OOTC Tour 1992

[David]

Lindsey should have long since understood and embraced the fact that he works in a popular art form in which commerce plays the biggest role with respect to an audience. But his dream was probably to make commerce and personal voice live side by side and even to strengthen each other. It’s potentially devastating when an artist realizes how difficult it is—moviemakers have been grappling with the same devastation in their own art.

If you make an album like Law and Order, which doesn’t do anything the way you’d expect it to be done within the context of everything else on the radio at the time, you can’t expect a huge audience to join you in the concert hall. If you do expect it, you’re a bit of an idiot. The trick is to take smaller steps and somehow develop your more personal voice within a broader context of pleasing the (intelligent) audience, so that they accompany you. I think Lindsey has tried to do that (in many ways, he isn’t more sonically oddball than Todd Rundgren or Brian Wilson or the Talking Heads—he just sounds a lot weirder when his song immediately follows a Christine McVie or Stevie Nicks hit). But he’s been disappointed countless times, usually because he’s in a band that’s a much bigger commercial force and he must be comparing commercial success in his mind even when he says he isn’t. That goes for us, too. We see Lindsey’s solo albums and performances on a scale which puts “Fleetwood Mac” or “Stevie Nicks” at one end. It skews everyone’s perspective.

The fact that Seeds We Sow hit #6 on the Billboard Rock Album chart and Gift of Screws hit #15 on the same chart indicates that, somehow or other, he has built a small but devoted audience and they’re coming along with him. There are thousands of acts in the business (I would guess) that would kill to put an album in the top 50 on Billboard.