Lindsey Buckingham: Live Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

Lindsey Buckingham: Live Blu-ray Movie Review

Trying to Go His Own Way

Reviewed by Michael Reuben February 6, 2012

Singer, songwriter, producer, virtuoso guitarist and general impressario, Californian Lindsay Buckingham won a cult following in 1973 with his debut album, Buckingham Nicks, which, as the title indicates, he recorded with then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks. But it wasn't until Buckingham and Nicks joined the long-established British band Fleetwood Mac (on New Year's Eve 1974, according to show biz lore) that they achieved the worldwide success that resulted in their induction, in 1998, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On the albums Fleetwood Mac (1975) and the blockbuster hit Rumours (1977), which went nineteen times platinum, Buckingham was everywhere, from the guitar licks to the tightly structured harmonies to the overall mix. For anyone familiar with Fleetwood Mac's former sound, the band had been entirely reinvented, and not in a bad way.

At the time, though, Buckingham's musicianship was overshadowed in the public eye by Nicks's shimmery vocals and her predictable popularity among the male fan base. (Look up photographs from the period, and you'll understand why.) Their relationship did not survive the band's success. Indeed, over the ten years following the release of Rumours, commercial considerations seemed to be the primary force holding the band together, while its internal relations came to resemble a soap opera of shifting loyalties and romantic entanglements that have been exhaustively recounted elsewhere. When Buckingham left the band in 1987, after the release of the album Tango in the Night, he had already begun pursuing a solo career, and he has continued to do so ever since.

But a musical event like the late Seventies Fleetwood Mac casts a shadow that's too big to outrun, and Buckingham has never entirely left the band. They reunited in 1992 for the inauguration of President Clinton, who had used their song "Don't Stop" as a campaign theme, and they surprised each other by reconciling for the tour known as "The Dance" in 1997. The year 2003 saw the release of a studio album (without Christine McVie) entitled Say You Will, followed by a world concert tour.

It was during this period that Buckingham appeared on Soundstage, the concert series that is a joint production of WTTW, Chicago's PBS station, and HD Ready, LLC. An hour-long version of the performance was broadcast in September 2005. The concert was released the following month, with several bonus numbers, by Koch Vision on a DVD that is currently out of print. Image Entertainment is now releasing it on Blu-ray (with a simultaneous re-release on DVD).

Buckingham's back-up group is as basic as they come: Taku Hirano on percussion; Neale Heywood on guitar and backing vocals; and Brett Tuggle on keyboards, backing vocals and occasionally guitar. For the two songs where he's joined by Stevie Nicks, Buckingham is the only instrumentalist.

He also performs several solo numbers, and for an example of just how much music can be elicited from a single stringed instrument, listen to his rendition of "Big Love" from Tango in the Night. If you weren't seeing it with your own eyes, you'd swear there were several guitarists at work, but director Joe Thomas keeps cutting back to Buckingham's busy fingers (he famously doesn't use a pick), so that you can see that, yes, he's really hitting all those notes—while singing. An acoustic rendition of "Go Insane", from the 1984 album of the same title offers an entirely different perspective on one of the first hits from Buckingham's solo career, since the original version was a multi-layered studio production full of harshly artificial electronic instrumentation. Restoring it to more human tones gives the song a directness it never had before.

As a songwriter, Buckingham is at his best with songs about love, whether happy or sad. "Trouble", from his album Law and Order, should be familiar to fans of the Eighties film Just One of the Guys, and it still has the sweetness that made it so effective for a gentle teen comedy. "Go Your Own Way" from Rumours, which concludes the set, remains a defiant break-up anthem. However, when Buckingham turns to social commentary in songs like "Peacekeeper" or "Murrow Turning Over in His Grave", the musicality is there, but he lacks the lyric cleverness, the instinct for the indirect and the elliptical, that allowed someone like Bob Dylan or John Lennon to be provocative without sounding trite.

The two songs for which Stevie Nicks joins Buckingham are fascinating not just for the music but for the spontaneous choreography (for lack of a better word). The two long-time bandmates keep a respectful, almost wary distance for the most part, and the songs they've chosen to share are low-key and restrained. No intense passions like those in "The Chain" will be explored on this stage. "Never Going Back Again" is a slight tune, almost a folk song; on Rumours, it served as a breather between the two intensities that were "Dreams" and "Don't Stop". Nicks's role is strictly that of a harmonizer to Buckingham's lead vocal. "Say Goodbye", from the then-recent Say You Will album, is a somewhat more balanced duet, but it's still Buckingham's song, and the rendition is low-key. Watch the eye contact between Nicks and Buckingham; they largely avoid it unless there's at least ten feet of distance between them.

The complete song list follows:

1. Someone's Gotta Change Your Mind
2. Trouble
3. Big Love
4. Go Insane
5. Down On The Rodeo
6. Peacekeeper
7. Red Rover
8. Never Going Back Again (w/Stevie Nicks)
9. Say Goodbye (w/Stevie Nicks)
10. Murrow Turning Over in his Grave
11. Go Your Own Way

Bonus:

12. Steal Your Heart Away (3:24)
13. I Am Waiting (4:02)

Lindsey Buckingham: Live Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

I am running out of ways to praise the efforts of director Joe Thomas and his technical crew for Soundstage. The 1080i, AVC-encoded image for Lindsay Buckingham: Live represents another fine effort from Image in reproducing their accomplishments. Buckingham is an intense performer, but it's a tightly coiled intensity. The demands of simultaneously singing and playing guitar limit his motion around the stage. Instead of resorting to frantic movement, the cameramen have kept it simple, which helps minimize aliasing and interlaced "jaggies". The image is smooth and clean, with deep blacks (e.g., Buckingham's costume), saturated colors from the various lighting designs, and fine details of the instruments, set and faces both on and off the stage. The lighting is the usual Soundstage illumination that shows the audience as well as the performer. Since the concert is just under an hour, and the bonus songs add an additional 7:26 minutes, a BD-25 accommodates the program without any compression issues.

Lindsey Buckingham: Live Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The DTS-HD MA 5.1 track reflects HD Ready's usual approach to mixing concerts recorded for Soundstage. The viewer is placed in the position of an audience member with the sounds of cheering and applause directed to the surrounds, while the band and vocalists (here, primarily Buckingham) remain spread across the front soundstage, with some degree of presence in the surrounds to create a sense of space and depth. Buckingham's ensemble is the smallest for any Soundstage concert I've reviewed, and it's easy to pick out individual instruments from the track, which is clean and clear with excellent fidelity. Soundstage and Image Entertainment continue to set a high standard in simulating the feel of a live performance in the home environment, as much as such an experience can be reproduced.

As with Image's recent Chris Isaak release, even the bonus tracks include a DTS-HD MA 5.1 option. Let's hope this trend continues. Now all we need is a "Play All" feature on the bonus track menu. (Note: A PCM 2.0 track is also available for all selections.)

Lindsey Buckingham: Live Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Since I don't count the bonus tracks, there are no extras on the disc.

Lindsey Buckingham: Live Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It may be impossible for Buckingham ever to escape his association with Fleetwood Mac, but there are worse fates. Besides, it will probably be impossible for Fleetwood Mac ever to escape its association with Buckingham, despite having existed for twelve years and released nine (9! ) albums before Buckingham played a note with them. Some combinations are magical, and no one knows why. Watching Buckingham sing and play guitar (a remarkable sight in itself), one can't help but recognize a prodigious talent, but it's a talent that didn't truly take off until Buckingham and Nicks met up with Mick Fleetwood and John and Christine McVie. The soap opera has faded. The music remains. Recommended.