Lindsey Buckingham on Fleetwood Mac's Real Influence: Not Motown, But Leiber and Stoller

Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac in 1974, bringing a country-inflected folk songwriting style into a band that had started out rooted in the London blues scene. According to a roundup by Far Out Magazine, when asked about the roots of his melodic sensibility, Buckingham skipped past the names most commonly cited from the Motown era — Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin — and instead named the writing and production duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

Taking over in 1974

After Fleetwood Mac lost founding member Peter Green in the early 1970s, the band drifted through an unsettled period under Bob Welch. Buckingham joined as an unheralded replacement — on one condition: Stevie Nicks had to come with him.

That move grafted the Buckingham Nicks vocal sound directly onto a British band lineup that, on paper, shouldn't have fit. In practice it turned Fleetwood Mac into a transatlantic rock powerhouse — this was before the couple's breakup and internal tensions became the story the band was known for.

Leiber and Stoller: 'ten years ahead of its time'

Buckingham described the pair as a writing-and-production team known for mature, sophisticated arrangements, with string and vocal work he considers unmatched, calling their sound quality "ten years ahead of its time." The example he cited was The Drifters' "Save the Last Dance for Me," included on the compilation The Very Best of The Drifters.

In Britain, the credit for fusing rock with large-scale string arrangements usually goes to The Beatles; Leiber and Stoller were doing much the same thing on a separate track, laying groundwork in the 1960s for cross-genre songwriting that wouldn't become standard until the 1970s.

After joining Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham largely steered the band's swings between hard rock, dreamy folk, and pop — drawing on a reference point from an American writing duo that was comparatively overlooked amid the Motown wave.