Bwana. Lindsey Buckingham. 1981. Asylum.

 A George Hurrell photograph of the artist looks out from the cover of his debut record, Law And Order. Buckingham has never looked better. Gone are the Dionysian locks from that time he helped control American radio and outdoor stadium events in the late nineteen-seventies. He’s tastefully shorn and shaved, suggesting an artistic pivot from the recording studio conventionality of Fleetwood Mac’s highly successful mid-seventies career, towards the boldly stylized experimentation of Tusk. Bwana begins with some nocturnal fauna noise at a jungle locale far from the relative familiarity of Fleetwood Mac’s home base, Los Angeles. A rhythmic intro then fades in, bringing a frenetic energy that is equal parts drug-induced celebrity paranoia, nervous excitement, and pop sangfroid. Bwana isn’t extraordinarily foreign territory for Buckingham; he ventured into similarly arranged eccentricity on Tusk, but here he sounds as though in a struggle to liberate himself from the dictates of band mates who grew disapproving of his unorthodox production techniques. Though Bwana is flush with pop optimism—its barely hinged arrangement owes as much to Raymond Scott and Carl Stalling as it does to Brian Wilson—it’s a record whose heart belongs to darkness. “The night brings on strangers,” sings the opening line, and who could doubt it? At the time of making his first solo record, Buckingham was a master pop craftsman who was marshaling the force of his creativity absent the group dynamic that had overseen his wildly successful career. The drugs and the tens of millions of dollars, the internecine love affairs and the ensuing psychological acrimony, the career pressure to sustain an unprecedented level of global listenership; Buckingham was engaged in a game of reckoning from the inside of a mythology that would prove fecund over the course of two more decades, long after the passions that had created it were calcified into a profitable network of bluechip investment opportunities. Bwana is the all-American tale of fighting for perspective over your past triumphs and defeats, and peering into the faces of the barbarians at the gate, hoping not to recognize yours among the horde. 

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