Lindsey Buckingham

Gift Of Screws

Reprise Records

By Geoffrey Himes

On the song "Underground," from his likable new album, Gift of Screws, Lindsey Buckingham ponders his "15 seconds" of fame in Fleetwood Mac and his relative lack of success as a solo artist. "The idea was new/but the business was rough," he warbles over one of his signature guitar hooks. "I think I might wander underground." The song does slip out of the sunlight to acquire a cave-like echo and tangled thicket of multi-tracked acoustic guitars. It's an eccentric arrangement, but the tune's focal point, the vocal melody, is the kind of sunny ear candy that Buckingham can't help but turn out.

The concept of an "underground" seems very much on his mind these days. On another song, "Love Runs Deeper," he declares that "Love runs deeper from the underground." On a third number, "Did You Miss Me," he explains his absence from a lover--or perhaps from his audience, which has received just three studio albums from him over the past 24 years--by confessing, "I took a trip out of town/a hundred years underground." Why does this man, who possesses such a rare gift for finding the pleasure spot in the pop mainstream, obsess so much over the underground?

Buckingham, of course, enjoyed much more than Andy Warhol's proverbial 15 seconds of celebrity. He and his then-girl-friend Stevie Nicks were the missing ingredients that transformed a middle-of-the-pack British blues-rock band into the world's most popular rock & roll group in the late ‘70s. Nicks may have had a piercing wail that grabbed the ear like Mike Love's tenor; Christine McVie may have had the seductive romantic croon of a Carl Wilson, but Buckingham had the Brian Wilson-like harmonic genius that framed those voices with chords and textures freighted with the longings of every lonely listener.

Like his role model, Buckingham had a rare gift for combining the weird and the comfortable, the counterpoint bass line with the teenage surf ballad, the augmented chords with the soft-rock fantasy, the underground with the mainstream. That subterranean current can be detected in all his music, but it bubbled to the surface most obviously on Tusk, Buckingham's third album with Fleetwood Mac, where he risked the band's wildly successful formula by tossing loops, treated guitars, funny echoes and the UCLA Marching Band into the arrangements.

Since then the tug-of-war between his underground and mainstream instincts has made him one of pop music's most fascinating figures, for he has been unable to abandon either half of that dialectic. That tension may have helped break up Fleetwood Mac, but it also gave the group some terrific post-Tusk singles, and it led to the one masterpiece of Buckingham's solo career--the 1992 album Out Of The Cradle. His last studio project, 2006's Under The Skin, had a similar mix of pop hooks and quirky arrangements, but the feathery sound of its layered guitars and whispery vocal harmonies was missing something. It was missing the rock 'n' roll bottom of Buckingham's best work.

The bottom is back on Gift Of Screws. "Wait for You," for example, begins with an irritating, nasal-sounding guitar figure that dares the listener and the band to react. The rhythm section pushes back with a stomping beat that in turn stiffens the catchy chorus melody. When the singer gets into a back-and-forth shoving match with his drummer and bassist, as on this cut, a welcome whiff of spontaneity blows through his carefully constructed arrangements and his pretty melodies suddenly seem to have more at stake.

"Love Runs Deeper" begins with the kind of atmospheric guitar strumming that marked his last album, but on the first chorus the bass and drums kick in and the song shoots forward, as if the river of love that the lyrics allude to was spurting out from its hidden cistern like a geyser. The sexual imagery is obvious, but it wouldn't work as well as it does if the melody didn't fit in the groove like a hand in a glove.

Like his hero Brian Wilson, Buckingham isn't much of a lyricist. His words aren't evocative enough to create emotion on their own, but they can provide clues as to what the tremendous emotion in the music is all about. The music in "Did You Miss Me," for example, is full of wistful desire, and the lyrics clue us in that the longing is for an ex-lover. The song's deep sense of regret comes not from the words but from the unresolved chord changes in the verses; the reawakened affection for the ex comes not from the platitudinous lyrics but from the tension-releasing melody in the chorus.

The guitar strum from Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue" opens Buckingham's "The Right Place To Fade" and the song soon develops a similar momentum. But this isn't a song of teenage lust, the words alert us; it's the song of an aging baby boomer feeling as if time is running out. "How long, how long," Buckingham yelps, "how long we wait" for that feeling of satisfaction, that sense of journey's end, that "right place to fade"? In his throat, it sounds like a need as desperate as an adolescent's quest for sex.

Gift Of Screws is an album of many pleasures, but ultimately it falls short of Buckingham's greatest work--Fleetwood Mac, Rumours, Tusk and Out Of The Cradle. The new disc feels too hermetic, as if it were more the work of someone holed up in his home studio contemplating his own navel and not enough the result of someone out on the street interacting with the world. Surely, it's no coincidence that the liveliest cut is the title tune, the one with political commentary about how "authority makes us bleed, bleed, bleed [till] essential oils are wrung." Nor is it a coincidence that that song's surging rhythms are supplied by Buckingham's old bandmates, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie.

McVie can also be heard on "Wait for You," while Fleetwood also plays on "Wait for You" and "The Right Place To Fade." There's so much more life in these songs, where Buckingham isn't playing every instrument himself but is forced to interact with different personalities. The music becomes a dialogue rather than a monologue, and the composer's confectionary melodies and abstract "underground" tendencies are brought down to earth by these two seasoned British blues-rockers. If they were smart, these three long-time pals would hit the road as a power trio, playing 1,000-seat rock clubs until Buckingham's pop hooks and quirky curiosity found the right rock 'n' roll balance.


Here's brand new footage of Lindsey talking about "Love Runs Deeper" care of Reprise Records.