Plenty of Mac, light on cheese

Just how punk rock is Lindsey Buckingham?

Well, not very -- we’re talking about a guy who, as a main player in Fleetwood Mac, built his rep as an architect of mellow 1970s California pop.

But there were certainly flourishes of aural anarchy during his show Friday at the Grove of Anaheim, where he slammed his guitar onto the stage, spanked the strings like an inebriated chimp, then flopped over and rolled around on his back. And there was the way he ended an otherwise quiet, acoustic take of “Go Insane” -- with a spurt of guttural microphone howling that made you think he’s developed an affinity for screamo, or Swedish death-metal.

So much for mellow -- the only thing missing was the heavy black eyeliner and steel-studded wristbands.

Maybe Buckingham was trying to show off for his toddler kids -- who were watching from the crowd -- by behaving like a man several decades younger than his 57 years.

But this burst of undignified youthful inertia was definitely preferable to what could have come from a guy who, since his last solo outing in 1992, has turned into a happy family man -- think songs of squishy, I-love-being-a-dad sentimentality, of which the rock canon is rife.

And while there are songs on his new “Under the Skin” album that celebrate those joys, none come off so corny that you wouldn’t ever want to hear them again. The head-bobbing summertime lilt of “It Was You,” for instance, sounds like a lost tune from Buckingham’s breezy ‘70s oeuvre or even something that might have been penned by his idol, Brian Wilson.

At the Grove, Buckingham dedicated the Mac chestnut “Never Going Back Again” (but oddly not “It Was You”) to his brood, which got the inevitable kin-mention out of the way early. What followed was a generous mix of songs from “Under the Skin”; some of his better-known crowd-rousers, including “Second Hand News,” “World Turning,” “Go Your Own Way” and “I’m So Afraid”; the rarely performed “I Know I’m Not Wrong” and “Save Me a Place” from the Mac opus “Tusk;” and the giddy “Holiday Road,” his shoulda-been smash from the “Vacation” soundtrack.

While the set list could’ve represented his midperiod work better -- there was just one song apiece from his pair of ‘80s albums, and nothing at all from 1992’s “Out of the Cradle” -- it was still a good time watching a clearly jazzed Buckingham revel in both his new material and his cavalcade of hits from a career that’s managed to last as long as it has.

For a pseudo-punk, that’s a pretty grand achievement.