Lindsey AUS Article

[face of glass]

I ain’t gonna say amen on this yet.

Originally posted by CarneVaca
The foundation of Go Your Own Way is that crazy beat and the power chords underneath the acoustic. The acoustic is icing, or to stay with the metaphor, the siding.

Since I’ve been gradually becoming one of the biggest nit-pickers at the Ledge, I might as well add that I remember you last year speaking of “GYOW” losing something important when it was played live without an acoustic. Sure, I could remember wrong. But I don’t think those early versions where they tried to play it without one really worked.

Originally posted by trackaghost
Take it how you like, and I know I'll be berated as being a "feminist" or whatever, because I'm annoyed with that, but whatever, I'm just calling it how I see it. Obviously Lindsey needs to listen to artists like PJ Harvey or Bjork.

I still don’t think he was denigrating women in there. He was mainly speaking of how the ladies in the Rumours line-up initially failed to follow the zeitgeist along with most of the American mainstream.

Even Lindsey speaks at Les’ site of his friendship to Laurie Anderson, probably the most experimental woman in rock during the ‘80s. So I certainly don’t believe that he thinks “women can’t be experimental”. He still quotes "O Superman" for the "Peacekeeper" speech, after all.

Originally posted by trackaghost
I can definitely see why Lindsey might equate "femaleness" as he so eloquently puts it, with commercial, "poppy" appeal.

If he actually does think that way then it should be stated that he always has something to keep the balance between the commercially appealing and the experimental on his albums.

For every “Soul Drifter”, “Countdown” or “You Do Or You Don’t” you find on OOTC you also have the forced, brute qualities of “This Is The Time”, the murky depression of “Street Of Dreams” and the esoteric, glorious washes of “Surrender The Rain”.

For every “Steal Your Heart Away”, “Bleed To Love Her” and “Deep Dense” there is on GOS you also find “Murrow”, “Red Rover”, “Someone’s Gotta Change Your Mind” and “Come”.

Also, even though “Don’t Look Down”, “Wrong”, “Go Insane” and others may have been attempts at a hit single, they never sounded non-intrusive or banal. There was never an idiotic, simplistic hook repeated for forty times in a row. If some people were looking for inoffensive musical wallpaper from Lindsey they didn’t find it. “Don’t Look Down” has such unusual harmonies in the chorus that it’s bound to intrude your mind. The sonic chaos that “Wrong” indulges into isn’t for everyone either. Neither is the off-kilter quality of "Go Insane".

He knows he can’t change his way of writing songs but instead of repeating the same progressions in same atmospheres he changes his arrangements and approaches. I get a totally different feel from “Big Love”, “Doing What I Can” and “Miranda” even though they could be described similar in songwriting.

Originally posted by trackaghost
It made me laugh in that Virgin interview when Lindsey said his solo work was never meant to be as commercial as his stuff with Fleetwood Mac, because there's lots of poppy stuff on all his solo albums in particular Out Of The Cradle. It's very easy after the event to say "well, that wasn't meant for a mass audience" when it didn't do well.

I’m not going to deny that he doesn’t sometimes try to intentionally produce something that could be appealing to the record buyers. He’s never been completely esoteric in expression. Here’s a man who values The Clash as much as The Beach Boys (and both have their share of commercial as well as artistically “deep-reaching” stuff).

Are Lindsey’s solo albums intended for a mass audience? I’d like to say that some aspects of them are and some are not. Again, I ruminated on the reasons above but yes, I believe that he knew he wasn’t going to be as successful as FM. Rumours is commonly regarded as their peak; the only FM album to own if you want to own one and then you can ignore the rest. He didn’t hope for those sales to repeat themselves. He knew he wasn’t going to sell like Stevie did. In the public eye Stevie and Chris were responsible for most of Fleetwood Mac’s hits; of course most failed to see Lindsey’s contributions to them.

So no. Lindsey didn’t want his solos to sell 25 million copies worldwide. Success on a smaller scale, like the 5 million of the White Album, would most likely have been enough for him.

Lindsey was the first in the FM camp to react to punk rock. He reacted to it while the form still had its initial freshness. The hard-hitting quality that punk had, its usage of mainly electric, powerful timbres influenced the mainstream. Stevie’s and Christine’s solo albums were affected by this too but that was already at a point when the mainstream had “interpreted” the ideals of punk and new wave for its own purposes so that it would not lose listeners. The Wild Heart, Christine McVie, Rock A Little and The Other Side Of The Mirror have no acoustically dominated passages in them. They didn’t choose that approach themselves, they changed because there was no choice.

I know Johnny Stew, for instance, thinks that RAL is experimental. I don’t, unless it’s viewed against Stevie’s other solo albums. So much of the aspects of RAL are dictated by the mainstream that it certainly doesn’t sound atypical of its time. Go Insane is far more atypical to me. It’s right there besides Mister Heartbreak and Hounds Of Love in classic ‘80s studio experimentation, at least in my collection of music.

So if someone is going to look up on Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie as musical adventurers then I certainly won’t follow suit, as much as I love them. I look up to Buckingham for that and at the same time I thank him for not going over the top or totally inaccessible with his experiments.

Yeah, yeah. Major digression. Like in a vintage Nicks demo.