“No match for”: The Beach Boys song Lindsey Buckingham couldn’t compete with
Any artist is always striving to reach some form of perfection once they get behind the glass. No artist can claim to discover the hidden meaning behind the perfect pop song or anything, but there are different pieces of rock and roll history that people will remember solely because of how a certain song touched their heart when they were a kid. It may not sound like hard work at all when listening to it, but Lindsey Buckingham was willing to put in the blood, sweat and tears if it meant getting the right tune down on tape.
And he wasn’t exactly willing to compromise his vision when he got into Fleetwood Mac, either. Buckingham Nicks had been a healthy breeding ground for him to test out some of his new material, but there were also moments where the studio technician started to show his face a little too much. So now that he had a proper band behind him when making albums like Rumours, he was convinced he would turn in the greatest tunes no one had ever heard yet.
While a lot of the magic of Rumours comes from the tension coming from everyone in the group, the fact that anyone was able to get their tunes done with Buckingham cracking the whip was practically a miracle. It’s bad enough asking a roadie to get strings every single hour to make sure ‘Never Going Back Again’ sounded perfect, but you know things weren’t going smoothly when the guitarist attempted to strangle one of the engineers because he recorded over one of his guitar parts.
Being a decent collaborative partner wasn’t always in the cards for him, but it was all done in service to the muse before anything else. He didn’t want to spend his life making tunes that were merely good, and that came from years of listening to the arrangements by people like Nelson Riddle and Brian Wilson.
Riddle may have been the one responsible for the sublime arrangements from the pre-rock and roll days, and while he did some fantastic arrangements for Linda Ronstadt’s work in his later years, Wilson was truly the Mozart figure of rock and roll. Even though The Beatles have been painted as the ultimate example of what perfect music can sound like, Buckingham knew that anything on Pet Sounds could be considered a stroke of genius.
There are times when Buckingham had reached the big time with his own band, but he knew that there was no chance he could write something nearly as good as what Wilson did on ‘God Only Knows’, saying, “I can’t judge myself by ‘God Only Knows’. No one writes songs as good as that.” But the real magic behind the song isn’t even the melody; it’s the chord progression behind it.
A lot of what Wilson was doing with the vocals was following the chords, and by using the kind of inversions that are easier on the piano than the guitar, the backing track feels like something that could have been played out with classical instruments, except this time there’s the Wrecking Crew behind everything. And when they hit the bridge with the round-robin of vocal harmonies, it’s clear that Buckingham took pieces of that musical soup and jammed it into his tunes, like helping build together the different layers of ‘The Chain’.
Then again, there’s a certain comfort in knowing that Buckingham will never be able to make something on the same level as ‘God Only Knows’. After all, the entire point behind rock and roll is to keep pushing oneself, and while it’s hard to measure up against perfection, the fact that anyone got that close to making this kind of heavenly music is why rock and roll should still be revered.
