bold princes and glowering monsters — this is fairytale rock 'n' roll delivered with roiling melodrama. • 

What keeps it all from becoming too coy, however, is Nicks' penchant for creating firm, commanding melodies that bolster her woozy lyrics. At the Spectrum, she gave bright, unsentimental readings of hits such as "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," "Leather and Lace" and the current "Stand Back." In the end, Nicks skittered along the lip of the stage, accepting bouquets and squeezing the hands of gawking admirers, and as always, her apparent sincerity and guilelessness was impressive. 

Preceding Nicks this evening was singer-guitarist Joe Walsh, whose billing on this tour is bigger than an opening act but smaller than co-headliner. 

Walsh is a man in the midst of change: His old group, the Eagles, has disbanded, and so he's testing his solo wings by touring to promote his new album "You Bought It, You Name It" (Full Moon/Warner Bros.). This record is a desultory affair that doesn't begin to hint at the tough-guy good humor and sharp guitar. playing of which Walsh is capable. 

Walsh's performance last night was charming but slight, with one exception - a terrific, extended version of his finest composition, "Life's Been Good," probably the most honest, and certainly the funniest, life-of-a-rock-star saga any musician has recorded.

BILLBOARD Boxscores

Headliner: Stevie Nicks

Opening Act: Joe Walsh

Spectrum, Philadelphia,Pa.

Produced by: East Coast Concerts

Ticket Price: $12.00 & $13.50

Available Tickets: 14,949

Tickets Sold: Sellout

Concert Gross: $189,340

Setlist:

1 Gold Dust Woman

2 Outside The Rain/Dreams

3 Gold And Braid

4 I Need To Know

5 Angel

6 If Anyone Falls

7 Leather And Lace

8 Stand Back

9 Beauty And The Beast

10 Gypsy

11 How Still My Love

12 Stop Draggin' My Heart Around

13 Edge Of Seventeen

14 Rhiannon

Listen to the Concert

A Conversation with Lindsey Buckingham 1981

A Conversation with Lindsey Buckingham 

By SAMUEL GRAHAM

Record World November 28, 1981

LOS ANGELES - Lindsey Buckingham's "Law and Order" (Asylum) is not the first solo album by a member of Fleetwood Mac; Mick Fleetwood's "The Visitor" (RCA) and Stevie Nicks' "Bella Donna" (Modern) were both released earlier this year, while Christine McVie had an album under her maiden name, Christine Perfect, more than ten years ago. But as good as the others are, "Law and Order" is arguably the best of the lot. Sometimes quirky and tongue-in-cheek, sometimes lovely and serious, it is always affecting. What's more, "Law and Order" is genuinely a solo album, as Buckingham handles all the vocal and instrumental work on nearly every tune. In the following conversation, Buckingham discusses both his own and Fleetwood Mac's forthcoming records, among other topics. 

Record World: Your solo album seems almost to have grown out of a hobby, as if you were tinkering in the studio and found you had enough strong tracks to make a whole record. But is it something that was formally planned all along? 

Lindsey Buckingham: I was thinking about it about the time we (Fleetwood Mac) got off the road (late last year). We needed to take time off anyway; we'd been touring and making albums, and touring and making albums and touring, more or less straight for four or five years, or whatever it was. It was all part of a plan, to have the time to do solo albums; I think Stevie (Nicks) knew she wanted to do that, and I did, too. After October ('80), I got the equipment together. I got an inexpensive console, and I took the band's 24-track from the Village Recorder, where it'd been sitting ever since we'd finished "Tusk," which was about a year and a half; we found a room over in Burbank and just set it up in there. I did all the engineering for the first half, and then Richard (Dashut) got in on the second half. But yeah, it was fairly well planned, and most of the songs had been somewhat prepared beforehand. 

RW: Was it not only planned but inevitable, considering how much you seem to enjoy working in the studio?

Buckingham: Well, I've certainly gotten something out of my system now, and I'm able to apply some of the things that I've learned in the last year to Fleetwood Mac as well, so I think one hand washes the other in that sense. I'm sure Stevie feels a lot better now (after her album), and less frustrated; she wrote so many songs, and never really had an outlet for all of that. And I never really had an outlet for the other side of what I like to do, which is engineer.

RW: If "Tusk" was predominantly any one member's album, though, it was yours. 

Buckingham: Yeah, you could have lifted the songs of mine off and made a solo album from that, and it probably would have made a lot more sense. 

RW: And it would have been not unlike "Law and Order." The fact that you're playing all of the instruments on most of this album suggests that you did the same thing on some "Tusk" tracks. 

Buckingham: Yes, I did. I think I succeeded more on "Law and Order;"there's a certain smoothness that wasn't there on "Tusk" in terms of the drums, and I got it to sound a little more energetic, which is one of the things I thought I failed on with "Tusk" - but that may have its own charm, too. "The Ledge," "Save Me a Place," "Not That Funny," "Walk a Thin Line" (all from "Tusk"): I played everything on those. But I was home a lot, you know; I was working on these things at home, and then I'd bring them in more or less finished, and we'd crank 'em up and put 'em through the board - it was very exciting. It was a great process of evolution.

RW: How does it work? How do you build a solo track from the ground up?

Buckingham: You pick a tempo that you like, and you record a metronome, a click track. On a lot of the songs, I played drums first; I'd just choose the arrangement and play the drums first, then add everything else. I don't know how McCartney does his stuff, or Todd Rundgren, or Prince, but that's the most typical way that I do it. You know how Mick (Fleetwood) will hesitate to the beat, or Charlie Watts, playing slightly behind the other instruments. You really have a problem doing that if you put down the drums first; then you have to try and play everything else too fast, to try and get that tension. But what I did was, I'd record the click track on track one, then I'd send it through a delay - like maybe 30,40 milliseconds - and record the delayed click track on track 24. Then I could play the drums to the click on track 24, and play the other instruments to the click on track one - which is slightly ahead - so you'd get the tension. 

RW: That must have been a riot, building that way and adding whatever you want as you go along. 

Buckingham: It's interesting, the ways there are to work. In a sense, doing it that way, you really have to surrender to the work a little bit, and let it lead you; it's a very intuitive thing. But at the same time, you're searching for control as well. 

RW: What else did you play on the record besides guitar, bass and drums? 

Buckingham: There was some acoustic keyboard work done in the second phase (of recording). Basically, the only electric keyboard that's on there is one of those little Casio -Tones; it costs 200 bucks for this two -and -a -half-octave thing that has 50 different sounds on it. I wish they were around when we were on the road. There was also a lot of half-speed guitar stuff, the stuff that tends to sound like mandolins, like the high, airy guitar lines on "Trouble." The guitar was recorded at 15 IPS (inches per second), and the (basic) tracks were recorded at 30.

RW: Were there any songs on "Law and Order" that were originally intended for a Fleetwood Mac album instead? 

Buckingham: Well, actually, there is a song on the (new) Fleetwood Mac album that I thought was gonna be on mine. One of the drawbacks of "Tusk," in working so much at home, was that I isolated myself somewhat; the best working atmosphere that could have been created in the studio was absent at times. If anything, I provide the band with enthusiasm in the studio, and I think there's probably something missing when I'm not there. That was a bit of a drag, and because of that, I wanted to really come in (to the new group album) with guns ablaze in the studio, and show them that I was ready to work and give everything I could give on all levels. In order to do that, I realized that couldn't just save the best stuff for my own album; anything that seemed particularly suited for Fleetwood Mac should be used if it was needed, so I yanked one of the real uptempo songs that I liked - sort of a cross between "Go Your Own Way" and "Second Hand News" - and we used it for Fleetwood Mac. 

RW: So you don't have a huge warehouse of old songs that were never used for Fleetwood Mac and ended up on "Law and Order." 

Buckingham: No, not like Stevie does. And sometimes, quite frankly, you get a little reticent about pulling out old stuff, because if it didn't get done to begin with, there's probably something about it that wasn't happening. For me, at least. I tend to want to look forward more, which can also be a mistake. 

RW: Beginning with some of the songs on "Tusk," you've developed a humorous, kind of wacky style that's apparent in tunes like "Johnny Stew" and "Mary Lee Jones" on your own album. A few years ago you weren't putting much funny stuff on records. 

Buckingham: No, but I didn't feel too funny in those days. I don't know. Odd as it may seem, it isn't as obviously humorous to me now as it obviously must be. "Johnny Stew" is humorous, but ... 

RW: It's really the way you attack - and "attack" is the word - the songs now that come off as funny. It's a kind of raw aggression that sometimes seems humorous, whether intentionally or not. 

Buckingham: You're right. I've heard people say that "Bwana" (on "Law and Order") is humorous, but I never would have thought it to be at the time. I can see it conjuring up sort of a cartoon -land visual, but beyond that, I was seeing it more just as a compilation of various styles from the '40s to the '50s. 

RW: But you know, it wouldn't be funny if it weren't also effective and pleasant to listen to. 

Buckingham: I'll try to do a serious album next time. 

RW: When "Tusk" came out, people in the business were upset that it wasn't another "Rumours"; they expected another super-commercial album, which "Tusk" certainly was not. Do you think people have "gotten over" the album by now?

Buckingham: I don't know. I think that it sort of sunk in slowly to a lot of people who were originally put off by it; hopefully, that will continue to happen. Most of the retrospectives that I see, comments from critics, are basically that one of the good things about it was that we didn't play it safe. I don't know what the mainstream thinks; I don't even pretend to know what the mainstream is. Most of the reviews I saw of "Tusk" were good when it came out, but it wasn't the critics who were buying the album. 

RW: If the new album is more conventional, you know people will say, "Well, Fleetwood Mac knows they blew it last time, so they've made another 'Rumours.'

Buckingham: It's not going to be another "Rumours." It's a good reconciliation of opposites. There was a tendency even within the band, when it became apparent that the commercial impact (of "Tusk") wasn't going to be that of "Rumours" -and who's to say what it would have been anyway, even if it was like "Rumours" - to sort of turn around and look at me. What was once a creatively exciting thing to them had become somewhat tainted by its lack of commercial success. 

RW: So there were some internal feelings about self-indulgence, and so on. 

Buckingham: But only afterward - that's the point. And it was only a relative lack of commercial success, four million double albums or whatever. It could have gotten totally reactionary (with the new album) and gone all the way back to the right, or whatever, but it hasn't. There's definitely a spirit of experimentation; you're going to hear some sounds that are definitely far beyond "Rumours." But the arrangements, the vocals - it's more of a group effort. I haven't heard everything together yet, but Christine's stuff especially is some of the classiest I've heard from her yet. 

RW: It was great to hear "The Farmer's Daughter," the old Beach Boys song, on "Fleetwood Mac Live." Are there any more covers planned? 

Buckingham: We did do a version of "Blue Monday," the Fats Domino song, for this, but I don't know whether it will go on. We've got about 20 songs this time, and we're not going to put out a double album again - that, ah, might not be wise.