Lindsey Buckingham Breaks the Rules (But Makes a Hit)
A Talk About the Recording of Law & Order
by Blair Jackson

LOS ANGELES – At Larrabee Studios, Fleetwood Mac is supposed to be meeting to decide which of the eighteen songs they’ve recorded for their next LP will actually make it onto the album. As usual, Lindsey Buckingham is the first to arrive at the studio; he uses his free time this afternoon to watch the Yankees pound the Milwaukee Brewers in the baseball playoffs. Buckingham seems more relaxed than the last time we spoke, in early December of last year, just a week before the release of Fleetwood Mac’s live album. (Buckingham was on the cover of BAM January 30, 1981). This time, we connect a week before the release of his first solo album, Law & Order, a project that was still a big "maybe" last Thanksgiving.

"I had four or five tracks started then," Lindsey now admits, "but I was being cautious not to hype something that wasn’t a sure thing, so I was purposely conservative in my appraisal. I kept working on it fairly steadily until I had to go to Paris for a month this spring to record this Fleetwood Mac album. Then I finished it up when we got back."

Buckingham isn’t exactly "hyping" Law & Order now, either, though he is justifiably proud of his album. Quite simply, the record is brilliant, a truly fresh work in an era when rock and roll is becoming more homogenous by the day. It is loaded with wit and invention, devoid of rock cliches, filled from beginning to end with radical ideas about production, instrumental voicings and song arrangements. It is a highly idiosyncratic work – which should come as no surprise to anyone who studied Buckingham’s work on Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk – yet it is still enormously accessible, largely because the unmistakable warmth of his personality shines through to give the songs a sense of immediacy.

It is a very personal work, reminding me at times of Harry Nilsson’s great Nilsson Schmilsson LP in its incredible diversity and consistently high level of intensity both in the ballads and the rockers. Like the Nilsson work, parts of Law & Order are undeniably odd, yet Buckingham pulls it off completely. Even in songs that seem almost fragmentary, Buckingham’s intent is obvious. On first listening one might wonder why this track only has a snare and a kick drum for percussion; why the guitars in another are tuned so that there is a small degree of dissonance when they play in unison; or why the wash of background vocals on a third song are so breathy, so airy. But on repeated listenings it all falls into place and what once seemed eccentric now seems a stroke of genius. It is that way with any record that challenges accepted notions of the way a song "should" sound. Think back, if you’re old enough, to the first time you heard The Beatles’ ground-breaking Revolver, or The Band’s Music From Big Pink. Those records were jarring because they broke with precedents. The same is true of Law & Order – Buckingham succeeds in redefining our expectations of what pop sounds like by simply breaking all the rules. Strange, for a work titled Law & Order.

"’Law & Order’ is really just about personal codes and disciplines," Buckingham comments. "You know, rock and roll has always represented a sort of escape for people, but it’s also a discipline, something you have to really try at. My life seems to have come down to committing to a small number of things that I try to do well, and that takes a certain amount of discipline – not ‘clean living,’ necessarily, but a certain amount of order and ‘law’ that may not be represented in what people imagine goes on in rock and roll. So it’s about commitment and what that requires. A lot of the songs are about commitments to relationships, and that’s another thread that runs through it."

We talk at some length about Law & Order – about the songs and the remarkable techniques he used to create this amazingly diverse and exciting work.

There is a ‘40s influence in there that I thought was kind of refreshing. When my father died a few years ago, he left me all his records, his 78s from the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s. They’ve been at my Mom’s [in the Bay Area] for many years, and all the times I’ve either flown up or driven up, I just never got around to getting them. Then, I finally hauled them all down to LA and started sorting through them and there was all kinds of great stuff by Kid Ory, Bunk Johnson, the Mills Brothers, all these great old singers. So that had a lot to do with the ‘40s influence coming out.

I’d actually been wanting to cover it for some time. In my mind, I heard it in a sort of Sun Records-early Elvis style. That’s how it started out, and then we added more to it. Then, when I got my father’s 78s, lo and behold, there was a version of Sinatra doing it, so I got the words and the charts from that.

A couple of people have told me they hear various Beatles things on the record. Certainly I’m a tremendous Beatles fan, and I was influenced by them. I don’t know if I can get more specific than that. "It Was I" [an old Skip & Flip tune] sounds a little like the early Beatles.

No, it’s not backwards. It’s regular guitar playing. But what you hear is bits from several different tracks mixed at random.

No, she’s fictional, but the song is sort of an analogy to things that were going on in my life when I wrote the song.

I didn’t use much Turner on the record. I used some Gretsches, a lot of Strat, a little Les Paul, a little Tele, and the various acoustics.

On that particular one, I recorded some of the guitars at half-speed. Some of what you’re hearing, though, is probably just harmonics.

Not really. I’ve done that sort of thing before. On Tusk I played all the instruments on a few songs – "The Ledge," "Save Me A Place," I played bass and drums on "What Makes You Think You’re The One." On the new album, the stuff I played was pretty simple, really. It’s real open and uncomplicated. A few songs we built from the drums up, which was interesting.

[Laughs] No, those are regular drums but they’re recorded a little differently. What’s on the record is a couple of generations down from the original drum track. One of the things I wanted to do on this album was try for an older-sounding drum sound. In the days of mono and early stereo, they had to do several generations of bouncing to get a complete track. By the time a lot of the other instruments got to that point, their sound had changed a lot and that created a very specific atmosphere. I kind of liked that. I’m real tired of how drums sound on most records, so I thought I’d for something different. I was really going for a smaller drum sound, so I didn’t use a full kit on most songs, and we fooled with the sound a lot. On some tracks we even sped up the drums to make it sound a little "off."

Yeah, it’s a definite cop. [Laughs] I thought it would be interesting to try a Dixieland thing using guitars instead of horns and actually assigning roles to the guitar parts – this on is a clarinet, this one is a trombone, this one is a trumpet. I’m real happy with the way it turned out.

I don’t think I’d want to ever use horns as horns. I’d rather use horns and try to make them sound like guitars. [Laughs] There’s so much I’m just starting to learn about what can be done with guitars, I think I’ll stick to that for a while. That doesn’t mean I’m not open to other instruments. I had a birthday recently and Mick [Fleetwood, Fleetwood Mac’s drummer] bought me a little twelve-tone harp and I’ll definitely be using that sometime soon. It’s just gorgeous. Anything you play on it sounds great.

Basically. It’s pretty light-hearted. Again, there’s a song with some of the ‘40s influence on it. It really isn’t very African at all, musically. It has some of that "Lion Sleeps Tonight" in it. The lyrics were actually written at the very end, after we’d done the tracks and the backing voices. The drum track for "Bwana" started out as being something very different. Eventually, that track turned into another song called "Eyes of the World," which may be on the next Fleetwood Mac album. That happens to me a lot. Songs turn into other songs. Parts of one song are right for another. You never know.

It’s not a guitar, but you’re right about the vocal being distorted. What I did there was sing into a mike and then run the vocal through a cassette player in such a way that it would totally distort so it would sound like it was somewhere between a sax, a kazoo, and a guitar.

I don’t think it’s really that country, as the term is used now. It has some "cowboy" feel to it, though. I was trying to approach a ‘40s Sons of the Pioneers feel. I think there were certain sensibilities going on at that time, certain combinations of sound, that were really valid. You don’t have to go back and do a big band album, but there are certain aspects of ‘40s music which, when approached in conjunction with other styles, still makes a lot of sense and actually sounds fresh.

I see what you’re talking about. The harmonies do have some Byrds feeling, but actually I know it from long before The Byrds’ version. My brother, Jeff, had a 45 of Red Foley doing it, and I always loved it. It was one of my dad’s favorites, one of my favorites, and it just seemed to be in the spirit of the album. I think my version is very, very close to the original, as much as I can remember it. I don’t actually have a copy of it.

I think my liking of country music has sort of been hiding for a few years and is just starting to come out in strange ways. Don’t worry, though, I have no plans to make a country album. [Laughs]

The philosophy in that song is a very religious one in a way, and I think to a degree that feeling runs through the whole album.

In some ways, yes, I am satisfied. I like to think that I have not had to compromise very much to get across the music I wanted to make. I’m not satisfied with everything I’ve done. I’m not even completely satisfied with this album – the running order could have been different – but certainly I’m satisfied that I did the best job I could and I’m satisfied with many aspects of my life right now.

I wouldn’t say I "hate" it. I do usually leave it until the end, but that’s just my orientation. I think usually in terms of rhythms and melodies first. I felt pretty good about the lyrics on my album and I like some of what I’ve written for Fleetwood Mac. Let’s put it this way: lyrics don’t come out of me like they do from Stevie. She just writes all the time. I express myself more through the colors in the music.

We tried an interesting experiment on this album with lyrics. Richard Dashut [Fleetwood Mac’s engineer] and I and whoever’d be in the room at the time would take a sheet of paper and I’d write down the general idea of the song, maybe one line, pass it on to Richard and he’d write a line that responded to my line without thinking too heavily about it. Then he’d fold over the first line so the next person could only respond to the line that had just been written. We came up with some interesting stuff that way. It didn’t work that often but it was fun and different. Very different.

It had a positive effect, I think. Since Tusk came out, I’ve had the opportunity to work out certain insecurities about my own songs. Working on my album and doing everything on it has helped me open up and ask for help when I really need it. Actually, there’s more collaboration on the new Fleetwood Mac album than just about anything we’ve ever done. I gave Christine [McVie] some lyrics, she gave me some. And there was, in general, much more of a flow of ideas than there was on, say, Tusk.

I think people are going to be very pleased with the Fleetwood Mac album. I think it represents a nice blend of our various styles. The way the songs are crafted makes them more accessible than a lot of Tusk, but it’s not a reactionary album in any way. It was a very collective effort.

I have absolutely no idea, to be real honest. I guess it’ll depend partly on how the single, "Trouble," does on the radio. [It’s currently bulleting up the charts]. Radio has gotten so it doesn’t matter who you are – if they don’t want to play your single, they won’t. That’s something we’ve got to live with. I think "Trouble" is certainly the safest choice on there. Maybe people will buy the album after hearing the single and think it’s a soft, MOR album. [Laughs] There’ll be a few surprised people!

I know it’s not going to enter the album charts at Number Twelve like Stevie’s album did. But there really isn’t much I can do at this point. I can’t let it get to me. Obviously, I want it to do well, but if for some reason it doesn’t, I’ll still feel pretty good about it. For the undertaking it was, having all the responsibility myself, I think I did okay.

Thanks to Les for posting this on The Ledge.