As is probably easy to tell, I have a weakness for emotionally charged guitar solos — doesn’t everyone, really? — to the point that I can even overlook lazy songwriting or cliché-ridden lyrics if, in the end, it’s all about the power of the mighty axe. But perhaps the greatest advantage of the guitar solo is that it is usually the most dynamic, experimental, "living and breathing" part of the song. Over years and decades of live performance, verses, bridges and choruses largely stay the same (unless you’re somebody like Bob Dylan who’s made a special art out of thoroughly reinventing his catalog over and over again), but the instrumental bits are specifically those moments where you have the potential to "update" the song with whatever textures, moods, and feels you think appropriate for the moment (unless you’re somebody like Lynyrd Skynyrd who have made a special art out of perfectly reproducing the exact same notes, regardless of the level of complexity, over and over again).
And when it comes to moody tunes with awesome guitar solos, no other song in the history of rock music has ever managed to grip my attention to the point of wanting to explore its entire lifeline than Lindsey Buckingham’s ‘I’m So Afraid’, from its first appearance as a studio track on the 1975 Fleetwood Mac album and all the way up to the band’s (and Lindsey’s solo) concert performances in the early 21st century. Compared to Fleetwood Mac’s big hits, ‘I’m So Afraid’ has always been more of a cult favorite — and not just because it was not released as a single, but also because it is one of the few Fleetwood Mac songs that offers not a drop of hope: bleak, morose, and desperate from start to finish, it claims to descend into much deeper depths of personal Hell than even something like ‘The Chain’, so it could never be a radio staple.
Yet it is also a song that has been steadily played at pretty much all Fleetwood Mac concerts since 1975, never ever dropped from the setlist — except for those time periods during which Buckingham stayed out of the band (e.g. on the Tango In The Night tour), presumably implying that nobody could ever hope to do the song justice apart from its own creator, a suspicion confirmed by the fact that absolutely no single pop/rock act of any notable stature has ever dared to cover the tune. Fairly few pieces in the history of the entire genre, to be honest, have been linked more tightly with just one man than ‘I’m So Afraid’, which makes it even more fascinating to track down the complex evolution of the song in live performance.
Although, apparently, no pre-Fleetwood Mac versions of the song have survived, it is usually said that Lindsey wrote the tune around 1971, while suffering from mononucleosis and having Stevie Nicks take care of him through much of the year; according to another account, he did not add the lyrics until his father’s death in 1974, but this I am not so inclined to believe because (a) the lyrics are entirely self-centered, with not the faintest hint of grieving for anybody other than oneself and (b) the lyrics show a certain clumsy crudeness that is more high school than college, if you get my drift: "Days when the rain and the sun are gone / Black as night, agony’s torn at my heart too long" is, frankly speaking, very cringey poetry — Lindsey’s no Dylan, for sure, but he got better with his words later on, and I’d rather believe that a 22-year old wrote this rather than a 25-year old. (Just in case, remember that the transition from 22 to 25 can sometimes be the transition from love, love me do, you know I love you to he’s a real Nowhere Man, sitting in his Nowhere Land).
Yet be it 1971, 1974, or 1975 when the song finally came out, every time I try to put it in context, much to my renewed surprise, I cannot truly understand its proper musical and spiritual roots. In fact, the more I think about it the more I realize that fear — primal, existential fear, the one that gives you a panic attack in the middle of the night with no apparent cause — is an emotion that was largely absent from popular music at the time. Skip a few years ahead to New Wave, and you get yourself Joy Division and The Cure and all sorts of goth-rock and what-not, but how many songs before that do you know that simply want to convey that terrified state of mind, driving you up the wall for no discernible reason? Having checked more than 120,000 titles in my personal digital library, I found absolutely no relevant compositions with words like "afraid" or "fear" in the title; most of them usually carry the encouraging message of don’t be afraid — amusingly, even Nico’s ‘Afraid’ from 1971’s Desertshore is a song of hope, and we’re talking of the prototypical «Goth girl» here!
You could think Jim Morrison, but Jim Morrison did not exude fear or vulnerability — his music embraced the darkness rather than dreaded it. You could think something like the Stones’ ‘Sister Morphine’, which comes close, but it was still a theater piece for Jagger who acted it out rather than lived it out. You could try and go deeper into the past, back to all those creepy old Southern bluesmen, but that would mostly be religious fear, drilled into them by tradition. Ironically, perhaps the closest person before Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac to bottling that vibe may have been... Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, whose own mental condition drove him to record stuff like ‘The Green Manalishi’ that crawled pretty deep under your skin. (And it is hardly a coincidence that the song that secured the acceptance of the Buckingham-Nicks duo into Fleetwood Mac was ‘Frozen Love’ from their eponymous album, which shares a bit of a common vibe with ‘I’m So Afraid’ — even a few lines in the guitar solo are the same — and might have easily given Mick Fleetwood a «this guy is the new Peter» impression).
Anyway, returning to the song, which closed out the self-titled Fleetwood Mac album on a stunningly morbid note compared to the overall vivaciousness, even breeziness of the record — the original studio version is fantastic all by itself, of course. It largely leaves out the ladies in the band, but it is an almost equally strong showcase for both Lindsey and the rhythm section, with John McVie pumping out the most grim-reaperish bassline he could think of and Mick, in tandem, never letting go of the bass drum throughout. Together, they create a bulging paranoid pulse for the song against which Lindsey unleashes his feelings — and those, within the somewhat padded studio setting, are dressed up in expressively melodic, almost romantic textures, from the near-falsetto overtones of the singing to the colorful effects on double-tracked lead guitars. The sheer open dread does not begin to pour out until the guitar solo, with its shrillness and distortion, comes out into the open... but then it only does so for just a few bars before fading out, leaving us yearning for more.
It’s pretty much a given among Mac fans that the song only properly came to life on stage, but over the years I have learned to appreciate the special charm of the studio version in much the same way as, for instance, I like the soft acoustic textures of studio Tommy just as much as the rip-roaring stage version. The smoothed-out studio production gives the song, one might say, a slightly more nuanced, «aristocratic», Byronesque vibe, and while in live performance Lindsey usually howls, growls, or screams out the words, letting it all out, here he sings it with no audience in sight, making the entire delivery more of an internal monologue than a theatrical look-at-poor-me tour-de-force. I can certainly dig that; this is an ‘I’m So Afraid’ for the genuine depressed recluse, rather than a desperate exhibitionist. From: https://onlysolitaire.substack.com/p/the-life-of-a-song-vol-1-fleetwood
