Lindsey Buckingham has always been one for the sonic effects of a great record. Even if he couldn’t match the intensity of those guitarists who played with a pick, there was no disputing his ear for melody whenever making a Fleetwood Mac record, usually balancing his internal struggles with some of the greatest hooks of the 1970s. Although any rock star of Buckingham’s calibre would have been blown away by The Rolling Stones, his love for Jagger and Richards came from one of the strange detours in their catalogue.
Because if you really think about it, half of The Stones’ 1960s work tended to be the sound of the blues taken to its nastiest conclusion. Regardless of the war that the press insisted on having between them and The Beatles, The Stones were always more than just a band looking to profit off the Fab Four, usually making their own dents into rock history on ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Paint It Black’.
When they did decide to get eclectic like their Liverpool counterparts, they made some of the strangest pieces in their catalogue. There’s no disputing that something like Sgt Pepper is a rock classic, but there are just as many people who saw Their Satanic Majesties Request and got a strange sense of deja vu.
For Buckingham, though, this was where things started to get a bit more interesting. He had just started to digest what The Beach Boys had been doing with albums like Pet Sounds, so hearing one of the biggest rock bands of all time use the studio as an instrument was wildly interesting on songs like ‘I Am Waiting’.
When cutting songs for his solo album, Buckingham remembered covering the song because he was an avid fan of the group’s sophisticated side, saying, “It’s funny—there was a point in time a few years ago when I was completely enamoured with all these obscure Jagger/Richards tunes. There was that one and ‘She Smiled Sweetly’ and ‘The Singer Not the Song’ and ‘Blue Turns to Grey’. ‘I Am Waiting’ seemed like such an abstraction. I almost took the original intent of the lyric to be more ominous about the state of the world, waiting for something catastrophic to come out of the corner”.
Then again, that kind of interpretation may seem more true to Buckingham’s character than he really lets on. When looking at his performance throughout Fleetwood Mac, many of his songs seem to be more dour in tone, which is probably why he needed to be balanced out by Stevie Nicks, who usually complimented a song like ‘Second Hand News’ with ‘Dreams’.
Even when working on some of Fleetwood Mac’s recent material, Buckingham was still looking at the cynical side of life. Although the song sounds like the rootsy rock and roll we’d come to expect, a song like ‘Murrow Turning Over In His Grave’ from Say You Will. doesn’t exactly imply that the audience is going to have a good time once they hit PLAY.
But that’s what The Stones had to offer people like Buckingham in the 1960s. The Beatles said that all we needed was love to get us through the dark times, but something about The Stones always spoke to the punks of the world, looking to say something a little jaded when they stepped up front.
