Meanwhile, somewhere on the West Coast...

While Fleetwood Mac were busy transitioning from one type of band to another to another to another, across the big pond and  continent inbetween two young aspiring musicians were trying to make ends meet. Stephanie, dite Stevie, Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, were trying to make a living on music, something that had hit something of a snag. After leaving Bay area bar band Fritz who for years had try to break through but never did, Nicks and Buckingham in the early 70s were not quite ready to take over the music world. Nicks famously worked as a cocktail waitress and a cleaning woman, while Buckingham infamously stayed at home honing his guitar-playing skills. And also, uh, getting stoned on eleven pounds of opiated hash with other music friends/hanger ons/stoners, including a pre-fame Warren Zevon. Like Warren, he went out on the road with Don Everly, albeit on a short club tour. Like Nicks, he finally had to join the working population before Fleetwood Mac came calling, working in a PR Agency. 

But in between these periods of odd jobs and busy-doing-nothing, there was Buckingham Nicks. Nicks had met enginer Keith Olsen in 1971 while cleaning his house, and with him the band cut their album for Polydor. Assisting Olsen was Richard Dashut, one of the architects of the California Mac sound later in the decade. Drums were manned by Elvis' backing band member Ronnie Tutt and pro's pro Jim Keltner, future Warren Zevon collaborators Jorge Calderon (percussion) and studio pro Waddy Wachtel (guitar) filled out the sound. Buckingham Nicks is a lush-sounding album that presages a lot of the million-sellers Fleetwood Mac would produce just a couple years later. But in 1973, with the record being more or less completely ignored by the Polydor PR team, no one would buy an album featuring virtual unknowns Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, despite the added attraction of Stevie being topless on the cover. So Polydor quickly deleted Buckingham Nicks from their catalogue. 

You would think considering the success of Fleetwood Mac and Nicks solo that Buckingham Nicks never got officially rereleased. Weird from Polydor that as soon as Fleetwood Mac or at least Rumours became hits they wouldn't run out to release this. And then for years Lindsey talked about the possibility of officially releasing it, giving it its first digital release, but alas...and considering the terms on which Buckingham and Nicks left things between them a couple of years ago, I think there is little hope that we will ever get an official release from this. The version I have is, I believe, a high-quality vinyl rip. 

This is a carefully curated version of Buckingham Nicks. You can get a bunch more of periphelia from places like Paul's Albums That Should Exist blog, but not every outtake is worth hearing, or hearing more than once. So for this edition I kept only the best and best-sounding outtakes/demos, on par with the album itself. Basically you won't hear a difference when the album segues from closing track "Frozen Love" into first outtake "Garbo". On top of the five top outtakes you'll also get five live tracks from a concert in Tuscaloosa, one of the last to feature Buckingham Nicks under that banner after they had already joined the Mac and wrapped up contractual obligations. They run through early versions of "Monday Morning", "I Don't Wanna Know" and "Blue Letter", plus another unreleased Buckingham original, "Heartbreaker" and the only mini-classic to come out of this album, the propulsive "Don't Let Me Down Again". For an album which sold, like, a couple of hundred copies, it must have at least ended up in the hands of some musicians, yielding cover versions of that song from Richard Torrance and Eureka (coming up on an All Pearls, No Swine comp in a couple of weeks) and Rusty Wier (probably also coming up in some form on this blog in the near future).  

Oh well, if you have some love for the Cal Mac and the Buckingham Nicks duo, you owe it to yourself to check this out. Liddy Buck has two instrumental fingerpicking showpieces, and generally speaking these songs are about as well constructed as most of their Mac stuff. Buckingham Nicks deserves better than being a half-forgotten juvenilia curiosity, with this version of the album hopefully doing its humble part to remedy that situation.

Lindsey Buckingham gets screwy...or screwed ?...again

From the minute Lindsey Buckingham started to really let loose during the making of Tusk, furthering the minimalisms of "Never Going Back" and cranking up the paranoia and craziness, there was no going back. He might've liked being a pop star, but he also was the joker in Fleetwood Mac at the time, and the joker's wild. If you wanna go back to Liddy Buck the nervy new waver be sure to check out Not That Funny, the OBG alt album that presents variants of Lindsey's Tusk contributions as his hypothetical solo debut. But with today's One Buck Record you can easily go back, at least partly, as my version of Gift Of Screws has anumber of decidedly Tusk-era Buckingham jams, none more so than the unhinged title track, whose blast of nervy, even hysterical energy serves as an energetic album opener here. But tracks "Twist Of Fate" and the miniature "Given Thing" also give off that loony Liddy vibe. 

On most of the other tracks, Buckingham,shows that his gift for writing perfect pop melodies hadn't diminished. In fact, you could argue that he wrote some of his best and most beautiful pop songs during the period that Gift Of Screws covers, and then let only a part of the songs be heard. Because the story of Gift Of Screws is one of commmercial considerations, unfulfilled potential and compromises. The original Gift OF Screws is an album that never existed as such, only as an idea of Buckingham fans who had gotten hold of some of the demos he recorded in the latter part of the 1990s, somewhat overlapping with the Fleetwod Mac comeback with The Dance. So when he presented his work - a sizable number of elaborate demos and finished songs, all finished mixes - to his label as the first version of an album he wanted to call Gift Of Screws, Warner Bros./Reprise asked Buckingham to hold some of the material back and rather use it for the proposed upcoming Fleetwood Mac album, which he finally did.   

Whether that was the right decision is certainly up for debate, but what isn't for debate is that a number of worthwhile songs bit the dust due to the decision to move some of the material to Say You Will. When Buckingham finally issued his solo album called Gift Of Screws in 2008 only the title song had made the cut, though most of what's on my version of Gift Of Screws had made it into the world in one way or the other. "Miranda", "Steal Your Heart Away", "Bleed To Love Her" and "Say Goodbye" appeared with minimal extra touches on Say You Will, and "Down On The Rodeo" and "Someone's Gotta Change Your Mind" - both recorded with Mick Fleetwood and John McVie - appeared on the 2006 solo album Under The Skin, together with his cover of Donovan's "To Try For The Sun". Probably as a warm up during these demo sessions he also cut a beautiful finger-picked version of "She Smiled Sweetly", which is one of the tracks that never saw official release. 

Thankfully for everyone involved, Buckingham's songs for the original Gift Of Screws album, given to Warner Brothers on a CD-R quickly got leaked on the internet, so a look at what the original Gift Of Screws could have sounded like was the intent behind this alt album. I dropped a couple of songs from the line-up, as with the full twenty songs the album just ran too long, whereas at fifteen tracks - some of them quite short - and a running time of around 57 minutes, this is pretty much the perfect length for a CD era album. And an album this is, after careful sequencing, rather than just a bunch of songs. And considering how strong the material here is, this version of Gift Of Screws quickly becomes a contender for best Lindsey Buckingham solo album of all time. The cover art came with the booted tracks, it obviously is too nice looking to be mine...

So, sit back and listen to how Liddy Buck's best album in years, if not ever, could have sounded like, had it come out in 2001...

...but no one would listen, he walked a thin line.

Tusk probably wasn't what the millions and millions of people who bought Rumours were hoping for, and it seems fair to say that about 4/5th of the band might've felt the same way. Now that its reputation has been restored, the story within Fleetwood Mac is that they were a hundred percent on board with Lindsey Buckingham's weird experiments all along. But that isn't true. When Tusk didn't come close to making the numbers Rumours did (and how could it have?), the rest of the group was quick to put the blame on Buckingham's folly, then urged him for the follow-up Mirage to please go back to writing nice, conventional (or at least conventional-ish) pop songs which he resigned himself to. But during the lead-up to Tusk, while the rest of the Mac were relatively risk-averse and the two lady songwriters plowed their respective fields of established songwriting, coke fiend Liddy Buck heard something different, something new. We don't know for sure what post-punk and new wave records he listened to, if any, but Buckingham was the only one not to be complacent in their multi-million SoCal soft rock paradise. There's something else, something maniacal, that wanted out. 

So, what if the band and the label had panicked a little more and a little earlier? What if their request to Lindsey to go back to writing 'normal' songs came in the middle of the recording for what would become Tusk? What if, to appease Buckingham, the label promised him that none of his work so far would be lost and that they would bring these recordings out as his first solo album, no questions asked? And what, yeah, what if Buckingham had actually agreed to this? 

Then we might've ended up with something like Not That Funny. You could make a point that Tusk needed Buckingham's crazy little vignettes to balance the stately, typically elegant balladry from Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks, but there was still an enormous  whiplash going from Buckingham's songs to everyone else's. They might be better served, I thought, by being put together to form Liddy Buck's own little madcap adventure. Enter Not That Funny. 

Not That Funny isn't simply the Tusk tracks all thrown together, none of the tracks as such were on the Tusk album. For almost all tracks I preferred the rougher demo versions sourced from the Tusk box set. If we imagine Buckingham going all DIY /punk /new wave on our asses, it would make sense to keep some of the edges that the band would then sand off as much as possible. So I tried to keep the big, sometimes cheesy-sounding synths, the akward drums or in the case of "That's Enough For Me" his trademark fingerpicking in as raw a state as possible. So, tracks 1 - 9 are alternate versions, track ten and eleven are the remixed single versions. 

A word on the two 'new' songs: "Out On The Road" with its near wordless vocalising is an early version of "That's Enough For Me", but really different enough to stand as its own track. And "Let The Fall Wind Blow" is a very early version of "That's All For Everyone", but in reality it is an almost completely different song with entirely different lyrics and major musical differences. It's also an interesting look into Buckingham's psyche. In this early form "Fall Wind" is still very much in the Rumours vein, a song about being left and feeling terrible and vulnerable. That last part especially comes out very clearly ("don't let 'em know...don't let it show"), whereas the new lyrics for "That's All For Everyone" have no trace of this, or really anything particularly personal. Maybe Buckingam's experiments would have fallen on more graceful and voluntary ears if he kept that kind of emotional content. His songs always seemed to keep you at a distance, which is of course quite the opposite of what Stevie Nicks' songs were about. And we know how that dichotomy turned out. 

Lindsey Buckingham's solo work probably deserved better than the attention it received. Maybe Not That Funny wll do its very small part to get people to tune into his very peculiar way of seeing things, again. And even if it doesn't reach such lofty goals, it is above else an interesting listen. And now, ladies and gentlemen, Liddy Buck...