Fort Worth - Star Telegram review

[Livia]

Singer goes his own way in style

By ROBERT PHILPOT
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER

FORT WORTH -- When you're essentially a cult artist who has sprung from a mega-selling band, sometimes you have to strike a balance in concert. For Lindsey Buckingham, that tightrope is strung between 30-year-old Fleetwood Mac songs about a relationship gone awry and present-day ones about finding peace in the marriage he's in now.

In his show Saturday night at Bass Hall, Buckingham pulled off the high-wire act and then some, playing several songs off his excellent new CD Under the Skin and his biggies from 1977's Rumours -- Go Your Own Way, Second Hand News, Never Going Back Again -- but also touching on many other aspects of his Fleetwood Mac tenure and his solo career.

The show's best moments came when Buckingham messed with the old stuff. When he pulled out an explosive, eardrum-rewiring guitar solo on I'm So Afraid, he may have risked self-indulgence -- except that he seemed to lose control, becoming possessed by the screaming tones that filled the hall. That was the high point, but it wasn't the only highlight.

Space doesn't permit listing all the examples, but another wild solo to climax Go Your Own Way and a malevolent take on the 1984 solo hit Go Insane, which sounded more like something from a spaghetti Western than the bouncy original, were among the many peaks.

Sometimes playing solo, other times with a band (guitarist Neale Heywood, percussionist Taku Hirano and bassist/keyboardist Brett Tuggle), Buckingham may have shocked anyone who still thinks of Fleetwood Mac as '70s soft-rock.

Rippling through finger-picked guitar runs, modulating his vocals from near-whispers to full-throated bellows, leading the group in the oddball sonic experiments he so loves, Buckingham showed why some people call him visionary even as his opening number Not Too Late indicated that he's uncomfortable with the term.

If the show had a flaw, it was in the momentum-threatening interruptions that occurred because the concert was being filmed for Mark Cuban's HDNet. But even with those minor glitches, Buckingham danced all over the tightrope, when he could have settled for just walking.

GRADE: A


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Robert Philpot, 817-390-7872 rphilpot@star-telegram.com