The Fleetwood Mac song Lindsey Buckingham thought was “really crappy”
Any artist will want their songs to sound as perfect as possible when they walk into the studio. Even if they don’t necessarily think they’ve written the next ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ it’s an unspoken rule that every band member tries to give it everything they have so that they can have a take they are reasonably proud of. Although Fleetwood Mac had cornered the market with perfect rock and roll records, Lindsey Buckingham always understood the power of making something sound unsophisticated.
Looking back at the legends of rock and roll, none of them began their careers sounding like the most seasoned veterans. The Beatles were still a bar band when they went into Abbey Road Studios for the first time, and as much as people fawn over Elvis Presley’s voice on his first singles, many of his best moments were about him making the most with the bare essentials rather than the Vegas sideshow he became known for.
As Presley was selling out casinos, Buckingham was putting together songs that sounded like musical gods crafted them. The whole point behind Buckingham getting into the group was his brilliant guitar playing, but once he started citing how things should go during the making of Rumours, everyone slowly realised that they had created a monster from the ground up.
And when Rumours became the biggest album in history at the time, that wasn’t going to do any favours to his ego. By the time everyone got back to the studio Buckingham was determined to make a completely different sonic statement, this time pulling from the realm of post-punk and new wave that was infiltrating the charts at the time. Some of it still sounded like Fleetwood Mac, but ‘What Makes You Think You’re The One’ is definitely a strange path for them to have gone down.
Because for all of the care and attention that was put into something as simple as the drum track on ‘Go Your Own Way,’ this deep cut is Buckingham making everything deliberately stilted. It’s easy to see it as a simple jam between him and Mick Fleetwood, but looking back on the record, the guitarist’s ambition was to make sure that things sounded a bit more ramshackle than normal.
When discussing the record, Buckingham remembered things sounding a lot looser, saying, “That was back in the day when everybody had boomboxes, and we had an old cassette player with these really crappy Mics. But you could record on it, and the system had built-in compressors, and we took the output. We put that right in front of the drums, and I think we put another one overhead, too, as opposed to mic’ing the whole thing as you usually do. And we ran that cassette player into the console, and it just made this really explosive, trashy sound.”
It does give the tune a bit more guts than their usual output, but it sticks out like a sore thumb throughout the rest of Tusk. There were other tunes that had equally weird sections in them, like ‘Not That Funny,’ but those songs paired with Stevie Nicks’s ‘Storms’ or Christine McVie’s ‘Brown Eyes’ often sound like the band is trying to make three separate albums at the same time.
Even if this is looked on as Fleetwood Mac’s version of The White Album, there is some merit to seeing Buckingham go rogue like this. They had done their perfect album, and ‘What Makes You Think You’re The One’ is the sound of him tearing Rumours to pieces and starting over again.
