Bootleg City: Lindsey Buckingham, 12/10/92

I was beginning to think I’d never find a tough lawman to clean up Bootleg City, especially after my faux pas-filled interview with Marshall Crenshaw. (I won’t bore you with the details of my preliminary talks with the Police. They work well as a team, but who needs all that drama?) But last weekend, as I was digging through CDs at the one place left in town to shop for music — the local Christian thrift store, Heaven Is One Coffee-Stained Couch Donation Away — I ran across a copy of Law and Order by Lindsey Buckingham.

Of course! Who better to scare the crap out of criminals than the man who followed up Law and Order with Go Insane? Here in America we can’t get enough of “maverick cops” who have trouble “playing by the rules” and are willing to risk “life and limb” to nab the bad guys, possibly because they’re “mentally unstable” or just plain “suicidal,” and years down the road may end up making “anti-Semitic comments” to arresting officers while “hammered out of their gourds on Cazadores tequila” behind the wheel of an automobile. In order to catch the bad guys, you have to think like the bad guys, but sometimes that means you end up talking and even acting like the bad guys. But isn’t it worth all the apologetic “Whoopsy!” meetings with rabbis and the stints in rehab and the worldwide public condemnation if it eventually translates to some face time with Diane Sawyer?

Let’s not forget that Lindsey simulated sex with himself on Fleetwood Mac‘s 1987 hit “Big Love.” That’s Rick James-level freaky. Plus he likes to talk about his “gift of screws,” he’s got a somewhat androgynous name, he wore makeup in the ’80s, and he used to do his hair up like Eraserhead and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

It’s no wonder Mayor P.R. Nelson of Erotic City was upset when he found out I’d hired Lindsey — no one had told him that Stevie Nicks’s ex was available as a gun for hire in the first place. His brisk e-mail said it all: “How come U don’t call me anymore?” His second e-mail was even more to the point: “I hate U.”

Don’t worry, he’ll get over it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about freaky people, it’s that they keep on comin’.

The following bootleg contains portions of “Live in Concert,” which was recorded at the Coach House Concert Hall in San Juan Capistrano, California, on December 10, 1992. Buckingham was promoting his third solo album, Out of the Cradle, but it was the first time he’d performed an entire concert separate from Fleetwood Mac, despite Law and Order having been released 11 years earlier.

Big Love
Go Insane
Don’t Look Down
The Chain
Trouble
Tusk
You Do or You Don’t
This Nearly Was Mine
Street of Dreams
All My Sorrows
This Is the Time
Eyes of the World

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