The song that almost got Lindsey Buckingham fired from Fleetwood Mac: “It comes down to this”
Most bands will have to think long and hard before letting one of their most important members go. Anyone can try their best to make the best music they can and still be friendly, but once everyone starts sticking their noses in places it doesn’t belong, that’s when things start to get a bit more hostile. And while Mick Fleetwood was more than happy to keep the peace throughout every era of Fleetwood Mac, there were times when he knew that Lindsey Buckingham was acting out of order when working with his bandmates.
Granted, Buckingham always seemed to have everyone’s best interests at heart. His whole approach to the studio was to inhabit every aspect of recording in the same way that Brian Wilson had done with The Beach Boys, which meant being an absolute perfectionist whenever the time called for it.
At the same time, that also means having tunnel vision and losing that pesky thing called compassion. Although breaking up with Stevie Nicks couldn’t have been easy to deal with since she was showing up to every single rehearsal, all of that resentment could get more than a little bit vicious, like when he consciously blocked himself from singing about the intimate details of their time together in ‘Second Hand News’.
It’s one thing to talk about everything in song, but all of that animosity boiled over when Buckingham started making other tunes a living hell. He was known to have a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde complex, and when the other personality showed up for work, nothing was off the table, whether that meant nearly strangling producers or forcing everyone to redo a track because he felt that he couldn’t sing it properly.
Even when the pair managed to patch things up for a while, it was only a matter of time before they began fighting again during ‘You Make Loving Fun’. No one would begrudge either of them from feeling hurt that they had separated, but after one too many sessions of them shouting at each other, Fleetwood had had enough of Buckingham turning the studio into his own relationship therapy session.
Despite everyone being dysfunctional, Fleetwood said Buckingham was on the chopping block, saying, “I said, ‘Lindsey, it comes down to this: either you’re in a band, or you’re not. It’s neither good nor bad. If you accept the fact that you’re working with other people, that’s great. But if you don’t, maybe you shouldn’t be in the band.’ I’m sure we looked haggard, but the matter was resolved, and we continued.”
However, Buckingham’s actions are only one-half of the arguments that happened at the studio during the recording. There had already been moments of tension when Christine McVie had to hide her new boyfriend away from John McVie in the studio, and no one was going to have a clear answer for what to do when Fleetwood arrived at the studio in tears after his wife left me in the middle of recording.
Even though Rumours has become known as the definitive Fleetwood Mac album these days, you’d have to think at what cost as well. All of them managed to survive with their artistry intact, but in another universe, there’s probably a version of the band that broke up the minute that everything was finished.
