The genre Lindsey Buckingham couldn’t stand: “Stop right there”
Most artists don’t really get a say in what genres they fit into. No one in Nirvana even knew what the term ‘grunge’ meant when they were getting started, but once the press assigned the name to them in the early 1990s, they had no choice but to run with it.
Lindsey Buckingham did have a clear idea of what he wanted his music to sound like, though, and that included staying away from certain genres. Inspired by the likes of The Beach Boys, he adored the potential for pop music to expand beyond its typical harmonic structure. So, throughout his career, he has always been aiming to be expansive.
If anyone goes through Fleetwood Mac’s albums in sequential order, they’re going to be in for a surprise style-wise. Even though Buckingham and Stevie Nicks made some of the best pop music of the 1970s when they were in the group, hearing them fiddle around with everything from British blues to even bits and pieces of jazz with Bob Welch in the group made them sound like a group critically stuck on what they wanted to be.
No matter what band he found himself in, Buckingham never lacked a vision for what his songs would sound like. He had grown up listening to the biggest names in rock and roll, but considering he played without a pick and relied mainly on his fingers, there were also some bits and pieces of folk and bluegrass laced throughout his first recordings in Buckingham Nicks.
Once people were graced with Rumours in 1977, it opened up new doors for how Fleetwood Mac could be viewed. They had those brilliant vocal parts and the occasional brilliant guitar solo thrown into the mix, but their reliance on acoustic guitars and an overall rustic take on rock also won over a bunch of country fans.
It’s not like the argument isn’t there for Fleetwood Mac being close to country music. Their peers in the genre had been acts like Eagles and Tom Petty, and since all of them relied on acoustic guitars and songs about heartache, it didn’t mean that Johnny Cash or Emmylou Harris fans had to bend over backwards to appreciate a song like ‘Landslide’ or cry alongside Christine McVie during ‘Songbird’.
But when The Chicks ended up recording their own version of ‘Landslide’ in the 2000s, Buckingham got worried that fans had been getting the wrong idea about his music, saying, “’Landslide’ is a great song, but I don’t want anyone to get the funny idea about Fleetwood Mac and country.”
Mildly offended by the remark, the guitarist continued, “Somebody at our label was talking about how we should broaden our audience, and they started talking about putting us on Country Music Television.”
Never a fan of the genre, Buckingham swiftly intervened, “I had to say, ‘Whoa! Stop right there.’ There’s a certain kind of profile you want to put out there. And that isn’t it.” So, to protect his image, even at the cost of potential commercial returns, he pulled Fleetwood Mac away from the country sphere with haste.
Buckingham does at least have some reason to be upset. Despite his history of disagreeing with members of the band about nearly everything, he has also been known to list artists like The Beach Boys as one of his biggest influences, and looking at the songs he made for ‘The Mac’ later, it would be difficult to consider something like ‘Big Love’ a country song with its synthesisers and layered harmonies.
Then again, no one has control over their audience in that respect, and if it meant more people coming to the shows, that was hardly a bad thing. Buckingham did have a unique approach to what he did throughout Fleetwood Mac, but looking at his reputation as a member of the biggest pop act in the world, he wasn’t exactly willing to throw on a cowboy hat and put ‘yee-haw’ in one of his songs.
The fact of the matter is that he wanted to disavow genre as best as he could in general. When celebrating The Beatles, one of the main things he picked out was that they “significantly broadened the landscape” of music, and it was their most complex album, Revolver, that he described as “perhaps the group’s high watermark”. That’s indicative of the sort of line-blurring he was gunning for. And country music is anything but line-blurring.
