Oklahoma Interview

[michelej1]

The Oklahoman, By George Lang

http://newsok.com/buckingham-goes-ow...222379074&pg=2

When Lindsey Buckingham discusses his life, both inside Fleetwood Mac and in the free zone of his solo career, his descriptors take on political airs. The guitarist describes music he makes on his own being "far to the left,” and the deliberations determining what parts of his solo work the band could absorb sound like what diplomatic correspondents often call "high level talks."

Buckingham, who performs tonight at Tulsa's Brady Theater, released his fifth solo disc, "Gift of Screws,” last week. It is an album that has existed in various forms for about 13 years, but great swaths of it were harvested twice: when Fleetwood Mac reunited in the late '90s for its live disc, "The Dance,” and for 2003's studio return, "Say You Will.”

"Those two are not the only times, but those are probably the most prime examples of what might be called ‘interventions' on solo work,” Buckingham said in a recent phone interview. An earlier run of solo endeavor in the mid-'80s got sidelined when Mac asked Buckingham to record what was to be his final album with the band, 1987's "Tango In the Night.”

There are two camps, or parties, who see this pattern from starkly different perspectives. There are Fleetwood Mac loyalists who still go pale recalling the stark blandness of 1990's Buckingham-free "Behind the Mask.” They believe that their favorite band cannot exist without its oddest component, the inventive string man who orchestrated the 1977 pop classic "Rumours” and then brilliantly detonated all that heartbreak and beauty with the messy and magnificent "Tusk.” And then there is a smaller group of Buckingham-loyal insurrectionists — fans who believe "Go Insane” and "Gift of Screws” offer their troubled genius in his best, undiluted state.

After "Say You Will,” Buckingham laid down the law, telling Stevie Nicks, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood that there would be a moratorium on picking over his work for future Mac projects.

"What I did was, I said to the band, ‘Look. I want to take about a three-year period and I don't want anyone knocking on my door,” he said. "My intention is to try to get two albums out in a relatively short period of time for me and to tour behind both of those albums. And when I'm done, we can talk about Fleetwood Mac again.”

When the band last knocked on his door, the resulting "Say You Will” sounded a lot like Buckingham and Nicks solo discs sandwiched together. But that meant that some odd-duck Buckingham tracks such as "Red Rover” and "Murrow Turning Over in His Grave” made the cut, and few purists would think of such songs as bedrock Fleetwood Mac material.

"The last time stuff that was that far to the left made it onto a Fleetwood Mac album was probably ‘Tusk.' So, in a way I was happy about that,” Buckingham said. "But it's not always easy to know. More often than not, what defines it as a Fleetwood Mac song is as much dictated by the politics of the band and what they are receptive to.”

As the Buckingham-free years reinforced, the guitarist's musical eccentricity is the fire that keeps that band alive. When he discusses the music he considers most pivotal in his artistic development, it is the work that most threatened Fleetwood Mac's standing in the '70s California "mellow mafia.”

"In the post-‘Rumours' environment, when we were poised to follow everyone's expectations and make ‘Rumours II,' shall we say, and to fall back on the formulas that were spontaneously created during the process of ‘Rumours,' I made the choice to make a complete left turn and to open up whole new areas of my process and bring them back to the band and take more chances and to present an album that was certainly more challenging and confounded people's expectations certainly,” he said.

"And that was the ‘Tusk' album. I kind of drew a line in the sand in terms of what was important and what wasn't, and (‘Tusk' is) the one that I always look back on as the beginning of me, you know, trying to maintain a road in which I'm making choices for the reasons that I think are important.”

In the mid-'80s, when Buckingham, Nicks, and former singer and keyboardist Christine McVie all enjoyed high-profile solo careers, it seemed Fleetwood Mac was a necessary evil, a beast that none of them particularly liked to feed anymore. This doesn't seem to be the case 25 years later. Christine McVie is retired, but the rest of the band seems more committed to the idea of Fleetwood Mac than at any time since "Rumours.”

A recent story involving Sheryl Crow and the band is a solid sign of this commitment. Earlier this year, Crow announced to Spinner.com that she and Fleetwood Mac "definitely have plans for collaborating in the future, and we'll see what happens.” Crow's forwardness — a breach of political protocol — sent the rest of the band into a defensive posture and, eventually, an offensive posture.

"That has come and gone,” Buckingham said. "I think Stevie put out the feelers and asked if she would be interested in doing that, and that was as far as it got. It was a hypothetical. And then, you know, when Sheryl was doing press for her album that was out a few months ago, she took it upon herself to announce to the world that she was joining Fleetwood Mac. And that's where all of this comes from: she made a choice to announce something which had not been even decided. The manner in which she did it was inappropriate in everyone's eyes, that if you're going to do that, you sit down as a band and announce it with everyone there.

"I know it bothered Stevie a great deal — and Mick, I think,” he said. "And I certainly thought it was off the wall. Stevie and Sheryl had some rather harsh words about it, and she was basically given her marching orders — not that she had even been in the group in the first place.”

So unless the band takes a shine to Colbie Caillat or at least someone who understands the band's modus operandi, it looks as though a four-member Fleetwood Mac will reconvene next year.

"Yeah, I think probably in January the band will start rehearsing,” Buckingham said before ironically echoing Sheryl Crow's fatal statement. "And then we'll see what happens.”