Sigh. I'll ignore all the evil gold digger stuff, because even if she is, who cares if he's happy and producing good music.
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Originally Posted by LukeA
I'd put most of the responsibility (blame) on David Kahne. Simply put, he had no idea what to do with Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, or even Stevie Nicks (as evidenced by how he handled TISL. but, that's for a whole other thread)- and was mortified at the thought of releasing GOS (as it stood in 1998) as-is. I think a lot of it had to do with the then-recent merger between AOL-Time Warner, and Kahne (commercial hitmaker/producer extraordinaire) entirely focused on the bottom line. Kahne was merely the interim acting President, so he logically had a vested interest in keeping (perceived) vanity projects by legacy/catalogue artists in line (Stevie applies here too).
Keep in mind, Kahne and Briggs are the two dunderheaded idiots who blundered the whole Wilco/Yankee Hotel Foxtrot fiasco (which went on at the exact same time as the drawn out GOS negotiations, not too coincidentally). Briggs famously offered his mea culpa in numerous print interviews (and the Greg Kot authored Wilco book, which he's heavily featured in, if anyone's interested), but he was complicit.
Hell, even when they gave Lindsey the green light to release GOS in early summer of '01 strategically on the heels of TISL (after he wrote the commercial "Peacekeeper" as a new lead single), they wanted Lindsey to make the concession of having Mick be prominently involved in the promotional aspect. They even went as far as having a Fall '01 tour all lined up- 1500-2000 seat venues for "An evening with Lindsey & Mick"- and Lindsey ultimately bailed, acknowledging the inevitable FM activity in '02, making the tour/album redundant.
That aside- did Briggs intentionally try to sabotage the release of GOS? I tend to doubt it. But there was no love lost between the two. Briggs worked VERY closely with Lindsey in the mid 90's. I'm sure if you're trying to get an album out, and you just "stole" the wife of your label's VP of Artist Development/Promotion, you're bound to get some pushback from the label on some level. Reprise was already wary of a solo album of Lindsey's, and they weren't going to make it easy for him even in the best case scenario.
From everything I've heard, Briggs is a great guy- one of the good guys in the music industry (he's still around). If you want to blame anyone, blame the asshat Kahne.
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Wow, that's fascinating stuff, thank you for all that. I followed all the Wilco stuff closely but I didn't realise that Lindsey went through a similar thing with the same guys involved. Of course Lindsey could have taken the album to another label like Wilco did, even if he wasn't lucky enough for them give it to him for free, it wasn't like he was in a Juliana Hatfield type situation where he wouldn't have been able to afford it. Interesting that instead he went back to Fleetwood Mac. After fighting for the album it obviously wasn't precious enough for him not to slice it up and give it to the Mac. But I suppose he knows more people will hear it as a FM product rather than a Lindsey Buckingham product, and I guess the ego thing plays into that as well.