LngPrmsdRd
11-30-2006, 10:38 PM
For us Ontarians, and Paula...WNED, Thursday December 7, 12:30am.
That clip? ADORABLE!!! I can't wait to see this, LOL...I love Lindsey's squirmy, eyelash-batty moments. ;)
Pattie, you won't be getting it in RI??? That sucks!!! If you don't already have a source, lol, I'm getting my parents to tape it for me and can send you a copy, no problem.
~Bree
BTFLCHLD
12-06-2006, 11:55 PM
Tavis: Lindsey Buckingham was a Grammy-winning artist and of course a member of one of rock’s greatest bands, Fleetwood Mac. (singing) Don't stop thinking about tomorrow. (Laugh) Anyway, more than 30 years after Fleetwood Mac took the world by storm, he’s still making music. His new CD, “Under The Skin,” is his first solo album in 14 years, and receiving some very good reviews. From the new disc, here is some of the video for “It Was You.”
Lindsey Buckingham: (singing) I waited for a woman, it was you. Back in ’99, our love just in time. If we had had to wait, we would be too late. Caught in history, future I couldn't see, you saw, oh so clear, past is gone, Willie’s ( :shocked: ) here.
Tavis: So you can a real artist, a true artist, because they show up, without being asked, with their instrument. It’s just (laugh) an extended part of the body. So next to Lindsey Buckingham’s chair, you see his guitar. And maybe I can talk him into strumming a few notes here in a few minutes. But the real artists always have their instruments with them. So you never leave home without it? Is that like your American Express card, or something?
Lindsey Buckingham: I started playing when I was about six, and taught myself, listening to my older brother’s Elvis records, and all that great original stuff when rock and roll crossed over, and it is sort of a part of my body, yeah.
Tavis: Yeah. I'm always amazed at artists, Lindsey, to your point now, teach themselves. There’s so many of us who love music. I love music, and wish that I could just pick up an instrument and teach myself, especially to the level for being the front man for Fleetwood Mac. You taught yourself pretty well.
Buckingham: Well, I got a head start. When you start that early, it’s like anything. You just kind of pick it up, and it kind of has a whole context to it. And really, if you think about how profound that was in those days, when that music crossed over to a mainstream audience, it was such a departure, and there was a sense of possibility that it had going. And I think a lot of people picked up on that at a young age.
Tavis: For you, why guitar? It could have been a thousand other instruments.
Buckingham: Elvis Presley.
Tavis: Yeah.
Buckingham: Yeah. The visual, the image, yeah.
Tavis: And what specifically – I could take that any number of ways. What specifically did you like about the Elvis image? The visual?
Buckingham: Well, I was very interested in music from the time I was maybe two or three. I can remember listening to my parents’ records when I was three years old in the living room. But of course, you're talking about “South Pacific” soundtrack, you're talking about classical, you're talking about Patti Page. (Laugh) Adult music, I guess. And Elvis was the image and the voice of tyranny, in some ways. Of finding something for a young audience to sort of have as an alternative to a cookie cutter type society.
Tavis: What’s your sense – this may be an impossible question, but I've been dying to ask you this. What’s your sense of why rock endures in the way that it has, and does?
Buckingham: Well, before rock hit, again, with a mainstream audience, I think people listened to music differently. Some of it was about skill. It’s all about feel. So, you can have complete sophistication as an approach on one end, you can have complete primitive on the other. And it can succeed equally well. You can have Leiber and Stoller as a producing team with the Drifters’ ultimate string arrangements and vocal arrangements, or you can have the Kingsmen doing Louie, Louie.
And it all is great. And it’s open to anybody to get in there and try their hand at it, and redefine it, to some degree.
Tavis: To your point a moment ago, Lindsey, about feel versus skill, it’s a crucial, but I think significant, distinction, about feel versus skill, that said, for you, we were talking before you walked in, and somebody made the point, this is one of the greatest guitarists of all time, one of the top 10 in the world. And I don't think anybody in the studio would argue that point.
But it made me wonder what, for you, makes a great guitar player? We could debate all day long who the top five are, but what for you, when you hear this instrument played by others, what for you makes a great guitarist?
Buckingham: Well, two things. One, for me, is that – and to some degree, it gets into an area of subjectivity, really. What you like. I enjoy someone who understands the instrument and uses it in a way that integrates into the fabric of the music they're making. Which isn't always the case. You may have someone who can play a lot of great licks over something, but it doesn’t necessarily become the fabric of what’s going on.
It doesn’t sink in. So that’s an important thing to me. And I think the second thing is just coming from the very center here. And a lot of people may, again, have the skill. But it may be skimming a little bit, in terms of feel. And you can just sort of tell when someone is an original. When someone is playing from the real center of their being.
Tavis: I wanna come to the new CD, “Under The Skin,” in just a moment here. Before I do that, though, I’d be remiss to not ask another impossible question. Lot of rock bands have come and gone. Some are enduring. Fleetwood Mac clearly in the latter category. Why?
Buckingham: We got nothing else to do? (Laugh)
Tavis: (Laugh) There are a lot of folk who have nothing else to do, but their sound, their style, didn’t connect the way that Fleetwood Mac’s has.
Buckingham: Well, it’s interesting. We are a group of people that probably on paper should not have been together in the first place. It wasn’t a formula that really made sense. I think that the tension of those sensibilities is what made us interesting, and…
Tavis: Stop for a second, before you go further. When you say on paper, it was a group that should not have been together, that sounds so oxymoronic for me. Because the sound works so well. I started the show, you can’t say the name Fleetwood Mac without songs starting to run through your head. The sound worked, but you're telling me on paper, it shouldn’t have worked.
Buckingham: Well, I'm saying if you go backwards from there, and you think about the people, and you examine the individual people as sensibilities that they bring to that equation, it doesn’t necessarily fit. If you were a casting director thinking, well, this is the way we’re gonna make this thing, (laugh) it doesn’t really make sense. But that was part of what made it great.
It was part of the tension, it was part of what made it so volatile, too. Again, you’ve got this whole kind of substory of two couples breaking up, and I guess whatever it took to get through that. There’s kind of a tension between an adolescence and a kind of maturity that we’ve always had.
Tavis: As you look back on it now, can you identify, perhaps not, but can you identify ways in which that tension added to the excellence, the brilliance, that product of Fleetwood Mac?
Buckingham: Well, yeah, during a certain period of time. I don't know if we were really aware of it, but it was pretty much everything. You're too close to it. I didn’t realize I was writing songs to Stevie, and I don't think Christine realized she was writing songs to John. It was just, it seemed a little more generic when the audience completes that with their interpretation of it.
Then it becomes what it is. But that’s been a big part of our story, is first of all rising above the personal difficulties to sort of follow our quote, destiny, or whatever you’d wanna call that. And then the other part of it is somehow getting through to the other side to find the closure and have your questions answered, even if it’s 20 years later. So that we are all in a place where we are still friends, and can acknowledge that we are people who know each other, and have been through a lot together. Which is an ongoing process, which may answer your question why we are still here.
Tavis: It answers it and then some, so thank you for indulging me in that. “Under The Skin,” the new CD. The first solo project from you – you’ve done, like, four solo projects, I think. And this is the first one in 14 years. Why so long?
Buckingham: I'm the Terrence Malik of rock? I don't know. (Laugh) I think it was not for lack of intention. Several times I started working on material, and then it got shelved to do a live album with Fleetwood Mac. And then I finished it, and then it got diverted into being part of a Fleetwood Mac album. And that’s part of the kind of the line that has been my exercise all throughout, is I've kind of got a more esoteric side that’s the personal work, but you still have to be mindful of the considerations of the more mainstream, larger picture.
So it just took a while to get there. And then, of course, a lot happened during that time. I got married and had three children. The material that came out on this album ended up being totally different. And it was appropriate that that was the case.
Tavis: To your point about the esoteric versus the commercial, is this something that you have to do? And by that I mean – and you're smiling already, so I think you know what I mean. Is this the kind of stuff that every so often, you have to do it to balance out those commercial demands?
Buckingham: Well, I think it was something that it was not always in me, but I think it was something that got cultivated, maybe possibly, quite honestly, not all for noble reasons.
Tavis: That’s fair, you’ve earned that.
Buckingham: Yeah. And I think to some degree, the idea of making solo albums that would sort of indulge the left side of the palate came from having made a more experimental album called “Tusk” after “Rumors,” and having not the record company or audience judge it in a certain way, but having the band after it had its run basically limit the kind of approach we could take, because it didn’t come close to selling the same number of albums. And at that point, the only way to work that side of what I was doing was to do solo work. Otherwise, I probably never would have done it.
Tavis: How would you describe this CD, “Under The Skin?”
Buckingham: Well, a lot of songs that started off as ensemble pieces made their way to the stage and eventually transformed to being single voice, single guitar. One of those would be a song called “Big Love,” another one is a song called “Go Insane.” And what I started to notice on stage was that, was that these, was that these were really connecting so well with the audience, and it gave me an idea of how do you present the idea of one or two guitars, which at the end of the day is what I do best.
And keep your production values, which is the other thing I do best. (Laugh) But minimalism. Almost the idea of being in your living room playing for somebody. The spirit of that, but with production. And that was the concept behind this album.
Tavis: I love that segue, because right now we are in many living rooms across the country. Thank you, Lindsey, I appreciate that. We’re in many living rooms across the country, you're supposed to be grabbing that guitar while I'm doing this, Lindsey, grab the guitar while I'm doing this. We’re in many living rooms across the country right now. How about a nice little intimate music conversation with Lindsey Buckingham?
The new CD from Lindsey is “Under The Skin.” Let me say good night right now. We’ll let Lindsey play us out. This is, that is, I should say, our show for tonight. Catch me on the weekends (laugh) on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles, thanks for watching, keep the faith, and enjoy my man, Lindsey Buckingham.
Lindsey Buckingham: (singing) Reading the paper, I saw a review. Said it was visionary. But nobody knew that that’s been a problem. Feeling unseen. Just like I'm living in somebody’s dream. What am I doing anyway?
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