The Fleetwood Mac album that made Lindsey Buckingham go solo
The fact that Fleetwood Mac could stay together with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in the group was a miracle.
They had already put themselves through the wringer, and while Buckingham did have a few more demons of his own to work out, he could always manage to keep everything civil up until the moment when the whole thing erupted after making Tango in the Night. But if you ask him, he had already had his mind on working without the band for years before that.
When looking at the band’s dynamic, though, Buckingham tended to get what he wanted more often than not on the production side of things. He was a perfectionist in every sense of the word, and while that certainly pissed off Mick Fleetwood when it came time to make that confusing drum part to ‘Go Your Own Way’, it’s not like Buckingham didn’t know what he was doing when working on some of their classics.
But when you have an album that’s as successful as Rumours, the thought of Buckingham playing those same songs again wouldn’t have worked. Any band should want to evolve beyond that kind of record, but when the guitarist said that he wanted to make the exact opposite of their record-breaking smash, it’s not like there weren’t a few tugged collars happening at that time, either.
Because when looking at Tusk, the rest of the band at least had reason to be concerned. There were plenty of moments on the record that sounded like Fleetwood Mac material, but there would be the occasional zany track from Buckingham and more than a few production choices where it seemed like he was losing his mind, especially when he suggested turning every knob on the board in the opposite direction to see what happened.
It was bad enough that the album underperformed, but when the rest of the band started badmouthing the record afterwards, Buckingham knew it was time for him to step off, saying, “Tusk was an impulse. Over time, everyone in the band got drawn in. And then, because it didn’t sell 16 million albums, it sold four or five, there was a backlash. There was a meeting. The band said, ‘Lindsey, we’re not going to do that anymore.’ That’s the only reason I started making solo records.”
Tusk might generally be regarded as a masterpiece today, but it’s not like Buckingham was going to spend most of his time making solo experimental records or anything. The fact that one of his first major hits outside of Fleetwood Mac was ‘Holiday Road’ showed he could still write a pop hit, but given the Beach Boys worship on those harmonies, he was clearly going for the kind of music that the rest of the band couldn’t pull off.
If I can be an armchair psychologist for a second, though, there might be a touch of jealousy that came from Buckingham releasing solo records. If you look at the timeline, his solo debut Law and Order came out only a few months after Stevie Nicks’s solo debut, and since she was gaining traction for a lot of her songs, there could have been that white-hot competitive streak coming into play as well.
Whatever the reason, though, it’s much better for Buckingham to have channelled that energy into his music rather than wasting the energy on fighting. That might have led to an inconsistent schedule for Fleetwood Mac albums, but it’s better to have a handful of decent albums than work on multiple records where the bandmates are always fighting.
