The 1965 album Lindsey Buckingham considered a masterpiece: “One of the great sides”
Most artists are rarely satisfied when they walk out of the studio. Since you only have so long to work on a track before handing something to a record company, there will always be those acclaimed albums that aren’t half as good as how they sounded in your head when you first laid them down. Lindsey Buckingham may know the struggles of getting perfection in the studio all too well, but The Beach Boys showed him the way forward before they even made Pet Sounds.
That dissatisfaction is often what drives great records in the first place. The nagging sense that something could be better pushes musicians to revisit ideas, refine arrangements, and chase an almost impossible ideal of perfection. In many cases, the gap between what an artist imagines and what they ultimately produce becomes the fuel for their next project.
For perfectionists like Buckingham, that gap can feel especially pronounced. The studio becomes less a place of completion and more a battleground of competing instincts. Something between spontaneity and precision, emotion and control. It’s a delicate balance, and one that often defines the difference between a good record and a truly enduring one.
Considering Buckingham’s background, though, it’s strange to think of him as an aficionado of The Beach Boys. Coming from the folksy tradition, many of the bluegrass techniques Buckingham made with Fleetwood Mac and during his solo career don’t always seem to mesh with the songs about fun in the sun and fast cars.
By the time Buckingham started making music with Stevie Nicks, though, he had had his conversion when listening to albums like The Beach Boys Today. Compared to the other beach party vibes found on every other Beach Boys project, Brian Wilson cut his heart open on the back half of the album, making songs that felt way too earnest for traditional rock and roll.
Even though Pet Sounds has its place in rock history, Buckingham knew that Wilson struck gold one album prior, telling Rolling Stone, “Pet Sounds is the acknowledged masterpiece…but even before that, there’s side two of The Beach Boys Today, which is really just one ballad after another and is, for me, one of the great sides on a rock album”.
While the album still existed in the vinyl era of sides, Wilson looked at the back half of this album as a way to express his feelings. Since B-sides were known to be cluttered with lesser tracks that most fans would skip, this might have been a way for Wilson to mask some of his internal emotions…were it not for him making the kind of music that leaves people dumbfounded.
Across every track, Wilson was toying with what was allowed in traditional rock and roll. Gone were the days of just using the typical bluesy progressions from Chuck Berry, instead replaced with the melodic beauty that would change the pop landscape and make other acts like The Beatles reconsider what made them so famous to begin with.
The lyrical content is also a bold leap forward. For all of the traditional sappy love songs, tracks like ‘She Knows Me Too Well’ feel like a warm-up for Pet Sounds, as Wilson talks about the problems with loving someone and using his songs as a means to find out what pop music’s favourite emotion is all about.
Once Buckingham started his own creative streak with Fleetwood Mac, though, he may have taken a few too many cues from the way Wilson ran the studio.
From the emotional honesty in ‘Go Your Own Way’ to his perfectionist mindset when crafting guitar solos, Buckingham adopted the same mannerisms as Wilson while not picking up on the charm as much, often leading to shouting matches in between takes and one time where he actually attempted to strangle an engineer for getting out of line. Buckingham may have gotten a musical education from The Beach Boys Today!, but some of that Beach Boys innocence got lost along the way when making Rumours.
