Thursday, November 16, 2006
Newmark Theater, Portland, Oregon
Mick Fleetwood and John McVie are geniuses and I don’t know if it was evil or unbelievably fortuitous that they stopped Lindsey Buckingham from becoming a solo artist, which he surely would have had Fleetwood and McVie not enlisted him and Stevie Nicks to join Fleetwood Mac back in 1975. As it turned out, it was a brilliant move for all parties involved. Buckingham was going to be a star regardless, but just imagine an artist who would have built a solo career out of songs like “Trouble,” “Never Going Back Again” and “Second Hand News,” to name a few. Oh, by the way, those are the songs he performed at the start of his concert Thursday night.
At once, the evening’s concert was presented as a hit parade. How do you follow three hits such as those? More importantly, how do you follow those with new songs that may have the effect of losing the crowd? Buckingham’s new CD, Under the Skin, is a lesson in fantastic production guilty of too much time spent in the studio with a mastermind at the helm. Buckingham has a habit of “tinkering” with the sounds too much, giving the end result a layering rather than a polish, forcing the attention of the listener to scatter rather than become focused on a melody or hook. Those same songs are stripped to their essentials when presented in the live forum and they thrive in an environment of instant feedback and open auditoriums as opposed to attention-deficit production in the confines and sterility of a studio. Following his hit songs, Buckingham launched into a three-song onslaught of new material which was every bit as good as the songs we know. Never straying too far from that which will keep the crowd from losing interest (Buckingham has enough experience to not lose a crowd): more Fleetwood Mac music in the form of “Big Love” followed. “Go Insane” was given the treatment of an eerie ballad which had the effect of a death march. Surprisingly, it was magical in its effectiveness.
I once read that “Lindsey Buckingham writes songs which are musically interesting without losing their commercial viability.” Never is that more evident than when watching him live. So much has been written about his guitar mastery. His songs and style dictate his consistent explosions of finger-fury up and down the neck of his guitar. Because of the pop-sense of his songwriting it’s easy to miss the intricacies of his work, except in the live setting. You also can’t say he was in rare form—he has done this for too long with too much consistency for any of his efforts to be rare. What you can say is, Why doesn’t anyone talk about his voice? So much time is spent on his guitar work and his production skills that we miss the fact that Buckingham is a fantastic singer with amazing range and ability.
With a three-piece backing him, Buckingham spent the evening wowing the crowd with fantastic interpretations of some of his well-known songs, solid performances of his new music, unbelievable guitar work, hilarious conversation with the crowd—which included asking if the band had “...lost [their] dignity on that one,” referring to the over-the-top barking into their microphones at the end of “Holiday Road”—and stunning moments of music we have heard over the past three decades performed with brilliant reverence to their recorded arrangements. He closed his set the same way it started, giving the audience a taste of his Fleetwood Mac days with “Tusk” and “Go Your Own Way.” The encore was three more Mac tunes and his first single from Under the Skin. The entire show was as exciting as watching Fleetwood Mac, as intimate as watching an up-and-coming act and as satisfying as watching a legend with massive expectations being met at every turn.
Buckingham had a lot of fun with the audience, especially between songs, when he got the chance to use his expert stage timing and soothing confidence to regale the audience with his wit, humor and unique perspective of life and music. At one point he told the crowd, “It’s sometimes very difficult to walk the line between a big machine and something more intimate and personal.” Apparently, that’s not true.
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