“He has got it by miles”: why Lindsey Buckingham preferred Jimmy Page over Eric Clapton
Every single guitarist who has ever tried to play Fleetwood Mac has questioned if Lindsey Buckingham secretly had a third hand at one point. While nothing the group did during Buckingham’s tenure was considered the most groundbreaking stuff in the world, hearing him play different rhythms across each of the strings as he played was always going to be trippy for anyone looking to get ‘Never Going Back Again’ under their fingers for the first time. For all of that folk vocabulary, Buckingham did still have his rock and roll chops when he wanted to use them.
Then again, Buckingham’s definition of rock and roll always had a bit more of a pop flavour to it. The vocal guitar solo in the middle of ‘Go Your Own Way’ might sound gigantic out of context, but listening to most of his songs being played without distortion, a lot of them owe a great deal to the glory days of 1960s music, whether that’s him making an answer to The Beach Boys or singing Everly Brothers-style harmonies with Stevie Nicks.
If there’s one thing that he is known for more than anything, it’s the fact that he doesn’t play with a pick. The sheer idea of playing some of the greatest guitar solos of all time would probably be a deathwish for any other player, but Buckingham seems to make everything look easy, to the point where the band needed two separate guitarists to replace him once he was kicked out of the group.
If anything, the fact that he didn’t play the standard way made him stand out next to the other guitarists in the rock and roll scene at the time. Everyone was still in awe of what Eric Clapton was doing in his prime, but the focus had started to shift towards people like Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, taking the crux of those bluesy tones that everyone starts out with and made it a lot more eclectic.
Even when other pickless players started cropping up next to Buckingham, like Mark Knopfler, Page could never be stopped. Despite never considering himself all that great at fingerpicking, hearing him delicately weave his way around different tunings in ‘The Rain Song’ and create his own vocabulary in ‘Going to California’ is somewhere between folksy techniques and traditional rock and roll.
Anyone could only hope to get Clapton’s licks to sound half as good as they are, but Buckingham always had to hand it to Page, saying, “There are people that I admire a great deal as guitarists, but always people who somehow apply what they’re doing to the art of good record-making. If it’s a choice between Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page? Jimmy Page. He has got it by miles, as far as I’m concerned. So that’s where I’m at.”
And that’s not simply lip service, either. The whole appeal of Clapton was that he always stuck with the blues, but in terms of Zeppelin’s catalogue, no two records sound the same, from Page’s time making progressive-sounding tunes on Houses of the Holy to the folksy playing on Led Zeppelin III to taking over the studio and adding textures when working on the tracks of Presence.
So, while Buckingham has developed his own musical vocabulary compared to Page, he does see a bit of a kindred spirit in the rock and roll legend. Both of them approached the guitar from completely different angles, but their main goal was always to see what they could squeeze out of the instrument that had never been done before.
