Rolling Stone 
Buckingham
talks Mac
Lindsey Buckingham discusses his next project
(by Andrew Dansby)
With their surprise appearance at President Clinton's farewell party on January
6th, Fleetwood Mac started a wave of rumours about the band's future. Following
their White House performance -- which marked their first concert together in
three years -- the band members began talking about a possible reunion. But at
least one member of the band's most famous line-up, Christine McVie, has already
decided to go her own way. The singer/pianist balked at the opportunity to play
for the President and seems to have no interest in performing with the band
again. So who's on board at the moment, and exactly how much faith can Fleetwood
fans have in the possibility in a new album and/or tour? Ask Lindsey Buckingham,
and he doesn't sound entirely sure himself. But as we found out when we caught
up with him after the Clinton send-off, the singer/guitarist is convinced his
options are vast. It's just a matter of deciding whether to throw his latest
batch of songs into the pot for a new Fleetwood Mac project or put them all
towards a new solo album, something he hasn't done since issuing 1992's Out of
the Cradle. A new Buckingham/Nicks album is also a possibility. Anything goes,
and for the moment, it seems, we'll all just have to wait for him to make up his
mind.
So did you have
plenty of prep time for the Clinton farewell show?
No, anything but. We got a call maybe two weeks before the event and I talked to
Stevie. I said, "Jeez, do you think we can pull this off? We need to
rehearse, right?" They wanted an hour, so we figured we could rehearse for
three days and put together just the workhorses for the set, which we did.
Christine's lack of presence wasn't really felt too much. We have some singers
who filled in those parts and it went very smoothly. We were involved in a small
way in ushering in his administration, so it was nice to kind of complete that
cycle.
Is playing before the
President tougher than other gigs?
It didn't make me too nervous. I think it did make Stevie a little more nervous
because she doesn't have a guitar to hide behind. I can kind of jump around and
make an idiot of myself and that gets me a certain ways down the line of
loosening up.
Did he have any
favorite songs?
I didn't ask him and we only talked very briefly afterwards before he was
whisked off to something else. But I was really surprised, there was a song
called "So Afraid," which was never a single, it's always been part of
the stage show, because it has a long drawn-out guitar solo at the end, and he
was sitting there singing all the words to that.
There's this sense in
the entertainment industry that the good days are numbered. Does it feel like
the end of an era to you?
Looking at what George W. seems to be about, it's questionable what he will
actually be able to get done, but what he wants to get done is a little scary.
And just as a person, at least from my perspective, obviously the media does
pigeonhole you, it's not necessarily fair to judge anyone on how they come
across on the tube, but he's kind of scary. He seems to be totally scripted and
a little blank behind the script, more than a little blank behind the script and
can't really put a sentence together, and he just doesn't seem qualified. Not
that he doesn't have qualified people behind him, but that has implications of
its own. Hopefully at the worst, he'll be around for awhile and we'll just get
over that cycle. He won't make abortion illegal or anything that bad, but I
guess he could try. Most stuff he can't push through, and looking at it in a
more amusing light, it might be an entertaining four years, in the Gerry Ford
sense . . . times ten I guess.
So what is the status
of Fleetwood Mac?
You know it's interesting, I made a joke at the show about us having worked
through our own partisan politics. And I really think there is a pretty potent
future for the band. In a way, Christine has really checked herself out of the
situation. She sold her house in L.A. and is just residing in England. God knows
what she's doing. But it kind of frees the Fleetwood Mac situation to be looked
at in a fresh light and in some ways in the dynamic that Stevie and I had going
before we joined the band. I think everyone's pretty up for the possibility of
that and of approaching a second phase of a group much differently than just the
whole epidemic of bands that were getting back together and touring and making
the quick buck and then that's it. I think that would be very intriguing to try
and do that. I have a whole mess of material that I've been calling a solo
album. And it may still be. The other option would be to spend the next eight
months or so working on material with Stevie and doing some sort of epic FM
album. So I don't know. There are some options out there, and we're still
looking at them. But the music I have right now, is the best that I've ever done
on my own, or with Fleetwood Mac, tapping into some new areas. It becomes a
little less important what you call it, the older you get. I can't tell you
whether that will come out as a solo album or not. We have some options and
they're all pretty good.
Is there a timeframe
for the material to be produced?
I have to decide this week whether this is a solo album or not. And if you talk
to the critics they'll say, put it out, what are you doing, why wouldn't you
want to put it out? And if you talk to people at the record company, it depends
on what your priorities are, so it's kind of scary. Not that I put solo albums
out there to fail, they're for the people who want to hear that sort of thing.
But the climate out there now is, God love people like Eminem, who are really
doing something great. But the pop side of things, the Britney Spears sound and
all of that, even though it's well-crafted, it's just a tough climate to try and
think that you could really get through to a lot of people as a solo artist at
age fifty. In that sense the Fleetwood Mac idea enables you to get through to a
lot more people so I have to just weigh just how important or unimportant this
is yet.
Is that
"week" a stringent deadline?
Well it's not a stringent deadline, it's just that I've been working on my own
running order and it's just something I'm so proud of. And again the people who
appreciate the artistic side of things, say, "Well why would you want to
put it together with a bunch of Stevie songs, it sounds like a Frankenstein
project or something at that point." But then the challenge would be to
make it not that. It's getting down to the wire though. You have any advice?
Could there be a
Buckingham/Nicks reunion?
Well that's something else we've talked about . . . very briefly I must say. But
it's interesting because Stevie and I have, that's kinda what I meant by working
through partisan politics. After all of this time, we've managed to get to a
point where we're comfortable. There's nothing we can't talk about. We've all
been down our own particular roads that have gotten us to that point and so it's
nice after all this time for both of us to have a good portion of the child
remaining within us. I talked to Don Henley one time about the Eagles, and it
seemed like there was so little love or idealism left in that group of people
and perhaps that's more the norm for people our age. But we seem to be slightly
more arrested and I think there's some potential for some good stuff because of
that.
For Buckingham/Nicks
that would be a pretty lengthy hiatus from which to return.
Oh yeah, but still, all of that stuff is a possibility. If I have to guess I'd
say this is going to come out as a solo album. But it is a little more daunting
than it was a few years ago. The older you get hopefully you work and getting
less and less selfish. And that's one of the things that drives people, in order
to do things that are outside the mainstream, you have to have a large ego and
that you have something to offer. It's sort of a Catch 22 that part of being
mature, part of growing up is letting go of certain rashness. So I don't know
where that falls now.
So can we expect some
sort of formal announcement when you decide?
I don't know.
Like the Bat sign.
Yeah, something like that. [Laughs].
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