The 1960s band Lindsey Buckingham was never impressed with: “I could already play”
Lindsey Buckingham didn’t ever have to settle for taking the easy route whenever he performed.
He liked the idea of keeping the audience guessing, even when working with Fleetwood Mac, and just when someone tried to figure out his fingerstyle guitar approach, they were left with a whole slew of challenges whenever it came time to learn the chords to many of his songs. But even if he felt that he had to keep trying something new, he understood when some bands weren’t worth going back to in his record collection.
Then again, every single one of Buckingham’s favourite records made him look at his records differently. The biggest names in rock at the time were always the ones who were known for taking risks every single time they played, and even if there were a few moments where things didn’t work on a Beach Boys record, for instance, Buckingham could still appreciate that Brian Wilson took a chance and walked away with something that no one had ever heard before.
Because even if it wasn’t completely accessible, Buckingham would have preferred original music over a bunch of tunes that rehashed the same thing over and over again. That’s what made all of those early Beatles records sound fantastic when they first came out, and when he wasn’t studying what Lennon and McCartney were doing, he wasn’t about to go back to the stone age before rock and roll got more sophisticated.
There were plenty of artists who had tried their hand at making rock and roll, but when you look at the way that The Rolling Stones were making their records, it was a lot more of a rehash of what had come before. Elvis Presley had shown everyone the ropes the minute he started shaking his ass on television for the first time, and since Scotty Moore was delivering a clinic on how to play rock and roll, Buckingham felt that The Stones were taking things in the wrong direction when he heard them.
They were still great, but compared to the other guitar heroes out there at the time, Buckingham felt that he didn’t really need to learn every Stones lick to be great, saying, “I cut my teeth on [Elvis’s lead guitarist] Scotty Moore, so that by the time Brian Jones and Keith Richards came along, I wasn’t overly impressed by what they were doing as guitarists. I mean, I loved how they made their records. Obviously, I love that stuff, but it wasn’t like I was going, Wow, listen to that guy!’ I mean, I could already play.”
And by recording standards, getting the sound from The Stones was all that mattered. Buckingham was used to hearing songs that had the same kind of structure, but when he first heard a tune like ‘Street Fighting Man’, he had the basis for how he wanted some of his songs on Rumours to sound when he heard that drum part. He wanted to expand his palette, and he didn’t need Richards’s open tuning to do it.
After all, most of the open tunings Buckingham uses had already been in his repertoire for years at that point, and even if Richards went in another direction, he probably couldn’t have played the same way that Fleetwood Mac could. Buckingham was often playing two different rhythms at the same time, and that wasn’t something that any novice guitarist was just going to learn overnight.
This required a lot more skill, and while Buckingham could still throw in a trademark Moore lick every now and again, what mattered to him was building his tracks forward. The Stones gave him a great blueprint to work with, but he figured that there was a lot more to explore than the typical bluesy licks that they played on their records.
