I guess when you’re sick sometimes good things come to you. When I was a kid it was watching a movie or reading a book that would probably make me wince now but seemed like the perfect setting for my childhood illness. This time it’s something a bit different: the live Lindsey Buckingham video I mentioned HERE that was pulled from YouTube not long after it surfaced.
I did some fruitless searching on the internet last night, hoping I’d get lucky and find it hidden away somewhere. Couldn’t find much of anything until I rearranged a few words, and then there it was, stashed in a secret place. Figuring out how to download it was tricky, but I found a way.
So here it is, for any Fleetwood Mac/Lindsey Buckingham fans who might be interested.
Linds is obviously a little wired on the kind of coke you don’t drink out of a can, or some other such substance, and his voice hits a few sharp notes, but I still say this is the best version of “Trouble” there ever was. The rough edges just make it deeper and better. Check out the three-part harmonies behind him, the little guitar fills he throws in between lines, and the way he bounces his head back and forth while playing the two solos, looking kind of sinister. I’m not sure why I like that last guitar solo so much, but I do.
And I like the edge here. It feels like there’s something unhinged swimming beneath the surface of a nice pop song, where on the album it’s just a nice pop song. The video/sound quality is decent, and it looks like it was probably ripped from a videotape that was recorded right around the time I would have seen it on TV myself, given the Comedy Central tag at the top right of the screen.
Crazy to think there was a time people with actual talent performed on Saturday Night Live and the performance was live, warts and all. Then again, these days it’s almost better when someone like Ashlee Simpson just mimes to her song, because when she sings live you realize why pitch correction software was invented. At least people had the good sense to boo her when she gave an abysmal performance at the Super Bowl or whatever it was a few years back. So there’s that.
(I felt bad for her when I saw that. You never want to see someone fall flat on their face on such a large stage when they don’t seem to be an awful human being. But man…that performance was not good. Not good at all. And the crowd let her know it.)
Dressing to Undress 
Hi Johnny, although I can’t say I’ve ever listened closely to fleetwood mac or knew who lindsey buckingham was before reading your blog entries (I skipped almost all music between 1975 and 1992), that video was fascinating to watch. Something about it even made me wonder what Tim Buckley would have been doing if he was alive in ’82. Something very unhinged I imagine!
Man…that would have been something to see. What would Tim have made of the 1980s? I imagine he might have flirted with some of the production touches of the day and made an album or two that didn’t sit with his best work (sort of the ’80s equivalent of “Look at the Fool”, which I still can’t get through aside from a few songs), but then he probably would have snapped out of it and went off to do something completely uncommercial that wasn’t tied down to any time, record company be damned. He covered so much musical ground in such a short period of time, it’s tantalizing to think of what else he might have done, had he lived longer. I’d give one of my kidneys to hear more music from the “Starsailor” period. Well, maybe I wouldn’t go that far…maybe I’d choose to part with my appendix instead, since they say you don’t really need those anyway.
It’s not the same thing as skipping whole blocks of music, but before my accidental musical re-education I used to write things off pretty quickly if the songs didn’t have keyboards of some kind in them. Can you believe that?! Shows how closed-minded I was. I didn’t even hear how good the songs might have been. I just thought, “No piano or synthesizer? How disappointing! I won’t be listening to this.” If someone had played me an album by Tim then, it probably would have terrified me. But years later, some of those things I tossed aside because they weren’t dominated by keyboards turned out to be some of my favourite albums.
I did just the opposite – avoided everything that had any sythesized sounds at all. Good job I got over that or my listening range would still be limited to a handful of folk albums from the late 60s – early 70s.
I don’t even think Look At The Fool is that bad – compared to Sefronia I think it’s actually pretty listenable, with only a few songs making me wince. But then again after listening to those two and then hearing Greetings From LA it is hard to reconcile the difference since I think Greetings does what he seems to be trying to do on the later two, but so much better.
I love that Billy Burnette (wearing the black cowboy shirt) is in this, as he was one of the two guys they picked to replace Lindsey Buckingham in Fleetwood Mac
Thank you so much for sharing this. I’ve been on an all things Lindsey bender recently and I have never seen this performance…..it is great! Can you tell me what show it is from?
Hey, you’re very welcome! Would you believe in more than ten years of maintaining this blog, this video has probably generated more hits than anything else I’ve posted? Turns out a lot of people are looking for this specific video. It’s never made sense to me why it hasn’t seen some sort of official release. The SNL people seem to be pretty stingy when it comes to allowing anything to be shared online, so maybe their attitude is, “If we’re not making money off of it through some official release we’re responsible for, no one gets to see it.” But you’d think they would have slipped it into a DVD set of musical performances or something by now just to make some money, since that’s what they seem to be all about.
Aside from when Comedy Central was airing full vintage episodes twenty years ago, and then a few fleeting sightings on YouTube a decade or so after that, this version of “Trouble” has been strangely elusive. I guess it’s also possible Lindsey himself is in no hurry to revisit performances like these, preferring to gloss over his drug-fuelled past, though I think he did some of his most interesting work when he was a little crispy. I mean, it’s pretty clear everyone was doing all the cocaine in the world during the making of “Tusk”, and that’s a brilliant album because of its manic energy, not in spite of it.
Anyway. The web tells me this comes from an episode of SNL that aired on February 6, 1982 (season seven, episode eleven). James Coburn was the host, and at some point I remember digging up a slightly longer version of this video that featured James introducing Lindsey and his band (the Cholos), but the quality was pretty dodgy. “Bwana” was performed earlier in the show, but I’ve never been able to find any video footage of that one.
Thank you so much for this reply. I really appreciate it. For the last quarter of 2018 I’ve been really into Lindsey and his artistic drive from the Tusk era to Tango In The Night. He was on fire. You can tell that drugs really fueled this era, and while I wouldn’t condone the most likely copious amounts of drugs he took back in the day I am kind of totally happy that it resulted in such great art.
Oh, how I wish that performance of BWANA could be tracked down! What a great tune. Heck, everything on Law And Order would be great to hear live. Such odd, frantic energy.
Hey Justin — guess what? I found that version of “Bwana”. The sound is wildly out of sync for most of the performance, so I need to fix that to make it more watchable, but I’ll post the video here once that’s done. It’s about as high-energy as you’d expect, given that performance of “Trouble”.
(One song from that era I keep coming back to for some reason is “Bang the Drum” from “Go Insane”. I don’t know what it is. It’s such a simple song, but I love the way those choruses explode.)
WOW! This is such great news. Thank you so much for sharing, for synching up the audio and video, and for everything else. I can’t wait to hear and see it.
“Bang The Drum” is so great. Simple and effective. It really puts me in a mood. My latest Lindsey fave has to be “That’s The Way Love Goes” from Seeds We Sow. I just love how the chorus comes in. Have a nice evening.
Hi there! I was just thinking about BWANA and wanted to check in…did anything ever come from this? Hope you are well!
Hi-
Lindsey also played Bwana that evening. Any chance you have that video as well? I saw it live as it happened and loved both songs.
Cheers!
GL
Hey GL!
Huge apologies for not responding sooner. So cool that you got to see this live. I’ve watched a lot of live videos of Lindsey from many different periods, and there’s just something special for me about the energy in this particular performance that makes it stand out.
I did manage to dig up “Bwana” in some secret corner of the ‘net. The trouble is, there’s a tape glitch near the beginning and the whole thing goes completely out of sync after that. I keep meaning to fix that in a video editing program and upload it here for folks like you who would love to see it, and forgetting, and remembering, and forgetting again. I’m going to make a point of taking a shot at it this week. I’ve been dragging my heels long enough.
Can’t wait to see it, sir!
Again, thanks so much for this gem. The studio version of TROUBLE is beautiful. This version has an edge and is almost jarring. I LOVE IT!!!!
I saw this live when I was a kid, and fell in love with the song immediately. Being live and before the days of search engines, I tried desperately to remember/decipher what the artist/band was that was introduced. I thought it was T”he Indians” (I had heard “Lindsey” wrong I guess). 😀
As I got older, of course this song was always in my music collection through the various formats over the years.
I agree with your assessment. Something about this particular performance is so much stronger than the studio version. Thanks soooo much for posting this!!