Lindsey Buckingham names the best drum track ever: “He turned into an animal”
Every drummer typically has a challenge whenever going into the studio. Although it seems like a reasonably easy job playing percussion and fading into the background, getting the pulse of a good song is what differentiates an artist from the kind of person who bangs on things for a living and gets paid for it. While Mick Fleetwood was already the leader of Fleetwood Mac, he was put through the wringer with Lindsey Buckingham before nailing the track ‘What Makes You Think You’re The One’.
Buckingham was never known to be the easiest person to please in the studio. Even though he was the new boy for most of his time with The Mac in the 1970s, Buckingham was known for being incredibly forward when he thought that something was crap or that he wanted his song to sound exactly like this.
If anyone got the treatment that Fleetwood got, though, chances are they would still be recovering from it. Outside of the straight-ahead tracks on Rumours, Fleetwood was pushed to his limit to get every single song, including breaking sheets of glass when putting together ‘Gold Dust Woman’ and eventually disassembling his initial groove for ‘Go Your Own Way’ to get it closer to what Buckingham had wanted.
Since it went so well the first time around with Rumours, the band figured they would do the same thing again for Tusk. There was only one problem…no one could put their finger on what made them so important in the first place, so it was anyone’s guess what the next album was actually going to sound like.
Compared to the other tracks on the record that are closer to classic Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham tried to pull out all the stops for his songs. Imagine if Brian Wilson had somehow been able to make his weird experiments on Smile but with a new wave energy to it, and you’re somewhere close to what Buckingham had been doing.
Amid the weirder tracks on the record was ‘What Makes You Think You’re The One’, which may be the most genuinely pissed-off that he has ever sounded on record. While there were more than a few claims that Buckingham wrote the song about Stevie Nicks, he ended up falling in love with what Fleetwood ended up laying down when he played it.
For Buckingham, this was the peak of Fleetwood’s drumming career, telling Rolling Stone, “That’s one of the great drum tracks that I’ve ever heard. That’s up there with ‘Instant Karma.’ That was a great moment. That was just Mick and myself late at night in the studio, me at the piano…He turned into an animal”.
Compared to the soft rock band that they were getting accused of being at the time, Fleetwood cuts loose on the rest of the track, sounding like he’s back in the 1960s with how forceful he’s hitting the drums. Considering how much precision went into mastering the song, it almost feels like something that could have come out of the Peter Green lineup of the band, only with a much sweeter melody this time around.
Still, Buckingham couldn’t be stopped when it came time to get weird on record, including putting the sounds of him doing pushups on the studio floor on the song ‘Not That Funny’. Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks may have been confused about what Buckingham was doing, but every now and again, that kind of experimentation can produce something genius.
