The band lineup Lindsey Buckingham couldn’t stand: “A little generic”
It was never easy to work around someone like Lindsey Buckingham, even if you weren’t dating him in Fleetwood Mac.
He was one of the best guitarists to ever live around that time, but even if he had the perfect idea for what a song needed every time he played, there were more than a few times when he could crack the whip and be one of the more insufferable production geniuses of his generation. He wasn’t above making some sessions feel like hell, but that didn’t mean that the results didn’t speak for themselves.
But it’s not like Buckingham was an absolute asshole to everyone he worked with or anything. He had tunnel vision for what he wanted most of the time, and even if he felt that some of the band’s songs didn’t work as well as they could have, he was going to go the extra mile to make sure that everything sounded perfect, even if that meant nearly strangling one of his engineers in a fit of rage.
That was all well and good when the band were on top of the world, but after one too many times where he had to sit on his hands in between sessions, he wasn’t going to keep waiting around for the band. Stevie Nicks clearly had her own agenda with her solo career, and no one could really blame her for wanting to share her songs with the world, but Buckingham felt that the root of all the problems became prevalent on Tango in the Night.
He wasn’t having fun anymore every time he played, and after the fights between him and Nicks turned physical, he wasn’t going to roll over and play an entire tour with his bandmates all over again. The goodwill in the band was snuffed out that day, and while Billy Burnette and Rick Vito were acceptable substitutions for Buckingham when they went on tour with the band, they were always understood to be replacements more than actual band members half the time.
Behind the Mask was a fairly decent slice of country rock, but when you’re judging their performances next to the greatest pop music the 1970s ever spat out, there was no way that they were going to compete. And even when promoting The Dance, Buckingham admitted that he wasn’t all that thrilled by what he heard when he heard what his old band was cooking up without him.
He was content to work on his own music, but those later lineups held no interest to him, saying, “All I can say is I felt that when I left it got a little more generic, not that the shows weren’t great and the album wasn’t good. But later, it was just something I wasn’t happy to see Mick and John doing – or having to do, if you want to look at it that way. It started to feel like the Platters franchise.”
And once Nicks left the fold, that especially seemed true of Time. Mick Fleetwood had that natural superpower to make every one of the band’s lineups feel like a whole new chapter of their careers, but since it resulted in one of the most faceless records that they ever made, it made sense why they didn’t eventually resurface again until Buckingham had a few songs up his sleeve for Say You Will.
Buckingham never claimed to rule the group with an iron fist or anything, but when you look at the kinds of choices that he was making at the time, it was clear that the band had lost more than another guitarist. They had lost a genius on the same level as Peter Green was before, and there was no sense in them trying to chase after the kind of highs that they had with him in the band.
