Rock icon Lindsey Buckingham and popular country group Little Big Town shared the stage for an episode of CMT Crossroads in Nashville October 5, 2006. This 2010 live archive release from the singer/songwriter and Fleetwood Mac leader, features solo and Mac hits including ‘Go Your Own Way’, ‘The Chain’, ‘Bones’ and ‘Big Love’.

Pre-orders Available Through Amazon in the US DVD or CD

or Pre-order in the UK Through Amazon CD

]]> http://lindseybuckingham.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/dvd-release-lindsey-buckingham-little-big-town/feed/ 5 poopsandsosa BY INVITATION ONLY - DVD http://lindseybuckingham.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/destiny-rules-fleetwood-mac-facebook-group/ http://lindseybuckingham.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/destiny-rules-fleetwood-mac-facebook-group/#comments Sun, 25 Apr 2010 15:51:48 +0000 poopsandsosa http://lindseybuckingham.wordpress.com/?p=1444 ]]> Lindsey Buckingham filming during Destiny Rules Documentary 2003

Lot’s of discussion… video… never before seen photos…

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IN THE airy, eyrie lounge at the top of the three-floor penthouse suite of one of New York’s ritziest hotels, the Plaza in Manhattan, Stevie Nicks is thinking about the good times.

“The party that could be had up here would just be spectacular,” she coos, gazing out over the rooftop terrace at the glorious views afforded by this, one of her longstanding favourite hotels. Her tiny dog Sulamith, named after a German artist and ever-present by the singer’s side, whimpers her assent. Is Nicks saying that she never actually partied up here, even back in the glory days of ’77, when her band released what would go on to be one of the biggest-selling albums of all time?

“No, no, I did not up here,” she says, flicking the thick, swishy, blonde hair framing a wrinkle-free face that belies her 61 years and her onetime, longstanding enthusiasm for cocaine. “I don’t think we ever came up here. It was probably winter. I think we partied downstairs.”

Last night Fleetwood Mac played a great and rapturously received gig at Madison Square Gardens, show number 12 on a comeback-cum-Greatest Hits tour. It’s the latest chapter in one of the all-time legendary rock’n'roll stories, that of a band with almost four decades of hits, splits, divorce, drug abuse, walk-outs and reunions behind them. Fleetwood Mac are still here (mostly – singer and keyboard player Christine McVie left in 1998; she now lives quietly in Kent), although these days there’s a functional dysfunctionality to their operations. On the road these multi-millionaire veterans all stay in different hotels and, on the rare occasion they grant interviews, will only be interviewed separately (or in the case of bass player John McVie, not at all).

Naturally their live set draws heavily from Rumours, the band’s landmark 1977 album. To date it has sold some 30 million copies, its timeless tunes and infamous lyrical backbone – the break-up of the songwriting couples within the band – appealing to a whole new generation.

At the end of the Madison Square Garden gig, Mick Fleetwood, six foot six and 62, had jumped down from behind his drumkit to take a bow. He was wearing the knickerbockers he’s long favoured onstage, with pendulous decorative “testicles” dangling beneath his scrotum. Just as he did on the Rumours sleeve. Why does he wear those, still?

“The original ones were toilet chains,” he chuckles. He’s talking in another hotel uptown, his preferred Manhattan pied à terre, his English accent intact almost 40 years since he shipped his blues band over to Los Angeles and set about reinventing them in late 1974 by hiring hotshot Californian guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and his hippy-chick songwriter girlfriend Nicks. “I had them hanging down there – obviously to be rude, pornographic. ‘Cause we were pretty graphic back then, all the old blues guys were. We weren’t a punk band, but we might as well have been. It was always the ethic: when you play, play with balls.”

In the cavernous rehearsal studio in Los Angeles where I meet him a few weeks before the New York show, Buckingham, 60, is thinking back too. Success came quickly after he and Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac – within nine months the Fleetwood Mac album was No 1. By the end of 1975, he and his girlfriend were millionaires. But it came at a personal cost. The marriage of Christine and John McVie was already in trouble, not helped by the bass player’s heavy drinking, and Buckingham and Nicks’ relationship foundered too. Nicks found herself “getting a lot of attention. I was the new girl in the band. And what could I do? Put a bag on my head? I tried to be as low-key as possible. Christine always wanted to be behind thousands of banks of keyboards. That was her persona. She never wanted to be up front. She had no interest in walking out in the middle of the stage and being the lead girl singer.”

The fracturing of the relationships was played out in the new songs that McVie, Nicks and Buckingham were writing. At the rehearsals in Florida in 1976 that presaged the recording of Rumours, the first new song Fleetwood Mac played was Buckingham’s Go Your Own Way. “Loving you isn’t the right thing to do…” it began. “Packing up, shacking up’s all you wanna do…”

Was he apprehensive about presenting these lyrics to Nicks?

“Hell no!” the guitarist fires back. “They were true. Yes, they were frank. I wasn’t mincing any words about anything. But they were also offering a choice to her.”

In Second Hand News he describes his rejection by Nicks, but also – as he sees it – “humorously” offers her the chance to make a booty call: “when times go bad, when times go rough, won’t you lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff…”

“At first I thought that was a little rude,” says Nicks. “I don’t think I saw a lot of humour. But now I kinda can.” Indeed, those lines are emblazoned on the T-shirts being sold on the Greatest Hits tour.

Christine McVie, meanwhile, wrote Don’t Stop (a message to her soon to be ex-husband: keep on being positive) and You Make Loving Fun (seemingly a message to her new lover, the band’s lighting director). She also wrote Oh Daddy, a paean to Fleetwood.

“I think that whole thing was about the fact that I was the only family guy,” says the drummer – he had two daughters with Jenny Boyd, sister of Patti, although his marriage was in crisis too. He was also the band’s de facto manager at the time. “And I was in the middle of my mess – and in the middle of their mess. And I like to think I was some help to both Chris and John, as a friend. And I think it alludes to this chap desperately trying to keep everything together as a father would. Stop people being horribly hurt. And,” he smiles, “I think she realised that I needed to be thrown a bone as well!’

Buckingham thinks that the three couples were heading for their individual breakdowns before the new line-up of Fleetwood Mac ever took shape, “but I think the coming together of us as a band became a catalyst for speeding up the process”. Was that process hastened by success, and by the cocaine use that was featuring increasingly within the band?

“Yeah, sure,” he shrugs. The making of Rumours was conducted in a blizzard of the white stuff: a bag was kept ever-ready under the mixing desk. “We all were drinking too much and smoking too much pot and doing pretty much what everybody in that subculture was doing, and maybe more of it. Maybe possibly (that was] somehow exaggerated by our circumstances.”

Nicks even wrote a song for Rumours about cocaine: Gold Dust Woman.

“You know what’s so very weird?” she says now. “Gold Dust Woman was written before the cocaine really became serious in our lives. And the line ‘take you silver spoon and dig your grave’ is the only time that I actually said something explicit – the silver spoon is obviously a coke spoon. But I had only been on the fringes of it when I wrote that song. So I always think that it was a very heavy premonition. That I somehow saw it coming.”

Over the following decade things became even worse. During the making of 1987′s Tango In The Night, a zonked-out Fleetwood was reduced to crashing in a Winnebago motor home at the bottom of Buckingham’s garden. Over the course of the year-long recording, Nicks showed up for approximately three weeks. She had been prescribed Klonopin to help wean her off cocaine; she became addicted to the tranquilliser instead.

“I was in really bad shape then,” she admits. “I felt bad about the eight years that I lost.” It was worse, she says, than the cocaine years. “No creativity. Creativity gone. You just wanna lay on the couch, watch movies, have a glass of wine, smoke a joint, call the deli, eat a lot of really fattening food. And get up the next day and do the same thing. It’s just, you know, a nightmare.”

Fleetwood, meanwhile, was a full-time party animal, bunkered up in the Malibu home he dubbed The Blue Whale with some like-minded crazies.

“Oh, lunacy!” says Fleetwood brightly of the four-day parties with a gang including actors Nick Nolte and Gary Busey. “A few people, yes, were escorted on all fours into their wives’ vehicles to be ceremoniously taken home, hopefully safely. And I think all that horrified Lindsey.” Indeed it did: the guitarist left Fleetwood Mac after the making of Tango In The Night. He didn’t speak to Fleetwood for eight years, before rejoining the band for 1997′s The Dance.

Speaking to the members of Fleetwood Mac is hugely entertaining: so extreme were their lifestyles and the ructions – and so monumental was their success – they’re long past being embarrassed or diplomatic. And the affection and closeness between them all is apparent, even if they won’t be in the same room as each other to talk to the press.

The seeming bonhomie is hard to reconcile with the rancour that attended the end of the band’s last tour. Nicks “hated” the trek in support of 2003′s Say You Will, the first without Christine McVie. She felt isolated, and the lack of female companionship was compounded by Buckingham’s self-confessed “abrasive” onstage behaviour. Nicks was particularly underwhelmed by the guitarist’s insistence on bringing his solo material into the set – notably the song Come. “Think of me sweet darling, every time you don’t come,” goes the song about one of Buckingham’s ex-girlfriends. The actress Anne Heche? “Possibly,” grins the puckish guitarist, “possibly. Yes, Stevie didn’t like me doing that song. She left the stage.” At the end of the tour Nicks vowed never to work with Buckingham again.

But, six years on, here they are again. What did Buckingham do to make amends to Nicks?

“Well, this is a Greatest Hits tour so there should not be anything to fight about,” replies Nicks, who’s still a wafty, scarf-loving presence. “And, you know, time passes. Things subside. And I thought, why not?”

“You don’t have enough time or energy to start hacking out stuff again,” observes chipper Mick Fleetwood. “We can’t do it. At a certain point you have to learn to address things in a more civilised, less time-consuming, and hopefully more intelligent way. As it is in my lifestyle: I still enjoy drinking wine. And eight times a year I’ll go, ‘oooohhh, is that what it sort of was like?’ The hangovers are catastrophic.” He grins ruefully. “So you just don’t go there any more.”

Fleetwood Mac play the SECC, Glasgow, 22 October. The Very Best Of Fleetwood Mac released 19 October www.fleetwoodmac.com

These pictures show the process of modifying it to be a cutaway guitar.

Visit schroederguitars for full images

Fleetwood Mac‘s anticipated remastered Very Best Of double album has finally got a UK release date of October 19 for the CD and digital versions.

The 36-track album, will be released just prior to the Mac‘s UK leg of The Unleashed Tour which starts at Glasgow SECC on October 22.

In their career, Fleetwood Mac have sold over 100 million albums worldwide — famous tracks include: “The Chain”, “Go Your Own Way”, “Dreams” and “Landslide”.

Fleetwood Mac’s The Very Best Of track listing is:

Disc Two:
1. The Chain
2. Don’t Stop
3. What Makes You Think You’re The One
4. Gypsy
5. Second Hand News
6. Little Lies
7. Think About Me
8. Go Insane (Live, 1997)
9. Gold Dust Woman
10. Hold Me
11. Seven Wonders
12. World Turning
13. Everywhere
14. Sisters of the Moon
15. Family Man
16. As Long As You Follow
17. No Questions Asked
18. Skies The Limit
19. Paper Doll

The rest was multi-platinum history; Rumours still boasts a place a place in the top-ten selling albums ever. But while the songs have endured, the addictions, the divorces, the petty band politic chipped away at their legacy for 30 years. Here, a reflective Lindsey Buckingham tries to find new meaning in those lost days of summer, and how being lucky enough to survive them has allowed Fleetwood Mac to get on stage one more time for their 2009 World Tour.

So: how’d this reunion come about?
In 2001, I wrote some material with the intention of putting out a solo album that actually ended up being the last Fleetwood Mac album [2002’s Say You Will]. My album got shelved, and a lot of my songs ended up being used on the Fleetwood Mac album. But I still had a few unfinished songs, so on my last solo album (Gift Of Screws), I was lucky enough to get Mick Fleetwood and John McVie to play on a few of the tracks. That was the start of a new discussion about taking Fleetwood Mac back out on the road in 2009.

Had you tried to dutifully maintain daily contact with the other members of Fleetwood Mac over the last few years?
I wouldn’t say daily. Part of what has allowed Fleetwood Mac to prevail over a long period of time is that we don’t actually maintain daily contact [laughs]. We don’t really keep in close contact per se. I think the very thing that keeps the chemistry so alive in the band and the music so good is because we take each other in small doses. Music is a very potent thing. So: I don’t speak to the others that often, but I had been speaking to them a lot because we were initially planning to do a lot of stuff together. Possibly an album, but definitely a world tour in 2009.

Surely modern methods of communication meant that you were never far from each other’s thoughts?
Of course from time to time I would email Stevie or Mick especially pictures from the kids’ summer holidays. We’re always interested in how our families are growing up. It’s good to just reconnect as human beings. Christine (McVie) wasn’t involved in any shape or form, as she pretty much took permanent leave of the performing world. I don’t want to say that she burned her bridges, [but[ she certainly closed her book on her contact with all of us over here on the west coast, including selling her house in Los Angeles. Shemoved back to England and lives somewhere out in the country, I believe. From what I hear, she’s completely changed her life, and to be honest, she never really enjoyed touring anyway. I think she feels like she had said what she wanted to say within the confines of Fleetwood Mac, whereas the other four of us feel that our artistic lives are still evolving.

Is is a coincidence that it’s usually Fleetwood putting the band back together?
Yes. Mick has a habit of ringing me just when I’m about to put an album out, don’t you think? [laughs] But the politics of Fleetwood Mac have always been a very convoluted thing. On some level, our sensibilities are so vastly different, you could probably even make a case that we should never have actually ended up being in the same band (even though it was that precise synergy that made it work). The politics have got increasingly difficult over the last ten years though. The mantra we need to remember is: we are making our own strides to just be adults, and grow up a little. I think we were all in various forms of arrested development, particularly back in the 70s and 80s, when there was a huge amount of (drugs) in the band.

How intense did the partying get?
I don’t recall one particular dark moment, I think there was just a particular time when I saw a lot of my friends doing what they thought they had to do, particularly in relation to alcohol and drugs. I needed to experience a really solitary existence for a while, and concentrate on my music. The time right before meeting my wife was potentially the time that I would now look back as the darkest, and then I met this woman, and suddenly: I turned a corner. Hopefully, I experienced some good karma there, or something. Fleetwood Mac really did exist within its own little bubble.

Can you recall the scene in it’s most vivid incarnation?
I feel fortunate that we were getting away with all that kind of behavior in an age when there were no such things as camera phones to record the excesses which would then be immediately propelled onto YouTube the next day. I definitely think after Rumours, the success detached itself from the music and it was more about people buying into our personal lives, and that involved bringing out the voyeur in everybody. Had that been today, I think we would have had a much more difficult time coping with the blurred possibilities of drug taking.

How has all that changed this time around?
The only challenge I have now regarding a world tour is that I have three kids, and I don’t want to come home after nine months on the road, and find that my boy’s voice has broken or changed. I want to be there for all of those things now. .

You seem content.
I think the main reason we still wanted to go back on the road as Fleetwood Mac is because we still needed to put some kind of closure to the music we made. It really has been so lovely reconnecting with John and Mick in particular, as we’ve known each other a long time, and we’ve all been through things that are too long and too weird to discuss. We have a very special bond, and it’s like getting together with your family again.

Finally Lindsey, can I ask you where, in your many years on the road have you enjoyed visiting the most?
The heritage of the band is, of course, British. So I have immense and deep fondness for the UK. I was recently reminded that when Stevie Nicks and I were asked to join the band, we were also asked—in some sense—to become honorary Brits. I don’t mean this in any derogatory way, but I firmly believe that Christine McVie’s very British blues sensibilities kept us from sounding like just another version of The Eagles. When I joined, they would take me to the public houses of SoHo, and show me places like the 100 Club on Oxford Street where my heroes The Rolling Stones and The Sex Pistols played. Then back again to the famous Soho pubs like the Coach And Horses on Greek Street where I was ‘converted’ by a time-honoured tradition of of drinking many, many pints of Guinness in the name of the British Empire! When I visit these places again today, the memories are overwhelming. I love that everyone calls it Tin Pan Alley. Even Bill Clinton’s favourite pub—The Portobello Star—brings it all back, especially as seems like only yesterday when we played at his inauguration. I find touring in Europe so rewarding.
]]> http://lindseybuckingham.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/lindsey-buckingham-getting-fleetwood-mac-back-together-for-one-last-tour/feed/ 1 thelordriddler Lindsey Buckingham http://lindseybuckingham.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/second-hand-news-remake/ http://lindseybuckingham.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/second-hand-news-remake/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:15:45 +0000 poopsandsosa http://lindseybuckingham.wordpress.com/?p=1422 ]]> Added the Matthew Sweet / Suzanna Hoffs version of Fleetwood Mac’s  ”Second Hand News” to the “BOX” player to the right of the screen.  Lindsey and his guitar appear on the track.

Taken from the “Under The Covers Vol 2″ released recently.

60 Minutes in Australia is based on the US current affairs version.

]]> http://lindseybuckingham.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/lindsey-buckingham-on-60-minutes-au/feed/ 0 poopsandsosa http://lindseybuckingham.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/2nd-fleetwood-mac-concert-announced-for-new-zealand/ http://lindseybuckingham.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/2nd-fleetwood-mac-concert-announced-for-new-zealand/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:16:11 +0000 thelordriddler http://lindseybuckingham.wordpress.com/?p=1416 ]]> Published: 10:35AM Wednesday September 09, 2009

Source: Newstalk ZB/ONE News

Fleetwood Mac fans have snapped up all available tickets for the band’s December 19 concert in New Plymouth.

Sales opened at 9.00am on Wednesday and sold out within minutes.

District Council events spokesman Garry Sharp Young says it is one of the fastest-ever sellouts in New Plymouth.

Following on the heels of their 55 city sold out North American tour, Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, will now play a second concert on December 20 in New Plymouth.