shackin'up
01-02-2007, 05:58 AM
ACOUSTIC GUITAR 2.2007
Lindsey Buckingham: On His Own
By: ANDREW DUBROCK
He fused folk and rock 'n' roll technique into his own brand of fiery fingerpicking, then rode the wave of pop music as guitarist, front man, and producer/mastermind of Fleetwood Mac. In this exclusive interview, LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM muses about his unique playing style and talks about his newfound desire to arrange and represent songs with just one voice and a guitar.
Lindsey Buckingham seems to have it all: guitar chops, a powerful voice, songwriting savvy, producing genius, and multiplatinum sales (and the stardom that goes with them). His unique fingerpicking and wickedly fast thumb patterns reshaped Fleetwood Mac's sound from a blues-rock outfit into a pop-rock megasuccess in the 1970s; his unorthodox guitar frailing fired up leads on songs like "Go Your Own Way" and "Don't Stop"; songs Buckingham penned were among Fleetwood Mac's hugest hits, his straining tenor adding an urgency that helped those songs reach the top of the charts. But, given all this, what's immediately startling about an encounter with Buckingham is his humility. Despite all the accolades, wide-ranging talents, and hit records, Buckingham is keenly aware of what he considers his shortcomings.
LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM
Born in 1949 in Palo Alto, California, Buckingham grew up in a conservative, upper-middle-class family. He started exploring his parents' classical music collection at an early age, but it was his older brother who proved most influencial to young Lindsey, by bringing home Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel." The sound of the King's primal rock 'n' roll inspired Buckingham to become a guitarist.
Buckingham had picked up the ukulele when he was only three or four years old, but his parents were never supportive of his music. "My mom would say, 'It's nice as a hobby, dear, but if you want to be an artist, you go and do commercial art or something. You go to college," he recalls. This resistance kept Buckingham away from the music scene, and it wasn't until he was a high school senior that he formed his first band, which eventually included a girl one year his senior named Stevie Nicks.
That band later morphed into Buckingham Nicks, who recorded their eponymous 1973 debut album at Sound City Studios in Los Angeles. Around this time, Mick Fleetwood was looking for a studio to record the next Fleetwood Mac album. Producer Keith Olsen played tracks from Buckingham Nicks to showcase the studio's capabilities. By chance, Fleetwood Mac guitarist Bob Welch quit the band one week later, prompting Fleetwood to ask Buckingham and Nicks to join the band. The late '70s became Fleetwood Mac's most popular years, with their self-titled 1975 album and 1977's Rumours topping the charts. In the years since, Buckingham has alternated work on Fleetwood Mac albums and solo projects.
Buckingham's newest CD, Under the Skin (Warner Brothers, www.warnerbrosrecords.com), his first solo album since 1992's Out of the Cradle, showcases his songwriting talents in a more stripped-down setting than does the full-band approach of Fleetwood Mac. On Skin, dexterous acoustic fingerpicking shares the limelight with his vocals, and his lyrics vibrate with as much raw emotion as do his songs from Fleetwood Mac's heyday.
At the end of September 2006, Buckingham camped out for several weeks in a Burbank soundstage to rehearse for his upcoming tour. We met up in a small sideroom on one of his last rehearsal dates, several days before his 57th birthday, to talk about his unique fingerpicking approach, his love of producing, and his newfound desire to represent songs completely with solo guitar and voice.
What was the deciding factor in your picking up guitar in the first place, the thing that made you go, "I have to play."
BUCKINGHAM I think that my being drawn to the guitar is not unlike thousands of other kids, because it was connected to something cultural that happened. When I was three or four, I was completely drawn to music; I used to go into my parents' living room or our room at home and put on their 78s and listen to whatever they had, which was Tchaikovsky, or soundtracks from musicals like South Pacific, or Patti Page. And then suddenly, in 1956, this guy named Elvis Presley showed up. In 1956, I would have been either six or seven, depending on what time it was, and my older brother Jeff started bringing home Elvis Presley and all the great rock 'n' roll that ensued after Elvis crossed over to a white audience. And it was not only the music but it was the role model that you saw: a guy up there with a guitar. And suddenly, instead of being in my parents' living room, listening to my parents' music, I was in my brother's room, with the door closed, listening to his stuff. I managed to get a ukulele, 'cause you can pick up a lot of the basic chords from that, and I would listen to those records--I think I got a chord book--and would just somehow learn the chords and then find the place where they fit with that chord in the song and started learning songs, and that was how I learned to play. It was an obsession. I was drawn to it in some really fundamental way, in a way that was almost religious. Now that I have my own kids, I can see how my mom and dad must have been going, "There's something wrong with Lindsey. He's in Jeff's room again, listening to the same song over and over." But you know, Jeff brought home Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Fats Domino, and all the good commercial stuff that crossed over. And that was it. There wasn't apprehension, it was just a real avidness to learn and to be a part of that music. It was in the same way I had wanted to get almost physically close to my parents' music at age four, and was thinking, "Gee, how do they make that sound?" It was like a violin section.
It's more complicated to try and figure out Tchaikovsky than to figure out what Scotty Moore is doing!
BUCKINGHAM But you know, the same fundamental kind of emotional connection was there. And where that came from, I really can't tell you.
What led you to fingerpicking pretty much exclusively?
BUCKINGHAM You mentioned Scotty Moore. You can go back to all those records on which he used a pick, but he also used the fingers [Example 1]. I learned those parts before I was even a teenager. So there was an element of that. Then, when the whole first wave of rock 'n' roll kind of went away and was replaced by the Fabians, I got into folk music and I learned to Travis pick, which is basically a three-fingered, very simple thing [Example 2].
I've seen you pick with just your thumb, index, and middle fingers, but I've also seen you pick with your ring finger as well. Is there a reason for that, or have you developed all the fingers? Do you play with your pinky too?
BUCKINGHAM I don't play with my little finger. But there's only so much you can do with that [Example 2]--not that you want to hit more notes, but you can only strike so many rhythms that way. You can get a lot more variations going [Example 3], and that was just something that I ended up extending from the Travis pick.
You played banjo, right?
BUCKINGHAM I played a little bit for a while. I could get a nice roll going but. . .
Did you transfer some technique to the guitar from the banjo?
BUCKINGHAM It's very possible, but it's hard for me to analyze. A lot of bluegrass stuff showed up on the folk shows. What was that old show, Hootenanny, they used to have on Saturday nights? A lot of great music came out of that. Yeah, I guess it came from folk, in a more general sense. I think it just came from the whole sense of orchestral playing.
I hear a banjo-type roll in a lot of your playing--on the first track of Out of the Cradle for instance.
BUCKINGHAM Oh yeah. That's not my piece, that's by Gluck [Example 4]. It's public domain.
Along with rolls, you seem to mix your patterns up a bit. On "Never Going Back Again," there's a tough roll at the end of each phrase.
BUCKINGHAM Well, it's like a measure of three across a measure of four [Example 5]. I can't say I intellectualized that at all. I can say with about 95 percent certainty it was a total feel thing. I may not even analyze it to the point of saying, "Oh, that's a triplet."
Have you ever played with a pick?
BUCKINGHAM I do in the studio sometimes. And actually, a few of the songs in the show I'm now playing with a pick--but it's very specialized: "Here's a part that needs to have a certain sound."
You solo with your picking-hand fingers plucking the strings individually and as a group.
BUCKINGHAM I know it may not be the most efficient way. It's funny: when I joined Fleetwood Mac, they knew there were certain things that were based in that kind of a thing. I did "Rhiannon" with my fingers, but when it got to the stage, everyone from the band was trying to get me to switch over to a pick.
Why?
BUCKINGHAM I think they though it was gonna fit with the sound. Believe me, adapting to the preexisting sound of Fleetwood Mac was just that: a lesson in adaptation. I had to change the guitar I wanted to play. Instead of playing a Telecaster electronically, which you can imagine is better suited to fingerstyle, I ended up playing a Les Paul, which was not at all.
So you play leads by flicking your picking-hand fingers down and up on the strings?
BUCKINGHAM Usually one [Example 6].
That gives you the option to have a lot more speed if you want to, because you have all those fingers working.
BUCKINGHAM If I had speed here, which I don't.
You have plenty of speed.
BUCKINGHAM I do in a certain context, but not for lead at all. I don't know my scales.
Where did you get that solo picking-hand technique from? It's like banjo frailing.
BUCKINGHAM I can remember getting Pete Seeger's banjo book and trying to learn how to frail, and I couldn't.
Do you have to do anything to your nails? Do you put any reinforcement or anything?
BUCKINGHAM It doesn't help, because I'm thrashing around so much up there. It's just a physical force. Nothing will help.
You don't play much lead guitar on your new record, Under the Skin.
BUCKINGHAM None. No drums, no bass per se, no lead. I wanted to hold the line. It's an album that wants to feel like I'm sitting here with you and I'm singing and playing a song for somebody on the guitar--the pureness of that, and then adding production touches.
So that was a conscious decision?
BUCKINGHAM Oh, very much so. Let's see, how would you characterize the whole psychology of that? You know, the song "Big Love," which started off as an ensemble of song with Fleetwood Mac, ended up a couple of years later being a single guitar [Example 7]. That ended up becoming one of the most distinctive thing that I did onstage, as well as something that the audience connected to immediately. It sort of made me think, "Okay, well, I can do that." So I started thinking in those terms. It was almost a mission to think in terms of making a record which was reduced--taking away this and taking away that--in order to leave the space for you to rise to the challenge of finding the guitar part that would carry the song. Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you don't. Not every song on the CD is exactly like that, but generally speaking, that was the intent. And so you've got at least four or five songs that are represented by fingerpicking. Donovan's "To Try for the Sun" and the Stones' "I Am Waiting" were chosen because they were songs from earlier days that I happened to like a lot, but beyond that they were chosen because they ended up being good vehicles for that style of playing.
I kept thinking about albums like the very early Joni Mitchell album, Blue, where that was about all that was going on. And how pure that was as a presentation, and how some people are getting into considering that an interesting thing again. But in my case, I didn't want to just present it literally; I wanted to present that minimalism but then add a kind of surreallism--no surrealism, but a production value that I found--on top of it.
"Flying Down Juniper," from the new record, sounded kind of jazzy. Do you have any jazz influence in your playing?
BUCKINGHAM Not a lot, but I know what you're saying. You could perceive it as a little more camp, or whatever. I think my wife thought it sounded like the Love Boat theme. If you dig a little deeper, certainly my father had a lot of 78s and Dixieland jazz, which wouldn't have applied, I don't think. It wasn't like I was listening to a lot of Latin rhythms. You get some of that in folk. And if you accept it as something that's not too schmaltzy, then occasionally that's OK. The thing about "Juniper," too, is that much as it's sort of a no-no, I'm a sucker for the major seventh every once in a while. I think it's an emotional place to go, if you can make it work properly. It works in a much less sentimental way on the song "Under the Skin," but that song "Juniper" really was about remembering my own childhood: how you see things as a parent that you had no idea of when you were a child, the way you objectify your parents and think of them as completely invulnerable.
As far as arranging goes, you seem to use the guitar more as a textural instrument. For example, "Turn It On" (from Out of the Cradle) has chord stabs in one channel, steady strumming in another, and accents in both channels. The individual pieces sound like complete lines on their own, but they're layered in a very cool way so they can interact with another element.
BUCKINGHAM That's a very good was of putting it.
Do you envision that from the beginning, or do you have to build that up?
BUCKINGHAM I think of those things as visual considerations. It's almost like seeing it. That's the great thing about having a palette which runs from right to left.
Do you feel there's something you do that's distinctively you?
BUCKINGHAM Maybe this is avoiding the question slightly, but it seems to me that when I think of what I do best, I'm a producer as much as I'm a guitarist. Record making is not about the surface; it's about the idea of transforming a raw song into a finished product. And that's a talent that I have always had and always applied to the band. In many ways, that was probably the thing that I gave to the band that was the most important. My talent as a guitarist is the ability to apply a certain amount of guitar playing into what I would consider a good and distinctive record-making style.
But a lot of people couldn't have played what you played or sung like that. You brought a distinctive voice and a distinctive playing.
BUCKINGHAM And then there are a lot of people who can play something that they can't integrate into a style of good record making. I see John Mayer doing incredible Jimi Hendrix stuff, and he's incredibly skillful, but it doesn't mean he can make records like that. You know what I'm saying? It isn't the fundamental thing that John Mayer does. So it's not that easy to find a place where you are able to use your mind and your heart and your fingers to work it into a fabric of a song and have it be right. I think I avoided your question a little bit. But that's the way I think about it. 'Cause I am not particularily skillful at once thing. I do have an overall style, but really, that's what it is.
And yet you are an excellent guitar player and an excellent singer too.
BUCKINGHAM Well, I might debate you on some of those. [Laughs.]
WHAT HE PLAYS:
Acoustic Guitars: Taylor 814ce; Rick Turner Renaissance RS-6 steel-string and RN-6 nylon-string acoustic-electric
Electric Guitars: Rick Turner Model 1; Gibson Chet Atkins
Amplification: Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifiers (electrics); SWR California Blonde and Trace Elloit acoustic amps (acoustics)
Pick: Fingers, no picks.
Capo: Shubb.
Strings: D'Addario EXL110 (electric), D'Addario EJ16 (acoustic).
FOR EXAMPLES AND A LESSON ON LINDSEY'S SONG "NOT TOO LATE," PICK UP A COPY OF ACOUSTIC GUITAR IN STORES NOW!
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