The musical icon that left Lindsey Buckingham heartbroken
At the centre of Fleetwood Mac’s blockbuster soap opera was lead guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, tethered to the soft rock monster’s most commercial period during the blizzard of drugs and relationship breakdowns.
Joining on New Year’s Eve in 1974, along with girlfriend and musical partner Stevie Nicks, the former blues outfit swiftly grew to one of the era’s gargantuan acts, 1977’s Rumours still standing as the eighth biggest selling album of all time. Partners would be swapped, inordinate levels of cocaine would be snorted, and good feelings would plummet to their lowest ebbs throughout the next decade, managing to eke out their other monster LP with 1987’s Tango in the Night.
Buckingham boasts a glittering and eclectic CV of session credits, having lent his guitar licks for everybody from Warren Zevon, Nine Inch Nails, and Miley Cyrus. One such big name eager for his services was Brian Wilson. Contributing to ‘He Couldn’t Get His Poor Old Body to Move’, eventually seeing life as a B-side to ‘Love and Mercy’, Buckingham’s insight into The Beach Boys’ former creative captain was fraught with the unhealthy presence of his 24/7 therapist and micromanager, Eugene Landy, when collaborating on 1988’s eponymous solo debut.
“Brian came up to my house with a song which was very catchy, but about exercising,” Buckingham told Q in 1992. “You don’t wanna do that, I said, so we rewrote it. It was a very unsettling situation. If Landy wasn’t there, he’d have these two little surf Nazis who would not let Brian out of their sight”.
The “surf Nazis” in question were Landry’s aides, a perennially uncomfortable presence in the studio who would exasperate the team and impede the sessions’ creative process. One such bothersome stooge was Kevin Leslie, reportedly on Wilson like a pest non-stop, relaying back and forth information or instructions to and from Landry over the phone. Even worse, Landry would take the master tapes home with him, a bizarre and deeply inappropriate overreach of his supposed professional responsibility to the vulnerable Beach Boy.
“I know Landy did him a lot of good in the beginning with his radical techniques, but in my opinion there was a role reversal where Landy glommed onto Brian as his ticket to a glamorous world,” Buckingham posited. “Brian was not happy, and there was no way he’d grow into a full adult in this situation. Musically, Landy was keeping him doing this ‘Baby, let’s ride to heaven in my car’ kinda stuff, when he really should have been getting into something a little more experimental, or adult at least. That was a little heartbreaking to watch”.
Brian Wilson was eventually released to the world, warmly received critically, if met with some underwhelm over the soggy use of digital emulators and mushy synths. It’s hard to listen to the record, however, and wonder what creative paths could have been taken should Wilson be rid of Landry’s therapeutic shackles, as Buckingham had suspected.
Wilson offered contradictory statements on Landry over the years, from bestowing high praise in 2002, “He pushed me beyond my limits and stopped me being fearful of the world,” to telling Rolling Stone in 2015, “I thought he was my friend, but he was a very fucked-up man”.
